"From an evolutionary point of view, it's an advantage for us to be able to say 'fuck you' from across the street while not having to worry about getting instantly punched or kicked by the disgruntled recipient." - Timothy Jay (New Scientist, 22/29 December 2007, p51)

The evolutionary advantage of the opposable thumb is another one that is often ( Read more... )

The Babel Fish is small, yellow, leechlike and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain - the practical upshot of which is that  ( Read more... )

Work has been mostly enjoyable, but perhaps others may not agree with my choice of adjective here. They would certainly have preferred something along the lines of 'dull', 'mechanical' or 'repetitive'. After all, how else should one describe a job under the rather unflattering title of End Processor, which involves nothing of higher skill than ( Read more... )

Two pleasantly interesting things happened today.
Whilst waiting with Dani and Addy for Jessica B-W to show up on sign out day, Mr Armitage offered me a job as a student teacher for piano with a starting rate of $10/half-hour. Being the man of formalities that Mr A is, I was of course asked to send him a "letter" upon my decision to accept the ( Read more... )

Aside from a 2cm paper cut on the back of my hand, I made it to the other side of the HSC without a scratch.

I looked at Terry Lee's solutions for MX2. Everything else seems fine except Q5 a) ii, where I forgot to subtract P(6Y, 0R) and got 0.33 instead of 0.32. It was worth 2 marks and I'm not sure how many they will deduct for that. At the worst ( Read more... )

"Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche

I would not have said this at the time, but looking back on it, the UNSW MBBS interview went fairly well. At the time, swarming in my head were a million things that I had forgotten to bring up, things that ( Read more... )

Section 1 Logical Reasoning and Problem Solving
Score: 60  Percentile Rank: 87

Section 2 Understanding People
Score: 52  Percentile Rank: 67

Section 3 Non-verbal Reasoning
Score: 71  Percentile Rank: 99

Total Raw Score: 183
Total Percentile Score: 253

OVERALL SCORE: 61
OVERALL PERCENTILE RANK: 94

I really don't see ACER's point in giving me three sets ( Read more... )

My trial results were finalised last week. Quite honestly, I'm not happy with my overall performance, but thankfully my final ranks are saved by stronger results from previous assessments. Even though I know that I ought to be content, at times being content is simply not good enough. The thought that I could have and should have done better than ( Read more... )

The trials are done and done, to state the blindingly obvious. So is it time to take a deep breath and relax? I think not.

I don't feel I've performed as well as I would like to hope. Having a jam-packed exam schedule for the first week wasn't particularly helpful, but I did have some five or six days to prepare for MX1 and I'm feeling the most ( Read more... )

The trials are done and done, to state the blindingly obvious. So is it time to take a deep breath and relax? I think not.

I don't feel I've performed as well as I would like to hope. Having a jam-packed exam schedule for the first week wasn't particularly helpful, but I did have some five or six days to prepare for MX1 and I'm feeling the most ( Read more... )