Why the Golden Gate Bridge Sounds Like a David Lynch Movie Now | KQED: the eerie sound you're hearing from the Golden Gate Bridge is in fact the result of new sidewalk railing slats, just installed, meant to curb the wind. Funny thing about wind: when it passes through certain open spaces, it creates a hum. This is how all reed instruments work, and it's something that the engineers of said sidewalk panels apparently forgot to take into consideration.
This Little Story About A Young Ivanka Trump's Lemonade Stand Sure Is Something | HuffPost Australia... it's an old story but holy shit: When Ivanka was a kid, she got frustrated because she couldn’t set up a lemonade stand in Trump Tower. “We had no such advantages,” she writes, meaning, in this case, an ordinary home on an ordinary street. She and her brothers finally tried to sell lemonade at their summer place in Connecticut, but their neighborhood was so ritzy that there was no foot traffic. “As good fortune would have it, we had a bodyguard that summer,” she writes. They persuaded their bodyguard to buy lemonade, and then their driver, and then the maids, who “dug deep for their spare change.” The lesson, she says, is that the kids “made the best of a bad situation.”
Black Lives Matter is six years old, but many founding members say these protests feel different - ABC News: The federal "abolish the police" plan most often cited by activists centres on divesting from the police budget and investing in local resources like education, healthcare and employment. The goal is not to end the police, but to increase the presence of social workers, teachers, doctors — the kind of people who make police interaction an absolute last resort. Mr Hansford expects there to be some backlash to flattening the complex policy discussion into a phrase like "abolish the police," especially from a white America that still views police as their protectors.
When the Office Is Like a Biohazard Lab - The New York Times: “There are some real practical limitations to the guidance they've provided,” said Jim Underhill, chief executive of Cresa, a commercial real estate firm. “In dense urban environments, you can't have everyone drive their car in alone. And in a 70-story high rise, you can't limit two people to the elevator.”
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Willy Walker, chief executive of Walker & Dunlop, a commercial real estate financing firm, said managers of his 40 offices plan a wide variety of approaches to office life in the midst of a pandemic. In states like Texas or Florida, he said, everyone wants to go back to the office. In New York and California, employees are much more concerned about returning. “In the blue states, just two to three people want to go back in,” Mr. Walker said. “And in the red states, just two to three people don't want to go back in.”
NSW police pursue 80% of Indigenous people caught with cannabis through courts | Australia news | The Guardian: During the five year period, 82.55% of all Indigenous people found with a non-indictable quantity of cannabis were pursued through the courts, compared with only 52.29% for the non-Indigenous population, the data compiled by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research shows. The data shows police were four times more likely to issue cautions to non-Indigenous people. In the five years to 2017, only 11.41% of Indigenous Australians caught by police with small amounts of cannabis were issued cautions, compared with 40.03% of the non-Indigenous population. (stats collated from BOCSAR | NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research)
NSW is unable to use Covidsafe app's data for contact tracing | Australia news | The Guardian: Guardian Australia understands NSW Health has tested the data but has had issues integrating it into the existing contact-tracing methods, and the Digital Transformation Agency was contacted by the department to fix technical problems. The Digital Transformation Agency referred questions on the matter to the federal health department. The federal health department initially declined to answer specific questions on the issue, instead providing a general statement that states now have access to the app data.
Bushfire royal commission hears that Black Summer smoke killed nearly 450 people - ABC News: The commission heard modelling done by health researchers found 80 per cent of Australians were affected by bushfire smoke at some point over the 2019/2020 season. Associate Professor Fay Johnston, from the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania, said her team estimated around 445 people died as a result of the smoke, over 3,000 people were admitted to hospital for respiratory problems and 1,700 people presented for asthma.
Robodebt: government to refund 470,000 unlawful Centrelink debts worth $721m | Australia news | The Guardian: Stuart Robert, the government services minister, said the refunds would be received by 373,000 people, cost a total $721m and would include recovery fee charges. The debt refunds would begin from July, he said. ... Robert's statement did not say whether the government would agree to pay interest on the debts, a key demand from the class action led by Gordon Legal.
