One of the best pieces of scientific news the last decades has been the spectacular improvements in solar energy generation. The current world price was set in 2017 when the Dubai government bought a large future solar contract for 7.3 US cents per Kilowatt Hour, a mere 1/6 th...

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In all ways that we measure these things, physical violence has reduced in Western countries in the last 70 years, particularly mainland Western Europe. What about psychological violence though? Psychological violence, ie the inflicting of mental pain, takes many forms. It inc...

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Suppose you buy the idea popular in psychology that there are stable personality types largely formed in childhood and that the population has relatively stable proportions of these personality types. The Big5 personality types are agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, con...

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Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...

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The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves, but because of how the progressive media and commentators have reacted to it....

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Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. In Australia, the royal commission has uncovered a lot of systematically covered-up child abuse in the Catholic Ch...

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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In part 1, I looked at whether it made sense to have random individuals inserted into parliament, or to let policies be decided by juries full of randomly chosen individuals. Both were argued to be unworkable and likely to lead to more corruption, rather than less: policies th...

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Governments around the world have in recent years destroyed their seized stockpiles of illegal ivor y, egged on by the World Wildlife Federation which believes it sends a signal to gangs that kill Elephants and Rhinos for their tusks. In January, Sri Lanka reportedly crushed 3...

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I visited Turkey in April last year, traveling through the country, witnessing the troubles of the leadership of the ruling AKP party: it had just lost a general election that left it without a workable majority in parliament and only 40% of the popular vote; it was sucked int...

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With the Internet being a regular feature of our lives for about 20 years now, what have been the related developments that were hard to pick at the outset? What are the lessons? Five thoughts: Communication and personal expression is the main business of the Internet. That wa...

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I've created a categorised featured posts list to highlight the rich diversity of material posted here at Troppo. I intended to have it here on the front page but it takes up too much room. Please check it out over the fold. Politics INTERNATIONAL NATIONAL STATE/TERRITORY Open...

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My father died early this year at the age of 90, after a long but slow slide into dementia. The discussion on another thread about euthanasia and mental capacity has led me to decide to post the eulogy I delivered at his funeral. My dad was still relatively compos mentis at th...

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In the last 5 years, I have made a point of giving clear predictions on complex socio-economic issues. I give predictions partially to improve my own understanding of humanity: nothing sharpens the thoughts as much as having to actually predict something. Another reason is as...

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Last Monday I posted 4 questions to see who thought like a classic utilitarian and who adhered to a wider notion of ethics, suspecting that in the end we all subscribe to ‘more’ than classical utilitarianism. There are hence no 'right' answers, merely classic utilitarian ones...

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Do countries that are already rich become even happier when they become yet richer? This was the essential question on which I entered a gentleman’s bet in 2004 with Andrew Leigh and which just recently got settled. The reason for the bet was a famous hypothesis in happiness r...

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It was quite a few years ago – last century in fact – that through Martin Gardner’s ‘Mathematical Recreations’ column in Scientific American that I first learnt of Raymond Smullyan. It was in a review of either The Lady or the Tiger or What is the Name of this Book , two of Sm...

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Some time ago a coworker of mine found a file on the train and gave it to me. A thick wad of papers detailing a conspiracy against all that was good in the world: The Queen, her constitution and her mighty railways....and the writer's right to place her wheelie bin on the kerb...

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I'm not very old at all, but I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of a era in playground equipment design. This period was typified by danger. Metal slippery dips that one could cook an egg (or buttocks) on and which would hurl you far into the grass or merry go rounds t...

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What do Nicholas Stern and Peter Brent have in common with me?

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In Nicholas's thread below tigtog raised the topic of The Sounds of Aus , John Clarke's documentary on the Aussie accent , written by Lawrie Zion . (Apparently there's no web site, nor even a page on the ABC site). I enjoyed it too, but a few issues weren't resolved to my sati...

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I remember as a young bloke reading an ad for a Holden FJ that was nearby for $3,000. I rang the seller and then jumped in the car to look at it. Unfortunately even back then three grand only bought you a rustbucket FJ that is up on blocks. I ended up buying a 1962 EJ Holden i...

