After a month in which I seem to have been travelling more often than not, and cold almost constantly, I’m settled back in Brisbane, enjoying, as Tex Morton put it[1] “our beautiful climate! Where we never see ice or snow!” I was talking to a taxi-driver who mentioned that he’d been attracted to Queensland by this song, also a favourite in my household.
fn1. Or, more precisely, pinched it, from Pappy O’Daniel
Via Chris Bertram at CT, here’s a novel way of overcoming free-rider problems. You can promise to do something socially desirable, conditional on a certain number of other people doing the same thing. This pledge asks you to give one per cent of your income to charity.
While I was in Adelaide for the Festival of Ideas, the Advertiser ran a piece I wrote on blogs and wikis, aimed at a general audience (it’s over the fold). I was going out for breakfast the next day, and the guy behind the counter said “Don’t you write for the Advertiser?”. It turned out he’d read my piece which ran with a small picture of me from the News Limited archives, used as a dinkus.
What was particularly nice about this was that they used quite an old (that is, young) photo, so it seems age is not wearying me too much.
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A lot of my work at the moment is bound up with a model of the Murray-Darling River system. As all students of economic methodology know, such models involve more or less unrealistic assumptions designed to allow us to calculate some results while maintaining some connection with reality. One tricky issue in the model, and in reality, is what to do about demand for water for residential use in Adelaide. A member of my research team (who shall remain nameless) has proposed a drastic simplifying assumption, with a very pleasing implication
Here are the model results excluding Adelaide.
I have assumed that Adelaide doesn’t exist.
Therefore the Lions actually won 4 straight.
if only!
This time I managed to get tickets to the footy and headed down to Indooroopilly station where the train was packed as expected. I noticed, however, that lots of people seemed to have the wrong colours: green and gold instead of maroon, blue and gold. All was revealed when they got off at Milton. Apparently they were attending a Franco-Australian cultural event, which went well by all accounts
Continuing on to the football, we settled in and had a great night. It was a good match, combining an excitingly tight first half with a satisfyingly crushing victory in the second. There was nothing to match Aka’s miracle goals of last week, but he bagged five and Bradshaw got nine! We can start looking forward to the finals with confidence now.
Six months ago, a number of readers of this blog gave generously to the Red Cross Tsunami appeal. I’m planning another appeal before long, and I thought it might be useful to link to this report (PDF file) on what’s being done.
Progress is slow, as a number of recent reports have pointed out, but things would be much worse if not for the generosity of the relief effort.
Aid is good, and so is trade. Watching TV tonight, the beaches of Phuket looked very tempting, and as one of the few hardy tourists pointed out, there’s no real reason to fear another tsunami hitting the same spot. If you’re thinking of a beach holiday, it looks like this might be a great opportunity to get a good deal and do a good turn at the same time.
I missed out on tickets to the Lions game against Geelong today. Halfway through the second quarter, watching at home on TV, with the rain falling and what looked likely to be a low-scoring mudfest in prospect, I was thinking maybe I hadn’t done too badly. How wrong I was
Since arriving here a few years ago, I’d always thought that Brisbane had only two seasons: Summer and Not-summer. In comments on this theme, I recall James Farrell describing winter in Brisbane, but I didn’t believe him.The place looked snowbound a few weeks ago after an exceptional hailstorm, but I put that down as a once-off.
Now with an overnight minimum of 7 last night (and zero in Ipswich), I have to concede that Brisbane does have a winter. I even put on a warm jacket when I went out to get the fish and chips tonight. Still, having just returned from Canberra, where the maximum was 7, I know where I’d rather be (though easy access to snow would be nice, I must admit).
Update It strikes me that the Brisbane reaction to cold is much like the way Washington DC responds to the heavy snow that falls there once or twice a year. We don’t so much deal with it as hunker down and wait for it to go away.
When we were discussing, not long ago, whether foreign aid could be useful in countries with corrupt and incompetent governments, I wasn’t imagining stories like this (see also this).
As a comparison, here’s a report from December 31, 2004 of aid finally reaching a city in Aceh, close to the epicentre of the earthquake/tsunami that struck on Boxing Day, 5 days previously. That’s in the middle of a war zone in a Third World country, with few roads, and thousands of kilometres from the countries giving most of the aid.
One further comparison. Ten days after the New Orleans disaster, the US has received offers of aid totalling $US1 billion. The total amount given by the US government in response to the tsunami was $950 million.
One of the great things about the internets is that you can instantly find song lyrics, even if you only recall one line of the song. In the case of The Kinks, Dedicated follower of fashion there was only one word I couldn’t make out despite hearing the song many times. The crucial line turns out to be
Everywhere the carnabetian army marches on,
Each one an dedicated follower of fashion.
It’s obvious when it’s written out that carnabetian is a reference to Carnaby Street, the fashion centre of Swinging London in the 1960s, but I don’t think I would ever have worked it out by ear.
John Quiggin 