My week of Monday 17 to Sunday 24 October 2021 was one of those pauses before a busy period. Nothing much new produced, but there’s now much more clarity about how the next few weeks will unfold. And I watched birds!
Highlight of the week was the success of The 9pm Spring Series 2021 crowdfunding campaign. We got 97.3% of the way to Target Two so I’m calling that close enough, and there will be six episodes in the series.
Currently the guest list looks like this, in alphabetical order:
- Space archaeologist Dr Alice Gorman (@drspacejunk) who’s been on the pod before in 2018 and 2020.
- Author and columnist John Birmingham (@JohnBirmingham) who’s been on the pod several times before.
- Justin Warren (@jpwarren), consultant, freedom of information tragic, hexagon enthusiast, and creator of the CyberRatingâ„¢ labelling scheme.
- Fr Karl Sinclair (@FrKarlSinclair), a Catholic priest now based in Orange, who’s been on in 2015 and 2020. I’ll catch the train to Orange and explore his current town.
- Satirist Mark Humphries, who’s been on the pod in 2016, 2020, and June 2021.
I’m still thinking about how my everyday behaviour might return to something more like the Beforetimes. I’ll say more about this next week.
Media Appearances
- A ZDNet article from 2018, North Korea is the most destructive cyber threat right now: FireEye, was cited in Shashi Jayakumar’s chapter Cyber Attacks by Terrorists and other Malevolent Actors: Prevention and Preparedness (PDF) in the Handbook of Terrorism Prevention and Preparedness from the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism.
Photos
- I have of course updated my Waratah sequence 2021 for another week.
Articles, Podcasts, Videos, Corporate Largesse
None, but you can read my previous writing at Authory, where you can also subscribe to an email compilation of any new stories each Sunday morning.
You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel, although new videos don’t appear very frequently.
Recommendations
- John Birmingham’s Alien Sideboob is always worth reading, as I’ve told you before. But last week’s longer essay about Facebook is both magnificent and disturbing: Kill all you see.
- Pru Goward is a former minister in a NSW Liberal government, and is now Professor of Social Interventions and Policy at Western Sydney University and a columnist for the Australian Financial Review. She got some pushback for her recent column Why you shouldn’t underestimate the underclass. That’s a link which leaps the Fin paywall. Do read it, but only to understand how terrible it was.
- Pru Goward AFR column on ‘underclass’ condemned as disturbing and abusive, as the Guardian put it. I’ll be talking about it in a future podcast.
- John Birmingham also parodied it his his Sideboob, Dear Prudence….
- China’s Orbital Bombardment System Is Big, Bad News — but Not a Breakthrough, or if you prefer a podcast on the topic, A Fractional Orbital Bombardment System with a Hypersonic Glide Vehicle??.
- Last week I mentioned Ask Delphi, 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“. Sure, but then when people looked at it, Scientists Built an AI to Give Ethical Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist.
- Synchronised spinning and the invisible PM: Australia’s best political cartoons of 2021, being Mike Bowers’ selection of cartoons from the book Best Australian Political Cartoons 2021.
- Finally, I’m nearly a decade late to this, but I’ve finally started watching Inside No. 9, a British black comedy anthology TV series by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. I’m catching it on Binge in Australia, but I’m guessing it can be found elsewhere too.
The Week Ahead
It’s the second of two weeks of federal parliament, and there may be stories to write about that. I hope.
It’s also Australian Cyber Week, a promotional week for the cybersecurity industry. There’s quite a few events but I’ll figure out which ones I’ll watch on the day. That said, Monday and Friday seem to be the most attractive for me.
On Wednesday I’m recording the first episode in the Spring Series of The 9pm Edict podcast with Justin Warren (@jpwarren) as previously described. I’ll probably edit and post it on Thursday.
The 9pm Edict is supported by the generosity of its listeners. You can always subscribe for special benefits or throw a few coins into the tip jar. Please consider.
And I’ve got that geek-work to do for a couple clients, which will fit in nicely around everything else.
Further Ahead
- NetThing 2021, online, 4–5 November2021.
- Stilgherrian goes to Orange to record a podcast with Fr Karl Sinclair and more, 8–11 November 2021.
- Australian Cyber Conference, Melbourne, 15–17 November 2021 (TBC).
- The Sydney Dialogue, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 17–19 November 2021 (TBC).
- Annual Communications Industry Boat Cruise & After Party, Sydney Harbour, 2 December 2021. I haven’t included a link because it’s invitation-only. I’m still not sure whether joining a group of random people will be a good idea, so I may cancel this.
- NSW local government elections, 4 December 2021.
- linux.conf.au 2022, online, 14–16 January 2022 (TBC).
- APRICOT 2022 / APNIC 53, 28 February to 4 March 2022 approx (TBC). The host country is Bangladesh. I wonder if we’ll be travelling again by then.
[Photo: A NSW TrainLink V-Set arriving at Wentworth Falls station on 22 October 2021. Not a good show-the-type image, but some some reason I liked the composition of this random snapshot.]