Dave's Archives

AI-generated (stable diffusion) ge of "cyclon writing with a pen".

The sporadic blog of David J A Cooper. I write sci-fi, teach software engineering, and occasionally say related (or not related) things.

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  • Asylum statistics

    One of Amnesty International’s media releases reports on a survey of Australians’ knowledge and opinions on asylum seekers. However, the point of the media release is clearly to highlight some of the facts themselves, not just the extent to which people are aware of them. This seems reasonable, given that: The opinion poll also showed…

  • Did you miss me?

    Oh… I see. Well, same to you with extraneous attachments. Nevertheless, after a short and somewhat unintentional break, I’m now ready to inflict myself upon you once more, hapless reader. I shall commence by drawing your attention to the fine specimen that is federal MP Wilson Tuckey. (A fine specimen of what shall be left…

  • Biblical decline

    I read that the National Biblical Literacy Survey 2009 in the UK has reported a poor showing for Bible knowledge. I can’t say I’m either terribly surprised or troubled by this; there are any number of other literary works more deserving of public knowledge, and at some level this must be reflected in the public’s…

  • Recycled drinking water

    The recycled water issue has arisen here in WA, where our state water minister Graham Jacobs has come out as a proponent. There is nothing wrong with recycled drinking water. Surely all the water we drink has been through the digestive systems of a hundred million organisms over the history of the Earth anyway. Hence,…

  • Even hypocrites can be right

    Julie Bishop is making the case that Stern Hu – the Rio Tinto executive mysteriously detained in Shanghai – should be released after having been detained for 7 days without charge. This is just a bit rich, considering her party’s time in government saw: the excessive detention for months and even years of completely innocent…

  • Bolt’s climate comedy

    Any appearance of Andrew Bolt on the ABC’s Insiders programme is bound to result in at least one deranged pronouncement on the conspiracy that is climate change. (This is something of a shame, because on other issues discussed on Insiders he does often approach sanity.) In the closing comments, Bolt had this contribution to make:…

  • Same-sex marriage bill

    Senator Sarah Hanson-Young of the Greens has introduced the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009. It’s been referred to the a Senate committee, due to report on November 26. Plenty of time for a raft of both enlightening and cringeworthy commentary to materialise as public submissions. The bill isn’t going to get far, of course (though…

  • How the sausage is made

    People like me should never, ever be told about parliamentary RSS feeds. Unfortunately, I found out anyway, and soon after discovered a report from last week entitled Plebiscite for an Australian Republic Bill 2008 (tabled by the enchantingly-named Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee). Briefly, the proposal is to hold a plebiscite on whether…

  • Meta-engineering

    I’m beginning to think I should have approached this maths modelling stuff from an engineering point of view: with a requirements document, version control and unit testing. Constructing a reasonably complicated mathematical model seems to have enough in common with software development that such things could be quite useful. I’m calling this “meta-engineering”, because I’d…

  • What am I doing?

    Over the past few weeks I’ve had numerous questions of the form: “how’s your work going?” I find I can only ever answer this with banalities like “good” or “meh”. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing. At any given point in time, I have a list of minor challenges written up on…