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Perth on cyclone watch
I’ve been watching the BoM update the position and projected track of Cyclone Bianca. They currently have it either (a) hitting, or (b) passing to the south of us on January 30. Of course, cyclones are inherently unpredictable, especially in this part of the world, but I assume the BoM has good modelling for this…
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Kangaroos disrupt Australia Day race
How un-Australian of them!
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A “pseudo-intellectual trifle”
Scott Stephens has an article on the ABC’s Religion and Ethics website called “The Poverty of the New Atheism“. PZ Myers has a go at this (and he’s seen it all before). Stephens’ article resembles the Courtier’s Reply, another of Myers’ illuminations. Theologians seem to object to atheist arguments not because they’re wrong – they hardly…
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The institution of specious reasoning
Stumbling across the ABC’s “Religion and Ethics” department, I discovered David Novak’s rather bluntly titled article: “No Right to Marriage for Same-Sex Couples“. It’s long, rambling and so far hasn’t attracted a lot of attention (judging from the solitary comment). Novak’s points are at least made clearly enough (though rather verbose), but in the end they…
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Dams might be the new controlled burns
The Queensland flood disaster continues in tragic and dramatic fashion, though Sri Lanka and Brazil have it even worse. However, there is a yet more pressing concern in some quarters. You see, this isn’t just about lost lives and property, but about the future of market economics. The real question is: how can we blame this…
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Who is Dennis Ambler?
Continuing on (a bit) from my [intlink id=”1426″ type=”post”]last post[/intlink], I’m going to examine another of Dennis Ambler’s articles for the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI). This one is mostly a long rambling swipe at lots of different and very accomplished individuals, and not (as in the other case) an outright attempt to reinvent the…
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Consensus Bashing
The Science and Public Policy Institute certainly does provide a lot of hilariously twisted commentary on climate change. Two years ago (January 2009), Doran and Zimmerman (D&Z) published a paper based on Zimmerman’s masters thesis. Unsurprisingly, they found that the vast majority (97%) of climate scientists think climate change is real and human-induced. This kind of…
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One brand to fool them all
As you might have realised, I work at Curtin University, [intlink id=”16″ type=”post”]formerly[/intlink] Curtin University of Technology (CUT), formerly – though conceivably somewhat apocryphally – Curtin University of New Technology (CU*T), formerly the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT), formerly Perth Technical College, formerly Perth Technical School, formerly – and definitely more apocryphally – the New…
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Existence continuation
As you have doubtless deduced from my total failure to keep you entertained over the last month and a half, I have in fact been a little busy. Possible illusions to the contrary notwithstanding, my existence is not synonymous with that of my blog. (At least, not yet it isn’t. This may change later in…
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.