I've said it before, and no doubt I will say it again - the librarians at the Barr Smith library (University of Adelaide) are awesome. They fossicked out hard copies of the Business Council of Australia Bulletin from the early 1990s. I spent a few hours today systematically going through them for any articles even... Continue Reading →
No system, as the adage goes, is fool-proof to a sufficiently determined and talented fool. Computer help-desk people have an acronym for it - 'PEBCAC', which stands for Problem Exists Between Computer And Chair. A serious amount of mental effort gets spent on human-computer interfaces (there are journals, conferences etc etc). In another life, I'd... Continue Reading →
Professor Ross Garnaut is a highly intelligent, tenacious and formidably well-informed public intellectual, and I’m not just saying that because I want to interview him for my PhD research. Because look, in my very next sentence I say ‘I think he is wrong about the future of energy.’ He was speaking tonight in Adelaide, giving... Continue Reading →
First thing to say is this - the librarians at the University of Adelaide (Barr Smith) Library are fricking awesome. One of them has gone above and beyond the call of duty and dug up some stuff I didn't even know they had, which is going to be very useful for my thesis. Huzzah!! Definitely... Continue Reading →
"I remember the moment when I knew we were going to lose the war. Frustrated by our inability to find the elusive Viet Cong, we had developed a top-secret program to locate enemy troop concentrations. It was called a “people sniffer,” a device sensitive to the presence of ammonia in urine; could be hung from... Continue Reading →
What hopes do ‘we’ have for the future? What choices do we think we will have to make, or perhaps seek to avoid? What do our old hopes tell us about our new fears? All good questions, which I can’t really answer particularly well, until I’ve had a longer think/looting of other people’s thoughts. But while... Continue Reading →
Things I learnt today- you can't watch half an episode of 'The Good Wife' - it's too compelling in a gourmet bubblegum for the mind kind of way. chest expanders are fun the physicality of archival research is fun. On the third point - those of us old enough to remember Before The Web might... Continue Reading →
On Tuesday 16th June, Dr Mark Diesendorf was in the hot seat. In front of a capacity audience of about 120 people, he outlined the report [pdf] about achieving 100% renewable energy that he has just written for the Conservation Council of South Australia. He also fielded a very wide variety of questions from the... Continue Reading →
Corris, P. (2007) The Big Score: Cliff Hardy Cases Peter Corris is an Australian author of very very many books (with a relatively small book market, if you want to pay the bills, you have to pursue a high volume low margins strategy). One of his mainstays is the Private Eye Cliff Hardy. Based in... Continue Reading →
Night Crawler You should see this film. Especially if you care about understanding noeliberalism and its consequences for those who perpetrate it and those on the receiving end. Jake Gyllenhal is brilliant as “Lou Bloom” (the name is a joke – there is nothing fertile about this guy, he drops toxic leaves all around him).... Continue Reading →
