John 
Almost half of #Australians think foreign military will attack within five years, #ANU study suggests.
World History EncyclopediaSargon of Akkad (reign 2334-2279 BCE) was the king of the Akkadian Empire of Mesopotamia, the first multinational empire in history, who united the disparate kingdoms of the region under a central authority. #History #SargonOfAkkad #SargonII #Naram-Sin #Mesopotamia #Inanna #Hurrians #AssyrianWarfare #Anu #Akkad #HistoryFact https://whe.to/ci/1-625-en/
Sargon of Akkad: From Gardener to King of the Four Corners of the World
Sargon of Akkad (reign 2334-2279 BCE) was the king of the Akkadian Empire of Mesopotamia, the first multinational empire in history, who united the disparate kingdoms of the region under a central authority...
Donald HobernI'm speaking today at the Field #Naturalists Association of #Canberra meeting (held in the Slatyer Seminar Room at #ANU at 19:30). Visitors are welcome.
I'll give an overview of some of the interesting insects collected in a #MalaiseTrap over a year in a Canberra suburb, including some of the things we can learn from the resulting specimens and #DNA. Many of the specimens were sequenced as part of the International Barcode of Life project (#IBOL). There will be plenty of photos of insects and other invertebrates.
The FNAC meeting each month starts an hour and a half after the monthly meeting of the Canberra #Python Users Group, also on the #ANU campus, so it's quite possible to attend both. The topic this month is a "Talk Writing Workshop".
https://www.meetup.com/canberra-python-meetup-group/events/313087616/
#entomology #taxonomy #Australia #Hymenoptera #Lepidoptera #insects
RaymondPierreL3These words are not mine, but they do a good job at expressing my fears for the future of our #TertiarySector
“The university sector’s continued high spending on consultants and the uncertainty staff face may well be contributing to a crisis in higher education staff mental health.
Adelaide University’s own Professor Maureen Dollard published results of a university sector survey last week indicating what many have been saying for the past few years: psychological safety in Australia’s higher education sector is in very poor shape.
Universities are alike in high spending on consultants and alike in poor psychological safety for staff. The low state of staff morale at UTS and ANU in particular has received plenty of coverage in the press. What Professor Dollard’s work shows in this new study is how this phenomenon is present throughout the higher education sector.
It is past time for a re-evaluation of how universities engage with consultants and how they can be better employers and better providers of the education students need.”
Source:
https://thepoint.com.au/news/260219-was-the-adelaide-university-merger-really-worth-185-million-in-consultants
The truly frightening revelations is the cost of Consultancies — in this case AU (Adelaide University) merger costs:
“The contract, which ran from September 2023 to 5 January 2026, was worth around $399,000 per day, or equivalent to the annual salaries of a professor and a senior lecturer combined. Put another way, the consulting contract was the equivalent to the salary of 420 professors and 420 senior lecturers for a year.
Was the level of complexity of the merger enough to justify spending the same amount as it would on the annual labour of 840 highly educated academics?”
Truly gobsmacked by this one… meanwhile, the cost of an Arts Degree (BA) is daunting for all who enrol for one — thanks to the Morrison (#ScottyFromMarketing) Jobs ready Graduate scheme.
Was the Adelaide University merger really worth $185 million in consultants?
The first full academic year for Adelaide University – the product of a merger between the University of Adelaide and University of South Australia – is about to start. The merger cost a total of $500 million with a significant portion of that going to consultants. It was Deloitte that won the contract worth $185 million to manage the merger.
Why is #JavaScript so popular? I hate everything about it.
I'm speaking at the #Canberra Field #Naturalists meeting at #ANU next month on #Malaise trapping and the #insects and other #invertebrates that surround us without our noticing them.
I expect most of my slides to be arrays of four or six #microscope images with a header (probably a family name in most cases) and captions for each image.
I don't want to lay out all these images in #LibreOffice (or any similar presentation tool) because I'm a perfectionist and getting it all tidy will take forever.
So, I decided to try out #Slidev, #Marp and other #Markdown-based presentation tools. The Markdown part is very appealing, but they all lean hard into JavaScript. That would be fine so long as I don't have to think about that side of things.
