tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68546912024-08-29T19:50:14.426+10:00Stuff about stuffJustin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.comBlogger54125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-73764164494990800572008-01-17T15:06:00.000+11:002008-01-17T15:16:52.256+11:00

Are there no lengths to which Sea Shepherd will not stoop to stop Global Warming?Many of you naively believe that the whaling war is about protecting endangered species from Japanese "scientists", but that's because you haven't come to recognize that there is a subtle form of Intelligent Design behind the crew of the Steve Irwin getting arrested for piracy.

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-29796576644363928862007-12-18T11:59:00.000+11:002007-12-18T12:16:28.067+11:00

I just came across VoiceThread, a new collaborative media site which aims to facilitate "Group conversations around images, docs and videos. It allows not only text comments, but audio and video comments, and even doodling (whiteboard style) on the presentation itself.This has all sorts of amazing applications, but I've embedded this particular VoiceThread because I found it very moving, and it

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-75464306354699579702007-12-14T11:21:00.000+11:002007-12-14T12:29:09.047+11:00

A little over a week ago, the SMH reprinted a Reuters report about criminal charges filed against the German version of Wikipedia by a left-wing German politician, Katina Schubert, over what she considered to be the excessive use of Nazi symbolism, especially on the site's page on the Hitler Youth.Fortunately, by the time the Oz and Yahoo!7News picked up the story, Schubert's party - Die Linke-

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-33738966735393357682007-11-22T16:18:00.000+11:002007-11-22T16:54:35.802+11:00

I thought the Liberal party's advertising onslaught last night was pretty intense in the leadup to the Wednesday night cut off for TV and radio election ads.But today, we've gone from the annoying to the ridiculous. Liberal party ads are all over the SMH today, on the very same pages reporting the story about the Libs' Lindsay leaflet scandal. Even Paul Keating's opinion piece had to compete with

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-51822281643124803702007-11-20T14:58:00.000+11:002007-11-20T15:23:11.430+11:00

The economist this week has a review of this book by Pierre Bayard, who argues that "the truly cultivated person is not the one who has read a book, but the one who understands the book's place in our culture." Well... that's not exactly what Bayard wrote, it's just a line from the publisher's blurb, but I think I get the idea. Perhaps I'll get around to reading his book one day...Either way, it

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-2784627472539246062007-11-15T14:56:00.000+11:002007-11-15T15:06:54.312+11:00

I'm not sure which is scarier, MTV's college channel wiki encouraging students to publicly criticise their professors, or this particular professor's response.

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-65333695261584267132007-11-07T17:11:00.000+11:002007-11-15T15:07:57.831+11:00

On Tuesday, I had my first experience of rock climbing for many years, down at the Ledge climbing centre at Sydney University.It turns out that climbing is disproportionately represented among members of the philosophy faculty at Sydney, and it prompts the question: what's the attraction?Not being one to shy away from generalisations founded on metaphors, I came up with a couple of striking

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-88349194017559241102007-11-07T15:13:00.000+11:002007-11-07T15:28:23.117+11:00

Tim Longhurst has raised the alarm about media player Crikey raining on the parade of a talented election commentary site run by Aussie youth since 2004.The site, electiontracker.net, which is run by Vibewire, is now finding its online presence undermined by the creation in late September of Crikey's electiontracker.com.au.Amber Sloan, General Manager of Crikey, has ruled out adding cross links

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-21502246219534901432007-10-15T17:00:00.000+10:002007-10-15T17:01:52.065+10:00

Just re-discovered this post from 2004 (BrainOfJ: Reading spaces = thinking room?), which suggests that Charlemagne started a revolution in communication by introducing spaces between words. Spaces enabled silent reading for the first time, separating writing from speech and contributing to the fall of the priestly class's monoploy on literacy. The historical claim probably goes too far (

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-55813905838421293802007-10-15T09:56:00.000+10:002007-11-15T15:09:01.972+11:00

In 2000, Nigerian teacher Mohammed Bah Abba won the Rolex award for inventing the Pop-in-pot evaporation cooler. It so simple, put one terracotta pot inside another, and fill the gap with wet sand. On dry days, the water in the sand evaporates through the porous clay of the outer pot, cooling the contents much the same way that sweat cools the body. This simple device, which uses no electricity,

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-50482676620657350232007-10-12T10:01:00.000+10:002007-10-12T10:43:55.718+10:00

Tim Hollo at Greensblog has brought my attention to a bunch of interesting new sites springing up that offer an online test to determine which political party you're most ideological compatible.I subjected myself to Bryan Palmer's version at OzPolitics. I was a little surprised by the results. I'd expected to be closest to the Democrats, but I came up with a nearly 90% compatibility with the

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-67681208582498039652007-10-03T09:21:00.002+10:002008-05-01T21:44:25.067+10:00

I haven't posted for a while, but I've been doing a lot of thinking about the implications of new social web technologies for academia, which culminated in a talk I gave at St Paul's College (USYD) on Monday 17th September. Thanks again to my student Don Cameron for the invitation.The content of my talk doesn't really reflect the breadth of the ensuing discussion, which I found challenging and

