hi, an australian here,

the arson thing isn't new. bush fires have often been started by "arsonists" in australia (although it's often some kids with a box of matches). perhaps more have been started by arsonsists this year than in previous years -- but there's plenty started by natural causes too.

it's been hotter and dryer recently, so these fires have been much worse than usual.

it would be great if we could have programs to encourage young people not to start fires. and it would be great to have something in place that prevents the weather from getting hotter and dryer too.

but i think you're probably right, it's not *just* AGW which is making these fires worse, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't tackle AGW with some urgency.

cheers

opal cards are free, so you should be discarding them, and getting a new one, every trip.

if you're reusing a card, it would be trivial to cross reference your travel times with social media access, phone records, and identify you.

wrt airport, you should certainly be discarding when you go to the airport. you need ~$4 credit to tap on, when you tap off, this goes to -$13. then discard the card!

this guy isn't thinking.

discriminating between people who have sz, and those who don't isn't very difficult.

how does it go discriminating between people with sz, and say, bipolar? these can be genuinely difficult for clinicians to tell apart, and would be useful.

did you poo-poo the existence of an intelligent creator?

> it still paints a fairly accurate picture of programming trends over recent years

i don't think it does (at least not very much). i think it tells us about shifts in GitHub's demographic.

java usage has increased at GitHub, but this more likely reflects greater adoption of GitHub by the business community.

ruby has declined, but this probably just reflects that the ruby community really embraced GitHub at the beginning.

i'd take a look at JASP.

http://jasp-stats.org/

- it has an attractive UI like SAS and SPSS, and you're not stuck writing code for an analysis that should be quite straight forward.
- the analyses are themselves implemented in R, and python is to be supported.
- an API is in the works for implementing arbitrary analyses

sounds ideal for /american style/ coffee; which has been criticised for being less than perfect. espresso anyone?

provided it isn't abused... oh wait ...

it appears that taxi drivers learning a city experience increases in size of certain brain structures implicated in memory:

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/stories/brains-of-taxi-drivers-work-differently-than-average-people (couldn't find the journal article sorry)

but that old chestnut keeps coming up:

your genes only explain so much, and trying hard seems like a plausible contributor to success. i'm comfortable with the idea that applying yourself can make you more successful. genes certainly contribute (you only need to look at the heritability of IQ), but other factors come into it, otherwise we wouldn't need to bother with education, etc.

homosexual men have enlarged corpus collums too. http://paws.kettering.edu/~pstanche/ArchSexBehav.pdf what do these macro imaging studies really tell us?

i really love calibre, use it all the time... but it's user interface harks back to the bad ol' days of open source user interfaces... not real pretty, not real nice to use.

wait. i remember the rotating skull, and the repeating nuclear explosion, but i can't help but feel the internet is a better place without them.

for some users?

Pioneers of the Inevitable: Irony Much?