White Fragility: Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism (The Good Men Project, April 2015). If you're white, like me, this spells out some of the assumptions you've absorbed from the surrounding culture. It's US-based, but much of it applies to Australia. Come to think of it, a lot of it applies to feminism as well, with the ( Read more... )

The supermarket is flogging "Finish Quantum Lemon Dishwashing Tablets". I assume if you suck a quantum lemon, half the time it tastes like a lime.

Reading an Analog magazine from a few years ago and was reminded of the dangers of being scientific, superior, and smug. The editorial: "many, if not most, people neither understand nor care about evidence or logic." Why? Because they believe "faith" is a "virtue ( Read more... )

Hard SF is primarily about rocks in space. I need to find out more about rocks in space. This sort of thing.

Why have I bookmarked all this stuff about language? Oh well, now it's your problem!

People of secrets: The slave sanctuary anti-language

Languages are dying, but is the internet to blame?

How societies learn to count to 10

Want to influence the world? Map reveals the best languages to speak

New signs of language surface in mystery Voynich ( Read more... )

"To say that the world is entirely comprised of combinations of one hundred or so elements does not in any way deny the infinite multiplicity of all the things in the world, nor does it produce a set of bloodless generalizations. This is because the manifest, diverse phenomena of the world have been reduced to a lowest common denominator, which ( Read more... )

"During Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, [Fang Lizhi] was persecuted and confined in a reeducation camp at a coal mine in southern Anhui province. It was this treatment that led him to specialize in theoretical astrophysics, which he later told me was 'the only field of physics I could pursue without equipment.'"
- Perry Link, "On ( Read more... )

First, some genuinely good news! Australia will release refugee families into the community on bridging visas while their claims are processed. It's being done for the right reasons - the toll on adults and children's mental health, and the enormous cost of detaining them ( Read more... )

An Australian doctor has given a nightmarish account of the inadequate medical facilities at the prison for refugees* and their children on Manus Island. "From early on I was sending lists ... saying 'look, we desperately need this stuff.' Stuff being oxygen, antibiotics, bladder catheters, suckers, tracheostomy equipment, anaesthetic agents, ( Read more... )

The most crucial tactic in Australia's brutalisation of refugees is keeping them, and the conditions of their imprisonment, out of sight of the voters. So it's no surprise that the Australian Human Rights Commissioner has been told she cannot visit Nauru or Manus Island to assess and deal with the detainees' complaints ( Read more... )