One of the nice surprises about our coastal hideaway is that the little township we’re in is so small that there’s almost no unnatural light after sunset, and so on a clear night the stars abound. I had forgotten how wonderful it is to see the Milky Way in all its glory.

Stephen Hawking died aged 76, more than half a century after he likely should have capitulated to motor neurone disease, and with vast and invaluable contributions to both physics itself and its popularisation across cultural forms. If you’re unfamiliar with his actual work my friend (and spectacular astrophysicist in her own right) Tamara Davis has a piece at The Conversation that goes into a little detail about its importance.

The nominees for the 2018 World Press Photo prize are, as usual, wonderful.

The Five Women episode of This American Life is really something. Required listening, particularly from you 🍆-having friends. And while you’re in that space you should also read this piece from Amis Srinivasan: Does anyone have the right to sex?

🌤John Hyphen🗳 on Twitter

Something mysterious has been happening to some clocks on the European continent. From Portugal to Poland, from Denmark to Turkey, some clocks have been running slow. And it's all because of a row between Serbia and Kosovo. A thread.

This thread on how a fight over electricity supply between Serbia and Kosovo has made clocks in Europe slow down by six minutes is fascinating. Failure reveals structure.

Jeff Goldblum: An Oral History of Hollywood's Most Charming Eccentric

This oral history of Jeff Goldblum makes it seems as though my love for him is both well-shared and well-justified.

Reuben Wu creates these ethereal landscapes using drones and long-exposures, though after having our bush walk serenity interrupted the other day by a noisy drone I’m not sure I agree with them existing any more.

China voted to abolish presidential term limits, which seems pretty not great. Two of the world’s super powers operating under effective dictatorships and the third under Trump: what could possibly go wrong?

While we’re in the realm of Russia-US interactions: If, like me, you hadn’t really grasped the details of what exactly the Steele Dossier contained and who produced it then this feature in the New Yorker is worth a read.

Inga Ting on Twitter

This is how much Australia's population would age by 2101 if net immigration were cut to zero (See how the peak on the left flattens and the bump to the right swells? That's the % of children decreasing and the % of 65+ increasing) https://t.co/uQ1jj4bl7g @abcnews https://t.co/Y0P9ou6fZm

From this ABC article exploring the shape of Australia’s population under different scenarios of immigration, fertility, and life expectancy.

This method of producing readable images from scanned notes is very neat (unlike my handwriting, alas, which is mostly doctor-levels of unreadable even to me).

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We’re down by the Great Ocean Road for a short break and so far I can highly recommend waking up to the sunset over the water and going to sleep to the lapping of the waves on the beach.

One of the fundamental problems with transport planning in Australia is that politicians see it as demand-led, when basically transport systems are supply-led.

Daniel Bowen puts the discussion around transportation infrastructure in a way I hadn’t heard so clearly framed. Worth a read if you’re at all interested in how to keep cars from destroying our cities (more than they already are). And, just in case you were on the fence on cars, you can read about the ludicrous economic cost of traffic congestion over this way.

Rusty Moyher codes video games using dictation and an eye tracking system. As an occasional RSI sufferer, seeing someone be an effective computer user without their hands is immensely comforting.

Somewhat relatedly: Andy Dexerity’s TEDx Sydney talk is a wonderful introduction to the joy and expressive possibility of non-verbal communication.

Reading about Jamison Bachman makes me pretty happy I no longer have to deal with roommates.

“It wasn’t cheap to have 24 journalists in Minneapolis for eight days,” Egger said. “The number of journalists we had on the streets here. The extra pages of content. It was an expensive proposition. We wanted to make sure we got our investment back on that, and we wanted to make sure it was a unique product. It wasn’t your normal day’s paper. In terms of what went into it and what it cost to produce.”

Joseph Lichterman on how the Philadelphia Enquirer gambled big on the Eagles winning the Super Bowl. The scale of investment here seems astounding — it’s a fascinating insight into the strategy and coordination of a major media organisation.

From this photo essay at The Atlantic: 2,000 Days on Mars With the Curiosity Rover. Something about photographs from the Curiosity Rover always make me 😢 — little thing is out there all by itself doing such wonderful work.