Slidev's AppleBasic theme seemed to be the best starting point, so I started hacking it to add som extra gridded image views. Plain image grids were not too challenging, but I really want captions for each image, so I started trying to understand how the templates use the forest of underlying JS libraries and CSS artefacts to produce the displayed slides.
Frankly, the whole thing is so opaque and would take me much longer to understand than preparing multiple presentations by hand would.
Then I realised I can use #montage on the command line to produce the kind of layouts I want, and I can script #exiftool to extract and prepare the captions which will save time.
So, my new plan is to write a #Python script that processes a #YAML file listing all the slides, titles and image paths. It can generate PNG images that are close to the target 1920*1080 size (give or take a little). I'll then use LibreOffice for a couple of more text-oriented or irregular slides, export those and combine all the images into a PDF.
I'm sure this will be way faster than battling Node.js. Not sure why I felt I had to write it up.
SESH.sx
The Last Dance: Rhythm Section Says Goodbye to Corsica Studios @ Corsica Studios - 13 Feb feat. anu, Frankie Valentine, Z Lovecraft + more
Ellis C. A. Arcwolf (Author)In both the Yoruban (Lucumí) and Celtiberian traditions, the door is the threshold—the interface between the public (the Material World) and the private (The Sovereign/"Ellis").
In the Lucumí tradition, the entrance is the domain of Elegguá, the Orisha who opens and closes paths. Additionally, while traditional Jewish homes place a Mezuzah on the doorpost, Crypto-Jews (conversos like my paternal family) often hid their sacred objects behind doors or within the internal structure of the entrance to avoid detection by the Inquisition. Moreover, Celtiberian castros (fortified hill-forts) were designed with complex, narrow gateways, and warriors were stationed specifically at the gate to ensure that anyone entering was meant to be there.
For these reasons and more, I'm delighted to have finally moved my bóveda to my room and placed it behind my door on my dresser. Now it's perfect. 💜
Elegguá, Anú, and my ancestors (Egun) can now watch over me while I sleep and work. 😻
The bóveda points outwards, with the open end kinda towards my bed. It was the best I could do in terms of facing it "towards the door." I partially wish I could curve it a little bit, but the arrow is all > and no —. 😛
Anyway, syncretism rocks, and I love how wildly diverse my ancestors were. I wish I'd learned any of this way earlier in life, but I'm happy and grateful to know it all now. 😊
#Lucumi #Santeria #Celtiberian #CryptoJewish #Sephardic #Yoruba #Eleggua #Anu #Egun #Ancestors #Syncretism #Boveda #Threshold #LiminalSpace #FolkMagic #HomeAltar #Sovereignty
Strypey"But what [Apple are] worried about is that Android is sort of taking over the market. Obviously they go from 0 - when the iPhone comes out Android doesn't really exist - to 80% of the market in a number of years."
#PatrickMcGee, 2026
This happened because unlike iThings, the original Android was an Open Source OS, which could be freely reused by device and app makers. As Android gets more and more locked down, this could happen again.
Bad Apple? How the World’s Greatest Company Changed Chinese Tech - The Little Red Podcast
In 2013, to mark International Consumers Day, China’s state-run TV network labelled Apple a ‘bad company’. More than a decade later, despite claiming to rely on multinationals from 50 different countries, Apple still has nearly 100% of its supply chain in China. In this episode, we look at how Apple became so dependent on China, what it did to rehabilitate its image in the eyes of the Chinese government, and how it has influenced China’s aspiring global tech giants. Graeme is joined by Jianggan Li, the founder and CEO of Singapore-based Momentum Works, and the co-author of Seeing the Unseen: Behind Chinese Tech Giants’ Global Venturing and Patrick McGee, Financial Times journalist and the author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. Image: c/- Gerd Eichmann, 2020. Apple Store on Nanjing Lu, Shanghai. Transcripts are available at https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast
Kathy ReidOn Tuesday night, I successfully defended my #PhD thesis on #dataset #documentation as a leverage point for better speech technologies at #ANU #Cybernetics! 🎉
I have some minor corrections and then I will officially be a #PhD. It's been a long six years!