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-45167471334348886112007-06-27T10:05:00.000+10:002007-06-27T10:16:26.988+10:00

Here's a bug in IE6 that is worth remembering.Situation:All the thumbnails in a site I am working on display in FF, but some of them do not display in IE6. (Note: they all display fine in IE7).I've ruled out mistakes in the img src field, and the images preview fine in the standard Windows preview utility.Diagnosis:Turns out some of these images are GIFs that have been saved with a .jpg suffix (

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-38726483858995438122007-05-18T10:47:00.000+10:002007-05-18T10:57:34.887+10:00

Is it just me or are internet radio stations like Pandora and last.fm based on an idea that resembles Dirk Gently's method of holistic navigation: i.e.When trying to get somewhere, follow a random car.You may not end up where you were going.But you'll certainly find yourself somewhere you needed to be.The only difference being on these stations, you don't follow one car, you follow the traffic.

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-27436889813295001462007-04-23T09:59:00.000+10:002007-10-12T11:01:28.532+10:00

Ideas cannot be owned. They belong to whomever understands them. - Sol Lewitt(thanks to dataisnature for the quote)Maybe ownership of ideas should take into account the way they are acquired - i.e. by understanding them.

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-8828068312290540612007-04-16T11:02:00.000+10:002007-04-16T11:14:39.228+10:00

Ok. Here's a bit of trivia that puts the energy needs of the human body into perspective.1 Mars bar contains about 1 megajoule (239,000 calories) of energy, which is about a 1/4 of the energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT, and about 10 times the kinetic energy of a car travelling at highway speeds.The mars bar isn't that special, by the way. There's an equivalent nutritional energy

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-12413462141738678172007-04-10T10:22:00.000+10:002007-04-10T10:30:17.157+10:00

Larvatus Prodeo put me on to this post by Kung Fu Monkey John Rogers, which is spot-on.Rogers exposes the way this film actually opposes core American values. The independent hero is not everyman, he's a professional soldier - which the minutemen and the Band of Brothers were not! And the freedom he's fighting for isn't for everyone, since in Sparta everyone is not created equal - in

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-7394955271856610232007-04-10T09:29:00.000+10:002007-04-10T09:37:34.836+10:00

In the episode I'm thinking of, Alan Alda's character stuns a roomful of farmers in Iowa (I think) by refusing to take the Ethanol pledge. Well, Castro is encouraging everyone to follow Alda's example, and the Economist agrees with him. It will be interesting to see how the real Presidential candidates manage this one. Ethanol Castro was right Apr 4th 2007 From The Economist print edition As a

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-89024142505686734902007-01-17T16:14:00.000+11:002007-01-17T16:18:26.599+11:00

Something to keep in mind.From New York MagazineIn 1981, Maslach, now vice-provost at the University of California, Berkeley, famously co-developed a detailed survey, known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, to measure the syndrome. Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp: working too much; working in an unjust environment; working with little social support;

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-1165879952392595532006-12-12T10:28:00.000+11:002006-12-12T10:34:18.316+11:00

This is a great idea. Help light up the Darfur Wall. Donate one dollar or more to turn a number from dark gray to brilliant white and honor one lost life. 100% of the proceeds go to four Darfur relief organizations.

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-1165539272307155452006-12-08T11:50:00.000+11:002006-12-08T11:54:32.316+11:00

"Oh Adso, you dolt," my alter ego corrected me,"These first years of the century, they're not the 'zeros' or the 'naughties'.""They're the Double-O's.""And next year is '007!"

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-1163546606147025282006-11-15T10:06:00.000+11:002006-11-15T10:23:53.796+11:00

In the SMH this morning ("How do you cook Kellyville max?"), Elizabeth Farrelly points out that by creating the North West growth centre from Mulgrave to Bidwell, the NSW govt is encouraging developers to pave over Sydney's best food-growing lands.Sydney is expecting maybe a million blow-ins over coming decades (though figures are revised downwards all the time) and they have to live somewhere.

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-1160021981956077142006-10-05T14:07:00.000+10:002006-10-05T14:19:41.986+10:00

Rather than trying to understand people as computers, what if we reversed the analogy - not in order to wonder whether computers really think or feel (what sort of person wonders in this way about other people?!). When one sets that question aside, the most interesting difference between human agent-perceiving-deliberators and their silicon counterparts is the relative poverty of the world in

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-1155522993676599042006-08-14T12:34:00.000+10:002006-08-14T12:36:33.686+10:00

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.* Translation: They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 30

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6854691.post-1137283271026920282006-01-15T10:05:00.000+11:002006-01-15T11:04:19.043+11:00

Could the study of junk reveal a continuity between biological and social evolution?A few years ago, I read Don Delilio's incredible homage to the second half of the 20th century, Underworld. No, it's got nothing to do with Vampires or Kate Beckinsale - sorry, Richard.The novel is a study of junk, beginning with a certain baseball, and centred on a garbage disposal consultant, Nick Shay, who

Justin Tauberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06713783462353399509noreply@blogger.com0