disassociated turns twenty-one again, sort of
6 August 2024
This is — again: sort of — /timeline page content, which seems to be a bit popular on InterWebs and IndieWeb at the moment.
Today — or rather last Sunday 4 August 2024 — does not really mark the twenty-first birthday of disassociated. That would’ve been back in 2018, given the first non-blog inception of this website went online in 1997. But, the oldest, presently published blog post, dates back to Monday 4 August 2003. A post about the Windows Operating System (OS), NT4, that I’d been forced to stop using, after upgrading my then computer.
I had a few nice things to say about Windows OS’s back then, quite the contrast to the present time. Ever since properly rebooting disassociated in May 2022*, I’ve gradually been restoring selected old posts from the early days. The post I wrote twenty-one years ago, predates content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, and was instead written onto a static HTML page.
In 2007, as I was preparing to migrate to WordPress, I spent several months copy and pasting several years of “blog” posts onto a template, I would later upload into my first WordPress database. WordPressing, was the term I used to describe that process. But anyway, there we have it. Twenty-one years (unless I restore even older posts, and there’s one or two), of blog posts at disassociated.
But then again, who doesn’t like turning twenty-one a few times?
* though I’d sort of been back since September 2021.
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blogs, design, history, technology
The Echoes, a new novel by Evie Wyld, author of The Bass Rock
5 August 2024
London based Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld’s 2021 novel, The Bass Rock, which won the Stellar Prize literary award in the same year, was a riveting read. Her new book, The Echoes, looks like it will follow suit, given it incorporates elements of The Bass Rock, including settings across several locations and time, and a dollop of the supernatural thrown in for good measure:
Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him.
In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story, but the past refuses to stay hidden. It finds expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, the details of their lives she never knew and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.
Both a celebration and an autopsy of a relationship, spanning multiple generations and set between rural Australia and London, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, stories and who has the right to tell them. It asks what of our past we can shrug off and what is fixed forever, echoing down through the years.
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Australian literature, authors, books, Evie Wyld, literature, novels
Is the Australian winter 2024 colder than normal?
5 August 2024
It depends how you define normal. Winter this year, or certainly in July, and absolutely since the recent Sudden Stratospheric Warming event, has felt distinctly chillier. But the bad news is, no this winter, when compared to the long term average, isn’t all that much cooler than “normal”.
Despite the relatively cool conditions, most capitals have still recorded temperatures comfortably above the long-term average, and all except for Melbourne and Adelaide were colder in 2022.
2022 seems a long time ago, as I don’t recall the winter of 2022 feeling cooler than this year. The thing is though, we’ve become accustomed to warmer winters, because you know why, so when a normal winter comes along, or one that is closer to statistically normal, it feels colder.
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Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright wins 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award
2 August 2024
As called/guessed by yours truly, Praiseworthy, the 2023 novel by Waanyi/Gulf of Carpentaria based Australian author Alexis Wright, has won the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Praiseworthy has cleaned up on the awards circuit since publication, also winning the other major Australian literary award, the Stellar Prize.
Wright also won the Miles Franklin in 2007, with Carpentaria. In winning this year, she joins an elite band of Australian writers to win the esteemed prize multiple times, including Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Patrick White, Michelle de Kretser, Kim Scott, and Thomas Keneally.
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Alexis Wright, Australian literature, literary awards, Miles Franklin
Moderate drinking is not beneficial, in fact is it harmful
1 August 2024
Michael Le Page, writing for New Scientist:
Drinking even small amounts of alcohol reduces your life expectancy, rigorous studies show. Only those with serious flaws suggest that moderate drinking is beneficial. That’s the conclusion of a review of 107 studies looking at how drinking alcohol affects people’s risk of dying from any cause at a particular age.
I’ve hardly touched alcohol in ten years. I didn’t make a conscious decision to stop drinking as such, I woke up one morning and simply didn’t feel like having it anymore. End of story. But I’m not one-hundred teetotal. I have a swig now and then. New Year’s Eve was the last time, I think. But I know I’m fortunate, and that stopping, or giving up, is far from straightforward for some people.
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The three main processes used to produce decaffeinated coffee
31 July 2024
Tangentially related to the previous post. Do you drink decaffeinated coffee? Did you know there are three common methods used by decaf coffee producers to extract caffeine: the carbon dioxide method, Swiss water process, and finally, solvent-based methods.
Not all methods are one-hundred percent effective though, as minute quantities of caffeine remain in the finished product.
Michael W. Crowder, professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Miami University, writing for The Conversation, details each method, and their overall effectiveness. Here I was all this time thinking to-be-decaffeinated coffee beans were simply left out in the sun for a while, or something.
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Coffee happy hour, discount prices for early bird customers
31 July 2024
Coffee happy hours at cafes? This is the first I’ve heard of the idea, but I like it. A growing number of Australian cafes are offering coffees priced at about three dollars a cup, for a couple of hours daily. This compared to the current average cost of about five dollars.
Cafe owners concede happy-hour prices are not making them a whole lot of money, but are hoping the deal will bring in a few new customers.
