Hi all,

I’m about to close down comments for the duration. Anyone who would like to continue discussions is welcome to start up a blog or maybe some sort of social media site – email me and I will link to it.

I’ve been meaning to give some recommendations for alternative blog reading. Apart from the big group blogs (like Larvatus Prodeo, Club Troppo and Crooked Timber) you can find interesting reading from some of the smaller ones like David Horton, Tim Lambert and Gary Sauer-Thompson, or just stroll random through the blogroll.

I’ll be doing occasional posts here and there possibly including Crooked Timber, Crikey, The Drum and The Daily Bludge (http://dailybludge.com.au).

See you all in September.

With various commitments, I’ve been finding increasingly difficult to post to the blog, moderate the comments section and so on. Unfortunately, my commitments are only going to increase over the next few months, so I’ve decided to take a three-month hiatus, until early September. According to my current plans, I should have plenty of free time to return, refreshed and ready for more by then. No doubt things will turn up to derail those plans, but hopefully I will still be less busy than I am now.

I’ve just edited several comments from sockpuppets ‘Julia’ and ‘Colin’ posting Liberal Party talking points. Both posted using IP 114.78.24.168, then ‘Julia’ switched to another one, also in the range 114.78.2x.xxx. Spurious email addresses jules77@hotmail.com and col.TRE67@hotmail.com. Anothe commenter advises ‘Julia’ has been seen at LP.

If anyone can out these pests, I’ll happily publicise the results.

For me the big change that came with the last decade was blogging. I started in 2002, and it’s been a big part of my life (sometimes too big) ever since. So, when it came to review the decade, the obvious place to look was the Wayback Machine, which captured my old blogspot blog on 27 July 2002. Looking at the blog as it was then, two things jump out at me

* Looking at the blogroll, I feel like the last of the Mohicans. The bloggers of those days have nearly all retired, and almost no-one runs a solo blog like this one anymore.

* I’m singing the same song now as I was all those years ago. The top post on the page is about how the financial crisis has discredited the efficient markets hypothesis, trickle down economics, privatisation and so on. Of course that was the dotcom financial crisis of 2000-01. I think a few more people are paying attention this time around, but we will have to wait and see.

The blog has been patchy for some time, and down altogether for several days. I’ve installed the WP Supercache plug in on the advice of my hosting service. I’d appreciate any feedback (+ve or -ve) on whether people are still having problems getting to the page and any suggestions from WordPress experts on other possible measurs.

I’ve started doing occasional posts for a new venture, Asian Correspondent. You can find me here. Only occasional, so RSS is probably the way to go.

Another “Internets makes you stupid story” from the Brisbane Courier-Mail (irony detector overload alert !!).

The original source is something called the Levitt Institute and the Courier-Mail story is a pretty fair summary of the Levitt Institute report, which is here (PDF). I’ll leave the deconstruction as an exercise for readers, with a bonus mark for the question “Which basic concept of classical hypothesis testing is ignored in this study of ‘ability to detect erroneous information'”

Update xxx ????? sex ????? ?? ??????? Sucked in! It turns out the whole thing is in fact a hoax by Andrew Denton’s new show.. Sad to say, with the irony detector already blown, it’s hard to tell the difference between genuine and fake stupid. ??????? ?????????