A new concept, hybrid success.

It’s a combination of things that you like to do, are good at, and that makes money, all cross referenced with what you actually do.

So nothing then.

In matters technology and startups, it used to be the case that form follows function and less is more.

These days, it’s pretty much form over function, just like say in the design and architecture fields.

And the entertainment continues from the ABC…

“Australia’s road toll is getting worse. Is the answer learning to drive at school?”

Click.

Bait.

Some spam is worth recording, otherwise it will be lost to history.

“Hi, we are running an escort company for female.
We provide fit bad boy to our female customers who are desperate to be fucked hard.
We are looking for sexualy fit male who can satisfy our female clients.
If you are a good fucker, then we are happy to pay you $100-$500/hour.
Apply here  –
https://sites.google.com/view/by359“

Unpick this and you’re smarter than me.

“Deaths of despair claimed the lives of almost 6500 Australians during the first full year of the COVID pandemic, new research shows, but a ban on over-the-counter codeine pain relief drugs helped prevent more people from dying.”

“People who still look young in their 60s and beyond usually adopt these 8 daily habits.”

This was actually was written by Tina Fey. Not the comedic actor, unfortunately. Another one that looks well into her 30s. Maybe she’s 65 and the point’s proven?

However she did write a book entitled “How to get your ex back”. So salt is required here.

1. Hydration is key

2. Regular exercise is non-negotiable

3. They prioritize sleep

4. Balanced diet is a must

5. They embrace positivity

6. Sunscreen is a daily staple

7.Regular check-ups are a norm

8. Self-care isn’t optional, it’s essential

You can scratch 5 and 6 straight up, and 8 is gibberish. Free advice there.

Also, you can’t overdo it because that’s a sign of anxiety which will age you faster than anything else.

Oh if you’re already past 60 it’s way too late to start. No ballast mate, you’re dead.

True story.

I’m chatting to an acquaintance, who’s from Hong Kong and has been living in Australia for a few years.

He says to me;

“What’s with this crazy welcome to country thing?”

Workshop, workshop, google, etc.

It’s not a law, you don’t have to do it.

Although some employers insist, so as an employee if you don’t comply you’re giving them ammunition for three warnings, as required for a sacking.

But mainly, if you don’t do it, you expose yourself to the highest court in the land, the kangaroo court of social media.

My Hong Kong acquaintance asks how that is different to having a dictatorship that tells you exactly what to do.

I say, no idea but best just to ignore the whole thing. It’ll go away eventually when people get bored with it.

After all, what harm does it do?

You can’t waste time in Australia; it’s one big waste of time anyway.

Arguably the carbon footprint and lost productivity (lol) of the welcome to country is avoidable. So just don’t measure it, I say.

Sidenote; you can tell how useless your chosen career is by how many welcome to countries you have to deal with in a year.

If it’s death defyingly hypocritical and boring, then don’t go. That’s what I do.

In any case, it’s good to weed out those that can’t stand hypocrisy. They’ll be quiet, if they’re smart, and then slowly leave the country. Effectively they’re enemies of the state. You’re better off without them.

Hops were originally added to beer mainly as a stabilizer, to keep it from spoiling. Hops also add that pleasant bitter flavour that offsets the sweet malt flavour.

India Pale Ale, for example, is very bitter because of the extra hops added to help it keep from spoiling on the long ocean voyage from Britain to India.

Before the adoption of the Reinheitsgebot (the Bavarian beer purity law) in 1516 specifying the use of hops as the bitter stabilising agent, black henbane was one of the key ingredients used instead.

But black henbane, a weed, is both toxic and hallucinogenic. However, the beer was definitely not hallucinogenic.

Henbane is hallucinogenic because it contains anticholinergics. A familiar example of an anticholinergic is Benadryl (diphenhydramine), which is also an antihistamine. Benadryl can definitely make you hallucinate, if you take enough of it.

