24 Aug 2005
Abbreviated Human (PDF, 157.3KB) was submitted today. The PDF uses Type 1 fonts, and is hence best viewed on paper, but Acrobat Reader does a fairly good job of rendering it nicely on screen. My recommendation to the reader is to click “View” then “Page Layout” then select “Continuous — Facing” in Acrobat Reader, if your screen is sufficiently wide.
Further, if you want to print it, the best way to do this is as a double-sided document, as the page margins alternate slightly to accomodate for this.
The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. Whilst the license permits reproduction for non-commerical purposes, I would personally prefer this did not occur extensively. A plain HTML version may be forthcoming at some point in the future.
Comments on this post are disabled for a reason — attempts to comment elsewhere will be deleted. I’m publishing this work, not seeking feedback. That stage has passed.
I’m using the Internet here as a unidirectional medium because this work was never crafted as hypertext, never meant to be part of an inter-related web of data relationships, and has been transposed into this form incidentally. I’m sharing this work, but not wishing for extrapolation. Read what you will from it alone. I hope it is powerful and lucid enough to be appreciated as a piece of art, but I don’t wish to receive feedback on it, be that criticism or praise. The work’s purpose was never that, and I hope it achieves something greater than mere acknowledgement or a number on a sheet of paper in a few months time.
19 Aug 2005
Until probably Wednesday evening, or thereabouts. Good night, world. Apologies for the lack of quality content lately.
Normal programming will resume shortly.
19 Aug 2005
In today’s paper, an article entitled “Wages crack the $1000 barrier“, came this spot of genius.
A pay packet of $1000 a week is no longer anything to brag about.
Full-time adult ordinary-time earnings – the benchmark for Australia’s average wage – rose to $1008.10 a week in the three months to May 31, or $52,432 a year, the Bureau of Statistics announced yesterday.
Full-time women workers are yet to reach the new pay landmark, averaging $906 a week compared with men on $1064.
Right, so, I’m throwing in a disclaimer here. I don’t do maths as a subject, and haven’t for a while. But I think I know how to average two numbers — correct me if I’m wrong. It goes something like “add them together, and divide by two”.
Women earn $906, men earn $1064. That adds to be $1970. We’re already guessing it’s wrong, because it’s impossible to get 10 cents from that. But hey, I’ll do the sum anyway: it’s $985. And no cents.
It seems there’s more than a few workers of dubious gender in Australia…
Ah, it appears Nick has discovered where I went wrong. The ten cents thing did seem a little too… odd… to be straight out incorrect!
18 Aug 2005
Whilst speaking of journalists who don’t bother to check their facts, the SMH’s Razor blog seems to be a tad keen on drawing a distinction between “bloggers” and “real” journalists. You’d think they’d be careful to not alienate their audience (presumably mostly geeks) in this way, but apparently not: the Big Media agenda seems to have come through rather clearly, as fact-checking standards for SMH weblogs are (one would hope — but possibly not) rather less strict than their ‘real’ journalism.
Robert Scoble’s cell phone number has been in the side column of his blog for ages. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if your blog post — I daren’t call it an ‘article’ or anything else that comes closer to ‘journalism’, lest they take offense — wasn’t speaking on the subject of lack-of-fact checking. Caught out by irony, it seems.
18 Aug 2005
