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.

Check out Nova Sapiens: The Believers.

  • The Philosophy of Nova Sapiens

    Isaac Asimov wrote[1]In the introduction to The Complete Robot (1982). that robots in science fiction fall into two categories: menace and pathos[2]Basically, the object of our empathy. I hadn’t come across the word “pathos” until I read this bit of Asimov.. Examples of both abound: The Terminator, The Matrix and Harlan Ellison’s I Have No…

  • The final paragraph: how to identify a nutter

    So you’ve been linked to some random weirdo’s blog, and you’re assaulted by an assertion, or better still a muted conspiratorial suggestion, that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Well, that is mostly the sort of thing we like to read about. But how do you know whether you’re reading the considered opinion of an…

  • The flying car revolution will never happen

    Edit (10 Feb 2025): 10 years after I posted this, the central point about flying cars stands, and yet even in my scepticism of one hypothetical technology, I was still proving myself naively utopian in regards to another. To be sure, driverless taxi services exist right now, easily one-upping our notably non-existent flying taxi services.…

  • What lecturers think when students say…

    Now, you might think that I’ve turned into a jaded and cynical old man when you read the following. And you might be right. I should also emphasise that there are many things students say that are not silly or irritating. As for the rest… Student: I don’t understand X. [Silence] (Extra points for incoherent…

  • Look everyone, I’m being ethical

    It is the fate of all blogs and media outlets to weigh in on #GamerGate at some point. Let’s not pretend now that I stand apart from the Global Media Conspiracy — we all know I’m in it up to my eyebrows. It has unfolded in a kind of frantic, ongoing information disaster of the…

  • Insulting Islam

    I came to know of Uthman Badar recently via the news that his talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, titled “Honour Killings are Justified”, had been called off. It’s certainly a provocative title. My instinct was not to take it at face value, and Badar himself said it would be “ludicrous”, but it’s difficult…

  • Don’t mock George Brandis

    He’s trying to be intellectual. In fact, today’s xkcd comic about free speech is delightfully well-timed, considering yesterday’s remarks by George Brandis about free speech in an online magazine called Spiked. The magazine quotes Brandis as follows: He isn’t a climate-change denier; he says he was ‘on the side of those who believed in anthropogenic global…

  • WA senate election 2014: allegiances

    At first glance, it’s difficult to make much of the group voting ticket (GVT) data. One of the most important bits of information, I feel, is whether each party preferences the Liberals before or after Labor. Or, to ask a slightly more complicated question, how does each party rank the most likely winners? The answer would…

  • WA senate election 2014: GVT rankings

    The senate group voting tickets (GVTs) for the 2014 WA Senate election have now been released in CSV form. This allows me to do what I did last time. First, here are the median positions of each party among all parties’ preferences: We’ve lost a few parties since last time: One Nation; the Australian Independents;…

  • Democracy sausage 2014

    In 2013, a small group of geeks, including myself, began mapping the locations of sausage sizzles and cake stalls on election day. So far we’ve done this for the 2013 federal and West Australian state elections. We were interviewed briefly on ABC local radio. [brushes hair back heroically] It turns out that these elections just…