This weekend’s open thread is hosted by this seagull, who wants a piece of what the otter’s having:
And a bonus otter with a wee pink nose:
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
I’m about to meet up with my sister to cast some of my mother’s ashes into the sea at one of her favourite spots. I’m already experiencing some anticipatory closure just thinking about this ritual gesture. Poignant but warm feelings.
Cool change came through last night just after I got home from work. So very much better…
Warm thoughts from out West to you also, tigtog.
angharad: And in true Aussie-alternating form, we’re heading into the warm: 36/38/36/35/35/35, so at least not as bad as last week. Not a lot of sea breezes in the forecast, though, so that’s a bit icky.
A quiet weekend is planned here, gods willing and the air conditioner don’t break.
Will be thinking of you TT.
17 years married today. We both forgot until lunchtime.
I saw John Pilger’s Utopia at a screening at the Block last night. I knew some of the things it covered already, but a lot of it was new to me.
Rottnest Island, for instance, had a concentration camp for Indigenous men and boys for about 100 years. The prison building, in which many people died, often of disease but with some executions, is now used as a hotel for the tourists. There’s a mass grave on the island that Indigenous activists had to push really hard to even get signed, and which tourists can walk over because it’s not fenced off.
@Lauredhel – well we’ll probably be getting that a few days after you. That seems to be the usual way it works.
@Mindy – Mr angharad and I did the same on our 13th anniversary….
Thinking of you, tigtog.
And congrats, Minday!
I realised today that Matt and I have been together for more time as parents than we were before we spawned. And we passed the milestone sometime last year.
And I am dyeing the tips of my hair Violet right now, after a friend bleached them, this afternoon.
Thanks everybody for the mindedness expressed for me while scattering Mum’s ashes. It ended up being a very positive day for both me and my sister. We divided the ashes, and there’s still two more special sites for them to be scattered later that we’ll do with my brother. I hope he finds it as soothing as we have so far.
Hey you Westralians! Did any of you catch your special premiere of Sherlock Season 3 on Channel 9 last night? Or did they change their mind?
Channel 9 still not letting the rest of us know when we’ll see it *grumblegrumble*
Ms 7 now has pink streaks in her hair. She looks rather awesome.
I have to go back to work tomorrow. I don’t wanna. I am working on being grateful for having a job.
I have just been to an alleged feminist website, where the blog author claims not to see any conflict over Woody Allen.
Going to take drugs and go to bed, now.
Adding my best wishes to tigtog. A good farewell is comforting.
eilish, ugh. I can see deciding that despite the conflict one is still going to see his movies to support the other talented people involved in making them (although it’s not the decision I’ve reached), but to deny that any conflict exists? Ugh.
It’s appalling how easily distracted by other things people allow themselves to be. Mia Farrow and daughter Dylan did a Vanity Fair interview last year or the year before talking about the molestations, and what ended up making most of the headlines? A tangent about whether Farrow’s son Ronan was in fact Frank Sinatra’s biological son rather than Allen’s, because that was sensationalist rather than disturbing.
oraclenine, I know what you mean about the after-wrap blues. It’s hard to go from that shared-endeavour intimacy to suddenly not seeing them for weeks/months and then rarely all together again. Last year I returned to rock and roll after 30 years and we put on a great show and then it was over – I need to get my own band going for real I reckon.
Talking about not seeing fellow performers after a wrap for ages, I’m meeting up with some old stand-up comedy friends for remembrance drinks for one of our community who recently died suddenly, and to help coordinate a seaside ashes-scattering later this year for him too that may help his brother with some healing – I hope it does, because I recently was on the phone listening to brother for nearly an hour and he’s in a bad place with post-funeral family conflicts and he needs something to help him through it all.
Urgh! The Red-headed Boy has insomnia, which means Mr a and I get to have insomnia too…
Spent tonight at the closing performance of the latest production I was AD for, followed by our traditional “go hang out at one actor’s house, drink, eat and talk about The Future Of Theater til the wee hours”.
It was a terrific experience and our actors are both smart, strong, funny people I look forward to working with again. It’s always a trifle weird after a show closes, the structure of production and the constant contact just evaporates. So I’m a bit at lose ends.
Hope the scattering went smoothly and brings you and the family what you need from it.
Has anyone else read the Dunning Kruger effect post, with the gender experiment at the end? They Dunning Krugered themselves, didn’t they?
I haven’t read anything particularly Dunning Kruger related lately, Matt. A few more specifics, perhaps?
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to, YetAnotherMatt. Do you have a link? Or is it at the sort of awful place that doesn’t deserve traffic?
Okay, I still need to calibrate my social media knowledge assumptions. It’s been going around facebook, I keep running into person or persons unnamed who say say “That’s so seven hours ago, everyone already knows, P.S. get on twitter you luddite.”, so am used to being way behind the curve.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/when-ignorance-begets-confidence-the-classic-dunning-kruger-effect
Manual linkage, the computer ate my
homeworklink.That article’s from 2010, Matt. It may well be having a resurgence in some circles on facebook, but it’s hardly the latest viral sensation. Looks like there’s been a few new comments added (boring partisan stoush stuff) in the last week, which might be why it’s bobbed back up to the top of some search results so that it’s getting shared again on social media, but in any case I don’t see anything startling about the final section on gender expectations.
The effect is about the effect of variable levels of ability on confidence, and they have done an experiment observing no variance in ability, and gone on to varying levels of confidence using gender as a variable.
I still don’t understand your problems with that section, Matt. If there were “no variance” at all in their population, they wouldn’t have any effect to measure at all (and it would contradict everyone’s everyday experience of performance (not necessarily the same thing as ability) variance across and between populations).
Now if what you mean is that they didn’t measure a *gendered* variance in performance for the test in question, you are quite correct.
However, they did find a *gendered* variance in confidence for the test in question, and I don’t understand why you think this is a problem for the DK effect hypothesis, which is all about people’s self-assessment of their own future performance. It merely supports their contention that there are other influences on individual self-perception other than one’s knowledge of one’s own past performance.
What happens when a silly cat not only insists on drinking from the tap, but doing it uphill:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/UA2tSDb_QUE?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent