It's good to have a really good handle on why it is "unravelling" (1). Might help us spot some of the hows of the unravelling before they quite arrive. No averting, that's a 20th century delusion... Anyway thanks to a smart and compassionate friend (who took me out to the coast last Tuesday, when I... Continue Reading →
Bill Stan Jevons and the meteorology/economics connection
So, this 19th century economist called William Stanley Jevons came up with a Paradox around how the increased efficiency in the use of a commodity/element of production would lead to an increase in overall usage. If it gets cheaper to use, it will be used up more. I made a video a few years back.... Continue Reading →
Nugget Coombs on power defending itself…
I play a "Tardis" game. I'd scoop up various folks and bring em forward to the here and now; set them up in a London penthouse with a subscription to the FT, Economist, cable TV, a kindle with an unlimited download limit. I'd give them a month to come up with their analysis of where... Continue Reading →
Targets, Science and targeted Scientists: Australian government and its climate change advisors
The Climate Change Authority that Tony Abbott tried to abolish has created a fresh headache for his successor, Malcolm Turnbull. Seven of its members have agreed the sort of compromise emissions reduction target that even the Business Council of Australia can live with. Two – public intellectual Clive Hamilton and scientist David Karoly- have produced... Continue Reading →
Nukes, prestige and dime-store psychology
The bang was big. In 16 July 1945, humans got to start using the power of the sun. First to fry people, but then – and this is not understood enough – with the hope (okay, maybe it was a bit of a fig-leaf) of the “peaceful use of nuclear explosions”. What's this, you say?... Continue Reading →
Beating nukes into plowshares
I thought I was cynical enough. Nope, not by a gazillion miles. Turns out both the US and the Russians were keen on using nukes for peace. Some of this I knew, but I didn't realise it was quite so extensive... "Project Plowshare was the overall United States term for the development of techniques to... Continue Reading →
The line from Stalin to Putin
This from the Big issue in the North 16-22 May Charlotte Hobson, author of The Vanishing Futurist was asked "Can you draw a line between Stalin and Putin? And she replied Varlam Shalamov, the great chronicler of Stalin's gulag observed that it was the mindset of the common criminals that dominated the camps - and... Continue Reading →
Thrashing thrashing
Ah, we have so many ways of distracting ourselves. Most of us do, anyway. I quite like this (though a brain is not a computer!) It is the same with a computer cache: there will be a hierarchy - from super-fast memory in the microprocessor itself all the way down to a hard drive (slow)... Continue Reading →
Video: What is absorptive capacity?
And here is the script that I more or less stumbled through. So, what is absorptive capacity? According to the seminal 1990 article by Cohen and Levinthal it's "a firm's ability to recognize the value of new information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends" Extending this, Zahra and George (2002) say it is... Continue Reading →
Concept fetishism and leather skirts
So a fetish is a god we create and then forget that we created and get down to serious worshipping of. There's a rather good Doctor Who story from 1976, that was going to be called "The Day God Went Mad" but ended up being called "The Face of Evil" that outlines this with added... Continue Reading →
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