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 →
Video: The Greening of Industry/Eco-innovation
More or less the script I burble. Stuff in square brackets didn't get said or referenced, because the damn thing was already 5 and a half minutes... The whole field of “green innovation” is a Rorschach test. We see in the blobs what we want and need to see. Capitalism mutating into something ecologically friendly,... Continue Reading →
Trolling Esso for the shits and giggles.
Oil companies. Doncha just love them? And they spend a lot of time trying to shape the public debate, shape the public mind. BP isn't doing arts sponsorship because they're a charity you know. Shell have been brilliant at their advertising for decades (see this post and this post). Esso (aka Exxon) have some new... Continue Reading →
Proposed script for video on “the Greening of Industry”
The whole field of “green innovation” is a Rorschach test. We see in the blobs what we want and need to see. Capitalism mutating into something ecologically friendly, capitalism wrecking the planet. The system working, the system shirking… This video throws out questions raised by the idea of “eco-innovation.” It also gives a quick overview... Continue Reading →
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