Second in my series of posts about the great word chutzpah.
Chutzpah is... running a series of concerts highlighting global warming and having one your sponsors be... well, a a manufacturer of cars that isn't exactly reknowned for its stellar fuel efficiency. For those of you who aren't Australian, Holden is Australia's brand owned by General Motors.
Update I see the American coverage is also sponsored by General Motors.
I wonder if they approached Exxon?
This one is the most creative I've seen in a while. "Aura of St Peters/Newtown". That's just brilliant!
Now if only they applied some of their creativity to filing their ads in the appropriate category. Flats are not houses.
Being the end of the tax year, I ordered a full set of the books by Edward R Tufte last week. I've owned The Visual Display of Quantitative Information before, but it went walkabout somewhere. Now I have the full set again, including his latest.
If you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about, Tufte is the guru of information display. His books are beautiful, inspirational works of art that also come in handy day-to-day. I'd recommend anyone who has to present complex information at least flip through these books. Developers in particular could learn a lot from these books, and the thought processes they kick into action.
One of Tufte's ideas, Sparklines, a method of graphically displaying time-series data in an incredibly small space. This method has been cropping up in more and more places. The following example is from Google Analytics, plotting data about visitors to my web site. (Yes, I won't be retiring to live off my site just yet.)
So I'm rather looking forward to getting to know Tufte's ideas again. Quite exciting!
I'm a big fan of The Economist as a foil to the hopelessly biased, provincial papers in Australia. Their clipped, accurate prose and quality proofreading make it a joy to read.
They're also not above slipping in the odd pointed barb, in their dry
style of humour. I particularly like this one:
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a
Paris-based think-tank for rich countries
Pointed barbs like that would have bigwigs at a stuffy organisation like the OECD spluttering into their brandies. Subtle and understated. I love it!
I picked up an old HP laser printer a while back and got it running. Problem was, it just kept jamming and driving me nuts. I'm sure if I wanted to spend a few hours with some cotton buds and metho I could clean the rollers and have it going again, but life's too short and printers too cheap. It's going to freecycle for someone who wants to spend that time.
Instead, I bought a lovely HP Laserjet 2200D. The "D" means it does duplexing: it can print on both sides. It's got two trays for a total of 350 pages of hopper. Sweet! Set me back fifty clams, which is next to nothing. Best of all, it plugs into the same JetDirect so I can connect it straight to the network for no-fuss printing. Brilliant!
And it works. Nicely. Double-sided even! Holly will be happy. The last one was driving us both nuts.
For some reason the old "SRA cards" we used to do in primary school, reading comprehension tasks, came up in conversation. So I looked online for them. And found this page. Those of you who've done proof reading for a living will see the hilarious bit immediately. Otherwise, look closely at the main heading. Mwahahaha!
Ben Fowler is right to be cynical about the NSW government's planned metro railway. After all, Action for Transport 2010, launched in 1998, was supposed to see us have a railway line from Chatswood to Parramatta, a North West Rail Link, 7 rapid bus transitways and an extensive bicycle network. Also started by 2010 was to be a new line linking Strathfield to Hurstville, a link to allow trains to run from Fairfield to Hurstville, a railway to Bondi Beach, and a pony for every child in NSW. Instead the only parts that were implemented as publicised were the roads projects. This is precisely what transport activists lobbying for public transport predicted at the time.
The problem we have is that roads can be started and completed within an election cycle. Heavy rail and the like takes much more time. So our gormless politicans have every incentive to talk about public transport while doing nothing.
What's more, our government is still working to the 1945 County of Cumberland Main Road Development Plan, Sydney's answer to Los Angeles, where freeways have been such a success. Just have a look and see how much of it they've managed to build. Notice how the next links in the motorway network are still those from this 1945 planning document?
Now if you were serious about new rail in Sydney, there are two areas that urgently need attention.
The big bottleneck is Central station going into the City Circle. At this point you have seven lines reduced to two, which causes obvious problems. My solution to this would be to install a very fast, very regular metro-style line underneath the platforms at Central and connecting to the city. All the suburban trains then stop at Central (except the through trains to North Shore and Eastern Suburbs) and passengers change to the metro for the final part of the journey. This system, of course, requires that the metro be incredibly regular, every five minutes as a minimum for peak hour, and the interchange be cleverly thought out. It's basically the same system used in Paris (RER and metro) and Tokyo (JR and subway).
The second big thing that's required is a vast new network of suburban lines. There are huge swathes of Sydney that don't have railways, with the city expanding in all directions even further out of the reach of public transport. A massive programme building lines to these areas will improve many social indicators for these areas by improving transport. After all, what do you think 12-17 year olds do when they can't get our of their suburban hell because there's no public transport? That's right, they fuck, commit crimes, take smack. Here's my prediction: Castle Hill will experience a crime wave in the next ten years or so, precisely because of this factor. Rouse Hill will be a bit later.
Howard has been quoted as saying the "emergency" in Australian indigenous communities is "Australia's own hurricane Katrina" and I think he's right. Just as Bush did nothing for years knowing about the danger, Howard's government has had more than ten years to sort this situation out, or at least make some inroads.
Instead they've been pushing their ideology instead of actual solutions, talking about "mutual obligation", encouraging property ownership over traditional shared ownership, fighting tooth and nail to stop the land rights movement and of course refusing to apologise for the mistakes of the past, mistakes often made in the same paternalistic frame of the current intervention.
Now it's all come back to haunt them. Where Bush will be remembered for Lake George, the puddle that was once New Orleans, Howard will be remembered for his refusal to do anything to help indigenous Australia, and acting far too late and with characteristic paternalism.
I must say, I certainly agree with Howard when he says "we should have been more humble". If only he were.
WTF?
I've been out to Telstra Stadium in the Olympic precinct twice in the last few weeks. The first for the Australia vs Uruguay football match and last night for the Swans vs Collingwood AFL match. They've really got a lot of things sorted out in this development, testament to what you can do when you've got an unlimited budget and a hard deadline.
The first time we drove out because we were going with Holly's Dad and he wanted to drive. It was a nightmare and we nearly missed kickoff, traffic jams starting miles away from the car parks. And you have to pay an exorbitant amount to park, then walk miles to get to the stadium.
Last night I caught the train and my 17:05 train from St Peters to Redfern got me, after changing, to the stadium by 17:25. Amazing! And the price of transport is included in the ticket for the match.
The thing that blows me away, though, is the number of cars we saw queued up to leave after the match. So despite the public transport being free and insanely efficient, loads of people still chose to take the expensive, slow and frustrating transport option.
We've got a long way to go to get these people out of their cars. I'm not sure what more you can do though, considering the alternative is so damn good.