I wish there were more official sources to reference here, but WA emergency services are really letting us down – maybe we’ve had our expectations raised by the excellent use of these communication channels in Queensland recent weeks. Perth media has been slow to ramp up; but AM radio is by far your best source.
Here are a few links that offer more-or-less direct links to the people (and robots) currently experiencing Cyclone Yasi in North Queensland.
Mainly so you can avoid the hype-storm the media (and Liberal party) is currently inflicting on us. Cyclone Countdowns on Today Tonight and Tony Abbott using the opportunity for fundraising, sheesh.
Webcams – how they are staying up is anyone’s guess
It’s situations like the one being experienced by the Queenslanders *at the moment* where Social Media really comes into its own. Thanks to some committed netizens, presumably on dry land, there are number of sources where you can see and hear the Brisbane flood stories happening in real time.
Two real-time streams of Tweets regarding the floods:
Maybe the reason Reality TV works so well is that truth really is stranger than fiction. Ars Technica reports on a study that supports the notion that TV Reality is actually, Reality.
If you’ve marvelled at how rarely the nice guys succeed in these programs, the paper in the latest Journal of Personality and Social Psychology educates you in line one: “The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group” .
According to the study, altruistic members of a group ‘raise the bar’ for everyone else, and are universally reviled for it. The results were repeated, just to be sure. Yep, Goody-Two-Shoes suck.
I suspect there’s a cultural bias here, but anyone who has worked in team knows the sort of thing that is happening.
It’s another reason I believe the group that has a vision beyond itself, that has a reason to keep resetting the bar higher, is the one that will succeed. It’s true of sporting teams, of churches, of businesses, of volunteer organisations. Where there is no vision, the people perish.
According to too many high school student debating teams (and their text books, apparently);
Australia is the fattest country on Earth
The article most often cited claims a statistic of 26% of adult Australians being ‘obese’, which is now a percentage point ahead of the USA.
This stat is attributed to a Federal Government report ‘Australia’s Future Fat Bomb’, which makes no comparison with other countries. The 26% figure can be pulled out with tricky maths, but comparing the results of a survey of a few thousand people on a free blood pressure screening day to different, broader worldwide surveys is more than a little problematic.
Anyway, it doesn’t ring true. For example, of my four friends, none of them are obese.
Part of the fun is defining what ‘fat’ means, and that all comes down to Body Mass Index. If you’re between 25 kg/m2 and 30 kg/m2, you’re just overweight. Over the 30 mark, you’re obese.
Also, it helps to go to the source(s) directly. The Wikipedia articles on Obesity in Australia and Epidemiology of Obesity have data that is several years old (none of which ranks Australia at the top).
The World Health Organisation has a bunch of cool data tools you can use to check the 2010 information for yourself. According to WHO, Australia is ranked #20 for males over 30 (years), and 49th placed for females. (The greatest girls and girthiest guys are in Nauru)
The OECD also publishes a report on their countries which is also summarised here. 2010: Australia third, behind the US and New Zealand.
The data isn’t worth celebrating; it shows we’re not far from being number one some day.
I know politicians are gonna be judged on everything they say, but sometimes, in the heat of discussion, you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark, which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth is those carefully prepared scripted remarks.
We worked hard. We tried to get the balance right, we tried to get the economics right, we obviously tried to get the politics right, we tried to spread the burdens around, we certainly were determined to keep the core commitments we made. And we have, in full.
An honest man is not a man who is honest; an honest man is a man who is dishonest but is quite honest about it. A man who hides his dishonesty, now he’d be a dishonest man. But disarming honesty about previous dishonesty is apparently OK. Of course the dishonesty in the first instance is annulled by the subsequent honesty and any reference back to it would be the act of a dishonest political point scorer.
As school starts for another year, I’m caught raveling a couple of loose threads exposed in my gray matter by an offhand Facebook post. I was gazing lovingly at my newly-christened ‘iPad mini’* and thinking about how similar in form is is to my first ever serious self-bought gadget acquisition: a Nintendo Game And Watch.
I had scrimped and saved lawnmowing money for 4 weeks to save up the $12 I spent at a Macarthur Square Pharmacy to buy ‘Fire’ – a simple little game of bouncing panicked residents from their burning building to a waiting ambulance.
Wouldn’t it be great to return to that simple gameplay for at least a little while? Today’s app ‘developers’ churning out sound boards and simple games of tic-tac-toe could learn a lot from the earliest mobile application developers – about gameplay, but importantly, about engagement.
They created situations and characters on tiny LCD screens which dragged 10 year olds away from the recess cricket pitch and under the Big Oak Tree for the first time. Nintendo – the inventor of Mario and Donkey Kong – understood early on that the game should be good, the hardware durable, but the kids will only keep playing if the characters are worth saving and revisiting. How many crowds of kids cheered on that little diver as he/she sprinted past the flailing arms of The Octopus? What is it about those cheesy little vignettes that inspires reverie today?
Unlike the Coleco Visions and the Ataris and the well-established arcades**, these games were portable (and school-suitcase-smuggleable). They could wake you up on the morning and keep you awake well past bedtime. There were no cartridges to purchase, no battery-draining backlights, and if things locked up, the ACL button was your friend. And they made cool little LCD explosions if you risked applying your thumb a little to hard to the screen. They established simple rules – 3 misses and you’re out. No saved progress, no cheat codes, no ‘unlocked achievements’, no multiplayer.
And yet, somehow, they consumed the attention and free-time of a generation.
As far as I can see, Nintendo has not allowed Game and Watch Simulators on the Apple iTunes Store. Presumably, the copyright police are (rightly) in Apple’s ear. You can find one or two ‘Game and Watch-type’ apps on there, but nothing worth spending time/money/bandwidth on.
However, there are some simulators available for Windows platforms – where developers don’t *necessarily* need to pass their wares through such a tight net. I found a couple of great sites, below, where developers have lovingly created some Games and Watches of yesteryear. See how many you remember!
For mine, the standout games I can recall: Fire, Octopus, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior, Snoopy Tennis and Oil Panic.
Sure, they’d barely rate a mention alongside today’s FPS/RPG/WoW/MMORPGs, and are probably heavily filtered through a nostalgic lens, but, dammit, they’re honest, hardworking little buggers that deserve a second chance in the apps store – come on Nintendo! Turtle Bridge for iPhone! Make it happen!
MADrigal goes One Step Beyond – even simulating some of the earlier non GW games like Sub Chase and Puck-Man – Yay LED!
If you have any other links or memories, please post in the comments.
P.S.: Circle of Life: I had to save up a similar amount of time to buy the latest Nintendo gadget: The Wii. And sure enough, in Super Smash Bros. Brawl – one of the retro Nintendo characters is – you guessed it – ‘Mr Game And Watch’ – all the way from the scene of The Fire. Spooky.
(* ‘iPad Mini’ is my new name for my ‘iPod Touch’.)
(Update – Feb 2013 – seems there’s a product called the iPad mini now. Guess we can substitute ‘iPad Micro‘.)
I had scrimped and saved lawnmowing money for 4 weeks to save up the $12 I spent at a Macarthur Square Pharmacy to buy ‘Fire’ – a simple little game of bouncing panicked residents from their burning building to a waiting ambulance.
For mine, the standout games I can recall: Fire, Octopus, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior, Snoopy Tennis and Oil Panic.
BONWAG 