Friday, October 20, 2006

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Drug-Sniffing Dogs - more false positives

The police did another one of their highly ineffective "harass the hippies" drug-sniffing dog sweeps in the Valley last weekend. Again, the police report a startling amount of false positives:
"During these searches the drug detection dogs indicated that 75 people had been in contact with or were at the time in possession of illicit drugs. From these indications 22 people were charged after they were found to have illicit drugs on them while a number of others admitted to police that they had consumed drugs earlier in the evening," Supt Carew said.
If all of the rest of the people had consumed drugs, then I wouldn't say there were false positives; but, if all the rest of the people said they'd consumed drugs then the police would have said so. They quite like giving exact numbers, even when it makes them look very bad.

This 30% success rate is even worse than last time.

[END]

Misc 061013

The Queensland Roar looked pretty good last night, but Tom Willis should not be goalie. And it's not just his creepy resemblance to Tom Cruise. He just doesn't inspire confidence. And it's not just because he fumbled the ball into the path of an attacker with less than a minute gone, it's that he appears likely to do this often. Maybe I'm judging him unfairly in comparison to Liam Reddy who has impressed me with the way he dives into the fray; and he's got the best hands in the league statistically.

Another meaningless opinion poll came out today. Apparently 7 out of 10 people think Howard will win the next election. That's all well and good, but firstly, what people think is going to happen isn't worth anything and secondly, we don't have a presidential election system. So this survey is even less meanful than the "preferred Prime Minister" stuff. I don't think that trailing in the preferred PM polls has ever stopped anyone whose party won more seats from becoming Prime Minister.


And here's some stuff from September 25 - lost in drafts again:

Dog Bites Man: The Chamber of Commerce and Industry say that any Labor changes to IR Laws will be bad for Australia. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?

Iraqi Govt removes Saddam trial judge: Iraq's Shiite-led Cabinet has removed the chief judge in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein, accusing him of being biased towards the defendant. - They only want judges biased against the defendant.

Argentines don't like Hewitt says Nalbandian: Don't worry, David. Australians don't either.

[END]

Sunday, October 08, 2006

I think the radar was malfunctioning...

...or this is what the apocalypse looks like.

[END]

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Qld Roar, Looking Very Poor

Or are Melbourne really that good?

They played us off the park: it's never good when it seems like there's twice as many of them as there are of you in the midfield.

What formation are we playing? This team is - formation-wise - unrecognisable from last week's team which played Adelaide off the park. Why don't we just play our own game instead of worrying about them? Bringing Murdocca on allowed them to have a bit more of their normal shape, except the defence then forgot what it was supposed to be doing.

We need Dilevski on more of the time. At least before the game is a lost cause.

The second penalty was crap. McLaren won the ball.

So back to my original two questions, I think it's a bit of both. We were poor and they were good. Remember, we were in close second after four rounds, but the teams that we'd played were in fifth to eighth at the end of round four. Since then, against the 'top' teams, we've won none, drawn one, lost one.

[END]