But all anticholinergics have unpleasant side effects at doses much lower than the hallucinogenic dose. A medium dose of anticholinergic will cause dry mouth, constipation, and increased heart rate. You need a much larger dose to begin hallucinating, and at that larger dose you are also likely to have blurry vision, a fever, impaired memory, and confusion. Death is possible.

Because even a medium dose is so unpleasant, the dose in beer was likely very small.

Henbane is also known as ‘stinking nightshade’ because it is so pungent, so a very small amount of henbane probably added significant flavor and aroma to the beer while adding only a small dose of anticholinergic.

In summary, that old school German beer was probably less hallucinogenic than Benadryl.

Tooling around the internet I did find one home brewer that makes henbane beer. He drinks it at 55 degrees C, and it tastes “like an earthy licorice”.

I suspect those Bavarian law makers knew what they were doing.

Instructions for assimilation into Australia for recent refugees.

Step 1; Pick a marsupial, any marsupial. Or just make one up, like the zoologists do every day. Obscure is good, eg the Eastern Striped Longnose Brown Swamp Quoll.

Step 2; Assume it’s endangered.

Step 3; Adopt it as your mission in life.

Step 4; Social the fuck out of it, ad nauseam.

The cat from Australia refused to be pigeon-holed on the basis of a stereotype.

In matters sushi, my strong preference is eel.

I just realised that my irrational and deep hatred of bureaucracies comes from 4 year employment patch at James Hardie in my 30s.

I remember that summer like it was yesterday. The sun beat down on the dusty red dirt roads, and the cicadas hummed a relentless chorus. My days were spent exploring the scrub, chasing goannas, and swimming in the creek. Nights were spent under the vast, starlit sky, listening to the eerie howl of dingoes in the distance. It was a world of raw beauty and endless possibilities, a place where a boy could lose himself and find himself all at once.

Cisinformation; knowingly false information designed to deliberately mislead and influence public opinion or obscure the truth, for nice or altruistic purposes.

In association football, both rugbys, and Australian football, when a game ends with an equal score for both teams, it’s called a draw.

The teams can be tied during the game, and if the scores are still equal when it’s over, then it becomes a draw.

In cricket and American football, a game that ends with an equal score for both teams is called a tie.

Confusingly, in test cricket a draw is when the game ends because they’re out of time, and the teams are on different scores.

Just to confuse things more, a tie in some sports is a future fixture, and the draw is the schedule of future ties.

Cicadas around the world hatch in cycles of 7, 13 and 17 years. These are all prime numbers.

Apparently prime number schedules make it less likely they’ll coincide with a peak predator population.

For example, if a type of cicada-hunting bird boomed every six years, a 17-year cicada brood would coincide with the peak predator year just once every 102 years.

If the cicadas emerged every 12 years instead, they’d be vulnerable to predators that peak every 12, six, four, three and two years.

What came first, the maths or evolution?

Sounds like bullshit to me. Wouldn’t the birds just adapt to the 7, 13 and 17 year cycle and have a 100% overlap?

It just proves that biologists aren’t real scientists. They get all mystical about prime numbers for example.

If you’d asked me what was more important for a lawn mower, torque or horsepower, I’d have had no idea.

Some engineer on the web has done the work for me.

For mowing lawns you need horsepower. When your lawnmower stalls in thick, tall or wet grass (or weeds in my case), it’s due to a lack of horsepower.

Now, there isn’t an electric lawnmower out there that has even 1 horsepower. Your low end petrol mower is 3 horsepower.

Because of this, the vendors of electric lawnmowers obfuscate by advertising volts, amp hours, etc. Anything but horsepower.

Power isn’t even listed in their spec sheets. That’s close to disinformation.

In any case they’re currently not fit for purpose. Single use plastics.

I’ve just bought a new mower because the old one stopped starting. Who knows why?

I had it serviced ($100) and the bloke said it had old fuel in it. Complete bullshit; it’s always had old fuel and no problems. In effect it cost me $100 to change the fuel.

Now a few months later it won’t start again and I’m not wasting any more money on it. Three services and you’ve paid for a new one.