I want to ask about the microfilm — microfilm? — but it’s hard to get a word in. He’s already gone three rounds on the whiteboard, scribbling, erasing, illustrating some of the finer points of gun tracing, of which there are many, in large part due to the limitations imposed upon this place. For example, no computer. The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data.

This 2016 article at GQ about the process of tracing a firearm in the US is so completely bonkers that it’s hard to believe it’s true: Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns.

Speaking of important data being hidden in stacks of paper: The Outline takes a look at Weather Rescue, an effort to crowdsource the digital-translation of weather records from the late 19th century. The data tied up there is crucial to being able to accurately predict how changing climate conditions might affect destructive weather patterns.

I hadn’t heard the story of (or heard literally) the inspiration for Nokia’s once ubiquitous ringtone.

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After many years of Roomba-induced jealousy we purchased a robo-vacuum after a friend recommended the first-gem Xiaomi Mi Robot Vacuum.

I was fairly skeptical of its overall effectiveness, this is the first autonomous thing I’ve owned (and the first “smart” device we’ve been willing to introduce into our house) and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by both the software and the vacuum’s utility. It does a pretty great job of vacuuming our house and the accompanying app is straightforward and useful: it sends you push notifications when it’s done or if it gets stuck (so far extension leads are the main culprit), and draws an unnervingly detailed map of your house as it completes its journey. Whenever our mechanical slaves decide to rise up and overthrow us they’re not going to have any trouble knowing where we sleep.

It is hard not to anthropomorphise devices that appear to act independently — especially when they’re so cute — and we’ve been unable to resist the temptation here so have named it Bernard.

The ABC obtained hundreds of classified documents after two filing cabinets they were left in were sold to a secondhand furniture store. Amazing incompetence all around.

Among the information revealed in the Cabinet Files leak are the details of Scott Morrison’s requests to ASIO asking they intentionally slow down the processing security checks for asylum seekers to try to ensure their applications would be covered by harsher (but not yet enacted) legislation. Absolutely disgusting.

Xiang Guan designs furniture that requires a human to be present to function.

Observable is an interactive notebook that looks both immensely powerful and a lot of fun. It’s made by, among others, Mike Bostock, who is the brain behind the now-ubiquitous data-visualisation library D3.js, so you know it’ll be filled with data-vis goodness.

Orcas can imitate human speech.

Two very different stories of love in the animal world: first the tragedy of Nigel the gannet, who was found dead in a nest he’d created for him and his partner — a concrete decoy bird he’d been wooing for four years; then then news that Thomas the goose, who lived much of his 40 years in three-way companionship with two swans, will be buried alongside his male partner of three decades.

Crows seem to have worked out how to eat cane toads — which are incredibly toxic — without being poisoned. Related: this segment from the BBC showing crows using traffic at stoplights to crack and retrieve nuts.

Slow Burn is a podcast that explores the history of the Watergate scandal and its slow (and almost accidental) destruction of Richard Nixon’s presidency — including a lot of peripheral details I hadn’t understood before. It’s very hard not to feel the parallels to the current quagmire that engulfs the White House (though perhaps that’s wishful thinking).

50,000 homes in South Australian will be gifted solar panels and accompanying battery storage in an effort to decentralise power generation (and distribution). It will be fascinating to see what a difference this makes to power prices and distribution at this scale.

In the most recent edition of government IT projects failing miserably: An audit of the Australian Electoral Commission’s handling of the 2016 electionfound that the electronic vote counting systems used weren’t compliant with security requirements. Oh, and it also didn’t work at all and so required the votes to be manually counted at a cost of $6 million.

My friend Sophie Cunningham on stepping down from the board of the Stella Prize and the change that the prize has effected in recognising women and a diversity of voices in Australian literature.

Jóhan Jóhannsson, film composer for Sicario, The Theory of Everything, and Arrival, died this week. There’s an episode of Song Exploder where he discusses his score for Arrival that’s well worth a listen.

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Melbourne’s temperature was about on par with the surface of the Sun over the weekend, so we spent most of our time either hiding inside or cooling off at Coburg Olympic Pool. If you have not made it out there before, you must before Summer escapes us.

The women’s final at the Australian Open was an absolute cracker. Both Simona Halep and Caroline Wozniacki searching for their first Grand Slam, a final set with something like five games in a row with multiple deuces, insane pressure. The men’s wasn’t quite as intense (though it was still a great match), but saw Federer confirmed his place as 🐐

Startups are designing swallowable capsules and ultrasonically vibrating enemas to shoot drugs into the bloodstream.

