Club Troppo

Will Longstaff's thoroughly spooky and fabulous Menin Gate at Midnight. If you haven't seen it in the AWM, go now, right now!

A very balanced and interesting article on the subject, even if it could have been improved IMO if it had been pruned back by 20% or so in length.

THE AWM is the behemoth of Australian public history, on a quite different plane from Hyde Park or any number of parks, memorials, local museums and the like. From its initial focus on the sacrifices of Australian forces during the first world war the AWM has expanded to take in the experience of other combatants and of civilians in wars and war-like operations in which Australians have been on active service, including peace-keeping. . . . . It is at once a research institute, a publisher, a museum, a memorial and a place of commemoration. It makes corporeal our loss, sacrifice and valour in war and is therefore central to the central component of our national identity. It is a sacred place. To propose, therefore, as many historians have done, that it should include in its embrace the wars of the frontier is to run risks up to and including the charge of sacrilege.

That proposal was first made in 1979 when a distinguished historian engaged by the AWM as a consultant suggested that it should include irregular warfare such as the Eureka Stockade, the Vietnam War (not then included in the AWM) and the frontier wars. Despite the historians conservative credentials (it was none other than Geoffrey Blainey) and his appeal to comparability, nothing happened. The idea was raised again from time to time, typically by academic historians, and most notably a decade ago two decades after Blaineys initiative by Professor Ken Inglis in the course of his remarks at the 1998 launch of his Sacred Places, an exhaustive and highly respectful study of our war memorials. Such an authority could hardly go unanswered. The AWMs director (retired Major General) Steve Gower commissioned a report from his Military History Section, which came up with the congenial conclusion that only police forces or British military units were involved in the wars, whereas the Memorials charter calls upon it to commemorate Australias military forces. This view the Council promptly endorsed.

Behind the scenes, however, disagreement simmered, with the AWMs director on one side, its principal historian, Dr Peter Stanley, on the other. Eventually the disagreement turned into a public spat, unimportant in its detail but revealing in its tone. . . .

White to play J Klinger vs Blatny 36. ? See game for solution.

I really don’t want to turn this into a chess blog. So this is overdoing it a bit. Then again, I’ve been surprised at the number of people I encounter who enjoy these posts, so I won’t feel too bad.  Anyway I enjoyed this problem.  I guessed the move, which is an odd one, but which emerges from an analysis of the tactical constraints on black. But I wasn’t really sure that it was the right move, which is to say I didn’t really understand how powerful it was until I saw that it was the move, and then realised that, once made, black’s position falls apart.

Amongst others, I recently argued that the Federal Government should pay its bills within 7 days rather than the 30 that they were speeded up to with much fanfare as part of our efforts in fighting the recession.  I don’t think there’s been any progress on that at the Federal level, but I may be wrong. In the meantime I gave a presentation to senior officials in the Queensland Government on innovation in government.  An invoice was sent for my services last Wednesday.  The money is now in our account. I don’t know how systematic this is, but I’m impressed.  Perhaps there’s a good reason, but I fail to see why this can’t be the rule with governments everywhere, especially when we’re looking round for sensible ways to increase the velocity of money in circulation.

Famous for his swashbuckling attacks, Mikhail Tal was one of the most talented players never to really hold down the world championship.  He won it and held it for just a year or so in 1960.

From Wikipedia I learned this:

In 1960, at the age of 23, Tal thoroughly defeated the relatively staid and strategic Mikhail Botvinnik in a World Championship match, held in Moscow, by 12.58.5 (six wins, two losses, and thirteen draws), making him the youngest-ever world champion (a record later broken by Garry Kasparov, who earned the title at 22). Botvinnik won the return match against Tal in 1961, also held in Moscow, 138 (ten wins to five, with six draws). In the period between the matches Botvinnik had thoroughly analyzed Tal’s style, and turned most of the return match’s games into slow wars of maneuver or endgames, rather than the complicated tactical melees which were Tal’s happy hunting ground.^[6] Tal’s chronic kidney problems contributed to his defeat, and his doctors in Riga advised that he should postpone the match for health reasons. Yuri Averbakh claimed that Botvinnik would agree to a postponement only if Tal was certified unfit by Moscow doctors, and that Tal then decided to play.^[7] His short reign atop the chess world made him one of the two so-called “winter kings” who interrupted Botvinnik’s long reign from 1948 to 1963 (the other was Smyslov, world champion 19571958).

