Fuck you ABC

Australian IPs only

presumably, this should be and/or the ACB.

Also, the ABC people or their program isn’t very bright:

I don't think we bowled New Zealand out for 6

No Clean Feed

Disturbing signs abound as there has suddenly been a frenzy about Chairman Rudd’s latest plan to censor the internet in Australia. As part of our mandarin-speaking PM’s attempt to turn Australia into an offshoot of the Chinese Communist Party, online dissent is scheduled to be terminated with the implementation of the Great Firewall of Australia. This project is backed by idiotic Senator Conroy and his PEADOPHILE chants to silence opposition.

It appears that the centralised site for information about this is No Clean Feed.

And on a not exactly unrelated topic, with both Conroy and Fielding senators from Victoria, this confirms my belief that Victoria should be stripped of its upper house representation.

Muxtape vs RIAA

Wanted: One person proficient in hacking to change the RIAA website so that the following graphic appears:

(background available by looking at Muxtape or Wikipedia.)

Quote of the Day

One can also obtain a lower bound: there exists no algorithm which needs less than sous certaines restrictions naturelles on peut démontrer qu’il n’existe pas d’algorithme de multiplication des nombres à chiffres avec le temps d’exécution inférieur à bit-operations for the multiplication of two general -bit numbers.

This is from the first page of the first chapter of Introduction to Modern Number Theory, by Yuri Manin and Alexi Panchishkin. And you can see this for yourself at Google Books.

Fixing the Draft

The problem as it needs to be dealt with is that the current system of determining the pick order in the national draft as the inverse of final standings provides motivation for teams to “tank”. Now no team will openly admit to doing so, but there will always be talk and suspicion of teams not trying their best to win and quite frankly, this brings the game into disrepute.

I can see a solution to this problem that is rather simple, yet have never seen it proposed by others. For each round of the draft, one should simply assign picks to teams in a random order.

Suddenly there is no motivation to throw games, and the second most desirable position to finish a season is now 2nd, instead of 16th, as it should be. This solution also has the benefit of being completely fair in any way possible. The concept of rewarding weak teams with earlier draft picks was initially introduced in order to equalise the competition. But now with all AFL players having made their way through the draft system, the competition has been equalised, and so there is no benefit (and only a loss, since teams which follow the morally dubious option of tanking are rewarded) to continue to assign draft picks in this fashion. Hence I advocate adopting the method of random allocation of draft picks to clubs.

How to Count

This is not a discussion on the beautiful art of counting without counting (sorry), but instead my soapbox to project questions about the act of counting in real life. I first considered the question when I realised one day that I had no idea what the answer was to “How many people were there at critical mass yesterday?” (Clearly, going by the date of this post, it is not a recent question).

The same sort of difficulty (and perhaps moreso) is present when asking how many people showed up at a protest (for example, though we could also say pillow fight). Crowd estimate to me seems like something you only get accurate or consistent answers for at modern sporting stadia, where every admitted person has to go through a turnstyle.

I can think of two potential techniques (though lack the resources or inclination to test these out). For a moving crowd, one could try to get an accurate count by counting numbers as they crossed a particular point along the route (probably most practical afterwards with a videotape, though the time involved may not be considered worth it). The other I can think of is to gt a desnity of people estimate, then multiply by the total area taken up. Edge effects are important here, since it is both hard to define precisely the edge of a crowd, and presumably person density is not uniform, but tapers off towards the edge.

Anyone know what is actually done in practice? Or do people just make up wild guesses.

DipTimer

DipTimer is a convenient computer program to control deadlines in a diplomacy game in a hassle free way. It can be downloaded from the Dip Timer Page or alternatively (and more conveniently), from Brian Shelden’s page.

I thought I’d mention it here because firstly I think it’s a great program, and secondly to record a little of my experiences (Just in case some random happens to come across this while searching). Initially while running, the program was rather slow to respond to my commands, but this problem was solvable by adjusting the scrolling message along the bottom to scroll at the minimum possible speed.

Drinking Laws

Basically this is one thing that the USA does not get. The overly religious country has never really managed to get over prohibition. Almost all of the laws relating to consumption of alcohol in existence serve no positive purpose and need to be scrapped. (having to wait until 21, rules about public consumption for example)

2020 Republic

Looking at the outcome of the 2020 summit held in Canberra, it is disappointing that the most touted “recommendation” appears to be that we should become a republic. Never mind the plethora of actual important issues that the country needs to address. What we really need are things like a real commitment to sustainable water management, higher education, safeguarding our public health system and keeping public infrastructure under public owndership.

The sorts of people who push for a republic are either incredibly stupid (and unfortunately stupidity is not rare) or trying to make a name for themselves. There are at least three obviously good reasons that spring to mind to not change to a republic.

1. It puts the Queens Birthday public holiday at risk. (A no brainer)

2. Those lovely British taxpayers are currently subsidising our head of state. I think that with a president, we’d have to pay out of our own pocket.

3. It is an immense waste of resources to go and change from governor-general to president, with no gain (and to anyone who advocates following the US and getting a directly elected president, well you really are stupid).

There are so many more important issues out there that people could be devoting their time towards. Lets keep our Queen, she’s serving us fine (if it ain’t broke…), and move onto issues of substance.

Megaminx II

To continue the story from last time, I followed this piece of advice and bought a new megaminx from Mefferts Puzzles. I can already say that this is a superior product, it turns much cleaner than my previous model, and I have managed to scramble and solve this model without having it fall apart on me.

In an ideal world, we would now say that they all lived happily ever after but this is a grumblog, so I’ll also record my negative experiences. Firstly, the mefferts site and online shop is not the most pleasant to deal with, but I did at least end up with the product I wanted. And secondly, during the first solve (which takes more time than is difficult, in terms of difficulty the megaminx is similar to the rubik’s cube), two of the coloured tiles came off. Still I believe that this is a solvable problem with a bit of glue.