From The Future of Ultrasound. Turns out future-medicine will be exactly as weird and gross (and amazing) as it is now.

MIT researchers have developed an algorithm that can extract audio from video footage based on the minute vibrations of objects within the scene: Your Candy Wrappers are Listening.

From this paper on teaching a neural network to ride a bike comes this beautifully simple visualisation: paths of 800 unmanned bicycles being pushed until they fall over.

48,592 people have died on Australia’s roads since 1989.

Speaking of data visualisations, the ABC News team is back with more lovely data work, this time exploring Australia’s epidemic of road deaths. The transition away from a car-centric model of transportation is something I hope manages to happen in my lifetime.

I suppose if I had to I would live in Erno Goldfinger’s Teesdale House.

41 Strange on Twitter

This Japanese Robot called "Tomatan" Will Feed You Tomatoes While You Run, invented by Japanese vegetable juice maker Kagome https://t.co/nx4Zj1XwAn

Weird robot futures are much more interesting than useful robot futures.

Warren Miller, progenitor of the modern ski/adventure film, died at 93.

Strava released their global activity heatmap and with it stirred up a whole nest of privacy and security concerns. People have found military bases, drone airports, and even segments inside UK nuclear weapons facilities by looking through the data.

There are some wonderful things about sharing this data — discovering interesting (or safer) routes, usage patterns that could be used to lobby for more (and safer) cycling options — but it feel like Strava have some work to do to protect users from inadvertently leaking information they might want to keep private.

In a long overdue move, the Federal Government has removed insurance subsidies for bunch of alternative/natural medicines. Though there are some oddities in the policy: total quackery like chiropractic services and acupuncture are still subsidised, but actually beneficial exercise classes like yoga and pilates are gone.

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I took the kid to see Regurgitator on the weekend. He was not impressed by the trip through my musical history (though he warmed up when they dropped balloons from the ceiling).

Labo is a fantastically weird and wonderful project from Nintendo. Build a cardboard piano that plays through your Switch? I’m in. There’s a bit more detail on the various kits over at The Verge.

“It’s just what ladies do.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden, who announced this week that she’s pregnant, answering a question on how she dealt with morning sickness while trying to form government. (And don’t worry, dad-bods, we might actually benefit from women being empowered to choose how they live and work.)

h on Twitter

here is my entire "A Story Like Mine" poem from today's #WomensMarch2018 in NYC tw: rape / assault. Thank you. https://t.co/l3fji73woM

Halsey’s poem reading from the 2018 Women’s March is all you really ned to hear to know why it’s still necessary and important this year (and probably for many years to come).

Last year Icelab decided to join the call to change the date of Australia Day and allow people to choose another day to take off and celebrate (we recommended 29 June, Eddie Mabo’s birthday). Change it Ourselves is helping push that cause forward this year and we’re on board again.

Dean Allen died this week. I didn’t know him personally, but I knew of him through his writing and his love for his dog. He was part of the cadre of people who were doing interesting internet things when I started to explore the web as a teenager. Mostly though I knew him through Textpattern — a piece of software he wrote that helped me learn to be the (moderately competent) web professional that I am today. Vale.

Saša J. Mächtig’s K67 Modular Kiosk via Neven Mrgan. Where can I get one of these for my house?

“1. No members of the Illuminati work at the Bureau of Meteorology and the Bureau has no relationship with the Illuminati.”

Sure, Bureau of Meteorology, sure.

CityLosAngeles-Jobs on Twitter

https://t.co/rVbTTIAFBR

Possibly the best ad for a graphic designer ever made.

If you’ve been wondering if there’s a prime number that looks like a picture of a giraffe: wonder no longer.

Staring at a spinning black and white spiral before you do an eye test can improve performance by 2.2 words on average. Brains are weird.

What we now call ‘queen’ bees-the main female reproductive honeybees-were erroneously called ‘kings’ for nearly 2,000 years.

