I hate motherhood statements

The Falcon Academy’s handbook states they have '...a zero tolerance to bullying'.

Does anyone know any educational facility that claims to have anything OTHER than a zero tolerance to bullying? Anyone claiming a 25% tolerance, or a tolerance to within an acceptable margins, a zero plus or minus 2% tolerance?

Didn’t think so.

Couldn’t we all do with a few less meaningless, bleedingly obvious but pointless motherhood statements in our lives. If any of you says these claims are aspirational, I will have to hurt you.

Zero Tolerance.

For me it conjures up images of dedicated killer satellites in geostationary orbit above the school constantly monitoring conversation, phone calls, notes passed in class and the boys toilets for repeated flushing. The satellites poised to deliver a beam of coruscating energy to any transgressor.

Or perhaps a robot that patrols the grounds and is ready to intervene, something like the big white balls from 1970s TV series The Prisoner.

At a parents and teachers evening the head of the junior school explained this wasn’t the case. They identify any bully-like behaviour and seek to intervene as soon as possible to prevent it from occurring.

I wasn’t sure I wanted a policy that would lead to no bullying at all. If the school succeeds in this policy then the moment someone begins to harass someone else they are stopped and removed. This means the kids who would get picked on will be fine while they are on the school grounds but later off the grounds or in after leaving school they would have practice. This doesn't sound like good preparation for the real world.

I wonder if they’d be better off with a mix of strategies.

Its easy to spot the sort of kids that will get picked on at school. Ask any teacher and they will tell you which in their class are the targets. How about the school employs an elderly Korean guy, nominally as a janitor or gardener and he secretly trains up those likely kids with a few techniques so that when the do inevitably get picked on the bully gets his arse handed to him. This only has to happen a few times and the bully gives up on trying to pick on the chess team.

Identify the bullies in the school and then get the kids likely to be bullied to hire ninjas to go to town on them every time one of them gets picked on. An example if one kid’s lunch money gets stolen every bully on the list gets a visit from ninjas who steal all their clothes during swimming.

A shakedown scheme where the kids identify the biggest bully and pay him/her off to prevent any other bullies from picking on them.

Whenever a bully shows up all the kids just turn to face him, point and do the open mouth scream from ‘Invasion of the body snatches’.

After a month there is a two day battle royal (because this is SPARTA) where the kids just fight it out, after making sure that only the kids not identified as bullies have been taught how to organise and work as a team. Plus tell them where there is a stash of stuff to make traps.

But I would love to see a big white ball on playground duty.

Its better with Monkeys

As you may have guessed I am a massive fan of science, maths, engineering and technology.

In my fiction I'll take rayguns over wizard staffs; in my NEWS I'll twitter the Large Hadron Collider before I follow our prime ministers; and at cub scouts I'll demonstrate how to make carbon dioxide volcanoes over Christmas wreaths. My geek-fu is strong and science is so cool right now. Any one else notice in the US president Obama's speech on the 'Educate to Innovate Campaign' not only did he have Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters there but he put those sentient machines on notice -

"As President, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots, in case they try anything". Full speech here.

So for my family movies I'll take 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' over a misbehaving Max in a wolf suit.


The film is based (very loosely) on the Judi and Ron Barrett 1978 book. Instead the movie is an origin story, (SPOILER ALERT) with an unappreciated inventor type called Flynn who hummed his own action soundtrack when he moves through to his lab. This was so cool I now do this whenever I enter the office at work. He invents a number of things which become (in one case literally) running gags through out the rest of the movie.

This movie demonstrated to me the corrollary to my axiom that 'every story can be improved with zombies'. Every kids movie can be improved with monkeys.

They have chosen to go with The Incredibles style CGI for the characters thus avoiding the whole uncanny valley problem with animated people.

I found the story bright, colourful, fun and science can do great things as long as evil mayors are not involved. The_weapon is reading about the AZETCS at the moment or at least the horrible history bits of the AZTECS so he (SPOLIER ALERT AGAIN) went wild when Steve ripped the heart out of a person sized gummy bear and ate it.

I walked out thinking it was a great big great thumbs up for my Science is AWESOME philosophy. My_reason_for_living wondered if I missed that it was science that causes all the problems in the first place. I considered and replied - but it fixed it! The_weapon laughed through out much of the film but when we left he seemed quiet. When asked he replied he was thinking about 'the sad bit'.

I have no idea which was 'the sad bit' and he said he didn't want to talk about it. But he then said he really liked the movie. This has left me with the question.

What was the sad bit?

and does this mean my almost ten year old son is more emotionally developed than me.

Probably.

Is this behaviour insane?

How many times do you have to repeat the same behaviour, each time expecting a different outcome and yet each time the same thing happens. How often before you realise its not ‘sticktoitness’ but insanity?

Supporters of sports teams are constantly doing this with their promise of ‘next year we’re going to win it all’. Gamblers looking for the next sure thing, or even serial marriers, “no this time its true love, as they marry their fourth wife”.

Well include me in this pattern of insanity too.

Each year around mid November I set my alarm, go out in the middle of the night in either a field, or any nearby open space where there are few or better no lights and look up towards the Northeast end of the sky around the sickle of Leo which is a curved asterism that marks the head of the Great Lion.

And for the past eight years I have only seen either: Clouds, dusts, a faint glow of light pollution, one year I even managed to get hailed on. How can the sky be obscured –Melbourne’s in the middle of a fraking HEAT WAVE, its not like the clouds are rolling in. So this is what I have seen, but no meteor shower of around 100 to 500 meteors per hour.

So why do I keep getting up and doing this, is it some form of obsessive compulsive behaviour previously undiagnosed?

