Last time I wrote about listener survey ratings for local and alternative music Australian radio station, Triple J, the news was not good for the broadcaster. Results of survey four for 2022, conducted between Sunday 22 May and Saturday 25 June, and released on Tuesday 5 July, showed a sharp fall in the number of people tuning in.
The findings of survey five though, where radio listeners were polled between Sunday 10 July and Saturday 13 August, revealed a jump in audience numbers, among Sydneysiders aged 18 to 24.
Australia’s national youth broadcaster Triple J has seen a noticeable bump in its key 18-24 demographic in the fifth radio survey of the year, after struggling with its core audience in Sydney for most of 2022. The latest survey has seen the broadcaster more than double its 18-24 audience share, leaping from 4.4 per cent to 9.6 per cent of all listeners in that age group.
Despite the overall increase of listeners in the 18-24 demographic, Triple J’s breakfast and morning shows saw a decrease in audience numbers.
Finding a traditional publisher for a novel is becoming ever more difficult. For one thing, aspiring — being unpublished — authors, are up against who knows how many other hopeful novelists. They also have to contend with a shrinking pool of publishing houses, as the industry appears to be going through a consolidation, which is seeing many smaller and independent publishers absorbed by larger players.
Even authors with several published works to their name, are reporting waits of up to a year to hear back about a pitch. But adding to the woes of many authors, emerging and established, are so-called morality clauses some publishers are including in their agreements.
These contract provisions allow publishers to terminate a book contract, and in many cases even require the author to repay portions of the advance already received, if the author is accused of immoral, illegal, or publicly condemned behavior. Publishers insist they need the clauses to protect themselves in the event an author’s reputation becomes so tarnished after the book contract is signed that it will hurt sales. But most of these clauses are too broad and allow a publisher to terminate based on individual accusations or the vague notion of “public condemnation” — which can occur all too easily in these days of viral social media.
People should be held accountable for wrong-doing, but everyone is entitled to proper due-process. The concern is morality clauses, particularly where the definition of inappropriate or wrong behaviour is poorly defined, could be used unfairly against some authors.
People have variously likened the droning sound produced by the black hole to wailing ghosts or grumbling, hungry, stomachs. Somehow I think of water draining down a plughole.
The Perseus galaxy cluster is intriguing of itself being, according to Wikipedia, one of the most massive objects in the known universe, containing thousands of galaxies immersed in a vast cloud of multimillion-degree gas. I doubt we’ll be sending our star ships too close to that cluster…
American author Ted Gioia intends to publish his next book on Substack, an online publishing platform. This really is worth a read for anyone considering self-publishing a novel.
The Internet may be a curse in many regards, but it has given me direct contact with my readers. I cherish that. Things that once took a year now happen instantaneously. Instead of getting feedback from one editor, I learn from thousands of people, many of them very smart with useful things to say. The whole process is energized, streamlined, and turbocharged.
Maxie, Summer and James share a deep bond and love for music. When James receives a devastating diagnosis, the friends throw themselves into a whirlwind of festivals in an attempt to escape reality.
De Souza’s debut was his 2007 documentary, Bra Boys, about the surf culture at Sydney’s Maroubra Beach, and a local gang called the Bra Boys, whose name derived from the last three letters of Maroubra. De Souza co-directed Bra Boys with Sunny Abberton, who founded the gang with his brothers Koby, Jai, and Dakota.
Ram Smith, whom I once worked with, has recently launched Queer Podcasts, a directory aggregating LGBTQIA+ podcasts from around the world onto a single platform.
An incredible interview with the late Frank Prentice, who worked as a storekeeper on doomed ocean liner Titanic. He recalls the ship stopping after being struck by the iceberg that led to its eventual sinking, though he didn’t feel any impact.
Prentice also talks of convincing a woman, Virginia Clark, to board a lifeboat even though she was reluctant to leave without her husband. When Prentice finally leapt from the ship, seconds before it sank, he swam through waters and was later pulled onto the lifeboat Clark was aboard.
This animation and sonification tracks humanity’s discovery of the planets beyond our solar system over time. Turning NASA data into sounds allows users to hear the pace of discovery, with additional information conveyed by the notes themselves. As each exoplanet is discovered, a circle appears at its position in the sky. The size of the circle indicates the relative size of the planet’s orbit and the color indicates which planet detection method was used to discover it. The music is created by playing a note for each newly discovered world. The pitch of the note indicates the relative orbital period of the planet. Planets that take a longer time to orbit their stars are heard as lower notes, while planets that orbit more quickly are heard as higher notes.
The question now is how many exoplanets are capable of supporting life (as we know it), and is life present on any of these bodies.
William Haselden, a British cartoonist who died in 1953, quite comically foresaw the potential nuisance mobile phones could cause, were they ever to be invented. At the time Haselden drew this cartoon, possibly around 1920, landline phones were still something of a novelty, with Americans sharing one such device between ten people.
I’m not sure when mobile, or portable, phones were first envisaged — likely relatively early in the piece though, even if their development took decades — but I doubt Haselden thought they would ever come into existence. Instead I suspect he was foreshadowing the vexatious nature of a communications device permitting a caller to contact another person at any time they wished, whether the person being called liked it or not.
How did electric eels become… electric? It’s an intriguing question. After all, the seabed isn’t littered with the recharge stations electric vehicles use, so what’s the deal? Israel Ramirez, a retired biopsychologist, explains:
It isn’t hard to produce slight electric currents. Most animal cells keep sodium out and potassium in. Regulating the flow of these substances across the membranes of their cells produces a slight electric current because sodium and potassium have a positive charge. Each cell produces only a slight current, but you can get many volts by stacking cells in the same way people stack low voltage batteries to get a higher voltage.