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There is speculation building that Holden is gearing up to full production in order to export the Ute to the United States. Holden Ute - Pontiac G8 Ute photochop by Aych Es Vee The traditional Ute platform in the US has been the Chevrolet El Camino, but it appears that the Ute...

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What do Schapelle Corby and John Howard have in common? (hint see Hansard page 54) What is it about Northern Territory politicians and fridges ? Why didn't I realise that Miranda Devine was right ? [ NB not work-safe ]

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Winners and winner-groupies were hugging themselves with delight and gay abandonment today, at the unbelievable news, that Australia's most famous news packaging and dissemination service, News Corporation , was first with the news, that News had been extremely successful at t...

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I spotted a comment in the last week that I thought would be a good starter for our weekend open thread. If I do so again in the future, there'll be another commenter of the week. The comment was from Cam in the thread on history education - which was itself a pretty high qual...

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This is what it looks like. Only it's bigger - even bigger.

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I was wired at birth to allocate capital and was lucky enough to have people around me early on - my parents and teachers and Susie - who helped me to make the most of that. Warren Buffett It's presumably in the papers and I've missed it, or it's a hoax but courtesy of slashdo...

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Customary Law is in the news again, but the Greek Gods aren't. Maybe they should be, perhaps their old dramas and poems would allow us all to see in dreaming a non-kissing cousin in the dance we have no choice but to partner. Remember a good dancer has good balance and that no...

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I don't often get time these days for a leisurely browse around the blogosphere. But I found a few spare minutes today, and happened to stumble across an unbelievably trivial but nasty spat between the lefties at Larva Rodeo and compulsive attention-seeking legal academic Jame...

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You aim too please. Iintroducing the latest in gaming technology. And who said my subscription to slashdot was a waste of time.

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Actor Gary McDonald, whose portrait by Paul Jackson was another Archibald finalist (and my personal favourite) While I'm on the Archibald Prize, the Art Gallery of NSW now has images of all the finalists available on its website here . The winner was Marcus Wills' work The Pau...

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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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I am running a surrepticious campaign to introduce the open source ways of the internet to the ABC. Being stacked with salaried people, the ABC is poorly in touch with the resources of the voluntary sector - the sector that produces Club Troppo and comments on it day in day ou...

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Well, Massachusetts seems to be still going for mandated open standards despite the hicough of a month or so ago . Courtesy of Slashdot, this source reports that the CIO for Massachusetts who left or was sacked in the aftermath of the announcement of the policy is being replac...

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The blogosphere is a useful source of word of mouth information or word of keyboard and screen as the case may be. Without some blog or other (I can't remember now) I would never have gone to see Spiderman 2. And though I didn't think it was a great movie, it was a good one an...

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Compared with a few hundred years ago the world works incredibly, almost miraculously well. But do you think of something really simple that you wonder why it isn't being done? I planned to compile a list of ten really simple things that should be done which were obvious (at l...

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You can't help wondering about legal academics. What with Deakin University's Mirko Bagaric waxing lyrical about the inherent morality of torture, and his colleague James McConvill arguing a variety of increasingly bizarre propositions (most recently today's article claiming t...

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The Academy Awards ceremony was just dedicated to US military forces serving overseas.

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I thoroughly enjoyed the Inaugural Brisvegas bloggers' meetup on Friday night. My first post-grogblog comment was at Mel Gregg's place and a round up of other attendees' posts can be found at the Meetup message board .

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A couple of polls for a leisurely Sunday.. First of all, and Troppo Armadillians who've been commenting on music and composers recently might like this, Norm Geras over at Normblog is now conducting a poll of 'five favourite classical composers.' Just send him a list of your f...

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I see some goober from the Weagles has won the AFL midfielders' award (once known as the "Brownlow"). When do they announce the award for best player out of all the other positions on the field? What a pathetic joke the Brownlow has become. Mind you, I would have given it to J...

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It's a privilege to listen to someone with a really powerful and awesomely quick mind. Such was neuroscientist Professor Susan Greenfield, who was just on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope . Read the transcript when it becomes available if you didn't catch the program. One of the ma...

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I may have given readers the impression that I think Clive Hamilton is as big a goose as Alexander Downer. In fact I think many of Hamilton's insights are very valuable, especially in focusing Australians on the deficiencies of global capitalist consumer culture and the relent...

