I have been super-busy in recent times, and I have the cold and the not-so-nice sunburn to prove it. I haven’t been sick since the illness I ranted about last June1, so this latest cold has reminded me of exactly why I despise colds. Because it clearly slipped my mind during that months-long reprieve which I probably should be grateful for. But now… ugh!
Anyway, uni starts tomorrow. I have only one class for the whole day, a linguistics lecture. Unfortunately, Monash decided to put this linguistics lecture (and every linguistics lecture) in the “Western Science Lecture Theatre”, which is for the record:
- nowhere near the campus centre
- nowhere near the Arts Precinct
- nowhere near the bus stop
- nowhere near any of the other buildings I have classes in
- nowhere near any of the parts of Monash I have actually been to
- one of the very last buildings before Engineering City2
I have a decent timetable. No days off, but Mondays and Fridays have only one class each, only one day of the week (Tuesday) starts before 11am (starting at 9am), only one day (Wednesday) ends so late that by the time I leave in winter it’ll be dark (at 6pm)… and so on. Clearly it’d be better if some of those “only one day…” and “only one class…” things didn’t happen at all, but still not that bad.
I spent part of yesterday looking over course outlines for “Contemporary worlds” (my international studies unit) and linguistics. It looks like there’s much less overlap between “Contemporary worlds” and next semester’s twentieth-century history unit than I initially thought — Contemporary worlds is pretty much entirely post-WW2 stuff, while twentieth-century history is, you know, about the entire (“short”) twentieth century (so 1914-1991).
Linguistics also looks really good despite its annoying locations and class times and the fact that the entire course handbook is written in Comic Sans MS. There’s assorted stuff on slang, language change over time, the international phonetic alphabet, neurolinguistics… and I get assignments to translate sentences written in obscure languages like Comanche.
I don’t have much else to say for now, so I’ll leave this entry here. I wanted to post something before February actually ended and passed me by. (March’ll be better for my resolution for sure!)
As I’m sure pretty much every single person who could possibly read this is aware, Vancouver is currently hosting the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. This means that for the past few weeks I’ve been enduring endless ads on Channel Nine when I’ve been trying to watch the cricket. A few weeks ago they ran a particularly interesting ad in which they described themselves as “bringing Australia to Vancouver”, and showed a CGI picture of Vancouver with the domineering form of Uluru right in the centre.
Sometimes, Channel Nine even broadcasts ads which attempt to entice the viewer to WATCH THE OLYMPIC GAMES, rather than just attempting to make us think, “Wow, Channel Nine is so awesome, with the way they somehow managed to haul Uluru across the Pacific Ocean and put it in Vancouver!”
For instance, in the middle of a Twenty20 cricket match, there’s supposed to be a musical performance (because Twenty20 is “the rock and roll form of the game”, lololol u so funny cricket commentators). However, at a recent one, Channel Nine went, “SCRATCH THAT - we need to inspire people to watch the Olympics!”
So they told us the ~inspirational~ story of Steven Bradbury, an Australian speed skater who was coming dead last in the final, only for every single other competitor to fall over, allowing him to win the gold medal.
I feel that this says a lot about Australia’s talent at the Winter Olympics. Keep trying and trying, and one day, everyone else will sabotage their own chances, allowing you to step forward and win. Read More »
I haven’t been blogging anywhere near as much as I was in December, but I have kept in mind the resolution I made at the end of that month. That is, this:
Post, on average, 30 posts each month. This is like my own personal NaBloPoMo. One thing that irritated me about this event was the need to post EVERY SINGLE DAY — compensating by posting two posts another day was not an option. So I will alter the rules just for myself, to remove the need for useless asides.
Luckily for myself there are a number of ways to interpret this. “On average” is so ripe for alternative interpretations, and I’m glad I added it to the resolution rather than just writing “Post 30 posts each month” (which I would already have failed!). Here are some ways I could decide to enforce this resolution:
- 360 posts in a year (since 360 ÷ 12 = 30).
- The median post count is at or above 30.
- I exclude outliers and then find the average post count, and the average is above 30.
- I look at all the months’ post counts at the end of the year and the most frequent one is 30.
I don’t think that last one is particularly relevant, since it would discourage me from posting any more than 30 posts, and what if there were no repeats over the whole year? Then every number would be a mode! But I was running out of ways to calculate averages.
Probably the fairest way to calculate is a combination of the first two — I make 360 posts over the whole year, and the median is at or above 30. The third one also seems pretty fair, provided I remember how to calculate outliers and don’t just exclude really low numbers because I dislike them. However, it would mean that I couldn’t post about 150 posts in December while trying to catch up!
Regardless of what is fair, you can bet that I’ll calculate the average in any way that helps me win! You know, like a creative accountant.
Yesterday I read about the case of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, who was found guilty of the attempted murder of her American interrogators in a New York court.
Reading that article, it seemed fairly obvious that the case didn’t stack up. In 2003, Aafia Siddiqui went missing, with no (public) record of her whereabouts for the next five years. The next the public record knows of her, she was arrested by Americans in Afghanistan in 2008.
US military personnel argues that they were interrogating her in Afghanistan when she picked up an unattended gun, and started shooting at them. She didn’t manage to hit a single soldier, but they sure got her, and then they hauled her back to the US to try her for attempted murder.
Forensic evidence suggests that the gun she ostensibly fired was never fired by her, nor even fired at all. Furthermore, common sense suggests that US soldiers wouldn’t have left loaded guns lying around unattended where their prisoner would be able to reach them.
Aafia Siddiqui also says that during her five years of imprisonment, she was held in a secret US prison in Afghanistan. This is denied by both the US and the Pakistani authorities, but it is not exactly hard to believe. Read More »
Only yesterday I wrote about the South Australian government’s plan to limit political free speech and today I get to write about how they’re giving up on it. If only the federal government would be this efficient!
In all probability, the South Australian government’s turnaround is due to the fact that there’s an election there next month, and they don’t want to completely destroy their supporter base when there’s so little time to go. The federal government can trust people to forget about internet filtering by the end of the year — and indeed, it seems vocal objections have died down — but the South Australian one didn’t have that much time.
Of course, a success is a success, and SA’s attorney-general announcing he’ll retrospectively repeal the law is probably a success (unless he changes his mind after the election and doesn’t repeal it after all).
Something particularly amusing to come out of this is the attorney-general’s insistence that a man named Aaron Fornarino doesn’t exist, and is merely a sock puppet internet account of the Liberal Party. Sock puppets like him are exactly why South Australian Labor felt this law was so necessary — the Liberals were disseminating propaganda whilst posing as ordinary citizens, oh noes!!
Except that Aaron Fornarino does exist… and lives in the attorney-general’s electorate… 500m from his office.
When asked how he could be so sure Fornarino didn’t exist, the attorney-general’s response was, hilariously, “Because I’ve been the member for the area for 20 years, I’ve lived here for longer. I have the up-to-date electoral roll and I just know West Croydon people very well.”
Yeah… evidently.
At any rate, it’s good to finally have an example of a government caving in to public pressure instead of devoting huge amounts of energy to resisting it. It’d be good if the Rudd and Brumby Governments would take note.
Wed, 03.02.2010, 1pm • 0 Comments • Tags: news, politics, Australia, rights, Internet, censorship