Robodebt was base politics, flawed policy and bad government: But those baying for the blood of the Government Services Minister, Stuart Robert, are looking at the wrong suspect. Robert was not even in the ministry when the Coalition devised the debacle. One of the chief proponents was Morrison himself. He announced the biggest part of the welfare crackdown as treasurer in the Turnbull government in the closing days of the 2016 election campaign.
Parasocial Relationships Are Changing the Way Women Use Social Media | Bitch Media: There's a more formal term for this: “Parasocial relationships,” a term coined by sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in 1956, are one-sided connections that people form with public figures that give them a false sense of a friendship or even of romantic connection.
Death of the office | 1843: It's too early to say whether the office is done for. As with any sudden loss, many of us find our judgment blurred by conflicting emotions. Relief at freedom from the daily commute and pleasure at turning one's back on what Philip Larkin called “the toad work” are tinged with regret and nostalgia, as we prepare for another shapeless day of WFH in jogging bottoms.
Covid-19 will change the standards of professionalism — Quartz at Work: Any illusion we used to propagate about “balance,” telling both our work and our families that they are the top priority and acting like the two are entirely separate forces in our lives, has ended abruptly. The affair we were having from our life with our work and vice versa has just been exposed.
The glimmer of hope I am clinging to in trying times is that the pretending ends for good, that this global crisis liberates us from our post-industrial hangover of humans as resources, as pieces of the organizational machine, without families or feelings.
Can an AI be an inventor? Not yet. | MIT Technology Review: Instead of listing a human author on the applications, the inventor was listed as Dabus AI, an AI system that Thaler spent over a decade building. Dabus AI came up with the innovations after being fed general data about many subjects. Thaler may have built Dabus, but he has no expertise in creating lights or food containers, and wouldn’t have been able to generate the ideas on his own. And so, the AIP team argues, Dabus itself is the rightful inventor.
Coronavirus pandemic exposes fatal flaws of the 'just-in-time' economy - ABC News: Official estimates showing that nearly 800,000 Australians lost their jobs in the space of a week or so as the crisis hit were a stark illustration of how quickly the "flexible" workforce can become collateral damage, with their loss of earnings threatening to unravel the economy and financial system. The lack of a buffer for many businesses in the just-in-time economy has also been brought into stark relief, with so many enterprises utterly reliant on short-term cash flow, with few resources to fall back on.
Empty sets - BBC Archive: Give your video calls a makeover, with this selection of over 100 empty sets from the BBC Archive.
Sydney inventor David Soo can grow $600,000 worth of vanilla from his smartphone - ABC News: The solution Mr Soo is developing is a custom-designed, 350-cubic-metre greenhouse, with controlled growing conditions that can be adjusted by mobile device.
Now three years into a pilot project on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Mr Soo is growing about 200 vanilla vines in a patented geodesic dome greenhouse.
He claims the vines are growing three times faster than in a plantation environment. The mobile is really incidental, bit of a crappy headline choice.
After coronavirus passes, nothing will be the same — and that might not be a bad thing - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): And there is the question of just how realistic it is that the threat of this virus will dissipate and the Government will be able to simply quickly turn off forms of assistance like the JobKeeper allowance and the increased JobSeeker allowance, or return to the previous system of funding childcare, or not intervene in areas like mortgage holidays and eviction moratoriums. Legislation to protect tenants from exorbitant increases in rents in the years after World War II was still in place in some states 40 years later. The term you're going to hear a lot is 'snap back', the fervent dream of the right wing that they can put everything straight back to how it was before. This is essentially the mindset of conservatism - that change is dangerous and must be avoided and reverted. But this change is too big. We can never go straight back and trying to do so will cause more harm.
