I stole this from a friend in the Australian Skeptics (thanks, Jayson!) on Facebook, but it comes from a US zoo. Which means the original image has a decent number of comments underneath where people are guessing what they are. Everything from bats to snakes to ‘some sort of weird hybrid’ until someone turns up and points out ‘duck-billed platypus’ (something that’s always made me think, what, there’s another sort of platypus?)
This, of course, is the Weekend chit-chat thread. I understand the result in the Qld state election has been rather decisive…
31 Comments
So you stick a duck’s bill, onto a mutant beaver, make it a mammal but insist it lays eggs… And on the eighth day God discovered acid. And it was goooood!
It explains the Royal Society when it got a stuffed platypus from Joseph Banks.
‘No, Dr Banks, we remember the Canadian Furred Trout. You’ve just glued bits of different animals together and are similarly having a lend of us…’
Open thread? An article about interviewing techniques from The Guardian which gave me a few chuckles last night, particularly the comments thread. One of the paras went as follows:
To which a commenter’s almost immediate response was “No wonder we’re all in the shit.” There’s also some very funny stuff about how to weigh an elephant.
On the other hand, maybe I need to get out more
On the astonishing wipe-out that is the 2012 Queensland elections, we note that the Greens are oh-so-not the wave of the future. Queensland voters were clearly monumentally pissed off with the incumbents, but not only did the Greens not capture any of that dissatisfaction, their vote share actually declined, from 8.37% in 2009 to 7.34% so far in this one.
Katter’s Australian Party did significantly better with 11.56% of the vote so far. Of course, ostentatiously parading how much you are in favour of Australians having jobs probably resonates a bit more than virtuously preaching who has to lose theirs. No matter how much economic baloney is involved.
As for the ALP, this is even a worse wipe out than the 2011 NSW State election. It is beginning to look like a pattern. I do not, however, think having a female Premier is the problem
Queensland is always different (I know this, I grew up there), but it does seem like Labor is just on the nose everywhere.
Newman was a popular Brisbane Lord Mayor, which no doubt helped him. He may have some future tangles with conservative elements in his own party – I won’t be surprised if he’s already shifted on daylight saving, for example.
SL@5 A friend of mine who is a long time LNP activist pointed out that Campbell Newman will have lots of MPs who would never have been preselected if folk thought they had any chance of being elected.
L@6, I was thinking that when I saw the number of seats the LNP won. There’s also the flip side of that point; there’s probably a few that have been elected that might not have had really intended to be an MP.
Hope those platypi aren’t male. They pack a nasty sting.
D@7 Yes, good point.
What was the original website SL? I’d like to have a look at those comment threads too!
It’s on Facebook – just click on the graphic on my page to blow it up to full size and the comments are there (I hope that instruction makes sense).
Also apparently they don’t grow the stinger on the back legs until much later. I have no idea how old these littlies are, apart from the fact that they’re very small!
D@7 You can just imagine the conversation with the spouse “honey, guess what I will be doing for the next four years, and four years only …”
Whack-job Jo Nova comes out as a Hayekian and recommends all climate skeptics buy gold and read “The Road to Serfdom”.
Has the whole world gone mad?
Thanks SL!
M@13 Actually, it is worse than that, since internet ‘Austrians’ endorse all sorts of economic nostrums Hayek moved away from.
Buying gold may or may not be a good idea: given the soaring Indian and Chinese demand, it might well continue to be a good bet.
Buying into the gold standard is the Really Bad Idea. And one reason it is a Really Bad Idea is precisely that soaring Indian and Chinese demand for gold.
David Glasner gets rather nicely stuck into Ben Bernanke for making a meal of explaining why the gold standard is a bad idea.
A high school student manages to demolish a standard Austrlian claim.
L@16 I’m sorry but I don’t agree with that article – in particular the final line
There is an implication there of market ‘benevolent supervisory control’ which is the exact reason imo why we’ve reached where we are right now. Real people (call them investors, or whatever) quite simply have lost all faith for the moment in the ability of any sort of ‘control system’ to provide an orderly market – and no amount of modelling, or political chicanery will presently cause them to part with what they have.
I mean, implicit behind his specific words is the ability to deliberately depress real interest rates. You don’t have to be much of a cynic to interpret that as manipulation, with the corollary that, should it be needed, the process could just as easily be reversed.
For mine, I’d prefer the sticky fingers of the government were kept well away from manipulation, and spent more on ensuring some sort of trust or fidelity in commercial life. And nothing more.
