What I Learnt Today

At last – a zoom meeting you will stick out to the end

What I Learnt On 6th June in other years

6th June 2021 Good to Go in WA or Tassie? Don’t forget your g2gpass

6th June 2011 Lions and iClouds: News from the Black Skivvy

Need an excuse to join your Mullum comrades at the top pub?

Why not start an all male acapella group singing classic Russian folk songs, thought Glenn Wright?

Master choir master Andrew Swain agreed. He had a great admiration for traditional songs of struggle sung by the proletariat, and enjoyed knocking back a Vodka. And there were plenty of wild and hairy men in ‘Mullumgrad’ with cloth caps, looking to spend some quality time away from being good new-aged family men.

Soon they were joined by 26 others. Dustyesky went from strength to strength, singing at music festivals across the country. Their popularity is enhanced by the frequency with which audiences are encouraged to toast the choir with vodka. “Now we look forward to meeting your womens and livestocks”, says Michael, in his perfectly fake Russian accent.

The choir came to the attention of the Russian ambassador, and then the Russian Ministry of Culture, and then the Russian media. Now they are sensations in the homeland they have never been to.

Unfortunately, an invitation to sing in Red Square for the Immortal Regiment at the Grand Victory Day Parade on May 9 was cancelled due to Covid. Maybe next year.

In the meantime, you can see more at Australian Story.

Dustyesky understands the long history of Russia, the Soviet Union and the Red Army.

We know Russia’s triumphs and atrocities just as we know those of our own country.

Our mission is to sing songs of suffering and despair to fill your hearts with love and joy.

The Hammer and Sickle is not an endorsement of horror, just as we are not Russian.

Any offence or distress caused to anyone is greatly regretted by all of us in Dustyesky.

Dustyesky hope that our music, our warmth and humour only bring people together. Always.

Spasibo bolshoi.
Davai!
Dustyesky

What I Learnt On 29th May in other years

29th May 2021 The greatest inter-generational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next

29th May 2011 Postcards from Ireland

Right now, every one is telling us that they are here for us during these uncertain times.

The agency Third Street thought that if brands are going to use the words, they ought to have a matching font.

‘Times Uncertain’ is a lot like ‘Times New Roman’, but a bit shaker, a tad more random, and the only punctuation available is ? or !

You can download ‘Times Uncertain’ for free from from Third Street

What I Learnt On 26th May in other years

26th May 2011 CoolTool: The Fisher Space Pen vs the Pencil

Turns out I’ve spent a great deal of time shaving yaks, without knowing what it was called.

Yak Shaving – how you find yourself doing something you shouldn’t be doing because you need to do that step before you can do another thing that will enable you to do the task that makes it possible to do the thing you should be doing.

Seth Godin explains it in this extract from this episode of his wonderful akimbo podcast.

The term is used in software development, where one spends a lot of time down rabbit holes, and was coined by Carlin J. Vieri at MIT.

I had to shave a few yaks for this post. To extract the audio, I had to record the system sound from my Mac. Turns out my old tool to do that, SoundFlower,is out of date. The demo mode of Audio Hijack did the trick. But to edit the extract, I needed an audio editor. I used Quicktime, but that created a mov file and I needed an mp3. So MediaHuman Audio Convertor worked for that conversion – I had found it last time I shaved a yak. Then I could complete the edit using Easy Audio Mixer.

I love shaving yaks. Beats mowing the lawn.

What I Learnt On 25th May in other years

25th May 2011 TED in Sydney: Ideas worth spreading

50 songs in three minutes

Happy Birthday Moo

What I Learnt On 21st May in other years

21st May 2011 Camino de Santiago de Campostela

May 20th is International World Bee Day.

We could not survive without bees. 90% of the world’s wild flowering plant species depend on them for pollination, as does more than 75% of the world’s food crops.

Bees provide a number of archetypal examples of important models.

The bee and the flower have a mutualistic relationship. The bees get to eat, and the flowering plants get to reproduce.

Richard Dawkins says the hive shows the ‘Selfish Gene‘ at work. All the bees in a hive are brothers and sisters. Their behaviour is determined by the genes they carry. When a bee stings and sacrifices itself, they are protecting their own genes as carried by their siblings. It is endurance of the gene that drives behaviour – the bees are the servants of their genes (as are we)

A recent article on the Illusion of Certainity by Rory Sutherland refers to the Waggle Dance as an example of the need for risk and innovation if we are to progress. When a bee finds a good source of nectar, it returns to the hive and waggles its bum to give directions to the other bees. (Really! See David Attenborough below). Luckily, not all bees follow the instructions.

