Club Troppo

Balmain is not  just the city of basket weavers it is also a place to find thinking drinkers and binge thinkers. Put this in your list of favorites.

Shaken and Stirred, the brainchild of Parnell McGuinness and Leonie Phillips, is a space for the free exchange of opinions without fear, favour or rancour. It is a moveable feast of ideas, usually associated with food and drink (well, why not?).

Modelled on the great Parisian salons of the enlightenment, Shaken and Stirred events gypsy throughout metropolitan Sydney presenting unusual speakers on provocative ideas. By deliberately seating ideological opponents adjacent, the events encourage thinkers from all perspectives to challenge their own ideas and those of others.

See the Shaken and Stirred Facebook page for previous events.

Every December since 2002 Sydney’s Pinchgut Opera has produced an obscure baroque opera at the City Recital Hall. The company employs top-notch instrumentalists wth period instruments that produce an incredibly haunting and evocative blend of sounds; they gather outstanding soloists, including a few international guests; and they bring these together in a cleverly staged, intelligently directed musical drama. What they achieve, every time, is to make you scratch your head and wonder how on earth such a sublime masterpiece could ever have fallen into obscurity.

This year’s work is L’Ormindo, composed in 1644 by Francesco Cavalli. It’s essentially a melodrama with touches of comedy; the poster stresses ‘Love Triangles’. I’d never heard of Cavalli, but I’ve discovered that one doesn’t know anything about mid, as opposed to early or late, 17th Century opera, if one doesn’t know about him, since he was evidently its brightest luminary.

I might comment on the production after I see it on Sunday, but by then it will be too late to influence any Troppo reader. If you’re in Sydney and like this sort of thing, don’t miss it. There seem to be quite a few seats left for Sunday and Monday. Pinchgut’s productions have become the highlight of my musical calendar. They’re all very different, but each one is like riding an exhilarating wave of sound and theatre — an intense experience that envelopes you, and stays with you for days. (Continued)

Suppose you believed the world was getting warmer due to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and you worried about it but you cant get yourself to believe that the 200-odd countries in the world are ever going to agree to drastically reduce their emissions via some joint scheme, partially because it is too hard to measure many emissions, partially because it might take a world dictatorship to actually enforce such a deal, and partially because some countries are most likely going to be much better off if the world warms up and hence are going to sabotage any joint plan. You would find yourself backed up in this opinion by a lot of auxiliary data on the difficulties of letting go of the growth fetish, ranging from the known miniscule effect that the ETS schemes currently on the table would have even if they were agreed upon, to the factoid that China is building two coal powered stations a week, to the factoid that in nearly every election politicians promise their electorate more economic growth (read: bigger cars, more holidays to far-away places, more gadgets running on energy, etc.), to the factoid that even the European countries who have been calling for reductions in emissions for over 2 decades have themselves been happily burning the midnight oil.
For people like this, which includes me, geo-engineering seems the only realistic way forward, i.e. some kind of technological fix that can be implemented by a single worried country or a sub-set of countries desperate enough to try unproven technology to cool the planet down. No world dictatorship or elusive coalition needed, hence much less of a free-rider problem. How serious are good scientists thinking about such technological fixes, what are the front runners, and are the front runners indeed things a sub-set of countries could implement?
It turns out that the possibility of geo-engineering is taken much more seriously in the academic community than youd ever think from reading the newspapers. English scientists in particular seem to have adopted the idea that they should look for technical fixes, just in case the world coalition on CO2 emission reduction doesnt quite live up to the dreams of its adherents. The Royal Society for instance advocated research in geo-engineering quite openly (see here) making it clear sensible people are thinking about this option seriously. Find over the fold a basic breakdown in basic options and their characteristics.

(Continued)

”Hang on, woah woah woah woah!”

If you believe Paul Sheehan we can thank Alan Jones for the demise of Malcolm Turnbull and the derailment of the CPRS.

Every time a Liberal backbencher is asked why he or she withdrew their support for Ian MacFarlane’s deal, the answer is the same — ‘my office has received literally thousands of emails and faxes from our electors, demanding that we stop this ETS’. The Senator or Honourable Member goes on to deny vehemently that the correspondence consisted of form letters, or betrayed any other signs of an organised campaign.

But it was always hard to believe these thousands of letters were spontaneous, and Jones is a plausible culprit. Sheehan doesn’t explicitly say that Jones exhorted listeners to write to their MPs, but he clearly implies it. Nor does he explain why parliamentarians outside of New South Wales received floods of correspondence — assuming they did, though I’m not sure about that, since I’ve been hearing mostly NSW backbenchers, on ABC Sydney local radio.

In any case, if it’s true that Jones inspired the letter campaign, it raises two issues. (Continued)

For four years now (ages in blogosphere terms) Club Troppo and On Line Opinion have sponsored a showcase of Australian independent blogging, which we call Best Blog Posts of <year>’.

With Christmas fast approaching, the time has come to launch ‘Best Blog Posts of 09′. On Line Opinion will publish the best 40 or so nominated posts over the course of January.

This year the judging panel includes Ken Parish and Nicholas Gruen of Club Troppo, Helen ‘skepticlawyer’ Dale, media studies academic Jason Wilson, and On Line Opinion’s Graham Young and Susan Prior.

The objective, as always, is to gather some of the best blog writing in one place. It’s a showcase or anthology rather than a contest.  There will be no “Best Blog Post of 09″ award, just publication over the festive season of 40 of the best as nominated by readers and “culled” to a manageable number by our judging panel.

Posts will enter the pool by two channels. First of all, to ensure there is a decent sample, our judging panel will feel free to make nominations from our own subjective memories of excellent blogging.  Unfortunately, our memories may not be as compendious as in past years because we haven’t been running the regular Missing Link feature over the last year, which makes the second nomination channel even more important previously. The second channel is you. We would like you to nominate your own favourite posts. This includes posts youve read and posts youve written.

As far as self-nomination goes, in case there are writers out there who are inhibited by modesty, keep in mind that there is no winner, so we are not asking you to claim that any post of yours is the best post of 2009. We just want to exhibit your wares. Please make our lives easier by supplying a list of the three posts of which you are most proud.

You can make your nominations in three ways:

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My particular problem at the moment is which chess clock app to download.  There are oodles of them. I’ve also downloaded a business card reader, but where do I find out which of what is often many competing apps are the best ones?

I’ve been reading RG’s strange columns with increasing incredulity.  About how raising interest rates will drive house prices up.  Now he doesn’t seem to understand that you can compensate someone for increased energyprices and they might still reduce their energy consumption (because it’s relative price goes up).  Pretty strange stuff.