2009 January Archive at www.maestrosync.com

Monthly archive: January, 2009

Psychic predictions

January 26, 2009

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Tonight, viewers of Today Tonight were in for a treat: Australia’s psychic of the year, Stacey Demarco (who technically calls herself a witch), offered her predictions for the coming year. As the presenter promised, the details really were spine-tingling. There was one especially serious prediction, concerning Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

According to Today Tonight and the psychic, this year our fearless leader “may be beset with a serious, even fatal heart problem”. (One has to assume that Australia’s top psychic is not just referring to the rheumatic heart disease he already has a history of.)

While the language in the report is tentative, with a little analysis we can see that the prediction has simply been toned down to avoid alarming the viewing audience. The psychic recommends “better diet and exercise” for Kevin, but this warning brings up a potential paradox:

If Kevin heeds the warning and manages to take good care of his health, he won’t have heart problems in future. But, if he doesn’t have heart problems in the future, she wouldn’t have been able to predict them and warn him about it. Since the psychic has forseen heart problems in Kevin’s future, we know he’s definitely not going to heed her warning.

There’s no doubt about it: Kevin Rudd is in trouble.

I know the world’s thoughts are now with Kevin in his time of need, so I’ve created a centralised resource for everyone wanting to keep up-to-date with news on Kevin Rudd’s upcoming heart attack*:

braveheart.maestrosync.com

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* Technical note: while the term ‘heart attack’ specifically refers to myocardial infarction, for simplicity, all life-threatening problems with Kevin Rudd’s heart will be included on the Kevin Rudd Memorial Heart Attack Counter.

Categories: Projects » Web applications » Braveheart, Humour, Local and Politics

Facts and figures

January 5, 2009

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Today’s episode of Today Tonight included a segment which featured a number of classic shonky current affair themes: today’s children being too insulated, political correctness gone mad, youth gone wild. It was rather impressive for a total non-news story. The start of the segment included the presenter making a comment along the lines of “what about the number of teen suicides these days”—no further elaboration was forthcoming, of course. It’s almost a given that Today Tonight is going to be full of crap, so I decided to look for some real statistics on the subject.

I didn’t have to spend very long looking, though, because there’s a very convenient source of statistics for issues like this. It’s the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and its website is full of useful and detailed facts and figures. In this case, I consulted a number of resources relating to suicide:

The figures I am using are for persons (male or female) aged 15-19 (which is as low as the statistics go), expressed in deaths per 100,000 estimated persons in that age group. First, the low-resolution (every 5 years) graph for 1921 to 1995:

graph

Yes, they have been going up. They’ve been going up since the 1960s. There’s nothing new about this. Let’s take a look at the graph for 1996 to 2006:

graph

They peaked in 1997. Since then, the suicide rate has been declining. This really is not news. In 2006, the figures had gotten below 1971-1975 rates. Data for 2007 and 2008 isn’t available, but it’s highly unlikely that suicide rate would have doubled in the last two years.

I’ll let these facts speak for themselves. Also, I’ve forgotten what the story was supposed to be about, but I’m sure I disproved something somehow.

Categories: Local and Maths & science

1938 Japanese civil defence posters

January 4, 2009

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The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought by Japan and China between 1937 and 1945, around the same time as (but starting before) World War II. There is a collection of civil defence posters from 1938 on the National Archives of Japan website. They’re available in ultra high resolution but at large sizes you can only view small sections of them at a time. I found this frustrating, because I liked these posters (I like most government/propaganda posters). They’re haunting, unsettlingly elegant and beautiful depictions of the horrors of war in a country which had suddenly come into the modern age.

I liked these posters enough to want high-quality offline versions. So, I made them, by downloading the images piece by piece and then reconstituting them. I figured I’d put this convenient collection back up onto the internet for anyone who’s interested. There are 55 images in total, divided into four categories. Each ZIP file is around 60 MB. Each image is around 2000×3000 pixels—this is only a quarter of the maximum size available on the original website, but it was going to be way too time-consuming to get them at full size. The image filenames include the posters’ titles from the original website, whose English I cannot be held responsible for, but they do provide some clue as to the meaning of the poster.

If you are at least casually interested and have a reasonable internet connection, you might as well download these. If you are casually interested but only have a poor internet connection, I’d recommend at least having a look at the original website.