That’s 518 days and counting, Stacey Demarco, you charlatan.

1. Was Barack Obama assassinated?

The witch was concerned about the possible of an attempt on the lives of Barack and Michelle Obama (and, as she helpfully notes, she’s “not the only one in the spiritual community who thinks that”). Both Barack and Michelle Obama are fine. Prediction failed.

2. Kevin Rudd “may be beset with a serious, even fatal heart problem”.

It’s been 321 days so far and The Kevin Rudd Chronometer of Valour is still ticking—and so is his heart. Kevin Rudd, who has a pre-existing heart condition (he received a cardiac valve transplant in the early 1990s), is fine. Prediction failed.

3. Is Malcolm Turnbull the Prime Minister?

Malcolm Turnbull is not the Prime Minister. We haven’t had an election. This question and the next may not have been meant for this year in particular, but that’s what the Today Tonight segment was about, so that’s how I’m rating them. For now: Prediction irrelevent.

4. Is Julia Gillard the next female Prime Minister?

See above. Prediction irrelevent.

5. Did house prices stop falling after six months?

This really doesn’t seem like the kind of field a witch ought to be concerned with, but nevertheless: in the first quarter of 2009, house prices fell 2.2%, but in the second quarter, they increased 4.2%. For the prediction to be accurate they should have kept falling in the second quarter and risen in the third, but I’m going to be generous, since she’s clearly not very good with handling timeframes to begin with. Prediction successful.

6. Was August the nadir of the economic crisis?

I’m lazy, so I’m just going to go by the unemployment rate, which peaked at 5.9% in July and was about the same (5.8%) in August. If this witchcraft business doesn’t work out, maybe this woman could become an economic statistician. Prediction successful.

7. Did Slumdog Millionaire, Mickey Rourke, and Kate Winslet win the Oscars?

The psychic of the year’s predicted winners for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress were, funnily enough, generally considered favourites even by those without psychic powers. She was right on two counts, but was wrong about the Best Actor, which Sean Penn got in a surprise win. Now, if she had picked that one, I’d be impressed. Prediction failed.

The final score: ignoring the irrelevent predictions, two out of five. Does Australia have a new psychic of the year yet? It sounds like we need one.

I was planning on putting together and releasing an EP-length collection of these ersatz 8-bit tunes but my focus shifted onto other things. It’s been months since I last worked on them, and the odds are most won’t be properly completed. A couple of tracks have been finished, however, and so I packaged them up along with an alternative version of the title track to come up with this:

Download

You can download the entire Void In Quebec single (zip, 14 MB) or download the individual tracks:

1. Void In Quebec (mp3, 7.55 MB)
2. À Consommer Avant (mp3, 3.98 MB)
3. Je Me Souviens (mp3, 2.74 MB)

License

Void In Quebec by Dashiell Dunn & The Odds is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I love derivative works! Let me know if you’ve made one.

Instead of asking for a confusing and unnecessary name change, Big Pork should be actively trying to get consumers eating more pork. Here is my idea of a poster for such a campaign:

It is perhaps better explained with an example: it’s 1700h (5 PM) in Tokyo, and you want a McMuffin, but the breakfast menu isn’t going to open for another 13 hours. You can’t afford to wait that long, but where else can you go? The answer, as this tool will tell you, is Honolulu. You’ll arrive around 0616 local time, ready to stride into a McDonald’s and get breakfast. In Tokyo, it’s only 0116, and you would have had to wait hours longer for your McMuffin.

The code is very simple, and the time zone calculations don’t account for DST (since they don’t use the date at all). Flight times are calculated based on latitude and longitude coordinates, a distance formula I got from Wikipedia, and an estimated average flight speed. You can use this tool for times other than breakfast, but it will get confused if midnight lies between the start and finish times.

I’ll be using it for my own gallery, so you can see it in action there. This first release of Avocado is a beta version, 0.5, and it’s not going to get promoted out of beta until (among other things) it has better search and editing capabilities. Still, it’s perfectly usable as-is, although the documentation is highly incomplete.

It goes without saying that the source isn’t an amazing example of good coding. It’s not too bad, considering the scope of the application, and I certainly learnt some things along the way. Speaking of the source: zip (37.7 KB) or tar.gz (31.8 KB). Aside from compression formats, the downloads are identical.

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

—

* 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.

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:

• 3309.0 - Suicides, Australia, 1921 to 1998
• 3309.0 - Suicides, Australia, 2005
• 3303.0 - Causes of Death, Australia, 2006

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:

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:

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.