Portrait of mathematician Ada Lovelace, by Alfred Edward Chalon (public domain via wikimedia)
It’s sad but true that there’s a worldwide backlash against science, facts and evidence.
Misha Ketchell from The Conversation was on 3RRR today, explaining among other things the ‘false equivalence’ line of thinking, which is how we get into this mess of discrediting researchers across many fields. The voice of a clueless but confidently opinionated blogger can now be perceived as equivalent to a researcher with 30 years experience and all the data. Kind of disheartening.
This started from a question about “Fake News”, and Misha made the strong point that fake news is actually a specific thing that happened during the US elections when a group of people spread misinformation for the purposes of making money. (The Saturday Paper produced a great article outlining this phenomenon.)
The Conversation has become one of my preferred outlets of information, because they’re connecting the knowledge of academia with the world of journalism. Academics must find a way to make their research accessible, while the public gains awareness of knowledge that was previously hidden behind the academic moat.
Great interview: here’s the “listen-on-demand” link from RRR, interview with Misha starts round the 10 minute mark, until roughly 30min: http://ondemand.rrr.org.au/player/128/201710231200
Image credit: Alfred Edward Chalon, wikimedia
One day soon this “debate” will be over. Hopefully a healthy kind of justice will prevail. I did that dumb thing of getting embroiled in the comments again, and wrote this:
Oh Malcolm Turnbull.. i hope Australia remembers the hell you unleashed on LGBTQ+ communities. I hope Australia remembers when you gave people like this (name) ‘character’ a license to spout their medieval and prejudiced viewpoints, when you declared that it was okay for people to share their intolerance of other people in public.
I also truly hope Australia recovers and gains some maturity from this disgraceful episode when you Malcolm Turnbull allowed hate speech to flourish for a simple case of political expediency.
Right now i’m hoping that the progressive forces of love and creativity will rise; the pendulum will swing back toward justice, inclusion and genuine healing.
I’m imagining a future where queer people of all kinds can walk safely down the street in public, in broad daylight or in the dark of night, hand in hand and unafraid, and Get Married If They Want To.
A future where these intolerant viewpoints have withered like dust and blown away. Where spiritual knowledge is based on experience rather than misinterpretations of an ancient text.
A future where everyone is valued for their strength and heart, for their humanity
#DontReadTheComments / Prof Frank Oberklaid on SSM “People are allowed to have opinions, but don’t use children as a reason for having an opinion against same-sex marriage.” Professor Oberklaid from The Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne says there’s no evidence children from same-sex couples do any worse. Posted by ABC News on Sunday, 22 October 2017
O M G research, wait is that SCIENCE? Ooooh, big word.
Anyone who’s interested in water and the Australian landscape will be fascinated by
This is extraordinary.
Listen to the story about a woman who taught a 27 year old Nicaraguan man how to understand language for the first time. “Something about his eyes caught her attention.” She uses sign to communicate, and he echoes everything she signs – right back at her. “Visual echolalia.” She could see intelligence in his eyes, but realised that he had no language; he didn’t even know he was deaf.
“What have you been doing for 27 years?” she wonders.
Listen for the moment when everything changes. It brings tears to my eyes when i hear what happened.
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via Words – Radiolab.
From the people at Radiolab. These 2 men make radio that seems to flow in a kind of liquid conversational story. The narrative is so beautifully woven from multiple voices, without signalling when the voice changes.
Read the rest of this entry »
Listening to an episode of background briefing, where they’re talking about how the Eastern quoll was wiped out in the 60s, and the Western quoll is endangered. So is it time to open up ‘captive breeding’ for quolls, and allow suburban dwellers to take in their own pet quoll.. instead of getting another cat?
Greg Miles reckons it’s an “anti-extinction” policy. A ranger from Kakadu, he has seen native animal populations ravaged by all kinds of ferals.
On one hand, the income could really help native animal breeders. On the other, animal rights advocates might say that marsupials shouldn’t have to live in captivity, with humans.
Good program, worth a listen.
Here’s the mp3 file on the abc site.
Sugar gliders sound like bad pets though. They bark, and their bark sounds like a mad car alarm. They will urinate on you as soon as they wake up. But in the US, people are hopping on the sugar glider bandwagon like kids lining up for sugar at a birthday party.
photo credit: pierre pouliquin
Apparently life on Earth is very unlikely.
i’m re-reading chunks of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. In chapter 19, ”The Rise of Life’, he points out that collagen – one of many useful proteins for life – needs 1055 amino acids to be organised in exactly the right sequence.
And collagen organises itself spontaneously. There isn’t someone assembling it each time.
“The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil” (p351). Bryson
One day i went to drop off some of my ex-boxes, and discovered the Reservoir Tip computer recycling facility. Masses of old rubbishy broken machines, and one smashed up MacBook Pro!!
i thought maybe Tim could use the parts so i surreptitiously grabbed it and drove off. Sure enough, later on that night we took it to pieces, and found the hard drive and the battery were still in working order.
Working enough to find out that somebody had left all their data on the drive. So Tim gets all the data off and then does the decent thing, contacting this person and asking if they need the backup.
Turns out this person, whose identity shall remain secret, had taken the laptop to the shop. The mechanics had said, “Can’t do anything love, it’s broken. Can’t get your data off, but don’t worry we’ll make sure noone else does either.”
What kind of computer shop doesn’t know how to get the information off a working hard drive??
The moral of this story? Don’t trust a computer shop with your data.
And don’t sit on your macbook pro.
Nice one Albert. i get an Einstein quote every day in my iGoogle feeds. This one made me jump. i think Albert spent much of his life regretting his contribution to inventing nucular weapons.
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Time for some good news. i’ve just been reading Pitchfork Design .. where Sam talks of a new project up near Swan Hill; and her inspiration is this amazing tale of greening the desert in Jordan.
This video is so worth watching, from desert to fruit trees and oasis: “You can solve the problems of the world in a garden,” says Geoff Lawton the permaculture artist behind the project.
3years later they’ve revisited the system to see what’s happened:
and here’s Geoff Lawton talking more about the project:
.. and read up on Sam’s projects too, she’s doing amazing work rebuilding the gardens in schools around Victoria. go Sam!
Just before new year, i was listening to the heaviest rain i’d heard in melbourne for years. Such a delicious sound. i revelled in the delights of pounding water.
But of course, most of that water was going down many drains into the bay, because we don’t have a huge embedded system to catch, keep and recycle storm water.
The smart guys at the top of town want to throw billions of dollars at private companies, to build a desalination plant which is going to use coal-fired electricity, add pollution and greenhouse gases, and line the pockets of those private investors for years to come
.. when research shows you’re so much better off catching what falls out of the sky.
(um, evidence, michael? Well, Bob Brown and the Greens say so. Average households receive 8 times the water they consume, apparently.)
Here’s Bob talking to a rally against desalination.
Bill Mollison once said that all the solutions are there already. It’s just the political will, and getting past the stakeholders.
One of my dreams for ’08 is that the people of Victoria will demand intelligently innovative, sensible and truly sustainable solutions to the water crises, and that we’ll be rewarded with the best new system in the world.
And i reckon that means we collect and recycle storm water.
Oh look, here’s a bunch of sane and clear-thinking locals investigating the whole DeSal/PPP setup (or maybe they’re commie free radicals?). Apparently we pay for the desalinated water even if it turns out we don’t need it.
(The weirdest thing .. the herald sun editorial agreed with me.)