The petrol station designed in 1953 by the French architect and designer Jean Prouvé and his brother Henry is one of the first serially manufactured petrol stations. Vitra acquired one of the last remaining models, which originally stood at a rest area in Haute-Loire (France). pic.twitter.com/CsXoy1Z2IN
More than 1.3 million Australians on jobseeker as Senate inquiry calls for permanent increase to rate | Australia news | The Guardian: More than 1.3 million people are now receiving unemployed benefits across the country, an increase of about 450,000 in less than one month. But a further 300,000 dole claims are still yet to be processed and department officials acknowledged on Thursday they expected about 1.7 million people to be receiving the jobseeker payment in September. On the same day the report from a nine-month Senate inquiry into unemployment benefits recommended an permanent increase to the rate...
AAP closure: competition watchdog says it is monitoring newswire's demise | Australian media | The Guardian: It is understood the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has the ability to look into the transaction because as well as closing the newswire business AAP plans to sell other parts of itself, including its profitable media release distribution unit. This could potentially raise competition issues that would not be posed by a simple shutdown.
Bill Gates leaves Microsoft's board | TechCrunch: Bill Gates has stepped down from the board of Microsoft to spend more time on his philanthropic endeavors, the company announced Friday afternoon. Though he will remain technology advisor to CEO Satya Nadella, this move reduces his involvement with the company to the lowest level it has ever been.
Australia's ALS probe finds half of coal quality reports amended - Reuters: Testing laboratory ALS Ltd said on Thursday an investigation found that about half the certificates it provided for export coal samples over the past decade had been manually altered to improve the quality of the commodity. ...
The ALS unit has about 40% of the market for testing coal samples to ensure shipments meet quality standards agreed with buyers, according to industry estimates.
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Shares in ALS fell 4.1% and are down 41% since it announced the investigation, outpacing a 28% decline in the broader market.
Gosh it's a good thing the government wants to double down on this industry, right?
EU votes in favor of choosing a common charging cable standard | Engadget: European Union lawmakers have voted overwhelmingly to legislate manufacturers to adopt a shared charging cable standard. ... The European Parliament also instructed the Commission to think about wireless chargers and how they could be used to reduce electronic waste. It also wants the body to find ways for the EU to collect and recycle more cables and chargers.
Streaming spells the end of the 'ownership' era of music, but are we ready to let go? | Music | The Guardian: Previously, people maintained access by owning records, cassette tapes, CDs or, more recently, digital files. Now all you need is a playback device and an internet connection. But the shift to streaming comes with trade-offs. [...] Streaming platforms offer convenience and variety, but they don’t always give us the latest album from the hottest artist of the decade – or the 1992 Vampire Mix of A Tribe Called Quest’s I Left My Wallet in El Segundo.
I had sort of assumed everyone noticed the Seinfeld opening music matched the timing of the standup routine, but given responses to this old video doing the rounds... apparently not!
How will MIDI 2.0 change music? — Quartz: In early January 2020, the MIDI Manufacturers Association, the nonprofit organization that manages MIDI, announced the release of MIDI 2.0. The new protocol involved years of work from the organization's volunteers, and getting companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and all of the major music manufacturers on board.
There are a few major changes in the new version. The biggest development is the expansion from 7-bit values to 32-bit values.
Adani Coal Mine: The World's Most Insane Energy Project Moves Ahead - Rolling Stone: The biggest myth associated with the Adani mine may be that continuing to mine and export coal is somehow vital to the Australian economy. It is not. As James Bradley points out, although coal accounts for almost 15 per cent of Australia's exports, it contributes less than 1 percent of the Commonwealth government's total revenue. And it's not like the industry creates a lot of jobs, either. In 2018, it employed slightly fewer than 50,000 people. That's less than 0.4 per cent of Australia's total workforce, and, more importantly, it's less that the 65,000 jobs created by tourism at the Great Barrier Reef. Even if you don't believe in climate change, the economics of Adani in particular simply don't add up.
