Politics
Five recent favourite TED videos
Thursday, January 13th, 2011TED is a profound, horizon expanding experience — and I’ve only ever watched the videos. One day I’d love to go to the event. Here’s five of my most recent favorites. There’s no common theme, and there’s no single reason why I liked them. Some of them moved me, others encouraged me or educated me [...]
Responsible policy on Bank Interest Rates
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010What we must question is that banks are effectively raising the price of a service after it’s been purchased. In no other industry is this legal and it must not be allowed to continue to be legal in the credit industry.
Environmentalists have it wrong — the economies of scale and inventing the future
Thursday, September 10th, 2009There’s a push on to ‘return’ to the idylic times where a man would work the farm chatting to his cows while his lovely wife baked a loaf of bread (probably with a dab of flour on her nose) while a pail of milk (direct from the aforementioned cows) stands on the bench beside her.
There’s a push on to do-it-yourself. To be handy around the garden and home. To plant one’s own vegetables and to bake one’s own bread.
But is that really good for the environment? I doubt it
Electronic Voting: How is it so damned hard?
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008OK, so it’s the eve of the US Presidential election so I thought it was worth taking a minute to rant about how screwed up the US has gotten their implementation of ballot casting.
At first I just couldn’t understand how they made it so damned hard. Then I saw a ballot paper. For my non-US [...]
More provocative images …
Sunday, July 6th, 2008[There is] no evidence that [if] eating beef is the community standard [it] will persuade a vegetarian to approve of it.
Warning: Provocative Images may offend some viewers
Thursday, May 29th, 2008Here in Australia there is an enormous brouhaha surrounding the photography of renowned photographer Bill Henson (left). If you’ve missed it, the controversy surrounds his use of nude child (teen) models in his photography (below).
I’ve been meaning to write a blog post entitled “What is art: I’m right, you’re wrong.” But it’s a difficult one [...]
The pointlessness of Earth Hour
Sunday, March 30th, 2008You’ve probably heard of Earth Hour, it started in Sydney last year and has spread around the globe this year. The idea is this: turn off all your lights for an hour.
The pointlessness comes in the confusion over why this is a good idea.
Turning your lights off for 1 hour will save approximately zero energy. [...]
lolpoli – lolcats with a political bent
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008From Wikipedia’s entry on lolcats:
Lolcats are images combining photographs of animals, most frequently cats, with a subjectively humorous and idiosyncratic caption in broken English referred to as Kitty Pidgin[1], Kitteh, or lolspeak.
They’re all over the place and they’re really dumb and annoying. Try searching flickr for lolcats. You get the idea.
Then I saw a few [...]