Rory Sutherland writes :

– Bees seem to have spotted this trade-off between narrow and broad-scale efficiency 20 million years ago. Although most of them follow the waggle-dance (exploiting what is already known), a significant minority do not. These R&D bees explore at random, seeking nectar and pollen from sources as yet unknown. Most of these journeys are individually wasteful — but every now and then they pay off hugely in the form of a new find. Indeed there would be no bees without this ‘inefficiency’; hives would end up starving to death.

– Bees are still around because they are part deterministic and part probabilistic in their behaviour. They use their ‘evidence-based’ waggle-dance data-model up to a point, but correct for the fact that it is incomplete, temporary and weighted to the past. Institutionalised humans obtain a false sense of certainty by assuming that life is one big waggle-dance: that what is optimal in a one-off transaction in a certain present is also optimal at scale, in an uncertain, long-term future. Even insects have figured out this is dumb. Like Socrates, bees know how much they don’t know.

What I Learnt On 20th May in other years

20th May 2011 WisdomWall: Louis XIV on Leadership

It is important and useful to have a reliable source of curated news.

I depend on The Squiz, which arrives in my email inbox each morning just after six am.

If you prefer, you can have it read to you as a podcast.

The Squiz was established by Claire Kimball in 2018. She still gets up at 3.30am to sort out the wheat from the chaff so I don’t have to. Thanks very much Claire. 40000 subscribers agree.

You can sign up and see if it suits you. It is free.

If you’d like a US flavour to your news, you may enjoy NextDraft. Editor Dave Pell is the absolute master of the headline pun. Whereas The Squiz remains apolitical, NextDraft has very stong opinions. Do not sign up if you are a fan of the president.

Extract from the Squiz today

CHINA BACKS A DELAYED CORONAVIRUS REVIEW

China will support a look into the global response to the coronavirus crisis after it is brought under control, China’s President Xi Jinping has told the World Health Assembly overnight. Telling those gathered for the online meeting that China has been “open and transparent” about the outbreak, he said his country would support an investigation led by the World Health Organisation (WHO) “conducted in an objective and impartial way” – but only when the dust has settled. The motion, which will be put to the vote tonight, seeks to start the inquiry ASAP.
BACK IT UP A BIT…
This started with Australia’s call for an independent investigation into the genesis of COVID-19 and the actions of China and the WHO to contain it. That was recrafted by the European Union into a motion that has been put to the 194 member states of the Assembly (which is the WHO’s decision-making body) that didn’t name China. Instead, it called for an “impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation” of the “international health response to COVID-19″. Momentum built yesterday when a group of more than 50 African nations said they would support the proposal taking the number of members behind it to more than 120. And WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says he’s all for an inquiry to start immediately.
SO IT’S A GOER?
Well, we’ll see… It’s expected to happen, but you never know until it actually does. There are concerns about the start date and access, and Australia has continued to advocate for the granting of ‘weapons inspector-like powers’ to the investigating body to ensure vital evidence isn’t missed. But Xi has sought to smooth the way with a commitment of US$2 billion over two years in aid. And he’s offered to share any vaccine as soon as one becomes available. Meanwhile, the US Health Secretary Alex Azar took a thinly veiled swipe at China as well as accusing the WHO of “failing to obtain the information that the world needed.” The US will support the motion when it’s put to the vote with US President Donald Trump retweeting a post by SBS listing some nations that support the push for an inquiry saying “We are with them!”

Extract from NextDraft Today

HOW’S IT HANGING?
This pandemic is the story of our lives and we’ve reached the cliffhanger. The next installment in this inaction adventure features the plot twist that will reveal an Everest-size foreshadowing of what’s to come. Nuances will be cast aside as we learn the answer to a question that can be boiled down to this: What Will Happen In Georgia? As reported in WaPo, many protagonists are confident, including the state’s governor: “In this grand gamble, Georgia has gone first, with Gov. Brian Kemp dismissing public health experts who’ve warned that opening too soon could cause a catastrophic surge of deaths, placing his faith instead in the citizens of Georgia to make up their own minds about what risks and sacrifices they were willing to accept.”

What I Learnt On 19th May in other years

19th May 2011 Waterslides