Gary Houston

Location: Lutruwita / Tasmania

Last Notes

2026-07-04 03:14:00 CEST

On of the flaws of Wikipedia is its concept of "reliable sources." Which means "mainstream" sources like commercial media.
An article on the Odin programming language was deleted, since the references consisted of self-published blogs, and an e-book. Written by experts on the language, presumably, so likely to be technically reliable.
If only Odin had been mentioned on Fox News, or the White House had complained about it, its status would probably be secure.
https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/

2026-05-12 04:21:21 CEST

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Hmm. I mentioned cultural, because of this article I saw a few months ago, and I was thinking "go up and flirt with random strangers, so creepy, who would do that?"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/16/australian-men-dont-do-flirting-why

2026-05-12 02:29:50 CEST

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it may be a cultural thing, but randomly complimenting strangers with something like "Your hair is amazing; I love that color blue 😊" seems rather intrusive to me.

2026-05-06 10:02:55 CEST

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maybe get the Pope involved, didn't one of them divide the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese? Perhaps Iran could have the east end of the strait and the USA the west.

2025-12-09 06:16:12 CET

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National, One Nation, what's even the difference.

2025-10-28 22:47:13 CET

The Dutch parliamentary system seems to be a lot more robust against fascist take-overs than say the USA or the UK. Sure, there were headlines that Wilders had won the last election, allowing him to take part in a coalition government with 3 other parties. But that didn't give him the chance to turn the Netherlands into another Hungary, or to leave the EU. They just spent their time in arguments until Wilders forced a new election, and it seems he has lost support.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/28/netherlands-polls-geert-wilders-faces-political-isolation

2025-10-20 01:28:48 CEST

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What is the alternative to some form of democracy? All I can think of is "whoever fights the best gets their way." Is democracy a ritualised form of combat?
Situations like, one group wants to preserve a wilderness area, another group wants to clear it for timber / farm land. How do you even decide which group should prevail?

2025-09-19 03:32:19 CEST

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It's all intense these days, free speech vs outlawing hate speech, and open borders vs ethnicities with their own territories. Europeans remembering their own colonisations and fearing the reverse?
I remember when it took off in the Netherlands with Pim Fortuyn. He had a particular objection (as a gay man) to Muslim immigration, seeing the immigrants as non-integrating and religiously conservative. I suppose his right wing successors are mostly Christian conservative.

2025-05-05 06:24:41 CEST

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why not merge with One Nation while they are at it, and a few others.

2025-04-28 07:21:16 CEST

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Internet Archive's Open Library is also a catalogue.
https://openlibrary.org/

2025-02-24 04:17:14 CET

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A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth is said to be one of the longest novels, 1,488 pages in paperback. I haven't read it.

2025-02-23 12:04:31 CET

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possibly The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton, with about 1000 pages. It did hold my attention, because it's just one crazy thing after another. It's the first part of a trilogy of equally long novels.

2024-11-17 22:41:44 CET

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well, in the first case, you've got some kind of system, where people are voting per-street on whether to have trees or not, and perhaps they have to put up signs on every street explaining their policy for wandering woodcutters. But who decided to institute and maintain this system? And how do people defend their trees? Do they have to always have somebody chained up to a tree to prevent somebody cutting it down?

2024-11-17 22:16:57 CET

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I'm puzzled by anarchist ideas about decision making. Surely collective decisions need to be made, but the critiques of democracy are also valid. You presumably wouldn't force people to vote, and in practice the people who show up to vote may form a fairly small clique. So how do you make any collective decisions? Things like, we want to have street trees so people shouldn't cut them down?