Ask An Entomologist goes deep on how social biases can hinder scientific understanding (as related to bees).

t on Twitter

I CANT STOP LAUGHING PLEASE HELP https://t.co/s4CDr4IC9O

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Kid #1 had minor surgery this morning to have grommets inserted in both his ears. His pre-surgery hearing levels were only at 40% 😢 so it’ll be interesting to see how he reacts and changes to being able to immediately be able to hear properly. (Sidenote: holding your child down while anaesthetic is administered is not the most relaxing way to start the day.)

The WFDF World Under 24 Ultimate Championships were held in Perth last week. Australia managed to win bronze in the Men’s and Women’s divisions, and just missed out on top three placing after finishing fourth in the Mixed division. You can view most of the games from the week in WFDF’s YouTube feed.

The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has published a damning assessment of Australia’s carbon capture and storage program, noting that more than $450 million has been invested by the government over the past decade, and nothing achieved.

Turns out “Clean Coal” is total horse shit — who could have possibly guessed?

Birds are intentionally spreading bushfires to flush out prey (and doing other less destructive things).

Each year, US cities give thousands of homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town.

There’s some lovely data visualisation work in this piece from the Guardianon, what seems like, a amazingly NIMBY policy for dealing with homeless populations in American cities.

This Studio for an artist from RUST is 😘 (via Kai Brach).

Apple’s privacy feature costs ad companies millions. *Cue sound of me playing the world’s smallest violin*

Why This Type Of Road Junction Will Keep Killing Cyclists is an interesting read on how the specifics of car and road designs combine to make accidents an inevitability (via John Barton).

Pre-convergence, a Tumblr filled with pictures of well-worn obsolete technology (via Pat Armstrong).

Geraldine DeRuiter made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls that Mario Batali included a recipe for alongside his letter apologising for sexual misconduct.

Disastrously bad interface design for the emergency alert system (and the inevitable human error accompanying it) led to Hawaiians spending 38 minutes petrified they were about to killed by an incoming ballistic missile.

Your Next T-Shirt Will Be Made by a Robot. It’s hard to tell what this means for countries like Bangladesh that are currently the go-to for outrageously cheap t-shirt manufacturing (never mind the complicated discussion around whether such industries are a net positive for those countries).

Aishah on Twitter

'asking strangers to tie your tie' this video always makes my heart warm https://t.co/ygJWtpZV9l

This man asking strangers to help him tie his tie for a job interview is here to start your week on a nice note.

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Just like that it’s 2018 and I haven’t written anything here for an age —let’s try that again. Best to start with some positivity I think: here’s a list of The 99 best things that happened in 2017. I’ll add one personal thing to that — in October our family expanded into a quartet with the arrival of Casper Cockatoo (he’s the little one above).

Every successful relationship is successful for the same exact reasons has some good advice about what makes relationships work over the long term.

Computers are probably over for a while.

The Recent Obsession With “African Gangs” Betrays A Sad Reality About Australian Politics and 10 things you need to understand about the media and crime reporting in Victoria right now are good rebuttals to Peter Dutton’s disgusting and shameful fear mongering. Also relevant: Africa is Not a Country from the Africa Talks series over at The Wheeler Centre.

If you could arrange for my house to be transformed into the Jungalow House that’d be just great, thanks.

Hugelkultur is a system for building raised garden beds that require very little irrigation.

The NGV Triennial is excellent. I took the kid down there on the weekend and he spent a good hour making art in the kids’ section (he wasn’t quite as convinced by the Ron Mueck as I was).

This is what it feels like to be young now. Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.

Michael Hobbes in Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.

Related from Gillian B. White: Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong.

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My laptop has been having weird battery issues for about a year or so and I finally got fed up enough to take it into Apple for diagnosis. Alas this means it has to be held by them for some indeterminate amount of time — somewhere between 3–12 business days — and so I’ve dusted off my previous computer in the interim.

I had expected a return to the world of beach balls and impatient finger tapping that I remembered from its use, but I have been pleasantly surprised. I’d upgraded its spinning disk with an SSD with the intention of passing to my parents, though somehow that never happened, and so this machine from 2009 is dramatically faster than it ever was when I used it. The only problem I’ve encountered so far is that it’s too old to install the latest macOS on. Obviously I’d still love a faster better stronger computer, but the point of ‘good enough’ for almost everything I do has clearly come and gone. It makes me think it’ll be a while before I replace my 2012 MacBook Pro as long as it continues to survive.