The 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change are all flawed — Quartz: Broadly, there were three main errors in the papers denying climate change. Many had cherry-picked the results that conveniently supported their conclusion, while ignoring other context or records. Then there were some that applied inappropriate “curve-fitting”—in which they would step farther and farther away from data until the points matched the curve of their choosing.
The medications that change who we are - BBC Future: The results revealed that paracetamol significantly reduces our ability to feel positive empathy – a result with implications for how the drug is shaping the social relationships of millions of people every day. [...] Technically, paracetamol isn’t changing our personalities, because the effects only last a few hours and few of us take it continuously. But Mischkowski stresses that we do need to be informed about the ways it affects us, so that we can use our common sense.
Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware - VICE: Farmers worry what will happen if John Deere is bought by another company, or what will happen if the company decides to stop servicing its tractors. And so they have taken matters into their own hands by taking control of the software themselves.
"What happens in 20 years when there's a new tractor out and John Deere doesn't want to fix these anymore?" the farmer using Ukrainian software told me. "Are we supposed to throw the tractor in the garbage, or what?"
Climate change and extreme events – quantifying the changing odds - ECOS: An important part of event attribution is posing the appropriate question. Natural variability and climate change come together to give us what we experience, thus “did climate change cause this event?” is the wrong question – climate change didn't start a fire or create a drought. What climate change may do is change the likelihood of the event or make the event more severe or last longer than would have been the case without climate change.
I’ve had a number of messages saying that the media is ignoring arson as a major cause of the Australia bushfire crisis. Well, we looked at it today. Arson is not a major part of why these fires are so widespread and so severe. Here’s why. Produced @courtbembridge. pic.twitter.com/P16nCD1Bli
An 'absolutely seminal moment': climate change opinion shifting in face of fires: Veteran pollster John Utting believes the fires have been an “absolutely seminal moment. The conversation in the past has been kind of abstract, with [the case for stronger action] very much in in the hands of the virtue signallers; people felt they were being lectured. But now, everyone is breathing the proof. There is an incredible amount of evidence that the issue is beginning to bite … people are worried about a huge loss of lifestyle, and the impact on how they want to live and what they like about this country.”
Huntley agrees, though she's not yet as certain as Utting that this season's fires are a complete game-changer. “People can respond to traumatic events in very different ways, and some can push back and say, %u2018I don't want you to play politics with this disaster',” she says.
Scott Morrison can't afford to waste the bushfire crisis when Australia urgently needs its own green new deal | Malcolm Turnbull | Australia news | The Guardian: If ever there was a crisis not to waste, it is this one. Morrison has the chance now to reinstate the Neg with higher targets. Both he and Josh Frydenberg were among its strongest supporters when I was PM. They abandoned it in the lead-up to an election, to pacify the right wing of the Coalition that sabotaged it in the first place.
The election is won, and the fires have surely demonstrated that an integrated climate and energy policy is vital if we are to be serious about cutting emissions.
Farmers Are Buying 40-Year-Old Tractors Because They're Actually Repairable - VICE: The tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s look and run like modern tractors, but lack the computer components that drive up costs and make repair a nightmare. That's made them popular at auctions around the American midwest. A Nebraska area auctioneer sold off 27 older model John Deere tractors in 2019. The old work horse tractors are so popular that one with low mileage can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. A 1980 model with 2,147 hours of use sold for $43,500. A 1979 model sold for $61,000.
Can Macron douse Australia's fires? - POLITICO: Australia - a country that implemented wildly successful strict gun laws in response to a 1996 shooting massacre and has been held up as the poster-child for gun reform since - is as stuck on climate action as the U.S. is on gun laws. In America, not even the deaths of 20 elementary school children in the Sandy Hook shooting massacre could shift the debate. In Australia, the mounting fire death toll couldn't even get the prime minister to cancel his Hawaiian holiday, let alone increase climate change efforts.
