Electoral politics in Australia. The mere thought of it makes me want to gnaw my arm off.
The Impact of Impact
On some aspects of the research funding system in the UK and Australia.
Love, the Answer to the Problem of Human Existence
A paean to, and exposition of, love, extracted as an extended set of quotations from Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.
More excrement
Poem about the material economy.
Force and restraint
Simone Weil wrote about the Iliad, how it dealt so beautifully with notions of force.
Forty years on
It is forty years on from the Dismissal, or coup, that ended the Whitlam government.
Why your calculator is a weapon
I gave a talk about the Defence Trade Cooperation Act, encryption, and number theory, as part of the Monash University LunchMaths seminar series, in August 2015. Slides are available.
Paranoid defence controls could criminalise teaching encryption
You might not think that an academic computer science course could be classified as an export of military technology. But under the Defence Trade Controls Act – which passed into law in April, and will come into force next year – there is a real possibility that even seemingly innocuous educational and research activities could fall foul of Australian defence export control laws.
The CIA 119
Years and years on, abuses continue. Only in December 2014 did the US Senate Intelligence Committee release its summary of its report into the The CIA’s kidnapping (“rendition”) and torture programme.
It took nearly ten years after the fact for an official report to arrive.
The lower classes of things
Everything is free to move across borders, except… some lesser things, like human beings.