On 14 October, Australians will be voting in a referendum on the following question: A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration? The proposed alteration is: I’ll be voting yes. Here’s why.
It’s time for a new bot! Unlike my Trove bots, this one isn’t useful or even historical; it’s just for fun. @TTAships tweets out an image of a spaceship (mostly), once(ish) a day.
Recently I’ve been playing around with AI-generated images. This is far less impressive than it may sound: there’s a small community on Twitter and elsewhere doing this stuff already, many using scripts and tutorials which mean you don’t need any more skill than the ability to log in to Google Colab, type in some keywords
Heavy rains are finally starting to extinguish the distastrous bushfires that covered a last part of eastern Australia during the last couple of months (and of course, bringing floods). Back while they were still burning, James Raynes tweeted a series of images he adapted from Australian recruitment posters from the First World War, which I
It’s been nearly four weeks since I farewelled my friends and left Armidale, which somehow seems both very recent and very distant. Before I left, I’d planned to post some of my favourite photos of the town, but in the press of events didn’t manage to. And after, I found it difficult to decide which
This a Boeing (Stearman) Model 75, built in 1941 for use as a primary trainer for the US Army Air Forces. After a postwar career in the US as a cropduster, it was registered in Australia as VH-JLW and is now operated by Fleet Adventures, based at Armidale Regional Airport. And last Friday, as a
In two weeks from today I’ll be leaving Armidale for good, and heading back to Melbourne, my hometown. It’s mostly for excellent personal reasons, but in part it’s also because of the usual early-career academic story of precarious employment. My colleagues at the University of New England have supported me as much they could, but
With war comes confusion, and with confusion comes a need for clarity. So it was with simple, determined messages like this that the National Office of Information kept the undersieged civilians of Britain in a robust frame of mind during the teething pains of the Second World War. The language may be arcane, but the
A tweet from William J. Turkel alerted me to the possibility of using 18th century-style fonts in LaTeX. The most noticeable difference from modern typesetting is the long s, but there are different ligatures too. There are a number of ways to do it but the easiest way is with the inbuilt Kepler Fonts package.
When did people wearing monocles stop being taken seriously in public life? Noel Pemberton Billing, independent candidate for Hertford, in 1916. From N. Pemberton-Billing, Air War: How to Wage It (London: Gale & Polden, 1916).
