The latest Ipsos poll for the Fairfax papers is the Coalition’s least bad result of the Scott Morrison prime ministership so far, recording the Labor two-party lead at 53-47, an improvement on the 55-45 blowout the pollster recorded as Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership entered its final week (which was the one poll suggesting a significant weakening in Coalition voting intention in the period up to the spill). Ipsos’ primary vote numbers are still idiosyncratic, with an already over-inflated Greens gaining two points to 15%, while Labor slumps four to 31% and the Coalition gains one to 34%. No conventional leadership ratings that I can see yet, but ratings of the two leaders across a range of eleven attributes finds Morrison scoring better than Bill Shorten on every question other than “has the confidence of his/her party” and “has a firm grasp of social policy”. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1200; more detail presumably to follow.
UPDATE: As related by the Financial Review, the poll has Scott Morrison debuting with 46% approval and 36% disapproval, while Bill Shorten is up three on approval to 44% and down four on disapproval to 48%. Morrison holds a 47-37 lead as preferred prime minister, little different from Turnbull’s 48-36 lead in the last poll.
So, it’s pretty common knowledge that Clive Palmer is attempting an almost certainly futile bid to return to parliament.
What I did not realize was that, rather than running for the Senate – where he might have had a ghost of a chance at being elected simply thanks to the disengaged protest vote and his present job as a series of unfunny Facebook memes – this deluded sociopath is in fact running for the House of Representatives again.
What seat is he running for, you might ask? Why, the Townsville-based seat of Herbert, of course, home of Queensland Nickel.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-17/clive-palmer-splashing-cash-as-he-attempts-political-comeback/10243712
Puffy’s call for people to block others they disagree is pretty cowardly. I will never block another person because everyone has a right to be heard. To deny it to others is to want to live in a bubble where you are confronted by only people who you agree with. To all my followers on PB I salute you!
nath
Just a shot across the bows. Don’t shit on your own door step.
meher baba says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 7:14 pm
nath: “The theory of gravity I think can now be considered as real.”
Newton’s theory of gravity was completely overturned by Einstein’s theory of curvature of space. It’s wrong, end of story.
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No it is not. Newton’s equations still work as well as they ever did, which was great for most purposes.
When I am doing calculations of surface areas and volumes of cones and cylinders and spheres in my head, I use Pi = 3, and add on a bit. Close enough for most real life purposes, and a great check on whether the calculator entries were correct.
Einsten’s theory of curvature of space adds more decimal points, and is more applicable for large distances and large masses.
And was a magnificent achievement.
Newton’s theory of gravity is a good (given the general state of knowledge and experimental design under which it was formulated it’s excellent) approximation of how things work at a human scale. It breaks down at very small or very large scales and so can be regarded as technically “incorrect”, but it’s good enough for most purposes that might reasonably have been forseen for its first couple of hundred years of existence, and is still pretty useful for describing the world as observed without sophisticated instruments.
Don,
I tend to do quite a bit of mental arithmetic for various reasons and tend to use Pi = 22/7 as I find fractions easier to do in my head than decimals, except for, perhaps, one last division to get a single-number final answer.
Mind you, after 20+ years as a professional engineer I still reckon there are very few problems that cannot be adequately approximated as either a simply supported beam or one-dimensional flow, so I think my standards for precision might be a bit low :D.
Snaps within the office of the Prime Muppet, aka Scotty from the Shire, tell a tale of batshit boring and boorish boganism. Check the airport novels on the bookshelf! And the homage to a suburban NRL team. Gough Whitlam and his kindred holders of the highest office in the land aghast.
don
When I am doing calculations of surface areas and volumes of cones and cylinders and spheres in my head, I use Pi = 3, and add on a bit.
The Intellectual Bogan
I tend to do quite a bit of mental arithmetic for various reasons and tend to use Pi = 22/7
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You guys need to go on a road trip together and film it for the ABC.
Science is a process. Science works by finding out where an explanation doesn’t work and then improving the explanation.
Newton’s theory of gravity is not wrong. It fails in situations, but for most of us it works just fine. Engineers and even physicists use it all the time to predict stuff perfectly well. Einstein had a different idea. His idea needs more math and makes more accurate predictions in situations where Newton’s theory ‘fails’, but his theory too does not work in all cases. Einstein’s theory is no more ‘right’ than Newton’s. You use what you need. Science is about finding where we are ignorant and figuring out how to be less ignorant.
And it is important to distinguish between the observation (things fall) and the explanation (Newton, Einstein, others?). Long before Newton came along I doubt you’d find anyone seriously arguing that jumping off a bridge meant you wouldn’t fall.
