Geek Week
August is a busy month for curious creatures. It is the time of year when the universities are out spruiking for new customers. Most of them put on open days for prospective students with lots of freebies, leaflets, lectures and an assortment of interesting displays to tempt the visitors. Some of them have gotten all sneaky and moved their main events to July in order to get one up on the competition.
But even so there is still the other big event of the month - National Science Week.
On the weekend just gone the city was filed with an assortment of stalls from the usual suspects such as the universities, Scitech, some hobby shops selling geek toys such as drones, wildlife rescue groups and CSIRO which is the largest scientific organization in the country in spite of being slashed to the bone by successive penny pinching governments that like to talk about jobs, growth and innovation but view geeks with deepest suspicion. They think that funding football and chasing Olympic gold is a far worthier object of taxpayer funding.
The stupid was on display for the whole world to see with the monumental stuff up that was the national census. By making online completion the default option this year (probably with the intention of saving on printing and postage costs as well as hordes of door knockers) and rabbiting on about 9th August being the day to stop a while and do your patriotic duty they pretty much guaranteed a complete stuff up. Having 18 million folks all filling in paper forms on the same day has never been the cause of too much drama but this year we had the online equivalent of 18 million people turning on their kettles during the ad breaks for a much anticipated football final.
What could possibly go wrong?
Of course the site crashed. As usual they blamed Chinese hackers and most folks seemed to swallow this sad and pathetic batch of excuses. The bright sparks from marketing at the Bureau of Statistics didn't bother to tell folks they could fill in the forms online for about four weeks from receiving their log in codes in the snail mail. Well they did say that after the torrents of #census fail rants on Twitter and Facebook but if they had made the extra effort to explain this in the first place then they could have saved themselves a whole pile of embarrassment.
Then there was the dodgy business of the ABS wanting to keep the names and addresses for 4 years instead of the 18 months that worked perfectly fine since such records began. The more cynical sorts assumed that these buggers were planning on a bit of selling oodles of this juicy data no doubt to make up for the massive slashes in their budget over the last decade or so.
Now the data will be pretty much as good as useless. Not just incomplete but a whole bunch of people will be giving false names to get around the spooking and surveillance especially in the light of the present data retention laws that came into effect a few years ago.
Next Saturday is going to be a public Open Day at the Pawsey centre which is a giant super computer forming part of the Square Kilometre Array radio astronomy project. It turns out that the guided tours got booked out weeks ago but I'll still turn up for a snoop. Been drooling over that place ever since it was built and wanted a sticky beak.
It's been such a feast of geekery. Between spinning metal eggs, magic tricks with magnets and cauldrons of liquid nitrogen, telescopes, robots and Star Wars toys operated by brain waves with no wires needed and even the occasional Gummi bear massacre to demonstrate the dark art of digestion, there has been just so many fascinating things to see and do and so many wonderful opportunities to be reminded of the wonders of the world.
There were cackling black cockatoos, cute and curly egg laying mammals such as real echidnas, blue tongued skinks, carpet pythons and an assortment of skulls and shells at the various stalls in the city and at the universities.
So many things to learn and so little time.
But even so there is still the other big event of the month - National Science Week.
On the weekend just gone the city was filed with an assortment of stalls from the usual suspects such as the universities, Scitech, some hobby shops selling geek toys such as drones, wildlife rescue groups and CSIRO which is the largest scientific organization in the country in spite of being slashed to the bone by successive penny pinching governments that like to talk about jobs, growth and innovation but view geeks with deepest suspicion. They think that funding football and chasing Olympic gold is a far worthier object of taxpayer funding.
The stupid was on display for the whole world to see with the monumental stuff up that was the national census. By making online completion the default option this year (probably with the intention of saving on printing and postage costs as well as hordes of door knockers) and rabbiting on about 9th August being the day to stop a while and do your patriotic duty they pretty much guaranteed a complete stuff up. Having 18 million folks all filling in paper forms on the same day has never been the cause of too much drama but this year we had the online equivalent of 18 million people turning on their kettles during the ad breaks for a much anticipated football final.
What could possibly go wrong?
Of course the site crashed. As usual they blamed Chinese hackers and most folks seemed to swallow this sad and pathetic batch of excuses. The bright sparks from marketing at the Bureau of Statistics didn't bother to tell folks they could fill in the forms online for about four weeks from receiving their log in codes in the snail mail. Well they did say that after the torrents of #census fail rants on Twitter and Facebook but if they had made the extra effort to explain this in the first place then they could have saved themselves a whole pile of embarrassment.
Then there was the dodgy business of the ABS wanting to keep the names and addresses for 4 years instead of the 18 months that worked perfectly fine since such records began. The more cynical sorts assumed that these buggers were planning on a bit of selling oodles of this juicy data no doubt to make up for the massive slashes in their budget over the last decade or so.
Now the data will be pretty much as good as useless. Not just incomplete but a whole bunch of people will be giving false names to get around the spooking and surveillance especially in the light of the present data retention laws that came into effect a few years ago.
Next Saturday is going to be a public Open Day at the Pawsey centre which is a giant super computer forming part of the Square Kilometre Array radio astronomy project. It turns out that the guided tours got booked out weeks ago but I'll still turn up for a snoop. Been drooling over that place ever since it was built and wanted a sticky beak.
It's been such a feast of geekery. Between spinning metal eggs, magic tricks with magnets and cauldrons of liquid nitrogen, telescopes, robots and Star Wars toys operated by brain waves with no wires needed and even the occasional Gummi bear massacre to demonstrate the dark art of digestion, there has been just so many fascinating things to see and do and so many wonderful opportunities to be reminded of the wonders of the world.
There were cackling black cockatoos, cute and curly egg laying mammals such as real echidnas, blue tongued skinks, carpet pythons and an assortment of skulls and shells at the various stalls in the city and at the universities.
So many things to learn and so little time.