I can remember discovering, with something of a shock, that Armageddon was a real place (modern Megiddo). So, I shouldn’t have been too surprised to find out today that Gehenna is the name of a valley near Jerusalem, bearing no obvious marks of being on the road to eternal damnation. I also got to see Golgotha and Mount Zion – I don’t think my reading of Biblical allusions will be quite the same after this.

According to this report, the man who killed two students and wounded five others in shootings at Monash Uni a couple of years ago is “not guilty due to mental impairment”. It’s a pity those responsible for giving him a license to own four guns didn’t inquire into his mental state first.

I’ve been enjoying a visit from my friend and co-author Simon Grant for the last couple of days. We’ve been working on fairly abstruse aspects of the economics of uncertainty, though with an eye to practical applications to issues like an analysis of the precautionary principle.

However, we downed tools this afternoon when it was announced that Simon has been awarded a Federation Fellowship. This is only the second such Fellowship in Economics, mine being the first.

Obviously, I’m very happy about this, and particularly about the fact that it will bring Simon back to Australia (he’s currently at Rice university in the US).

Big news from today’s karate training session! Having had the stuffing kicked out of me during the grading session at our annual training camp a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t too sure that I’d get my upgrade to 9th kyu, which would have entitled me to a black tip on my orange belt. But, in a continuation of my recent run of luck, when our Kancho (founder) announced the results, I got a jump to 8th kyu, entitling me to a stylish blue belt (I’ll try and post a new photo soon). Perhaps this will discourage my opponents more effectively than the Fed Fellowship has done!

For those readers who live in Brisbane or the Gold Coast and are interested in learning karate, I strongly recommend Seiyushin for a traditional and rigorous style of karate training. Kancho Nagayama was the winner in the 1988 All Japan National OpenWeight Tournament, and is a great teacher. The group is friendly, and open to a wide range of ages and skill levels (roughly 5 to 50 at present), and welcoming to both men and women. Dojos are in St Lucia, Toowong and Southport.

After a fairly high-pressure trip to Sydney and Canberra, I’m back in beautiful Brisbane, having arrived just in time for karate training with my son. Thanks to the latter I’m too tired to write much, but I should be back on deck soon.

Confirming my view that the generation game is, for journalists, the last refuge of the incompetent, Richard Neville lets off a spray on behalf of the Boomers against Gen X. A typical para

Around the time US snipers were taking aim from the rooftop of Falluja’s last functioning hospital, and images of their infant victims started to appear on websites, an old-fashioned student demo erupted in Sydney.

At last, I thought, the era of the zombie workaholic is over. It’s back to reality, instead of back to reality TV.

But no, these respectable ruffians in branded chinos were holed up in a vice-chancellor’s office to protest against the rising costs of education. No posters of dead Iraqi babies. The students have a point about the fees, but why can’t they get upset about other people’s problems?

I hate to break it to Richard who was, perhaps, a bit out of it at the time, but a large proportion of student protests in the 60s and 70s were about internal university issues, and a lot more were about the issue of the draft, directly relevant to those protesting against it. Quite a few of those attending probably wore Levis jeans and, some, as cool kids at high school, had probably made life a misery for those unfortunate enough to have parents who thought that King Gee was good enough. Finally, contrary to what Neville implies[1], there were loads of young people at the marches I attended in protest against the Iraq war.

Of course, this piece produced the appropriate response from outraged GenXers on the letters page, which only encourages hacks like Neville to reach for this piece of boilerplate next time they have nothing worthwhile to write. I’ve been bombarded with generational cliches since I was old enough to turn on a TV set. I look forward to a time when the idea that you can classify a person by the date on their birth certificate is accepted only in the astrology columns.

Update 06/05More on this from Ken Parish and I should also acknowledge Geoff Honnor who beat me to the punch on this one. Paul Watson recognises the silliness of Neville’s attempts to define Gen X on the basis of a sample apparently provided by his daughter’s affluent boyfriends, but doesn’t yet concede that it’s the whole idea of defining generations that’s absurd.

fn1. The story makes it pretty clear that Neville himself hasn’t been to an antiwar march for quite some time, and is relying on what he sees on TV.

I’ve got quite a few events coming up, including a couple of possible TV appearances. The first will be on the SBS Insight program (a revival of the old Monday Conference format for those who remember it), which is on the topic of tax and public spending. It’s on Tuesday at 7:30 (here are some details).

I’m also doing an interview with Inside Business on Public-Private Partnerships, but I’m not sure if or when this will go to air. Finally, the Senate Committee of Inquiry into the FTA is running a roundtable on Wednesday, which I’ll be attending along with quite a few other participants in the debate.

Following up the links on a post by Eszter at Crooked Timber, I discovered that she shares with me an Erdös number of 3 (Eszter via Aronov and O’Rourke, mine via Fishburn and Wakker). This is pretty good for social science academics.

We thought this was worth a CT post, and came up with another issue. Although Movable Type and other systems encourage group blogging, they don’t, it seems, allow for jointly authored posts. This is of particular interest since it’s at least arguable that a joint post would count as co-authorship for Erdös number purposes (this comes back to the question, frequently discussed on this blog, of whether and how blog contributions should be listed on vitas). But more generally, it would seem as if joint posts would be worthwhile for at least some purposes.

The Erdos number site asserts that numbers as high as 15 have been found, but that, at least for mathematicians nearly all finite Erdös numbers are below 8. This seems about right, though mean, median and modal numbers must grow as those with low numbers die or retire, becoming unavailable for collaboration.