Is anyone else getting frustrated by a Prime Minister and an Attorney General making it prime time important to denounce a criminal act on strawberries? Aren’t there police and an entire system in place to handle this? How many people have been physically injured so far? Isn’t the scare mongering making it more difficult for farmers to recover?
The Intellectual Bogan says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 8:13 pm
Don,
I tend to do quite a bit of mental arithmetic for various reasons and tend to use Pi = 22/7 as I find fractions easier to do in my head than decimals, except for, perhaps, one last division to get a single-number final answer.
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Yeah, but I don’t use decimals. I use Pi = 3.
When I was a kid I used 22/7 also, which is close enough for any rational being unless you are calculating an trajectory for insertion into Moon orbit, in which case too many decimals are not enough.
And the initial questions in the maths book used r = 7 or some multiple thereof, which made the job a lot easier!
And base 10 log tables for four sig figs for the other questions. We never used slide rules, I think they would have been very much faster and easier.
And a photo of a tearful ET after the 2016 NRL grand final.
I wonder if he has that notorious photo where you can glimpse a few of ET’s yeti pubes.
I prefer my road-trips solo, which is one of the reasons I do a lot of mental arithmetic.
No offence intended to Don, BTW. I’m just a bit solitary by nature.
sprocket_ @ #2656 Wednesday, September 19th, 2018 – 6:14 pm
His choice of reading material looks especially strategically curated.
Confessions, thank ‘God’ the RWNJ’s only ever convince the already-convinced. And that the pool of such people only number enough to be decisive within the COALition and not in Australia as a whole. Bring on the day they’re out of office and can’t inflict their rubbish on the rest of us.
Morrison has a copy of The Boat by Nam Le. What an irony!
sprocket_
When they ask Morrison why they changed from Turnbull he should just tell them the market research with 2GB listeners indicated a bogan yob from the Shire rated higher than Mr. Harbourside
Just look at the idiot strawberry Ad to see the plan in action
The Intellectual Bogan says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 8:18 pm
I prefer my road-trips solo, which is one of the reasons I do a lot of mental arithmetic.
No offence intended to Don, BTW. I’m just a bit solitary by nature.
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Me too. You’ve got to have somebody intelligent to talk to, so I often talk to myself when my wonderful wife is not around, especially on lone bush walks down the gorges east of here. A magical place.
The snakes and possums don’t talk back, either.
In my time in and around Parliament House, one thing which always struck me was portraits of the Queen in offices you would not expect.
Forelock tugging is a cult – Scotty is a paid up member.
“When I was a kid I used 22/7 also, which is close enough for any rational being” – but not quite good enough for an irrational number. 😉
The best is the enemy of the good.
Imagine that. If Nam Le’s parents had not got onto a boat and illegally crossed from Vietnam to Malaysia then Scomo would not have his book on his shelf. Incredible!
All the book spines on Morrison’s bookshelf are unbroken…. unread, including Stay on message
Understanding Sharia Finance?
ScumMo is going to be in trouble with the RWNJs.
sprocket_ @ #2656 Wednesday, September 19th, 2018 – 7:44 pm
“His choice of reading material looks especially strategically curated.”
Yes his book ‘Africa’ is suss because he thought it was a country the other day.
Scotty has ‘Understanding Sharia Finance’ on his shelf – no wonder the debt and deficit have ballooned under his watch as Treasurer!
If I was Prime Minister I would just have the collected works of Winston Churchill. What more do you need?
One more thought on strawberries. The consensus I am feeling is that it will take a ‘Black Swan’ event to prevent an ALP government resulting from the next federal election. I wonder what almost-black-swan could be marketed by our Prime Marketer Morrison as a Black Swan? And in the same vein if no single event occurs can enough brown swans be promoted to a similar effect? In other words, is this that Morrison is doing?
aeger says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 8:26 pm
“When I was a kid I used 22/7 also, which is close enough for any rational being” – but not quite good enough for an irrational number.
The best is the enemy of the good.
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So how many decimal points for Pi do you use?
10? 100? 1000? 1 000 000? more?
“Yeah, but I don’t use decimals. I use Pi = 3.
When I was a kid I used 22/7 also, which is close enough for any rational being…”
Multiply by 3 and add 5%. That is often close enough (3.15 c.f. 3.14159…).
@Don
well Pi is 3.14159265359
So 11?
Just to be different I prefer to use 314/100. The final division is easier.
Puff:
LOL!!
