Local news for local people
General and miscellaneous articles - Page 1
There are miscellaneous stories in the archives.
Things that don't fit anywhere else.
Remembering the goodest dog This week marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Cody, who was my best friend in the world when I moved to Oberon. This is something I wrote for the Oberon Writers' Workshop in 2019. |  |
 | First piles drilled in major milestone for Victoria Pass reinstatement Someone was whining on Facebook a few days ago, complaining that no work was being done to reopen Victoria Pass. He was wrong, of course, but attempts to educate him failed. Here is the latest report from Transport for NSW, with a video showing that a lot is really happening. |
They Say They're Saving a Forest. They're Really Saving Coal. There's that old saying: "Follow the money". Social commentator Frackman Project has done a bit of research into what is going on around Oberon. It's worth a read. |  |
 | Lower speed limits to deliver safer trips on Jenolan Caves Road New speed limits will apply along Jenolan Caves Road from September 23. When we can actually drive to Mount Victoria again we can observe the caution "adjust travel times accordingly". |
 | National Collaboration Resolves Insurance Concerns for Landholders living near Renewable Energy Projects A lot has been said about the liabilities of people living near renewable energy projects, much of it scaremongering and disinformation. This media release from the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner (AEIC) should dispel most of the concerns. |
Moron Alert It was a lovely day for the 175th birthday of the town of Rockley. Unfortunately, some people decided that their convenience overrode other people's needs. |  |
 | AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI - and reliable information is getting harder to find If you've looked at a Google or Bing search lately you would have been presented with an "AI summary" before you got to the actual list of pages that contain what you are looking for. What isn't obvious is that these summaries reduce meaningful traffic to the sites that actually contain information (while spuriously inflating the visitor count). Not only that, AI is feeding on itself by crawling AI generated sites. There could come a day when it's virtually impossible to find reliable stuff without using another way to search for it. This article from The Conversation looks at the problem. (The good news is that the site search system here bypasses Google's AI BS and only provides links to pages on the site that contain what you are looking for. Google will probably eventually find a way to "fix" this, but until then ...) There is also an answer to the strange visitor statistics for this site (and any others, of course). |
Older people's media literacy can be boosted in just 60 minutes - new study I know I keep harping on about the sewer pipe of mis- and disinformation that floods us every day from social media (and real media, too). Some new research published in The Conversation indicates that older people might be more susceptible to this while some (but not all or enough) young people are taught something about critical thinking at school. The research went on to look for ways to correct this deficiency, and the good news is that there is some evidence that the problem can be averted with a quite small amount of education and training, although this needs constant reinforcement. |  |
 | Another winter driving hazard to worry about Now that winter is here, this is your annual reminder about freezing fog. This is a road hazard that rarely gets mentioned but which can be very serious (and frightening) when it happens. |
