Another day, another broken promise. This is getting tiresome. On the eve of this year’s federal budget yet another retreat from last year’s. Scrapping an increase for Family Tax Benefit part A recipients is surely the last piece of evidence people need not to take seriously anything Treasurer Wayne Swan announces next Tuesday.
The market speaks. This morning the Crikey Election Indicator has Labor’s re-election chances down to just 10%. How low can it go after the Treasurer releases his annual budget fiction?
The perception and the reality. With the coverage shootings in the US get on television throughout the world, I’m sure that the Pew Research Center would find the results of its latest study replicated in other countries:
And the people would be quite wrong. Analysis of government data shows national rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s,
Like a new nose? Well choose a design, get it printed and find a surgeon to insert it. The new technology of 3-D printing is upon us, and not just for things like the plastic gun you can make at home that I drew attention to yesterday. As US President Barack Obama declared in his most recent State of the Union address, 3-D printing “has the potential to revolutionise the way we make almost anything”.
Strange, surely, that our government ministers who pretend to be concerned about reinvigorating Australian manufacturing are so silent on the potential of the process (please see below about the use of that word “surely”).
The process called 3-D printing (or additive manufacturing, in industrial parlance) follows instructions from digital files, and joins together layer upon layer of material — whether metals, ceramics or plastics — until the object’s distinctive shape is realised (read a good introduction here).
News and views noted along the way.
- How will Imran Khan’s fall affect Pakistan’s election? — “In an election called the most unpredictable in Pakistan’s history, the campaign took a turn no-one expected. Imran Khan, a rising political star, took a fall … And, with his fall, the political high ground rose.”
- Malaysia’s disastrous national election
- Bee deaths may have reached a crisis point for crops — “According to a new survey of America’s beekeepers … the number of honeybees has now dwindled to the point where there may not be enough to pollinate some major crops, including almonds, blueberries, and apples.”
- If you get a PhD, get an economics PhD — “Lab science PhDs. These include biology, chemistry, neuroscience, electrical engineering, etc. These are PhDs you do because you’re either a suicidal fool or an incomprehensible sociopath.”
- Benefits of sun ‘may outweigh the risks’, Edinburgh University study suggests
- Arrest first — ask questions later: How dawn raids and ransacking houses became standard operating procedure
- How to spot a weak argument — “Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word ‘surely’ is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about.”
Australian Government ministers have not been silent on 3d printing. Australian and State governments have funded, with great and justifiable fanfare, RMIT’s Advanced Manufacturing Precinct and Platform Technologies Research Institute, which are researching and training in 3d printing.
Maybe the silence is in the mainstream media’s reporting.
Agree with Gaving Moodie – do a search for invetech 3D printer and you’ll see a “bioprinter” hardware/software product from Melbourne being used in a San Diego startup company where 3D printing is expected to build a structure to “hold” the living cells for an artificial organ. Note the year of release.
Sheesh Richard. “Another broken promise”? Is that the sum total of your contribution ? Does that mean that no one is ever allowed to adapt to new circumstances?