My new one is a 127cc motor mower that puts out 3 horsepower. But my 150cc motor scooter puts out 13hp. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

My guess is that lawn mower engines produce fewer horsepower than motorbike engines of the same displacement because lawnmower engines are cheap arse rubbish; they are air-cooled, inefficient but robust, and run at much lower rpm. This makes them cheap, durable and virtually maintenance free (lol).

On the subject of the upcoming fake news (disinformation) act, which would make social media companies liable for any fake shit on their platforms.

It would be more effective to make it a crime to be disinformed.

That is, put the onus on the people to start thinking a little.

Scenario; labor gets in, and then jails everyone that voted for the coalition because they were clearly disinformed at some point.

Misinformation is false information that is spread due to ignorance, or by error or mistake, without the intent to deceive.

For example, when the US food and drug mob initially warned the population about excessive salt intake. They meant well but later admitted they were dead wrong.

Disinformation is knowingly false information designed to deliberately mislead and influence public opinion or obscure the truth for malicious or deceptive purposes.

By example, same bunch of American bearucrats, cholesterol. T’were part of a concerted effort to flog statins to people that don’t need them, and which do actual harm to your kidneys.

Incentivised by three days of fever, I did a little research.

It turns out that the immune system generates heat and chemicals, locally at the site of infection, so as to kill the pathogens and maybe sacrifice some of your own cells in the process.

But get this, local temperature at the site of infection can get up to 50 degrees C.

Your blood system acts like any water jacket for cooling and heating; it works to equalise the temperature all over your body.

Which got me thinking, maybe it’s best to extract heat from your body while you have a fever. The best way to do this is a cold shower or bath.

My thinking is that chilling the body would take heat away from infected site, this causing the immune system to double down on producing heat and chemicals at the site of infection.

It also makes you feel much better. I suspect the brain gets all weird over 40 degree C and doesn’t work properly anymore. Hallucinations etc.

It worked for me.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

“Misinformation is false information that is spread due to ignorance, or by error or mistake, without the intent to deceive. Disinformation is knowingly false information designed to deliberately mislead and influence public opinion or obscure the truth for malicious or deceptive purposes.”

Yeah but who decides what’s malicious or deceptive?

A bunch of politicians, lol.

We all know that Australia is the greatest anthropomorphic inventor of all time, e.g. the ute, WiFi, the lawn mower, pavlova, etc.

Now I learn that Australia’s indigenous people are the original inventors of bread and the axe.

In an article in the Conversation –

“The book [Dark Emu] raises an important question. If you lived in a country [Australia] that invented bread and the edge-ground axe – a [Indigenous] culture that independently developed early trade and social living – and did all of this without resorting to land war – wouldn’t you want your children to know about it?”

I kid you not.

So many questions, the chief of which, was the axe used to slice the bread?

No one, not even the imperious Musk, can single-handedly beat an army of bureaucrats.

It’s like a law of thermodynamics, if there was such a thing for the organisation of ants.

Is now.

I just read this, so it’s self apparently true…

“It is said that prodigies are infused with an old spirit that guides them through their art, giving them knowledge that would take them years to learn otherwise.”

Although the original had “in school” instead of “otherwise”. That’s so retarded that I just had to correct it.

If you got another go at life, one thing is for sure, you wouldn’t waste a second of it in school.

“And the number of self-appointed experts with no kin in the game – or even basic knowledge about the region – is exhausting and dispiriting. And let’s not forget ignorant social media influencers, though I would like to.”

It raises the question, who is in the game? When are you qualified to publicly ponder any specific drama du jour?

Is it where you live, what you consume, or who you love? Who your grand parents were, how they died, or what religion you pretend to believe in?

So keep your stinking reasonableness to yourself.

The truth is, no one cares what you think.

Lifts and trains, these are places where the smart person checks out the shoes of others.

Beats looking them in the eyes. 9 times out of 10, all you see is the terror that is reflected by their choice of shoes.

