The lobby at Google headquarters - where "open source management" (whatever that is) no doubt takes place Here's an interesting article on Google - on how it tries to maintain it's evolutionary edge as an organisation. The thinking in it is very much in the style of modern man...
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Tamsin Carroll belts one out in Dusty: The Musical Troy Dodds at AussieTheatre.com has an engaging rant about the "jukebox musical" genre, of which Dusty: The Musical (recently doco'd to death on ABC TV) is the most recent Australian example: Australia has been dealt some incr...
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Are birds better conversationalists than humans? Why the cover illustration? Some Troppodilians may be interested in this New York Review of Books review of a book du jour entiled On Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller. Though this is far from 'must re...
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Courtesy of Slashdot, there's a new documentary on open source and free culture featuring various leading lights - most particularly Laurence Lessig and Richard Stallman. Go see a trailer here . Looks interesting. It's odd that they haven't 'open-sourced' the doco itself, allo...
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Yesterday I asked people to tell me what a list of books have in common. They include Enid Blighton's The Magic Faraway Tree and Milan Kundera's Unbearable lightness of being . Lance Armstrong's It's not about the Bike and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights . Now you may think t...
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Jacqui Stockdale, The Nature Maker . Courtesy Art Gallery of NSW. The Art Life has a long-ish post reviewing the Wynn, Sulman and Photographic Portrait Prizes (decided at the same time as the much more famous Archibald Prize for portraiture). Actually, although TAL has some in...
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The Third Battle of Ypres/Passchendaele in 1917 One of the advantages of blogging for almost 4 years (as I have done for my sins), is that you can occasionally get away with brazenly recycling old posts that have become lost in the dim recesses of the blog archive files. This...
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What do the following books have in common? Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins It's not about the Bike Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights Enid Blyton The Magic Faraway Tree His Holiness The Dalai Lama & Howard C Cutler The Art of Happiness Joanne Harris Chocolat Terry Jones Lady C...
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Another evil old man or a ray of unexpected hope? Tim Dunlop has an excellent post (with which I wholeheartedly agree) about an editorial in The Australian praising Pope Benedict XVI for deciding to reconsider the vatican's prohibition on HIV-infected males using condoms when...
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I hope this is the right Gillian Bouras. I Googled her to find a photo. I've just returned from a talk by Gillian Bouras as part of the launch of her book about her sister who took her own life which I wrote up here . I even met Peter - a Troppo lurker - which made me feel esp...
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Eel gets crushed but team wins game Howdy Troppo Readers! Ken has kindly asked me to come on board and be Troppo's NRL columnist. Some of you may know me as a one-eyed (or even blind) Parramatta Eels fan. But have no fear. I will not allow my love of the Eels in any way to lea...
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Shaun Cronin has joined the Troppo team to write occasional posts on rugby league (cf Christopher Sheil's rugby union posts). Shaun mostly blogs at Larva Rodeo on political stuff. His LP bio sketch says: Shaun Cronin is the blogger formerly known as Immanuel Rant. Back in the...
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[photopress:beach.jpg,full,pp_empty] The Top End's dry season officially starts next Monday, the 1st of May, which I point out solely as an excuse to run a cartoon to see how it copes with this new-fangled layout.
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As you can see, we took the opportunity of adopting a new theme while fixing the formatting and database problems that have bedevilled Club Troppo for some time now. The work has been done by Vicki Berry of DistinctiveWeb (her blog is here ). It's a slightly tweaked version of...
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Cyclone Monica looks like it's going to follow pretty much the same track as Ingrid last year: directly westward skirting the north coast straight across Cobourg Peninsula and Melville Island and then on out into the Timor Sea. Cyclone Monica looks like it's going to follow pr...
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Spog, who commented liberally on a post of mine a few days ago sent in this explanation of his comments on the effect of Family Tax Benefit B. It appears below the fold together with illustrative diagrams. They are posted with Spog's permission and my thanks over the fold. As...
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Jen's show isn't quite like the Disney Broadway version. It's funnier and more self-aware ... If anyone has wondered what's happened to Jen over the last couple of months, she's been working 80 hours a week (or more) on her school's production of Walt Disney's Beauty and the B...
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Astude readers of Club Troppo will have noticed quotes running at the top of the page. Quotes that Ken, I and others occasionally have half hearted debates about whether they're appropriate for Troppo. Well I found another one the other day and it's below. Readers might like t...
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Can someone please, please, please tell me why there are always stories in the press about our glorious tax office going on compliance rampages and 'discovering' whole heaps of people who haven't put in a tax return? Crikey reports as follows: Data matching has become a favour...
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The Dark Lord chats to the Parrot The engine room of Australian economic reform has always been the quality of our bureaucrats. Now John Howard is trotting out the logic that has driven Australia's welfare system to be the most economically efficient in the world. Where target...
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Professor Richard Lynn, guru of modern eugenics, race and IQ Like a bad penny, former Macquarie University legal academic Andrew Fraser keeps turning up. Michael Duffy wrote an opinion piece in Saturday's SMH resurrecting Fraser's pet issue of race and IQ: [Last] Wednesday, Th...
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No time for dances: A memoir of my sister I had a fine old time over Easter having a read of various things. I read Gillian Bouras's No time for dances and thought it was wonderful. I didn't expect to because my wife had been rather scornful of Bouras's earlier work about (I g...
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I've been reading literary and movie blogs recently. Not that I'm denying that Iraq and AWB are important or anything, it's just that there's only so many times you can say the same thing before outrage fatigue begins to set in. Chekhov's Mistress is a tasty US literary blog b...