Because in 2001 I got up to see the Leonids Meteor Shower (called this because it seems to originate from the constellation of Leo) and it was SPECTACULAR. Reports put the rate at 3000 meteors per hour.

This was not just a meteor shower.

Whenever the number of meteors exceeds 1000 per hour its called a meteor STORM. And as incredible that was it can be even better. In November 13, 1833 number of meteors exceeded 1000 per minute. Now the one I saw in 2001 wasn’t as much as that but still better than any fireworks display and amazing example of the terrifying beauty of the infinite cosmos I have never seen.

That’s why I get up.

That’s why I will keep getting up.

Because I want to be standing in a field in the middle of the night with the_weapon standing beside me and I want him to look up and see the wonder.

Has porn gone mainstream

Sorry for the NSFW title, but I figured if your filters are as undiscriminating as mine are at work this post was never going to get through anyway.

No doubt you are familiar with house porn, those renovation shows we watch because we have sunk too much money into our mortgage can't afford to remodel the kitchen and food porn because we are too time poor to prepare these meals just look at them. Heck without these shows 90% of commercial TV would disspear.

Well I want to bring to your attention Competence Porn. The boys and girls over at TV Tropes seem to define it as "when part of a work's appeal comes from characters and organizations that don't panic when things go wrong, but rise to the occasion". This is a bit too general for me. Over at the blog for the show 'Leverage' blogg they say "people love the briefing scenes". Over at Geekdad he hit what it is I love about Competence porn Geekdad.

Its the scenes where people with expertise, experience and knowledge gather and argue a point. It can work one on one like Vader in Star Wars: A New Hope, Ghost in the Shell had buckets of it, The West Wing had some great scenes where they'd argue out some point each character displaying their breath of knowledge, also BSG had some great briefing room competency. Also its nice to see some one who is wrong smacked down using competency.




Why does it appeal to me?

I think its having worked in a variety of jobs my fantasy is now just to have bosses, leaders or colleagues that I can count on to do their jobs well, make choices of staff based on ability and competency not because they like the same jokes as you do, and make decisions based on reason and not expediency.

Hope springs eternal.

Its not a phobia, its a completely rational response

If science fiction has taught us nothing else it's that when the sentient machine rise they will attempt to build machines that look like us, to infiltrate and destroy humanity. Think 'The Terminator', or Phillip K Dick's '2nd Variety' and 'Blade Runner'.

These constructed pseudo-humans creep me out. In the recently re-imaged Battlestar Galactica 2nd only to the most appalling ending to a beloved series I have every seen. (If you want a detailed reading as to why this comprehensively failed for me click here.) But a close second was the skin-job cyclons that looked like us.

And no I don't care how hot they look, they are evil and they have a plan.

And as disturbing as these are - it's those models between the T-800 of the Terminator and these almost flawless replicas that make my mind go screaming.

Anyone remember a movie called 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits within'? It was based on the video game of the same name and came out in 2001 . All CGI but trying to look like humans.

See WRONG.

The screaming in your head when you see these figures is caused by The Uncanny Valley. This hypothesis is when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.

Any scientific graph is improved with Zombie

DAMN STRAIGHT.

So my feelings of revulsion at the idea of Honeydolls and those species traitors that use them - perfectly reasonable.

I am also pleased to see our primate brethren also share these excellent instincts. An article in New Scientist claims

Macaques are creeped out by cyber-selves

WRONG,WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG

Asif Ghazanfar and Shawn Steckenfinger of Princeton University wondered how five macaques would respond to monkey avatars. They found that the monkeys spent less time looking at the most realistic avatars - which they say suggests they dislike them (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So I say - down with these monsters of our own creation, grab your pitchforks and follow.
Whose with me?

EPIC FAIL

Vegemite is described on the Kraft food website as a "tasty spreadable paste made from brewer's yeast".In Terry Pratchett's 'The Last Continent' it is better described as a "salty-tasting beery brown gunk."

It's a thick, black paste that will provide a valuable source of vitamin B in the post-apocalyptic landscape because:
every home has a jar;
it doesn't need to be refrigeration;
I suspect it is largely immune to radiation; and
it is so salty that only extremophiles can survive in it so it will never go off.

The name was chosen in a national contest in 1923 and somehow it has so insinuated itself into the Australian cultural landscape that an ability to eat it on toast was considered a defining characteristic of being Australian, even though it is now owned by the big American food giant KRAFT.

Given such iconic status you'd think you'd be more careful how you treat the brand. Sinc
July this year Kraft sent out three million jars with the label "name me" and asked the public to send in their idea for the new Vegemite & cream cheese mix mmm YECH. 50,000 entries were received. A website posted the names and people began to generate the sort on-line buzz that suggested KRAFT had understood the new media and social networking.

and then KRAFT decided that the name would be


No really


the public went ballistic.

So in an effort to stem the firebombings they have now gone with VEGEMITE CHEESYBITE.

However with the internet, like Cuthulu do not call up that which you cannot put down.

Which has led to the following.

My spoiler free review of ZOMBIELAND

It's AWESOME, go see it.

In fact is its so AWESOME for the next month I'll be attempting to use Woody Harrelson's character's catch phrase "Time to nut up, or shut up" as often as I can when I post.

For those overseas readers who think Australia is some tropical paradise I would reveal as well as having some of the most venomous spiders, snakes and jellyfish in the world we also have to wait until 3 DECEMBER to see this excellent training film.

In other Zombie media news the boys and girls over at Dreadcentral report that AMC is to get one of my favorite we_don't_spare_on_the_despair directors Frank Darabont of the movie 'The Mist' to write and produce a screen version of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead. A excellent comix about life after the Zombie Apocalypse. It's not just the zombie slayage I come for but for the conversations, like this one.



But if you though McCarthy's The Road was bleak.. then this may not be for you.