A man killed in Sydney's first fatal shark attack in nearly six decades has been identified as diving instructor Simon Nellist.
The 35-year-old was an ocean lover who spent much of his time in the sea and had been training for the Malabar ocean swim this weekend.
The event has been cancelled following the deadly attack.
Diving instructor and ocean lover killed in Sydney shark attack
The city was rocked by its first fatal shark attack in almost 60 years on Wednesday after a swimmer was killed at Little Bay, metres from the rocks in front of horrified fishers and onlookers.
Terrifying video footage showed the moment the shark struck. “Someone just got eaten by a shark,” the man recording the video can be heard yelling, adding it was a “big great white”.
Today shark attack put Little Bay into history books as at my swimming 🏊 spot a swimmer died
Little Bay Shark attack - 2022 Last shark attack in Sydney was In 1963 …
Several Sydney beaches to close after fatal shark attack
Man who died in Sydney shark attack swam at Little Bay 'every day'
4-story rogue wave that randomly appeared in the Pacific Ocean is the ‘most extreme’ ever detectedLive Science
“Coleridge, why are we to live on after all the strength and beauty of existence are gone, when all the life of life is fled, as poor Burns expresses it?”
“One thing in my line of work that you find out is that most people act like they have more than they really do, that they’re better off than they really are. It’s always the same kind of people too. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years and it never changes. Rednecks and gangsters want to be rich but most of them aren’t rich. Rednecks with their trucks and gangsters with their SUVs and Cadillacs. And on the other side are the full-of-shit people trying to act white collar rich by driving BMWs and Mercedes and Audis.”
Peter Dutton 'more likely' to fund community grants in Coalition seats, audit finds
Risk of Long COVID explained Don Ford A must read. Circulate widely. From what I can tell, even though this piece is written in a very layperson-friendly manner, its statements are accurate. Particularly alarming is a chart that confirms what we’ve been saying, that the vaccines offer virtually no protection from long Covid. The frequency and duration of long Covid also is worse than widely assumed. And another nasty feature: long Covid symptomsy can develop months after infection.
An Undiscovered Coronavirus? The Mystery of the ‘Russian Flu’ New York Times How long has IM Doc been talking about this? At least a year?
There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveller overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast. Escaping from the beast he gets into a dry well, but sees at the bottom of the well a dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him. And the unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should be destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom of the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes s twig growing in a crack in the well and clings to it. His hands are growing weaker and he feels he will soon have to resign himself to the destruction that awaits him above or below, but still he clings on. Then he sees that two mice, a black one and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he is clinging and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and he will fall into the dragon's jaws. The traveller sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around, sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig, reaches them with his tongue and licks them. So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not understand why I had fallen into such torment. I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I hung. I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet. I only saw the unescapable dragon and mice, and I could not tear my gaze from them. and this is not a fable but the real unanswerable truth intelligible to all. The deception of the joys of life which formerly allayed my terror of the dragon now no longer deceived me. No matter how often I may be told, "You cannot understand the meaning of life so do not think about it, but live," I can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false. The two drops of honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel truth longer than the rest: my love of family, and of writing -- art as I called it -- were no longer sweet to me. "Family"... said I to myself. But my family -- wife and children -- are also human. They are placed just as I am: they must either live in a lie or see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or watch them? That they may come to the despair that I feel, or else be stupid? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them: each step in knowledge leads them to the truth. And the truth is death.
It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart”
Well, this article about the importance and difficulty of friendships as you grow older by Jennifer Senior just hit me squarely in the feels.
When you’re in middle age, which I am (mid-middle age, to be precise — I’m now 52), you start to realize how very much you need your friends. They’re the flora and fauna in a life that hasn’t had much diversity, because you’ve been so busy — so relentlessly, stupidly busy — with middle-age things: kids, house, spouse, or some modern-day version of Zorba’s full catastrophe. Then one day you look up and discover that the ambition monkey has fallen off your back; the children into whom you’ve pumped thousands of kilowatt-hours are no longer partial to your company; your partner may or may not still be by your side. And what, then, remains?
I’m 48 years old, divorced, introverted, with two kids in their tweens/teens. I haven’t had coworkers in more than 15 years (and have worked from home for the past 7 years) and moved away from many of my friends to a place where I didn’t know anyone almost 6 years ago. I feel, acutely, the desire for and the falling away of friendships in this weirdo phase of life, which is happening during the most societally destabilizing event many of us have ever lived through.
Were friendships always so fragile? I suspect not. But we now live in an era of radical individual freedoms. All of us may begin at the same starting line as young adults, but as soon as the gun goes off, we’re all running in different directions; there’s little synchrony to our lives. We have kids at different rates (or not at all); we pair off at different rates (or not at all); we move for love, for work, for opportunity and adventure and more affordable real estate and healthier lifestyles and better weather.
Yet it’s precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much. We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us — parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians.
It’s not wholly natural, this business of making our own tribes. And it hardly seems conducive to human thriving. The percentage of Americans who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life.
One of those articles where I wanted to quote the whole thing…so just go read it.
Researchers warn that social media may be ‘fundamentally at odds’ with science
TechCrunch: “A special set of editorials published in today’s issue of the journal Science argue that social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason. The algorithms are running the show now, they argue, and the systems priorities are unfortunately backwards. In an incisive (and free to read) opinion piece by Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the basic disconnect with what scientists need and what social media platforms provide is convincingly laid out. “Rules of scientific discourse and the systematic, objective, and transparent evaluation of evidence are fundamentally at odds with the realities of debates in most online spaces,” they write. “It is debatable whether social media platforms that are designed to monetize outrage and disagreement among users are the most productive channel for convincing skeptical publics that settled science about climate change or vaccines is not up for debate.” The most elementary feature of social media that reduces the effect of communication by scientists is pervasive sorting and recommendation engines. This produces what Brossard and Scheufele call “homophilic self-sorting” — the ones who are shown this content are the ones who are already familiar with it. In other words, they’re preaching to the choir. “The same profit-driven algorithmic tools that bring science-friendly and curious followers to scientists’ Twitter feeds and YouTube channels will increasingly disconnect scientists from the audiences that they need to connect with most urgently,” they write. And there’s no obvious solution: “The cause is a tectonic shift in the balance of power in science information ecologies. Social media platforms and their underlying algorithms are designed to outperform the ability of science audiences to sift through rapidly growing information streams and to capitalize on their emotional and cognitive weaknesses in doing so. No one should be surprised when this happens.”…
As it happened: Thousands of NSW nurses strike over pay and staffing ratios; COVID-19 cases continue to grow across the nation
- Broede Carmody, Rachel Eddie and Angus Thompson