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Created
Sun, 02/01/2022 - 12:02

This food timeline started as a way to explore the revolution in Australian food that has occurred during the baby-boomers’ lifetime, but has since expanded to include more about the previous decades (and century) as well. Also included are overseas events and trends that had an impact here. The entries are brief, but there are lots of links if you want more information.

Most Googled recipes - gnocchi

Tracking the list of most Googled recipes over the past few years is both revealing and mystifying.  The most Googled recipe for 2021 was gnocchi, perhaps not a surprise given our ongoing love for Italian food. But the most baffling is how curried sausages became the third most Googled recipe of the year. I remember […]

Created
Wed, 29/12/2021 - 01:13

Our fifteenth annual International Day Against DRM (IDAD), might be over, but the fight against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) continues. Each year, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its Defective by Design campaign distill what we've learned throughout the year in our anti-DRM activism on one special day: a day especially supportive to those retailers and publishers who rightly refuse to foist DRM on their customers, and a day especially critical of those who haven't gotten the message that our real digital rights cannot be restricted. For those of us steeped in the Defective by Design campaign, IDAD never fails to provide moments that inspire us in our work for the coming year.

Created
Mon, 27/12/2021 - 17:13

“One of the first things you have to decide on with a musical is why should there be songs.”

The person speaking is Stephen Sondheim, the writer of some of the best songs for musicals in the 20th century, who died in November aged 91.

You can put songs in any story, but what I think you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If it’s unnecessary, then the show generally turns out to be not very good.

I’m no Sondheim, but as an editor I won’t put a graph into any story unless it is absolutely necessary to tell the story.

When I do, the picture can be worth at least the 800 words that accompany it.

So here are my 10 favourites from the business and economy stories I edited for The Conversation in 2021.

Some of the best graphs remove doubt

This graph, from the Bureau of Statistics, leaves no doubt about what happens to consumer spending when lockdowns end.