Tim's Bits and Pieces

Well, I haven't posted in near a month, oops. I have got an excuse though, I just started a new job the day after my last post. I'll try and get back into more regular posting.

I've a basic addition problem based captcha to my comments script. Feel free to try it out.

I was going through my archives and I came across the post I wrote about Lance Corporal Matthew Croucher back in March. I decided to do a little search and see if I could get an update on this event. I found out that he is going to receive the George Cross. Congratulations to Lance Corporal Croucher, he certainly deserves it.

Four wildlife groups are claiming that kangaroos are "on the brink of extinction" in three Australian states. If you read to the end of the article you find that that means they believe that "there are less than five kangaroos per square kilometre across most of NSW, South Australia and Queensland". OK, even accepting their figures on face value according to Wikipedia the land areas of these three state are 809,444 sq km, 1,043,514 sq km, and 1,852,642 sq km respectively, for a total of 3,705,600 sq km. In other words they believe that because kangaroo numbers between those three states have dropped below approximately 18,528,000 they are now "on the brink of extinction".

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The Australian Defence Force has some good news™. Congratulations are in order for the men of the SOTG.

I recently wrote this simple script to allow me to set a random image as my background:

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Kevin Rudd warns of darkening financial times. That's strange, while far from perfect, things where looking pretty good before Rudd won the election. For example check out these statistics from the 2007-2008 budget, make sure to check out the next couple of pages as well. I suspect that this is just Rudd trying to protect himself from the political fall-out of his pathetic economic policy by blaming "global storm clouds" for any potential future economic woes in Australia.

Apparently the US terrorist watch list has now reached 1,000,000 names. Even taking into account the fact that many of these are aliases bringing the number down to only 400,000 people this is ridiculous. Also, make sure to check out the link to Bob Blakley's calculated false-positives and false-negatives rates. As would be expected it's pretty sad.

A couple of news articles that need snarky comments:

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Apparently an US "Expert" believes that the North Pole may have an ice-free period this year. The reason expert is in inverted commas, is because apparently Mr. Serreze, a scientist from the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, believes that this has "certainly not [happened before] in modern times", since most people consider 2000 to be "modern times" I'm forced to concluded that Mr. Serreze is a moron or a liar. Either way, his opinions are largely irrelevant.