Author: Stilgherrian

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Achtung! Die grosskapitalistischen Hühner kommen!

Photograph of paste-up art on the railway overpass at Newtown Square

As long as I can remember, the bridge over the railway at Newtown Square, Sydney, has been covered in posters. Last week the posters were stripped, it was painted a dreary shit-brown — and then a phone number appeared. Last night this paste-up protest appeared too.

At first I’d been pleased that the bridge was getting a fresh coat of paint, despite the colour. But when the “Bill Posters Prosecuted” message appeared, along with the phone number to book advertising space, I was disappointed to say the least. Yet another community space was turned into a commercial one. No longer could anyone with a bucket of glue and a brush promote their event, now it was only those who could afford to pay commercial rates on busy King Street.

The vibrant arts community of the Newtown precinct is precisely one of the reasons we and many others choose to live here, even though we’re under a flight path and real estate prices have become outrageous. “Achtung! Die grosskapitalistischen Hühner kommen!” indeed. We do not need yet another billboard for mainstream advertisers.

Marrickville City Council, please call off your advertising broker and return this wall to the community where it belongs.

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Echoes of America’s racial history

Map showing correlation between US cotton production in 1860 and votes for Barack Obama in 2008

Much has been said of the supposed racial element in the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. This map shows how deep the historical roots run.

The base area map shows in blue the counties which recorded a majority of votes for Obama. The overlay dot map shows US cotton production from 1860 — each dot represents 2000 bales. The similarity of the distribution is uncanny a century and half later.

It’s worth reading the comments on the original post at Strange Maps as people attempt to explain the finer details.

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Crikey: @KevinRuddPM stumbles into the Twitterverse

Crikey logo

[This article was first published in Crikey on Friday. It covers much the same material as my previous three posts [1, 2, 3] but for a general non-Twitter audience.]

Wednesday 1.35pm. Someone logs into the newly-created account “KevinRuddPM” and types “Looking forward to communicating with you on Twitter“. Thus did our Prime Minister enter the crazy hyperconnected global front bar cum water cooler conversation that is the Twitterverse.

Twitter avatar of @KevinRuddPM

It took a couple of hours for word to spread and for KevinRuddPM to gather his first ten “followers”. But soon the numbers grew. People said their greetings, asked questions and offered opinions — and most of the opinions were calling for an end to the Internet filtering trials. Smart-arses like me even offered snarky advice.

By mid-evening, KevinRuddPM had more than 700 followers. Those hanging out for a response eagerly devoured the second Prime Ministerial tweet: “Thanks to everyone for adding me on Twitter.” [My reaction: OMFG! Kevin Rudd tweeted again!] And then all the followers suddenly disappeared. Huh?

Continue reading “Crikey: @KevinRuddPM stumbles into the Twitterverse”

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Space: we’ve still such a long way to go

Hubble Space Telescope imagery of newly-discovered planet around Fomalhaut b

This morning I watched the Space Shuttle Endeavor [sic] rocket into orbit on NASA TV. Exciting. But now I see this new photograph (above) of a planet found orbiting Fomalhaut, and realise we’re still only taking the tiniest of baby-steps into the universe.

I’m a child of the Space Age. When I was born, no-one had been outside the earth’s atmosphere. I was too young to be aware of the flights of Yuri Gararin or Alan Shepherd. But when Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong walked upon the Moon we got the day off school to watch the grainy video imagery — our rural school didn’t have enough TVs for everyone to see.

Today I watched quietly as Endeavor became a tiny blue dot in the empty black sky — oh so quickly! And yet… And yet in the full-sized Hubble Space Telescope imagery the newly-photographed planet Fomalhaut b is also just a faint dot.

25 light-years away.

Endeavour would take more than 900,000 years to get there at its low Earth orbit speed of 8 kilometres a second.

Tiny. Baby. Steps.

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@KevinRuddPM isn’t really Kevin

Twitter avatar of @KevinRuddPM

I’m not particularly surprised to discover that the Prime Minister’s Twitter presence isn’t really Kevin Rudd but a minion of some kind.

I’ve already written about this [1, 2], and will doubtless write again, but I figure today’s the day they really do need to sort out how they’re going to use this Twitter account.

Are they talking in first person like “I’m on my way to the G20…” or the third like “We think getting 700 followers in 7 hours + following back caused us to crash“? How will they respond to the massive return traffic, making sure everyone feels like they’ve been heard while not sounding like a robot?

Why wasn’t this written up on the site before the account went live? After all, those basic ground rules would have been negotiated well before the PM approved the idea, wouldn’t they?

I’m still not convinced by this “we crashed Twitter” line either. Al Gore joined Twitter the other day and was getting 2000+ adds an hour. It coped fine then. I don’t see why it wouldn’t cope now. Linkage please, Prime Minister’s Minion!

I’m also surprised that they seem to be stumbling a bit, even by rolling out the account while the PM’s travelling. Surely they’d have hired an expert for such a public activity?