Before I took my computer into Apple I backed it up using the trusty SuperDuper. It allows you to create a bootable copy of your entire computer (and one that you can incrementally backup) so anything you had access to on your hard drive you can get to. I’ve used this app for more than a decade I think, and it has saved my butt more than a few times.

While we’re on the subject of computer-related things: screen sharing in macOS is now amazing. I’ve long used the screen sharing stuff built into the macOS/OS X to help with family tech support and getting it connected has always been the most painful bit — no longer! The in-built screen sharing app allows you to send a sharing request to any Apple ID and so, as long as your parents are logged into iCloud on their Mac, it’s incredibly easy to get a screen sharing session going.

“While you were working on Friday, I was running 20km in Thredbo.”

Michael Honey, my Canberra-based colleague and friend, in an article from the Canberra Times on Icelab’s four-day work week. This press appearance came in the wake of Greens leader Richard Di Natale floating the idea as a response to the changing landscape of work-life as white-collar automation inevitably takes hold. Having lived with three-day weekends for the last seven years, I can confirm that it is every bit as good as it sounds.

Rodrigo Duterte, perhaps trying to create another set of vices for which he can brutally murder his people for, announced plans to ban smoking in public places across the Philippines. If you’ve ever spent time there (or almost any other country in Southeast Asia really) you’ll understand how completely insane this seems. Smoking is so entrenched, it’s hard to imagine such a blunt change lasting long. Perhaps though it’s the only way to make progress?

American politicians were seemingly dumber than usual: Jason Chaffetz said that people without healthcare might have to prioritise it over purchasing a new iPhone; Jason Smith wondered, in discussion of a tax on tanning beds, why his colleagues across the aisle weren’t also proposing a tax on ice cream or the Sun; Sean Spicer seems overly focused on lack-of-quantity over quality; and finally Paul Ryan stated that insurance cannot work if healthy people have to pay more to subsidise the sick.

If, like me, you haven’t been paying that much attention to the detail in Trump’s America Health Care Act or how it’s been received then Slate’s Political Gabfest has your back. The title of the episode, The “Is This the Worst Bill in History?” Edition, might give their conclusions away a little though.

James Bridle’s Autonomous Trap 001 made me giggle, though it does perhaps illuminate the potential real-life hacking opportunties that these kinds of automated systems create. How long long will it take for some kids with a couple of spray cans to fuck up traffic on the highway for a couple of hours once these things are ubiquitous?

It’s been an age since I really enjoyed a new game on my iPhone, here are two I’ve been getting into lately: Zip — Zap is a fun little physics puzzler, and TypeShift is a surprisingly addictive word game with a wonderfully simple mechanic.

And my parting gift to you is a video of a zookeeper trying to sweep up the leaves in the baby panda enclosure.

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Two weeks back we went down to Venus Bay, a sleepy little coastal town to Melbourne’s south-east. Alas, the weather was not particularly accommodating while we were there, but we did manage to squeeze in at least one pants-free session down by the water for the babbies.

On our return the kid’s moderate snot-nose turned into pneumonia, continuing our apparently cursed sickness-status. I’m starting to wonder whether there’s some karmic force that’s balancing out my general good fortune against his health (he also has gastro this weekend).

Then last Saturday, after a week of babby-induced insomnia, I woke to my alarm at 4:15am, seriously reconsidered the decisions that had brought me to that point, and then flew to Hobart for the Southern Regional Ultimate Championships. Our club has split evenly this year, and so it was a new look group of players on my team, which was great! Lots of fun playing with a bunch of young kids.

After a delicious dinner there a few weeks ago, Lexi started volunteering with Tamil Feasts and has been having a great time. They’re always looking for new volunteers, and you can commit to only a night every few weeks or so!

McMansion Hell is back; this time taking aim at the Australian ugliness.

The post includes this fantastic image that will forever colour the way I see the Sydney Opera House.

NASA announced the discovery of an exoplanet system that is basically next door in universal terms. Only 40 light-years away, the TRAPPIST-1 system contain seven (!) Earth-size planets in the habitable zone around the central star. They’re so close that, “If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.” 😍

Being an Australian longer than other people does not make you more Australian, or a better Australian. Australia is not a loyalty points reward program.

Alan Jones (no, not that one) has a nice analogy for countering negative perspectives on immigration.

