Last post ?

John Quiggin8 Comments

Chris Sheil has announced that Back Pages is closing down, after exactly one year. Chris is taking six months off to write a book, which raises the prospect that he may return to the scene at some future date. Chris has a lengthy farewell, but isn’t taking comments, so I’ll be glad to host any appreciations here (critical comments aren’t precluded, but I’ll be ruthless in enforcing the norms of civilised discussion, which include respect for the recently departed). Chris also offers a lot of useful advice for bloggers.

I haven’t had time to formulate my own thoughts, but I’ll try to write something later.

In the meantime, this is as good an opportunity as any to note that Chris’s blog and this one were joint winners, with Surfdom and Troppo of Lord Sedgwick’s award for blog which consistently attracts the best comments. So you can all give yourselves a pat on the back.

Time to stock up on drugs

John Quiggin11 Comments

The Free trade deal with the US has been settled.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, in Santiago, Chile for the APEC meeting, said Australia had agreed to what he said were some minor changes at the request of the US.

But that won’t affect the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, he said.

And if you believe that, I have a very profitable and mutually advantageous deal with a Nigerian bank manager in which you might be interested/

Common sense

John Quiggin40 Comments

Over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy complains that

When you’re a Sociologist like me, and your field has no credibility, people just assume you’re stupid and don’t bother sending you their Final and Completely True Theory of X in the first place. On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.

But sociology is a victim of its own success here. All of the big insights of sociology, from its beginnings in the 19th century up to 1950s work like that of Erving Goffman are indeed common sense, not because they were already known, but because they have been incorporated into the intellectual baggage of everyone in Western societies, educated or not. No one, for example, would be accused of talking academic jargon if they raised the problem of “peer group pressure” at their local school, or made a reference to ‘social status’.
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Guest post from Tom Oates

John Quiggin6 Comments

Expat Aussie physicist has sent me this personal view of the Ukrainian Presidential election. Well worth reading

‘I’m back in the USSR,
You don’t know how lucky you are boy…’

What exactly did Paul McCartney mean by that second line? The question ran through my head with a mixture of excitement and awe as I located Mykola’s wave and smile amongst the rainbow of babushka scarves on the platform at Kyiv Vokzal. A multitude of peaked caps were balanced precariously on the blond crew-cuts of rosy-cheeked teenage soldiers greeting girlfriends and mothers in the dim autumn evening. It was a relief to see Mykola’s familiar face after 24 hours on the Berlin-Kiev ‘express’. Through the train window the rural scenery presented the country as incredibly poor. Groups of farm workers digging potatoes by hand and antiquated soviet machinery were sparsely scattered between vast forests and the odd pollution belching industrial centre. A rude 2am awakening by a self important Ukrainian border guard, and subsequent mild interrogation, was smoothed over by my well ordered paperwork and an official letter of invitation from Mykola’s Professor at the Taras Shevchenko University to attend a physics conference.
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Postmodern spam

John Quiggin1 Comment

The latest trend in comment spam, at least on my blog, is self-referential stuff of the form

2 much spam in here 😦

The links appear to be to sites that try to download viruses or spyware as .exe files (having a Mac, I’m largely immune, so I sometimes do risky things like clicking on dubious links).

What I’m reading

John Quiggin28 Comments

Contact by Carl Sagan. It’s a novel (his only one?), now apparently out of print, about contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence. I’ve decided to start a process of discarding books I’m never going to read again, and I recall finding this one a bit disappointing the first time I read it, so it’s a candidate for the recycle bin. I’m only a couple of chapters in, and it starts off well enough, so maybe I’ll keep it.

This got me thinking about SETI in its various manifestations. It’s of interest as a distributed computing project, but I don’t know much about that side of things. More relevantly, I think the fact that nearly all the visible sky has been searched for radio signals, with no result, leads to some interesting and disturbing thoughts. A useful place to start is the (in)famous Drake Equation, which might be better referred to as the Drake Identity.

I won’t spell out the details, except to say that I think we can now assert, with high confidence that there are many planets (billions) and very few radio-using civilisations (probably none within thousands of light years of us[1]).

One implication that is fairly solid, I think, is that, either intelligent (radio-using) life arises extremely rarely (say once per galaxy) or interstellar travel is impossible. Otherwise some species would have colonised some planet in our neighbourhood. Either way, it seems certain that we will never have either physical contact or meaningful two-way communication with any other species.

The other implication is that radio-using civilisations either don’t arise often or don’t last long. I tend to favor the first implication. Even now, it would probably be possible for humans to set up a radio beacon in space that would last more or less indefinitely, and would serve as a permanent memorial if we managed to blow ourselves up (or back to the Stone Age). But even with civilisations lasting 100 000 years and arising on thousands of planets in our galaxy, the chances of actual contact (say, two civilisations existing simultaneously within 100 light years of other) would be minuscule.

fn1. In reference to planets a thousand light years away, it would be more precise to say that there were none a thousand years ago.