Labor got wiped in QLD?
Sure did.
It got wiped because the venal denial- ridden thuggish private contractors, publicans and fish’n chip shop proprietors of QLD voted for it, as well as the serried ranks of TDT and ACA viewers, which we all expected.
It was joined in the venture by its own long suffering supporters, finally driven to murderous revenge by the ALP’s pathetic attempt at imitating mindless white collar phonies imitating economic rationalists imitating genuine Laborites.
Queenslanders have, lemming-like, voted to destroy all trace of a healthy environment, above single-digit consciousness and any cultural activity likely to breed it, to ensure that Australia remains a fiefdom of the Koch Bros, XStrata, BHP, Goldman Sachs and a million crass developers.
Jabba the Hutt impersonators like Palmer,Twiggy Fortescue and the ultimate vulgarian, Gina Rinehart, are ascendant, at least until the the concentrated methane finally gasses them all.
Humphies-esqe characters like Campbell Newman, Julie Bishop and Scott Morrison, likewise and the senile Ghost of Joh rattles its chains, joined by Russ Hinze, in gleeful anticipation of belated final revenge.
Seneca (played by Leo Genn), about to suicide on the orders of the emperor Nero, mourns in the movie “The Robe”, “It’s not so much the cruelty I deplore, as the unforgiveable bad taste” (not verbatim).
kvd@17 Given the government is the monopoly supplier of local money, it is going to have an effect on interest rates. Now, whether government should be the monopoly supplier of local money is a fascinating question, on which I am agnostic.
I would not necessarily put the question in terms of lowering real interest rates (though that would be the effect of my preferred policy), but I agree with our young blogger that an explicitly stimulatory monetary policy is what is required.
PW@20: So, the voters, the ALP and the LNP are all unworthy of your ethical standards: must make life lonely.
Correction: Genn played Petronius Arbiter.
No Lorenzo, it actually relieves me that so many others have failed also, when it doesn’t sadden me.
pw, is there any chance you’ll emigrate after the Federal election?
Yes.Thinking of emigrating to Australia.
On a completely different matter, this being an open thread, SL and LE, do you have any thoughts on this post?
I read the whole series of those posts, Lorenzo, they were most entertaining and I for one find Haidt’s findings utterly believable and entirely consistent with my own dealings with ‘liberals’.
Even in the narrow field of law which the volokhians are talking about, albeit from a slightly different angle, ‘liberals’ simply don’t even begin to get conservative jurisprudence. Because they are so teleogical themselves they just assume that conservatives are also making it up to suit themselves. For my money this makes law much harder for a lot of liberal-minded students than it heed be!
Lorenzo @ 25 – now that is an interesting post. As a legal academic myself, I know exactly what Adler means when he says that there is a push to developing an overarching theory rather than working out what the law actually is according to what the judges say. We see the same thing in my field. Often the answers to legal questions in my field depend on whether one believes in Weinrib’s theory corrective justice, or whether one believes in Birks’s theory of unjust enrichment, or some kind of rights and law theory, or law and economics theory…
But to my mind, it is essential to at least pay respect to the reasons that the court gives. Don’t get me wrong, I like playing with some of these theories, but sometimes, they seem to just ignore the reasoning of the courts altogether and say, “According to our overarching theory, this case fits here (even though that’s not what the court says in its judgment at all, but the court is wrong).” No, I wouldn’t go as far as Gummow J of the High Court and say “top-down reasoning” is wrong, but I would say that we have to respect the reasons that the court give and acknowledge them.
My own work is interpretive. That is to say, I am trying to interpret what the judges say, and to get it to work as a coherent whole. Not all cases work with my attempts to draw together a coherent body of law, of course. If I say the courts are wrong, however, I try to acknowledge that they have historically intepreted things differently to me, to explain why they might do so, and then explain why this is not a good idea from a practical and theoretical level.
My personal mission is to make case law more comprehensible so that litigants, courts and scholars can predict with greater ease what the likely outcome might be and why. I have the time to draw together a giant bunch of cases and explain why (the luxury of an academic) but I do try to make sure my theory has a real practical utility and could be understood by practicing lawyers and judges.
Anyway, perhaps I should write a post on the topic… thanks for alerting me to that.
LE@27: That sounds like an excellent topic for a post.
As this is an open thread, I see qualified immunity has got another run, along with that American favourite, the crime of driving while black.
The link is here.
Another apparent no-no is the act of buying skittles or twinkies from the corner store whilst in a state of culpable blackness …