After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong. I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.

This WSJ article about the ongoing dominance of Google’s AlphaGo over human players touches on the most wonderful and most terrifying things about artificial intelligence: that it will find perspectives of our universe that we cannot imagine to be.

In a straight-up middle finger to privacy, the human services minister Alan Tudge released the personal information of a welfare recipient Andie Fox, who criticised the government’s much-maligned debt recovery system. Not only that, but they did it incompetently, accidentally sending a number of official documents to multiple media outlets that contained additional information that hadn’t been cleared for release.

Speaking of government officials being asshats: after blaming over reliance on renewable energy sources for state-wide blackouts in South Australia late last year, it turns out that the advice given to the government at the time directly contradicted that. See also Barnaby Joyce’s current boondoggle, the entirely coincidental relocation of the APMVA into his electorate, which is going exactly as well as you’d expect.

And continuing the theme: Uber continues to be a terrible company. After entirely unsurprising details emerged about the toxic and misogynistic internal culture at Uber a few weeks ago, we’ve seen them sued by Waymo for corporate espionage, video of CEO Travis Kalanick fighting with Uber drivers and, most unbelievably, that they created a tool called Greyball specifically to identify and deceive law enforcement agencies who might be investigating the company.

Unfortunately the landscape for alternative services in Melbourne isn’t as rich as in the US, but there are some. The best of the bunch seems to be GoCatch, a ride sharing application that hooks into every taxi service in Australia. I haven’t actually tried it yet, but it comes recommended by a couple of peeps and it certainly seems decently designed, if Uber inspired. compared to its competitors. And on the food delivery front there’s Deliveroo and Menulog, who at the very least don’t seem to be morally bankrupt to their core.

If you weren’t quite sure what exactly has been happening at California’s Orville Dam then this thread is for you. Water really is an unstoppable and destructive force at times.

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The week kicked off with dinner at Tamil Feasts, a social enterprise run by and in support of Tamil men seeking asylum in Australia. Despite my love for curry of all types, I hadn’t had much opportunity to eat Sri Lankan (and specifically Tamil) food before. Spoiler alert: it is delicious. The feasts run three times a week, so get on down there.

The kid kept his regular schedule of disease acquisition and so we spent another hour or so at our local doctor. The woman who runs the place has a Nurse Ratched-like approach to things, and this manifests in fantastically passive-aggressive notes. Here’s a non-exhaustive set of the ones I could capture unseen:

Shaun Inman, long time design/programming crush of mine, has released a teeny app to disable all keyboard and mouse input on your computer with a single key-combo. Little Fingers is here to save your unsaved documents from your marauding babby (and to stop your chat-room-ed coworkers from wondering if you’ve had a stroke).

RubyConf was on this week in Melbs and the entire Icelab dev team went along (plus me as a ruby-pretender). Icelab coincidentally ended up top-and-tailing the first day of talks, with Tim opening the conference and Piotr closing out day one. We’ve spent much of the last year reinventing the way we write and build web applications, and so it was rather gratifying to see the ideas that we’ve been pushing in the ruby-world catching on. (It was also our 11th birthday! 🎉)

The AFLW kicked on strongly in its second week, and my frisbee-friend Cat Phillips emerged as the star of the round 💪🏽. You can see why I prefer to be on her team than playing against her.

“Analysis has shown that 7% of Australia’s Catholic priests abused children in the six decades since 1950 … ”

“Children were ignored, or worse, punished. Allegations were not investigated. Priests and religious [brothers] were moved. The parishes or communities to which they were moved knew nothing of their past. Documents were not kept, or they were destroyed. Secrecy prevailed, as did cover-ups.”

Gail Furnes, head of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, outlined the true scope of the absolutely horrific abuse and subsequent cover-ups of that abuse by the Catholic Church in Australia. George Pell really is a pathetic excuse of a human being.

Hans Rosling, perhaps the world’s only celebrity statistician, died at the too-young age of 68. I loved seeing the wonder and energy he brought to a traditionally stuffy field, and the genuine passion he clearly had for helping identify the real problems affecting developing world. Time to rewatch all his talks.

A couple of bed-time readables for y’all: ‘I thought I was smarter than almost everybody’: my double life as a KGB agent and The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding.

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