Is Understood To Be More Than Double

I’ve already posted this to Twitter (twice, actually) but I’m going to keep posting it until someone else finds it as funny as I do. Yesterday The Age reported on the announcement from Optus of their plans to televise the Premier League here in Oz from next season. My favourite bit, though, was this: Sources close to the business recently confirmed to Fairfax media that 2 and 2 are understood to equal 4. As of…

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Letter To The Editor

For some reason The Age chose not to publish my letter. Can’t think why… * Sir, I almost choked on my cornflakes reading Scott Phillips of The Motley Fool in today’s Money section explaining “How to avoid investing in the next Dick Smith“. One answer to this might be “don’t listen to what the so-called experts say”. As recently as October last year one stock picking service was extremely bullish on DSH, writing that it…

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Oh FFS, Not Again: The Economist Worldwide Cost of Living Index is Not a Cost of Living Index

So every six months it seems The Age re-runs what is essentially the same story as the latest incarnation of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living Index is released. In the most recent of these, they lead with a typically startling claim: It’s cheaper to live in Copenhagen, Hong Kong or New York City than it is to reside in Sydney or Melbourne, according to the Worldwide Cost of Living Index compiled by…

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Modern Life Is Not Rubbish

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural…

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China Eastern Airlines Passenger Eats For Free For A Year? I Call Bullsh…

So there’s this story doing the rounds. It tells of an enterprising guy in China who supposedly managed to eat for free for the best part of a year, purely by purchasing a first class ticket, which he then used to access the airline lounge. Once he’d finished eating for free in the lounge, he simply cancelled and rebooked his fully refundable ticket for the following day, and then repeated the exercise 299 times. When…

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Sloppy Data Journalism

Flicking through The Age as I chewed on my lunchtime sandwich yesterday, this article, about car thefts in Victoria, caught my eye: It’s more interesting for what it doesn’t say than for what it does. It quickly skips right over what to me would be the most interesting part of the story: While total thefts hit a 10-year low of 9624 in the 2012-13 financial year, the number of cars fewer than five years old…

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Schrödinger’s Medicines

So there I was flipping through the paper yesterday when I noticed something a little, um, odd about the massive full page ad on page 6 of The Sunday Age: You can’t quite see it from that distance, so lets look a little closer… Yeah. That’s odd. All the labels on those little bottles of Swisse Snake Oil are all blurry. A printing error maybe? Surely not… I assumed that this would be something to…

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Old Media

I’m a little behind on this one, but I found this recent message from the old media rather amusing: Bloggers terrorizing politicians? Well that will never do. That’s your job, isn’t it Rupert? Also, while I’m at it Rupe, do try to remember that if you’re going to make claims about what results a particular Google search returns, you might not want to do that on the internet, where such claims are laughably easily verified.

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Mr Pot, Meet Mr Kettle’s Web Presence

Just catching up on a couple of recent Private Eyes, I couldn’t help notice that they chose to conclude a story about recent problems at the Times Literary Supplement with this somewhat surprising paragraph: The resulting outcry is awkwardly timed for [Sir Peter Stothard, the editor of the TLS], since to access his organ online is to find utter chaos. Already a laughing stock because it is reached via the Times’s “entertainment” division, the TLS’s…

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MWF 2011

As someone was pointing out in The Age the other day, this city sure loves a festival. Pick any time of the year at random and you can be sure that a festival of some kind will be taking place at that very moment. Just as some world cities are on a permanently heightened terrorism threat status, Melbourne seems to be on perpetual risk of festival. Careful where you stand now–some culture might break out…

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