Scommo Knighted
Sohar @ #2673 Wednesday, September 19th, 2018 – 6:28 pm
He has a number of books on Africa. Obviously feeling the missionary…
As to how many decimal positions to use, 5 significant figures is normally enough. Cents in a couple of thousand dollars, a couple of inches in a mile, a day in a lifetime…
Again, for precision engineering, you need more.
Late Riser:
I’ve been thinking the same thing.
The response from both the media and the government to this has been really overblown, in my view – both exacerbating the damage it has done to strawberry farmers and sellers and being exactly what the lunatics putting needles in these things would have wanted in the first place.
Zoidlord says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 8:32 pm
@Don
well Pi is 3.14159265359
So 11?
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Overkill for most purposes. Steve777’s method will get a good enough answer for most situations, like ordering how many cubic metres of sawdust for the lunging yard. But using 3 will also be close enough.
Three is what the christian bible used for Solomon’s temple furniture.
A very high proportion of ScoMos books are about lost souls venturing to other countries to enrich their lives. As I tell my kids, you are what you read.
Zoidlord:
Pi has an infinite amount of decimal places.
After 3.14, the only one I can ever remember is the forty thousandth digit, which is, of course, 1.
Asha Leu says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 8:39 pm
Zoidlord:
Pi has an infinite amount of decimal places.
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I am pretty sure that Zoid knows that.
There’s a bloke in Japan who has memorised Pi to a zillion decimal places:
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(wikipedia)
Akira Haraguchi (原口 證 Haraguchi Akira) (born 1946, Miyagi Prefecture), a retired Japanese engineer, is known for memorizing and reciting digits of pi.
Memorization of pi
He holds the current unofficial world record (100,000 digits) in 16 hours, starting at 9 a.m (16:28 GMT) on October 3, 2006 and having recited up to 83,431 digits by nightfall, stopping with digit number 100,000 at 1:28 a.m. on October 4, 2006. The event was filmed in a public hall in Kisarazu, east of Tokyo, where he had five-minute breaks every two hours to eat onigiri to keep up his energy levels. Even his trips to the toilet were filmed to prove that the exercise was legitimate.
Memorisation of pi is one of those feats where one can admire the dedication required while at the same time wondering why.
One of the strawberry perps has been collared. A young kid.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/strawberry-spiking-boy-arrested-in-nsw-after-putting-needles-in-fruit/news-story/9a52a860a2c50a230be9a782d3337a3b
‘Diogenes says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 8:38 pm
A very high proportion of ScoMos books are about lost souls venturing to other countries to enrich their lives. As I tell my kids, you are what you read.’
FFS. I read Bludger.
Steve777 says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 8:35 pm
As to how many decimal positions to use, 5 significant figures is normally enough. Cents in a couple of thousand dollars, a couple of inches in a mile, a day in a lifetime…
Again, for precision engineering, you need more.
Real engineering was done with a slide rule. If that was not good enough 5 figure log tables (they are about 2 inches thick). Today it is done on 32 bit or 64 bit floating point processors and old farts do it in their heads as a sanity check ( 3 is good enough).
32 bit processor standard IEEE floating point (8 bit exponent), in meters number has 19 km offset; you want to work with centimeters, do you have a problem?
New title for the site:
Pi Bludger
Some of you may be interested in the fact that Newton, as stated in his own writings, believed that the end of the world would occur in 2060, then later in his lifetime, 2034, and still later 2016.
These calculations were based on prophecies the book of Daniel, which was written in the second century BC. They had to do with with the ‘Antichrist’, and its 1260 day ‘reign’, which Newton and his mates took to really mean 1260 years. To them, the Antichrist was the Roman Catholic Church, and they took as their Year zero of the Antichrist the year 756 AD, when King Pepin of France gave Rome and surrounding duchies to the Papacy.
frednk:
Real engineering was done with a slide rule. If that was not good enough 5 figure log tables (they are about 2 inches thick).
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That’s the 7 figure log tables book you are thinking of. I’ve got one somewhere, I bought it when I was going to live in a buckminster fuller geodesic dome, and needed to do the calculations.
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……and old farts do it in their heads as a sanity check ( 3 is good enough).
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Guilty as charged, yr honner.
For mental calcs 355/113 is a handy approximation to pi 🙂 It is good to 6 decimal places.
Shaun Micaleff was quite good just now, timing a bit rusty, but he will be good viewing in the coming months
Yabba:
Some of you may be interested in the fact that Newton, as stated in his own writings, believed that the end of the world would occur in 2060, then later in his lifetime, 2034, and still later 2016.
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Newton is reputed to have gone a bit crazy in his latter years because of breathing mercury fumes in his quest for turning base metals into gold.