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Easter cartoon via The Art Life . There's no formatting to get buggered. And a rather more serious (not to say disgraceful and depressing) story from David Tiley . Anyone care to revisit their opinion about Tony Blair and his leadership qualities?
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(via Chekhov's Mistress ) A story from RGJ.com : Jacob Behymer-Smith, a ninth-grader at Coral Academy of Science in Reno, has excelled in classroom, school and county poetry competitions, reciting a W.H. Auden poem that contains the words " hell " and " damn ." Coral Academy o...
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The Larrakia native title claim on Darwin and surrounds was dismissed in a judgment handed down today in the Federal Court. Justice Mansfield said: The evidence shows that a combination of circumstances has, in various ways, interrupted or disturbed the presence of the Larraki...
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There is more than a faint whiff of hypocrisy about Kim Beazley and federal Labor's opposition to the just-announced Howard government plan to have all illegal arrival asylum seekers, even those who make it to the mainland, processed offshore and assessed by UNHCR rather than...
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[photopress:cross.jpg,full,pp_empty] Feel free to be offended by the above. I could use the publicity. Have a top Easter everyone.
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The three most talented politicians in the last couple of decades that I know of have all been left of centre pollies though really vigorous centrists - Clinton, Hawke and Blair. Other politicians like Reagan and Thatcher achieved as much or more, but these guys seemed to have...
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I'll be posting some reflections on the recent report on regulation shortly. In the meantime, here's an article that I wrote about a year ago and couldn't get placed in the media's op ed pages. The reason is instructive of the dilemma of regulation review more generally. Who w...
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Today's column from the Financial Review. About twenty years ago, a boatload of Indonesians arrived on Australia's coastline and claimed refuge. That request threatened relations with Indonesia and alarmed federal ministers. Cabinet secretly decided - without any interviews -...
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I was thinking of this rather bad pun as a headline for a story on Mick Gatto (not that I was writing a story on him, it just occured to me as my wife was talking about Mick Gatto - a Melbourne underworld figure who I guess I figured might be called Mick Gateaux). Anyway, I fi...
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[photopress:tnycartoon_060409.jpg,full,alignleft] Around Christmas time I downloaded and listened to a podcast of a lecture at the Adelaide festival of ideas by Kathy Laster called " The Dark Side of Kath and Kim ". I really disliked the lecture which argued that Kath and Kim...
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Hiptomus hoptimus Jupiter Optimus Came to the earth in the Form of a swan Leda pretended to Parthenogenesis Heaven she said had been Egging her on Thus was I introduced to a marvelous comic poetic form about thirty years ago when I read the New Statesman's wonderfully erudite...
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Social Darwinism is undeniably obnoxious. But it's hard to feel sorry for some victims of Internet fraudsters. I certainly wouldn't be wasting any sympathy, for example, on the greedy but moronic victims of the good old Nigerian email scam. They're people who are perfectly hap...
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Today the AFR Friday Review published an essay of mine based on the series of posts I did on Adam Smith. They've locked it to their subscribers (lucky things) but if you want to email me on nicholas AT gruen DOT com DOT au, I'll send you a copy. It has now been posted by Gavin...
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The Sydney Morning Herald certainly seems to be making a determined pitch for the airheaded end of the Generation Y demographic, at least judging by its blog Sam and the City (whose author is if anything even sillier than The Australian 's Emma Tom ) and an opinion piece yeste...
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Is there a simple way of explaining what Paul Krugman calls "Ricardo's difficult idea"? Who knows? But the way most people talk about trade and tax shows that they don't understand it. Paul Kelly is in this group, but so too was the PC (then the IC) until Paul Krugman made it...
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Some people who post material on the Internet have far too much time on their hands. That's certainly true of a bloke named Jeffery P. Dennis who obviously spent vast amounts of time writing an article called Queertoons - The dynamics of same-sex desire in the animated cartoon...
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It seems like it's been raining forever here in Darwin. Mould is growing on just about everything that doesn't move, and all our clothes are vaguely damp despite clothes dryers working overtime. Things are even worse for the people of Katherine, where the river is in flood aga...
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[photopress:taxcartoon.gif,full,alignleft] In the wake of Treasurer Costello receiving (but not yet announcing) the results of his tax review from Dick Warburton and Peter Hendy, we've seen ongoing usual op-ed nonsense over the last couple of days from the hucksters for cuttin...
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I attended a function this afternoon put on by Liberty Victoria featuring Major Mori the marine who has been appointed to defend David Hicks. Maybe I'm making it up, but I've always thought this guy was great. You can catch him tomorrow night giving a public lecture details he...
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Another advantage of Wikipedia - no 'spin' department. (Well they probably have one, but not as well resourced and shameless as Britannica's.) Anyway, as some Troppodillians will know, Nature Magazine did an independent review of Wikipedia and Britannica and found that the deg...
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Federal politics hasn't been this action-packed for constitutional law buffs since the time of the Whitlam government, when I was studying the subject at Sydney Uni. That's fairlt ironic given that we currently have a "conservative" government which has hitherto paid rather mo...
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George Williams and David Hume (not the philosopher unless UNSW has invented some truly remarkable new technology) have an article in today's SMH focusing on the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Bill about which I posted last week : Under the Telecommunications (Int...
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I recently commented on John Hirst's compelling portrait "The distinctiveness of Australian Democracy". I've since gone out and bought the book Sense and Nonsense in Australian History which is a very interesting read. Robert Manne, having been ejected from Quadrant seems to b...
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I love cliches, and there aren't many better than " I don't know much about art but I know what I like ". It just so happens that for me it's a true statement (and no doubt for many others as well, that being how cliches become cliched). I like Dobell and Whitely and Albert Tu...
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