Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Report: Failing to Curb Greenhouse Gasses May Hurt Australias Economy

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Here’s an interesting news item from the ABC about a report commissioned by 6 big companies (not known to be Eco-warriors or Greenies) including BP Australia and the Australian Conservation Foundation and carried out by CSIRO and Allen Consulting Group which claims that delaying action on climate change would harm the Australian economy when compared with having to take action later.

The ACF’s press release on the report is here and the actual report is linked from here.

Interesting points from the press release:

  • A 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is possible while maintaining strong economic growth, with real GDP averaging 2.1 per cent p.a. through to 2050 if early action is taken;
  • In comparison to early action, delaying action to 2022 would result in lower real GDP growth by an average of 0.2 per cent p.a. through to 2050, and concentrate any disruptive shocks over a shorter period;
  • An additional 3.5 million jobs will still be created in the economy under the early action scenario over the period 2013-2050; equating to 250,000 more jobs than under the delayed action scenario.

National Archives of Australia Transitioning to OASIS OpenDocument Format

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This has been foreshadowed for a while now, but there’s movement on the National Archives of Australia transitioning to the OASIS standard document format OpenDocument (used by OpenOffice.org amongst others).

It’s not clear whether this will merge with or replace their existing open source XML archive file format Xena and how it will interact with the way that documents are currently imported into the repository.

OK – after reading through some of their docs it appears that Xena uses OpenOffice.org to do some of the conversions between file formats, so my guess is that they’re considering saving their documents with OOo inside a Xena container (presumably in addition to the binary blob that contains the original document format).

Apple Advertising to Satellites ?

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[April Fool! – Yes, I am part of the global conspiracy.. 🙂]

Here’s an interesting coincidence, was talking to a person I know interstate who told me that a friend at Apple had let the cat out of the bag by mentioning that they were planning a big PR stunt for their 30th anniversary in conjunction with Google, but shut up as soon as he’d realised he’d said too much.

Then I find that my good friend Rich has stumbled across what’s got to be the same thing – a massive iPod advert visible from space!

Now that’s a cool stunt…

[Update: MIT’s Advertising Lab have picked up on this as well]

Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) and Pro Hart (1928-2006) – RIP

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A sad day for the arts with the loss of a Polish science fiction author and an australian painter.

Stanislaw Lem has died (Via Alec – though it’s not obvious unless you grok Unix humour or click on the link). A controversial character, he was the author of books such as The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress.

Pro Hart has also died (via ABC news) who had been ill with motor neuron disease. He was largely self taught and is famous for his “cannon art” where Christmas tree balls were filled with paint and fired at a canvas by a home made cannon.

I hate being ill..

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I’ve been really lucky with my health, so having come down with what I reckon to be food poisoning in the early hours of Sunday morning was not fun. I’m over the worst of it now though and I reckon I’ll be able to eat something for the first time in 36 hours – then it’s into the massage chair and have a nice bath.