It’s bad karma to see that terror. The good you feels empathy and wants to do something for them, but doesn’t, for practical reasons.

Back to the shoes, Oliver.

The centre point is comfort with no compromise. The near-universal deviation that comes with the terror is simultaneously individualised and corporatised, by branding, design, colour, cut and material.

And often along with just sheer stupidity. Geez there are some dumbarse options out there.

And so [many/much] bunions, hammertoe, heel spurs, ingrown toenails, neuroma, plantar fasciitian, sesamoiditis, tinia, and shin splints.

Good morning parents,

HASS PROJECT
As mentioned yesterday, there seems to be a little bit of confusion regarding the HASS project.

Please note that students can create as little or as much of their part of our city at home as you would like. If you do not have the time to create anything at home, this is absolutely fine as we will be working on the city at school. This will not disadvantage students in any way.

Many parents have asked if there is a deadline to send in items created at home. There is no deadline but please just send items in as they are completed and we will add them to your child’s part of the city. Please also continue to send in materials like cereal boxes, tissue boxes, butter containers, paper towel rolls etc.

Please see the attached flyer inviting you into the classroom on Monday November 4 at 2:15pm to see our city. On this afternoon you will also have the opportunity to visit other Year 1 classes with your child to view their city creations.

Students have now planned their part of the city, therefore, we will start on the construction at school this afternoon. If you have anything that you have been working on at home that is ready to send in, then please do so this morning if possible.

PARENT VOLUNTEERS
On Thursday October 17 between 11:30 and 12:45 we have our World of Maths incursion. Each class is looking for parent volunteers to assist us with the incursion. If you are available, then please let me know.

Kind regards,
Katherine

On Tuesday in Parliament, our Prime Minister, the simple tool, took umbrage at an interjector from the opposition ranks: “Have you got Tourette’s or something? You know, you just sit there, babble, babble, babble.”

Funny on so many levels. The man might have some merit after all.

For what it’s worth, I’ll record this.

Queensland, the state of Australia, in a magnificent effort to cut costs, has silently removed most of its cops from the roads, relying on cameras to do the heavy lifting when it comes to traffic offences.

Which means, so long as you avoid the cameras, you can do any devious shit you want on the roads.

Worth noting because I suspect most people haven’t.

“Firebombings of Victorian tobacco shops surpass 100 as police detail meeting that sparked war”

Good job, gubment.

Take a perfectly legal product and tax it into legalised crime territory.

Must have been a hell of a meeting.

The latest study of the Irish Travellers is damn interesting.

Mostly the study was genetic but it’s been used to speculate, as historians are want to do.

They don’t let the absence of data get in the way of a good story, just like physicists. I like that.

It seems that before the English Normans invaded Ireland, most of the Irish were pastoral  nomads, wandering with their flocks and practising hunter and gathering tactics for desserts.

The English forced them to settle so they could be taxed – a mobile target is harder to control. However a small fraction refused and became the travellers.

Genetic studies show a diversion of the traveller population from the general population around the 12th century.

Until recently it was thought that the travellers were refugees forced to wander by the potato famine in the 1800s.

I’ve done a study.

If I ask for a doppio, I always get a “what?”

But perchance I change it up and ask for a double shot espresso, in reply I get a “doppio?”.

Very occasionally, upon suspicion of entering into coffee hell, I’ll ask for a short black with an extra shot. What I get is what I asked for.

What do you get if you cross a libertarian with a bogan?

A lunicorn (looneycorn). I’ve got one, and a cheerful one at that.

I’d rather vote for the actually corrupt major parties than the intellectually corrupt greens or teals.

The Billboard should read – “simple tools for managing your country”, then have pictures of Dutton and Albanese.

Noting the evil preferential voting system that we have, I prefer my non voting strategy even more.

At least this way I get the satisfaction for not even being partially responsible for whoever gets in.

I guess it had to happen eventually. I’ve hit people, birds, other bikes, dogs and even parked cars, but I just ran over my first snake on the bicycle.

