Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Last charitable appeal for 2006-07 – update
As the end of the financial year is approaching, it’s a great time to give charitable donations. I’ve used up all the gimmicks I could think of for the Great Australian Shave appeal, so this is going to be a bog-standard fundraiser. I’m giving $500 to Oxfam as my last donation for 2006-07. Anyone who would like to be part of a collective effort can announce their donation in comments, or (if you’re modest) in email to me. I’ll post a running total until 30 June. Give to whatever charity you choose, and whatever amount you can manage.
Thanks to some generous donations from readers, we’re up to $800. There’s still time to get in with a donation and make Peter Costello cough up his share.
Thatcherism after Blair
While there will doubtless be plenty of discussion of Blair’s contribution on his departure, it might be more useful to take a step further back and re-evaluate Thatcher. When Blair took office, he was generally seen as offering Thatcherism with a human face. Thatcher herself was generally seen,as a successful (counter-) revolutionary and aspirants to the Tory leadership were still competing for her mantle.
Ten years later, the picture is quite different, superficially at least. Brown seems much more Old Labour than Blair, and Cameron is eager to be seen as anything but Thatcherite.
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Horde
Snarky, I know, but I couldn’t resist quoting this headline from the ABC website
Illegal weapon horde seized in Customs raid
Scary in more ways than one!
New on the RSMG blog
There’s lots of important and interesting stuff on the RSMG blog.
First up, RSMG is hiring. More on this soon.
Nanni takes a sceptical look at peak oil (more precisely the claim that market failure prevents impending peak oil from being reflected in prices) and notes the news that China has overtaken the US in CO2 emissions.
Most interesting is a post with links to a piece The Economist making, yet again, the point that most of the cheap options for reducing CO2 emissions are in the area of energy conservation. There’s a nice graph, which I’ve reproduced over the page.
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The moderate march chant
Over at CT, Henry’s given all you need to know about the recently concluded EU treaty negotiations. It strikes me that this would have been an excellent occasion for a march with the classic chant of moderates everywhere:
WHAT DO WE WANT? A REASONABLE COMPROMISE !
WHEN DO WANT IT? IN! DUE! COURSE!
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
The myth of “The Myth of the Paperless Office”
The “paperless office” is one of those catchphrases that gets bandied about for a while, only to disappoint and eventually be used in a purely derisive way. As Wikipedia says, it has become ‘a metaphor for the touting of new technology in terms of ‘modernity’ rather than its actual suitability to purpose’. The death of the phrase was cemented by a 2001 book, by Sellen and Harper “The Myth of the Paperless Office”. This book wasn’t a snarky debunking but a fairly sophisticated analysis, pointing out that a sensible analysis of task requirements could allow a significant reduction in paper use. Here’s a good review from Kirk McElhearn. But it was the title that stuck. No one would ever again refer to the paperless office with a straight face.
Six years later, though, looking at my own work habits, I find that I have virtually ceased to use paper, in all but a couple of marginal applications.
BrisScience reminder
BrisScience is on again, this Monday 25 June at City Hall, with a lecture by Dr Paul Francis entitled WHAT WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT COMETS (ALMOST ANYTHING!) (details over the fold
The second reliberation of Iraq
It appears that General David Petraeus is a reader of William Tenn, having recently announced that the US is once again liberating Iraq. Tenn’s classic story The Liberation of Earth in which two alien races, the Dendi and the Troxxt repeatedly liberate earth from each other, was published back in 1953, but has, sadly, never lost its relevance for long. The ending, if I recall correctly, has the planet’s remaining inhabitants gasping for air but taking consolation in the reflection that “no planet in the history of the galaxy had been as thoroughly liberated as Earth”.
John Quiggin 