It’s a smart move, given coffee shop owners are not only competing with numerous other operators, but cheaply priced machine brewed coffee, priced at about two dollars a cup. Coffee making machines are common at service/petrol stations, and convenience stores, and the resulting brew is sometimes not bad. All the more so when there are no cafes to be found.
Their coffee and donut combination deals can also be hard to look passed as well…
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Only some search engines can access and index Reddit content
30 July 2024
Google, and Brave Search, are apparently the only search engines permitted to crawl Reddit, and index content published there. Other search engines, including Bing and Duck Duck Go, are presently being prevented from accessing the “front page of the internet” forum and discussion website.
Reddit appears to be concerned that search engines other than Google and Brave may use content on their website for training AI chatbots. The move has nothing to do — or so we are told — with a sixty-million dollar deal between Google and Reddit, made earlier this year.
This deal precisely allows Google to use content published on Reddit to train its AI apps though. It seems like it’s ok to take Reddit content for these purposes, so long as you’ve stumped up the cash. I wonder if Reddit members, who wrote the content in the first place, see any of this money.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
Sudden Stratospheric Warming is bringing weird weather to parts of Australia
29 July 2024
El Niño and La Niña are global metrological events most people are probably familiar with. In Australia, the influence of one or other seems more pronounced over the summer months. El Niño marks periods when ocean temperatures in parts of the Pacific Ocean rise by a certain amount, while La Niña events refer to occasions when these temperatures fall by a certain amount.
While ocean temperatures may affect how many people decide to go for a swim, depending how warm or cool the water is, these variations in ocean temperatures can have a significant, and far reaching, impact on the weather. For instance, parts of Australia may experience higher than normal temperatures during an El Niño event. La Niña’s on the other hand, may instead result in below average temperatures in the same regions.
But El Niño and La Niña are not the only metrological phenomena that influence weather and climate in Australia. The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is another. The SAM is an indicator of westerly wind belts, and their proximity to the southern coast of Australia. A negative SAM for instance, sees these westerly wind belts, and their associated rain fronts, come much closer to southern Australia, bringing higher rainfall with them.
Then there’s the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), sometimes known as the Indian Niño, an indicator of temperature differences between the eastern and western regions of the Indian Ocean. A positive IOD reading can result in periods of low rain fall and drought, particularly in southeast Australia, while negative readings bring higher rainfall to effected regions.
But in trying to determine how the weather may play out over the coming months, an eye should also be kept on Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) events, of which one occurred a few weeks ago, albeit thousands of kilometres from Australia. SSW, as the name suggests, refers to temperature increases in the stratosphere, a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere. The stratosphere is situated anywhere from ten to twenty kilometre’s above the planet’s surface. Higher in equatorial regions; lower near the poles.
But SSW events, which usually occur in the northern hemisphere, can see temperatures rise markedly, generally in the order of about twenty-five degrees Celsius. However, the recent SSW event, over Antarctica — which, in July especially, is unusual to begin with — saw temperature rise by about fifty-degrees Celsius. Fifty-degrees. Remember though, this happened some twenty kilometres above Antarctica, and not on the ground.
One can only imagine the impact of a snap surface temperature increase of fifty degrees in Antarctica, or anywhere for that matter, were that ever to happen. That’s not to say nothing at all, weather wise, will happen though. The previous time a SSW event occurred over Antarctica was in September 2019, resulting in warm, dry weather, across much of Australia in the months that followed. Coupled with an extended period of drought, the event precipitated the tragic Black Summer bush fires of 2019 and 2020.
At this stage meteorologists anticipate more westerly winds for southern parts of Australia over the coming weeks. A negative SAM index reading, then? This has already resulted in heavy snow in some places, but temperatures nudging past twenty-degrees Celsius on parts of the southeast coast, unusual for the middle of winter. As the SSW event occurred in July, and large parts of Australia have been drought-free for some time, it is expected, hopefully, there will not be a repeat of the widespread bush fires of four or five years ago.
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My Old Ass, a film by Megan Park, with Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza
26 July 2024
Canadian actor and director Megan Park’s latest feature, My Old Ass, trailer, would be a sure bet to win movie title of the year, should such an award exist.
Otherwise, My Old Ass is on my want-to-see movie list because of the time-travel-like, older-self goes back in time to see their younger-self, and dispense some surely sage advice, plot. But there are no time machines, or flying DeLoreans, to be found here. Movement through time is occasioned by entirely different means:
A mushroom trip brings free-spirited Elliott [Maisy Stella] face-to-face with her 39-year-old self [Aubrey Plaza]. But when Elliott’s “old ass” delivers warnings to her younger self, Elliott realizes she has to rethink everything about her family, life, and love.
My Old Ass looks to be at least Plaza’s second role in a time-travel-like story, after 2012’s Safety Not Guaranteed, directed by Colin Trevorrow. The soundtrack also aptly includes Perth based Australian act Tame Impala’s 2012 hit, Feels Like We Only Go Backwards.
My Old Ass opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 26 September 2024. If you’re able to move through time though, you may be able to see it sooner…
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