Eastern Brown is my best guess. A dead baby now.

The Australian Constitution does not expressly protect the freedom of expression.

However there’s plenty of legislation that limits freedom of expression, including defamation, anti-vilification, classification and censorship laws and the treason and urging violence offences.

If I’m to understand our politicians they reckon it’s currently illegal to have an anti-Israel protest but legal to have a pro-Palestine protest, despite the fact they’re the same thing.

Possibly a tad oxymoronic to have a pro-protest, so in effect all protests are currently illegal.

I’m thinking it’s worth promoting a pro-free speech protest.

I can’t figure out what would happen?

The symbol for “OR” is typically represented by a descending wedge (∨), otherwise known as “V”, derived from the Latin word vel, meaning, not surprisingly, or.

Certainly not as catchy as the ampersand.

The ABC is at it again … “Queensland remains one of only three Australian states and territories that do not change their time zone”

Can you tell me why ears get bigger after 60 years of age?

Which also leads to cultural nostalgia; that things were better then. And they probably were.

Unless you can individuate from your culture at this point, you’re a prime candidate for conspiracy theories, big ears.

I nominate the Tony Lockett retirement plan. Arguably the greatest AFL player of all time (he’s certainly kicked more goals than anyone that’s ever played), at retirement he said;

“The game owes me nothing, and I owe the game nothing”.

In other words, fuck off and leave me alone.

My version;

“The country owes me nothing, and I owe the country nothing.”

The current two favourite prefaces to any arguments, as used by under age thinkers are;

Technically, and

Literally

Generally, the use of these prefaces means that they have no idea and they know it.

Mine’s “generally”.

Get this, we’re having a state election in Queensland.

The big issue, and I kid you not, is youth crime. They’ve got the media spruiking it as a plague to our half-witted population (sorry, Qld, the average IQ of our population is on par with the bush turkey).

Not ever having been a victim of youth crime, not ever having seen it in action since I was a youth, I don’t give a stuff.

But then again I don’t vote either.

The reason I don’t vote is that both sets of clowns want to solve this fake problem by getting hard on the perpetrators, ie locking the kids up.

“adult time for adult crime“

Without even looking at the research I know this will just make things worse.

Thus proving that the politicians are either stupid or corrupt, and probably both.

I know who I’d be locking up.

In 1930 the world fastest production motorcycle was the Brough Superior SS100.

With a 1000cc motor it could reach 110 km/h.

Which is exactly what my 150cc Kymco motor scooter can do.

Usually conflated at the hip in matters literature, there is a difference.

Flotsam is floating crap that fell off a ship, or is from a shipwreck.

Jetsam looks identical but was purposefully jettisoned from a ship.

The nomenclature refers to legal rights of those who find this stuff, it’s different in the two cases.

Although just by looking at it, you can’t possibly tell if it’s flotsam or jetsam.

It’s a quantum problem.

PS, for the authors out there, correctly, it should be “flotsam or jetsam” because statistically it’s extremely unlikely to be both.

belief (noun): An acceptance, without proof or evidence, that something exists or is true.

Trust is a belief, for example. When there is proof or evidence that your trust was misplaced, what do you do?

Most people, being the sort that harbour beliefs, simply double down.

This isn’t an evolutionary disadvantage because it relies on everyone being as usefully stupid as each other, which collectively protects them from each other.

Hates the people, loves the food. Complex man.

“More recently, scientists discovered that a cluster of Neanderthal-inherited genes on chromosome 3—a trait that is present in roughly half of all south Asians—is linked to a higher risk of respiratory failure and other severe symptoms of Covid-19.”

“Noise camera trial to be launched on roads as part of a multi-agency effort with the EPA, Transport for NSW and NSW Police”

I have this recurring dream where I buy an old car as a project.

But then I move house and forget to take the old car with me.

Sometime later I recall I own a car parked in a suburb that I used to live in and go looking for it.

Haven’t found it once.

I don’t like it.