Now you have learned it too!  

Anyway, the point of this post is that here’s a pretty wild example of his style I came across the other day for those who like that kind of thing.

Google docs is a Good Thing.  It’s not a great substitute for a rich client word processor or a spreadsheet, but both the word processing and spreadsheet parts of Google docs are great to have something simple in a cloud.  Peach Home Loans and Lateral Economics operate from home offices around the place and in both cases, so where one wants to make notes in collaboration with someone else – to work up ideas for a paper or an agenda or whatever, having a simple page in the cloud that others can work on at the same time from different places is teriffic.  As is keeping basic books from different locations.  

I’m often telling people when beginning to think about things that we should each make lists of ideas in the same Google doc and away we go.  Simple, not too clunky as so many wikis are, and away we go.

But there’s one thing really surprises me (or perhaps this just shows that I don’t know how to use some feature).  Given that Google docs isn’t a patch on Word or Open Office as a word processor, it’s great strength is as a means of collaboration.  But if that’s the case, you’d think that one of the first sophisticated features Google would have developed would be a ‘track changes’ facility, because that’s very very handy in lots of collaborative situations.  I’m not alone. 

So I bleg of you: tell me a collaborative word processor in the cloud that will enable me to track changes (and preferably also insert comments, though that can be worked around more easily).

In New Matilda Ben Eltham asks “Yesterday’s GDP figures show the Government’s fiscal strategy has worked, writes Ben Eltham. So why isn’t Labor saying so?”

Well yes, they do show that they worked (like some of us commonsensically suggested they would) and Labor is saying so. WTF?

Yum. My favourite.  

I just got sent this by email from in inimitable Tim Harkowitz.  Others please feel free to add to Troppo’s stock of Jewish jokes in comments.

There is a very pious Jew named Goldberg who attends synagogue every Sabbath. Every Sabbath, he prays: God, I have been such a pious Jew all my life. What would be so bad if I won the lottery? But the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldnt win. Week after week, Goldberg would pray to win the lottery, but the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldnt win. Finally, one Sabbath, Goldberg wails to the heavens and says: God, I have been so pious for so long, what do I have to do to win the lottery?

(Continued)

Well that’s an overstatement, but there’s been a long standing idea – going back to before Adam Smith that there’s something ‘good’ about “making things” to use some words that have suddenly become very popular. In reaction against this the economic establishment is of course against picking winners, and this occasionally manifests itself in a mindset that is almost anti-manufacturing.

In any event, I’ve never thought that there’s anything good about manufacturing – or better than other things. It produces some good jobs and quite a few awful ones, and the returns are not that high – it’s an area in which you get the ‘flying geese’ behind you threatening to catch up all the time – more so than in many services. One (not necessarily particularly strong) argument for assisting manufacturing was that it would help ‘diversify’ our economy and ameliorate the volatility of our terms of trade and our growth. Well not any more. Just as commodities used to come with a strong cycle, at least in this cycle, so has manufacturing.

As Glenn Stevens illustrates with this graphing (pdf) of the share of manufacturing against short term growth right now.

I have a credit card with a limit of just $500 for internet purchases and other risky transactions from the CBA.  It is often in arrears and I don’t bother paying it because I’d rather pay the usurious interest rate when the amount outstanding is $100 or whatever.  So they sometimes send me rude letters. And they’ve threatened to cancel the card before.  And yesterday I was sent an email worrying about a ‘suspicious payment’ from Westpac – to which I replied – see below the fold. 

So I nearly fell for this:

Dear Commonwealth Bank customer,

Your card has been suspended.

To activate your card again, please call to the following number: (61) 280144856

 

NOTE: Do not click any link in the e-mails pretending to be from Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

© Copyright. All rights reserved. Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

 

Seemed slightly odd that they’d communicate with me in this way, but it wasn’t phishing was it? After all, there’s no link. So I rang the number and a robot asked for my credit card number. I hung up, more pissed off with the non-humanity of it all, and I couldn’t be bothered putting all the information in.  Perhaps something else was bothering me.  Anyway, the moment I got off the phone I realised that it was almost certainly phishing and that the robot would have asked, not just for my credit card number but also for my expiry date and perhaps the confirmation code.  Nasty business. 

(Continued)