RFS firefighter who died when fire tornado flipped truck during Green Valley bushfire named as Samuel McPaul - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): "The driver was a veteran captain of 35 years-plus experience. He thought he was in the right spot — as he was, from what I can understand — and just this freakish weather event that would have to be seen to be believed. Even then, other veteran firefighters don't believe what they saw, [it] engulfed that vehicle with flame, fire, and strong winds and literally picked up an 8-tonne truck and flipped it over." When people say 'unprecedented' this is what it means - the old rules no longer work, experienced crews run into conditions beyond anything they can predict.
These two interviews from the 24th are just extraordinary. Fire fighters talking about how locals have had to use private vehicles and equipment, even talking about forming their own fire crews in future.
Cashout - Fugazi. Digging back into old punk stuff got me onto Fugazi and this classic protest song.
FIGJAM - Butterfingers. Saw Butterfingers live on the Breakfast At Fatboys tour. Hell of a lot of fun.
Wolf Totem - The Hu. Seems people either love or hate these guys. I think they're great and really only hamming it up as much as any other metal band. They just have a really big budget for film clips ;)
midas heel & drama free (feat. Lights) - deadmau5. Listened to these as a pair a lot when they came out as a single, basically feels like one track. Dug back into the deadmau5 back catalogue a lot this year.
Let It Go - Sietta. Interesting soul/electronic duo from Darwin, pity more people don't know them. Spotify popped them up as I have Caiti Baker's solo stuff. I get the feeling even they think the film clip is overwrought but the song's great.
Schism - Tool. Tool finally decided to join the streaming world, so I no longer had to pull out my ipod to listen to their back catalogue. Apparently I've gone from a die-hard iPod Classic user to a Spotify junkie. There are clearly two camps - the "I'm over Tool" and "fuck yeah new album and tour"... you can guess which one I'm in ;) It's probably their swansong and epitaph but it was fun to see Tool owning the charts and confusing da yoof.
DEUTSCHLAND - Rammstein. Speaking of well-executed more-of-the-same, Rammstein dropped this jaw-dropping clip seemingly out of nowhere. Part socio-political commentary and part trolling, making it typical Rammstein fare. Interesting statement on a nation's relationship with its history, or cynical attention seeking? You decide.
Closedown - The Cure. We got lucky and had nearly-front-row tickets to see The Cure play Disintegration at the Opera House. I nearly didn't include it in the list because, honestly, I was a bit overwhelmed. Also which song to include? My favourite song's on the album but that's a moment I won't attempt to share. In the end I chose this because Cooper's drumming was just superb on the night and this track really showed it off. It's not actually all about our beloved Bob ;)
Shudder/King Of Snake - Underworld. Back at the Opera House just a few nights later, almost in the same seats. An unexpected standout of Vivid Live, it deserved the rave reviews. I'd wanted to see Underworld live ever since I'd heard the Everything Everything version of Rez/Cowgirl on my car radio nearly 20 years ago. Despite that, I'd been preoccupied with The Cure and hadn't built up big expectations around this gig. But hooooooly shit. They ripped the roof off the place. The band were incredible and the crowd fed it back, demanding an encore so loud and long that turning the house lights on didn't move us. The band came out and did an encore, exclaiming... "we don't do this... YOU did this!" No recording can capture it.
Into The Abyss - Hilltop Hoods. New Hilltops = high rotation.
Hey Ladies (Paul Nice Remix) - Beastie Boys. Just a catchy remix.
Please - U2. I got a line from this stuck in my head for days before we saw The Joshua Tree. We didn't get it on the night but somehow this is the track that feels right for the mix tape. Also since this surprises someone every single time - yes I really do like U2.
Honourable mention goes to the Black Hole Recordings psytrance recordings, Psytrance 2018 vols 1 & 2:
They hit the spot and helped get a lot of code written, but several hours of bleepy psytrance doesn't really fit into a mix tape.