The Rationalist Manifesto

Sitting here in Sydney’s airport, waiting for my flight to board in about an hour and a half.  These days with Gabe were great, and I should definitely arrange to visit more.

Bangkok, here I come!

To be continued…

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Just came back from a lovely night with Meg and Gabe, which started with an amazing meal at a restaurant called the Red Lantern and ended with me tying a game at the PokerDome, winning $85 having re-built my stack from 125 in chips to most of the chips on the table.

Truth be told I’ve had an amazing run of luck, but it was enjoyable. I was chip leader but agreed to split the total prize with the other person left on the table as it was getting late and I just wanted the game to end.

The funniest part is that with 125 chips when the blinds were at 600/300 I was ready to call it quits, but got convinced to stay by Gabe and two others which later in the game I took out (Gabe was out at that point). As Gabe said to me- as long as you’ve got a chip and a chair… :-)

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Flying out in 14 hours… Can’t wait!

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All are taken from Jackie’s going away part three weeks ago.

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The pseudo-science in Martin Durkin’s “The Great Global Warming Swindle” which I’ve just watched on ABC tonight has been so rigorously debunked that I’m tempted not to even discuss it, but… The short of the counter-argument to his so called documentary is that the solar-radiance model of climate has been valid for most of the history of the world, but then a certain species, known as homo-sapiens, started pissing in its own back yard.

Durkin intentionally ignores the last twenty years or so of climate data, which shows a huge divergence between the prediction of the solar-radiance model (which predicts temperature reduction) and the actual data which shows a sharp increase in global temperature. We are in fact going through the warmest period of climate since man invented farming. Durkin conveniently terminates his graphs at 1988.

The scariest part lies in something that was mentioned in Durkin’s film as an argument against human produced CO₂ as a cause of global warming– that the warming didn’t coincide with the post-war industrial boom.

This can hardly be accounted as an argument for his point of view, as climate effects often lag behind their causes by as much as several hundred years. Unfortunately for us the lag between carbon emission growth to temperature increase simply means that it might take us as many years or more between the time we finally hit the breaks on our carbon emissions to when we see the benefits, meanwhile we’re probably in for a hell of a ride. Literally.

As a side note, if anyone is interested, one of the prevailing theories of why we have only felt the effects of our emissions in the last twenty years is because the oceans were capable of absorbing a large amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we have since saturated them.

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I should have a category for that…

What type of Fae are you?

Time wasted thanks to Fa11ing Away…

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I finally have a partially confirmed itinerary!

Flight out of Sydney to Bangkok on the 30th of August, confirmed (finally) with British Airways. Flying out from Bangkok to Tel-Aviv on the 3rd of September (still on the waiting list) with El-Al flight LY084, due to arrive at 23:20 Israel time. I’m also on the waiting list for the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th just in case.

Returning by flight from Tel Aviv to Hong Kong on the 29th of September (wait-listed) and leaving Hong-Kong on the 1st of October (confirmed), arriving in the early morning of the 2nd of October back home in Melbourne…

Anyone know anyone at El-Al that can move things along on my 3rd of September waiting list? ;-)

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On Sunday evening John and I went to see the ‘Best of Festival’ screening at the Melbourne International Animation Festival at ACMI. It was very cool, and we also found out at the time that there is a Pixar exhibition starting this week, including panels by Pixar creatives. We’ll be going to one of the more interesting ones, that cover the creative process at Pixar itself. (Yes, I know you are jealous Tasha ;-)

For the exhibition promotion they have some pretty familiar and extra cool characters on display!

…Just in case you were wondering, the Monsters are the two on the right ;p

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Caught up with Dave/Dov yesterday and we went by his recommendation to a Japanese restaurant called Shoya, near where Market Lane meets Little Bourke St. It was an amazing culinary experience! Definitely the best Japanese food I’ve ever tasted.

The restaurant is divided into four sections and we had been seated in the “Traditional Dining” section. We decided on a seven course ‘Chef’s Meal’ and each dish (except for one) was an experience to savour!

One of the dishes was assorted Sashimi presented in an hollowed out ice ball, it was a sight to behold as well as being incredibly tasty, they have the ultimate salmon in that restaurant. The first two photos are from the site, and the latter two are from my crappy cellphone camera:

Note that once the temperature rises a bit in the ball, it turns completely clear, they seem to use purified water so there is absolutely no imperfections in the ice, it really almost looks like the Sashimi is floating in crystal.

Other dishes included crab meat wrapped in something I didn’t recognize dipped in monk fish liver sauce, sea-urchin hollowed out and filled with itself along with salmon caviar, Wagyu beef (like Kobe beef) tartar and more.

I had a really great time there and will return for special occasions.

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I am like a dog that just keeps coming back for more abuse after all.

Of course she was hedging her bets, what was I thinking?!

She did it before, why stop now? Just because she said she misses “us”? Merely because she sent me wistful SMS in the middle of the night? Only because she said (and apparently lied) that she could never be with him???

Ha! I should have known!

Again, I let her get close enough to hurt. It wasn’t very close, but she still managed to hurt me. I’m so stupid.

I will never ever be someone’s option ever again. That is a promise I made to myself that I am not going to break. I deserve better than that.

Now I’ll have to go through the whole mourning thing again. Damn. At least it won’t be that difficult this time but boy do I hate the process.

This time I should get it right. Get her out of my head for good.

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