My week of Monday 11 to Sunday 17 October 2021 reminded me just how much human interaction I was missing during Greater Sydney’s lockdown. That ended on Monday, and I enjoyed the simple pleasure of sitting in a room where there were strangers and their sounds, and wine.
I also had the second-best haircut I’ve ever had, simply because after three months it was a pleasure to see the ragged curls disappear. You can see the results in the photo.
The very best haircut I ever had was in Bangkok back in 2007.
My current Pozible crowdfunding campaign The 9pm Spring Series 2021 aims to fund more special guest episodes of The 9pm Edict podcast through to the end of November and beyond. Please consider.
At the time of posting, we’re 48% of the way to Target One off 29 supporters with four days remaining.
Articles
- Calls to ID social media users is just another Morrison government rush job, ZDNet, 12 October 2021.
You can read my previous writing at Authory, where you can also subscribe to an email compilation of any new stories each Sunday morning. Or you can just send me gifts.
Podcasts
None, but on Thursday I was the guest on a recording of the Australian Democrats’ podcast Keep the Bastards Honest. That episode won’t appear until the week after next, I believe.
Videos
I decided last week to combine “Videos” and “Photos” into an “Imagery” section but now I’ve separated them again. Not that anyone cares.
- 005 Soggy Currawong Breakfast (ROUGH CUT), being a few minutes of some damp birds of the pied currawong kind (Strepera graculina) grabbing food in the rain at Bunjaree Cottages on Wednesday.
You can subscribe to my YouTube channel, although new videos don’t appear very frequently.
Photos
- I’ve updated my Waratah sequence 2021, adding this week’s images.
Media Appearances
- For some reason my July 2020 piece COVIDSafe’s problems aren’t Google or Apple’s fault despite government claims was citied by New Zealand news site Scoop in COVIDSafe: The Failure Of An App.
- One of my flower photos was used by a Spanish-language site in Argentina for its entry on Coreopsis lanceolata.
Corporate Largesse
None.
Recommendations
- Ask Delphi. Why? Delphi is a computational model for descriptive ethics, i.e., people’s moral judgments on a variety of everyday situations. To learn more about the model and the dataset, please read our paper. Update 18 October 2021: There’s been some criticism of this thing as being… bad. Have a play. I’ll tell you more about it next week.
- Africa’s iconic architecture in 12 buildings. The BBC has identified some beautiful architecture, sure, but imagine trying to summarise, say, European architecture in just 12 buildings. Africa is not a monoculture.
- A fascinating Twitter thread (archived) of graphics from the covers of US government reports from the 1960s to the 1980s.
- A review of Stephen Berkman’s book Predicting The Past – Zohar Studios: The Lost Years, also the subject of an article in The Atlantic, The Uncanny Tale of Shimmel Zohar. What is real and what is not?
- It hasn’t been updated in seven years, but this YouTube channel of Australian political adverts may bring back some memories.
The Week Ahead
The actual counting part of the Aussie Backyard Bird Count starts on Monday so you can expect some tweets about that.
It’s also the first of two weeks of federal parliament, and I know there will be stories to write about that.
However I really need to tackle that much-delayed geekery for a client. Fortunately the improving spring weather helps with that.
[Update 22 October 2021: Ending three consecutive paragraphs with the word “that”? Terrible editing!]
On Tuesday I’ll drop in to the seminar CAPABILITY: Submarines, Industrial Development, and Future Technologies, run by InnovationAus. There’s some interesting names on the panel, but with eight people in just one hour, we’ll hear maybe six minutes from each one. Deduct their opening thank-you for inviting me and this project is important for Australia that’s down to four minutes each. Don’t have so many people in a one-hour event.
The Pozible campaign wraps up on Thursday night. I might do something special at 9pm AEDT. Which campaign? The 9pm Spring Series 2021.
On Friday I’ll try to catch a Sophos webinar, Navigating the Data Security Maze in Australia.
Further Ahead
- Australian Cyber Week, AustCyber, 25–29 October 2021.
- NetThing 2021, online, 4–5 November2021.
- Australian Cyber Conference, Melbourne, 15–17 November 2021 (TBC).
- The Sydney Dialogue, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 17–19 November 2021 (TBC).
- NSW local government elections, 4 December 2021.
- linux.conf.au 2022, online, 14–16 January 2022 (TBC).
[Photo: Photographs of your correspondent’s hair, before and after the haircut on 11 October 2021. Doesn’t the lighting make a difference too! The first image was taken on the train coming down to Sydney, the second out in the cloudy daylight of Railway Square.]