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“Consider the gecko pupil”
I encountered a weird meme going around rightish circle. I won’t repost it here for fear of boosting it even further. It was an image of a range of different eye pupils of various animals and a claim about what that indicated. Nightime ambush predators, like some cats or foxes, have vertical pupils, animals like…
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Apes and cranks
I’m thinking a lot about pseudoscience, crank magnetism and science fiction authors at the moment. Partly what I’m interested in is the aesthetics of scientific hypotheses i.e. what is it about some ideas that they gain longevity beyond their empirical life span. The specific idea I was looking at is the possibility of an ice…
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Review: Rapid Antigen Testing Part 4
This is me actually doing this one slightly wrong. This one is rated as Very High Sensitivity (https://www.tga.gov.au/covid-19-rapid-antigen-self-tests-are-approved-australia ) which is unusual for an oral test. The downside of the nasal swab style if you are sneezing from hayfever is obvious. You don’t want to sneeze with a cotton bud up your nostril. This misnamed…
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Covid March 2022 update
I can’t speak for the rest of the world but Australia isn’t in a post-covid world yet. I’d describe it more as a lets-not-talk-about-covid world. There’s not much news coverage but given substantial flooding in parts of Australia and the war in Ukraine, this isn’t surprising. However, there are a lot of people sick. Schools,…
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LTUE and the self-enforcing conspiracy
The Utah-based Life, The Universe & Everything (LTUE) is an annual quasi-academic conference on science-fiction writing. It’s not explicitly a pro-Sad Puppies conference but the Utah location and the connections between the original SPs and the Utah writing scene means there has been a lot of overlap over the years. In 2020 Mary Robinette Kowal…
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Australia Covid Update
For a lot of the time (heading towards two years) that I’ve been posting these graphs, Australia has either looked like a footnote at the bottom or (like my last post) I’ve shown it just with other countries with low case numbers. Well, now Australia is competing on the international stage but not in a…
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Some Graphs to Start the Year
Not wanting to start your year with doom, I waited a day. I didn’t post much satellite global temperature data last year because I was busy. Here’s how things look up to November 2021. The usual caveats apply here: not the best temperature record but the one that side-steps some time-wasting arguments. If you focus…
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Well, that didn’t last…NSW Covid numbers escalate
Back in November, I made this post on how covid numbers stabilised after the NSW lockdown lifted. Various reasons were offered but I thought it was probably just a matter of time. Anyway, it really was just a matter of time: “New South Wales has recorded Australia’s highest ever daily Covid case tally as the…
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Debarkle Chapter 74: Meanwhile…Election 2020
[content warning: discussion of violence and murder] Robert Heinlein’s “crazy years” were a period in his extrapolation of history into the future where rapid technological change would accompany a period of cultural and social decline. The idea resembles aspects of accelerationism[1] and the sense of galloping technological change and social unrest is one the world…
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Debarkle Chapter 73: Covid, Contrarians and Cons
The exact start of the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t known. At the time of writing this chapter (November 2021), it is believed that via some means a variant of a coronavirus found in other mammals made its way into the human population[1]. A less likely possibility (on current evidence) is that the virus outbreak was due…
Camestros Felapton
FELAPTONL
Camestros Felapton 