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I thought he was dead, but apparently not. Rupert's mob reports : Neil Diamond has lashed out at big-name performers who "rip people off", vowing no one will pay more than $99 to see him live in Australia. They'd have to pay me $99 to go to a Neil Diamond concert, and even the...

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This morning's SMH carries a special investigation into alleged large-scale multi-million dollar fraud and mismanagement in various NSW Aboriginal land councils. The scams mostly seem to involve deals and kickbacks with dodgy developers over valuable coastal development sites...

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I can't resist covering this story from the NT News : Territorians don't mind an orgy and are not embarrassed to use sex toys, survey of sexual habits shows. Sixty four per cent of Territory women and 48 per cent of men admitted to having been in a threesome. Fifty per cent of...

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My attention was taken by this piece from The Weekend Australian (not available online as far as I can see): The world may be about to watch one of its last Olympic Games without genetically enhanced athletes. With the first genetic treatments to regenerate muscle, enhance its...

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(Via Gareth Parker ) An IT expert writes (in Crikey's subscriber email): There is a good chance that Labor will give the Howard Government a hard time over its failure to make e-commerce safe through adequate regulation of ISPs. The Minister for Telecommunications Darryl Willi...

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The ABC reports that the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation aims to make Darwin "the Tamworth of Indigenous music"!! Why doesn't this fill me with joy, I wonder? Tamworth may be a valid comparison from more than one standpoint. Country music is mostly shithouse, and so is...

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(via Michael Jennings ) A fairly old paper titled The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States by Charles Whitebread, Professor of Law, USC Law School makes fascinating reading for those interested in the bizarre byways of history in the Land of the Free an...

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Leaving aside painful distractions, I see (via Jason Soon ) that yesterday was Darwin Day. No, not a day honouring the heavily taxpayer-subsidised (and currently very wet) city where I live, but instead commemorating the father of evolutionary theory. As an employee of newly r...

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This article about increasingly diverse self-labels in the gay community caught my eye while browsing Arts & Letters Daily just now : First, there was the term "homosexual," then "gay" and "lesbian," then the once taboo "dyke" and "queer." Now, all bets are off. With the unive...

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Although the left has lost no time in dismissing the Hutton report as a pathetic whitewash, while simultaneously demanding to know why Lord Hutton didn't enquire into questions totally outside his terms of reference (like why US/UK intelligence on Iraqi WMD capabilities was so...

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Jason Soon links to an excellent historical summary of public choice theory by its founder James Buchanan . As one of the principal components of the group of ideas usually called "neo-liberalism" or "economic rationalism", public choice theory remains an important influence o...

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If I was Wendy I'd be right chuffed by Sophie Masson's compliment about her "lovely, limpid" prose style (an evaluation which I share, for what it's worth). Sophie should know, being no mean exponent of the art of lovely, limpid prose herself. I find that immersion in turgid l...

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Earlier this afternoon we drove down towards Palmerston (Darwin's satellite city, more commonly known locally as Palmerslum) to inspect progress on the Darwin-Alice Springs Railway. Track-laying reached Palmerston on Friday and was supposed to be due to end 10 km further north...

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Despite Geoff Honnor's elegant demolition of Germaine Greer's egregious Quarterly Essay titled " Whitefella Jump Up - The Shortest Way to Nationhood ", and even despite Greer's figurative self-immolation on Andrew Denton's program last Monday evening, I continue to feel compel...

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The Twin Towers rise again. If you don't believe it you don't know Darwin. Back in the 1980s our principal gay nighclub was named Dix, while its main hetero competitor was called Fannies. PS - Speaking of restraint and good taste (not to mention wit and intelligence), I see Ti...

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Christopher Sheil reckons there's no such thing as a Left Wing Death Beast. It sounds to me like a dubious proposition at best. What about Paul Keating? Admittedly it's a bit of a stretch describing him as a "left winger" but at least he's an ALP politician not a Tory. Here's...

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I don't think I've ever until now linked a story from Channel 9's A Current Affair . Tonight, however, they had a story on an idea that's been a hobbyhorse of mine for a long time: DIY real estate sales . Having spent nearly 20 years running a private legal firm which involved...

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