Aug. 12, 2010

I don't often get political on here, but watching the Australian Liberal party trot out the "we will stop the boats" line, referring to trying to stop people seeking refugee status in Australia who arrive by boat, has annoyed me enough to write something about it.

The Liberal party have obviously seen the numbers. They know that people arriving on boats seeking refugee status are statistically insignificant. This is basically a cynical political stunt by that party, designed to prey on a deep-seated "rational racism" found in modern Australian culture. Essentially they are taking some of the most powerless and unfortunate people in the world, turning them into boogie men, and then telling the Australian population that they will protect us against them. Heck, I'm going to say it; it's just plain un-Australian!

Why?

  1. As a member state of the United Nations, we are shirking our obligations to the United Nations under international law. We derive huge benefits from being part of the United Nations and we should meet our obligations in return. "Stop the boats," is quite possibly illegal in that context. See this article for an example of UN HCR's reaction to Australia refusing entry to refugees in 2003.

  2. The number of people arriving by boat is statistically insignificant, especially when compared with:

    • The number of people arriving by air and staying here illegally.
    • The number of refugees arriving to other nations, to European nations for example.
    • The total population of Australia.
  3. Finally, and most damningly, Australia's political policy on refugees and immigration has no demonstrable effect on the numbers of people arriving regardless. The number of people arriving are determined by external factors (like hostilities in Afghanistan; a war in which Australia is involved). See this article for details and a thorough statistical analysis.

In other words, if we wanted to regulate refugee immigration to Australia more tightly (a desire of debatable value), then we shouldn't focus on boat people at all. In that case, the rational thing to do would be to focus on our contribution to situations outside of Australia that cause people to want to seek refugee status here, such as wars, disasters, etc. Focusing on "boat people" is irrational at best, and racist at worst.

I will never vote for a party who will capitalise so cynically on, and in doing so advocate, such an awful cultural trait as the racist reflex we are witnessing. Surely we are smarter than that, Australia? Surely we can see through this kind of hateful scaremongering?

Because of this, I will put the candidates of the liberal party very last on my ballot paper on the 21st August, 2010.

Upate: Here are some useful links with statistics:

"Boat arrivals since 1976 by calendar year"

"Australian Prime Ministers Since 1901"

I hope you'll notice something deeply ironic when you look at these links. The year with the highest number of refugees arriving by boat is 2001, which was smack bang in the middle of the term of John Winston Howard of the Liberal party.

Aug. 9, 2010

squeakyshoecore

I have uploaded a new squeakyshoecore tune called Hilbert Curve, named after my favorite fractal. Czech it here.

Also, here are the Pure Data patches which are used to make this music. You can control them with a midi controller.

Aug. 8, 2010

This weekend I have competed in Simon Wittber's GameJam. It's been a fun couple of days and nights hanging out with other nerds, programming video games. I used my Javascript/HTML5 games library jsGameSoup which meant I got the first working iteration of the game up and running after about four hours on Friday night. Saturday afternoon I polished it and tweaked the game mechanic with some good suggestions from Jack, Simon, Nick, and Jason. This afternoon I spent a few minutes getting it online and fixing bugs.

Anyway, here is a link to the game, PingZinger. I would love to hear what you think!

The theme of the game was "choose two at the expense of the other," which should give you some clue as to how to play the game.

Have fun!

July 31, 2010

I am ridiculously behind on blogging because of the amount of contract work I have going on at the moment (working Saturdays and weeknights until 2am - not fun!) Anyway, I'll stop whining now.

Below is a video of the talk I gave at PyCon AU at the end of June. In it I talk about my time working for London based "reactive music" company, RjDj, and also about my video game Infinite8BitPlatformer.

I haven't posted an Infinite8BitPlatformer update for ages, and I have been meaning to do so since a lot of progress has been made since my last post, but here's a quick update:

  • Multiplayer code: this is going really well. It's almost at the point of beta release.
  • Contributors: another person has started contributing to the codebase. I am hopefully going to be merging his code this weekend. Julian has put basic chat into the multiplayer code, among other tweaks and bugfixes, and a huge amount of very useful information for other people looking to contribute. He's been very patient about my lack of time!

Anyway, back to work.

July 11, 2010

I've started a new album. It is called squeakyshoecore. It is algorithmically generated acid using some software I wrote. I am going to release it online bit by bit, as I finish each track. I will announce each new track here on this blog.

squeakyshoecore logo

squeakyshoecore

The software makes two different beats and two complementary melodies using random number generators and some carefully tuned algorithms for using those random numbers. The melody shaping rules involve applying a low dimensional random fractal effect on very basic seed melodies, producing a type of self-similarity which seems to sound interesting to humans. The beats are created using a variety of custom rule sets, much like my previous work with algorithmic hip-hop in CanOfBeats and my algorithmic drum-and-bass generator, GhostWave.

After that I manually control how loud each of the parts are present in the mix, what effects are being applied to the different parts, and the parameter values of those effects. I use a midi controller to mix it in real time and record it.

Soon I will make the latest version of the Pure Data patches ("GarageAcidLab") available online under a Free Software license.

Enjoy the first tracks!

P.S. Some other music I've released on the net previously is Cryptolect, end-of-millenium style chopped-up breakbeats.