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An Australia Post van driver gives Mike a bit of hope..

Mike's Pith & Wind - I make lots of mistakes
Maria told me recently that I make lots of mistakes. I’m prone to forgetfulness, but if I were to somehow forget that I’m also mistake-prone I would just need to wait a matter of hours, or even minutes and she’d be proven right – again.
One of my more recent episodes involved a credit card – or to be more accurate, a debit card - and began when the Commonwealth Bank sent me an anonymous looking envelope containing a shiny new card and an explanatory letter.
Without going to the trouble of reading the explanatory letter I found the identical-looking card in my wallet and cut it into irregular-sized pieces in case some mischievous council employee with very sharp eyes and a deal of patience might spy the shards of my expired card and painstakingly glue them back together again. To do what then I’m not quite sure, but you know what I mean.
Anyway, as it happened I visited my branch of the Commonwealth Bank that the very same day to make a deposit. We’re being discouraged from making contact with people-type tellers these days so I joined a small knot of people hanging round the cash and cheque deposit machine inconveniently located in the foyer.
Before me in the queue was a tiny Asian woman trying her best to be inconspicuous, a young couple chatting overly-loudly at each other and a young-ish fellow actually doing business with the machine. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - All Things Bright and..
Like most of the baby-boomer generation I grew up under the declining influence of the church, a downward trajectory that saw me tumble out into a little desert isle of unthoughtful atheism . If you saw the graphed curve as it slowly belly-flopped from zero to sixteen it might have seemed that, for a long time on the x axis, nothing much was happening. It was a slow process of realisation that any form of scientific rationalism was preferable to accepting the teachings of the various religious organisations that had provided me with negligent tutelage that had the supposed intent of saving my immortal soul.
Let me again mention Rene Thom’s 1970’s ‘Catastrophe Theory’, the then new branch of mathematics useful for modelling how a living organism grows and changes. Enthusiasm for the theory started to build in 1975, and reached its peak about three years later. Then it just disappeared much in the same way as his theory might have described. Hardly anyone except algebraic topologists talks about Rene.. read more