Club Troppo

Troppodillians will want to know - OK, some will want to know that the chess world championship is currently underway. Topalov, swashbuckling, highly strung, nasty piece of work is challenger to Anand who is a calmer, probably nicer and a tad more consistent player - and the W...

Continue reading →

Here's my article for yesterday's Crikey. The media inform us that the Rudd Government is adopting the world's most draconian cigarette packaging regulation and requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain packages from January 2012. Good on it. When I was on the Productivity Comm...

Continue reading →

Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think , the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome...

Continue reading →

My article for yesterday's Crikey! It's been clear for a long while that we've picked a lot of the low hanging fruit available in traditional economic reform. Once tariffs get down below 10% not only are the gains from cutting them painfully slim compared with the gains from c...

Continue reading →

From the NBER Digest: Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants , Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie, and Alan Sorensen "Mandatory calorie posting influenced consumer behavior at Starbucks in New York City, causing average calories per transaction to drop by 6 percent." Nutrition labe...

Continue reading →

And why not? I wonder what his golf handicap is.

Continue reading →

Political commentary and pseudo demography speaks of a class called the latte sippers. This is a class of noisy, isolated, out of touch and elitist people; enemies of common sense and the common man. Apart from these traits they are also clearly defined by their beverage choic...

Continue reading →

I've never seen an aurora, but I'd love to. HT Three Quarks

Continue reading →

It's been a Fatih Akin blitz this week, having watched his new comedy and two older films - a music documentary and his dramatic feature debut. I've also revisited The White Ribbon , the must-see film of the festival (though it has a cinematic release just after). All up, ther...

Continue reading →

During the Hawke years one conservative columnist used to bemoan the lack of professionalism of the right in Australian politics. I don't much read columns of professional columnists anymore, so I don't know if this theme has recurred but somehow he seemed to become more prote...

Continue reading →

Even if I would have choked on my Weeties that the New Statesman presumably thought this picture looks like Adam Smith. The economist manifesto, by Amartya Sen, Commentary, New Statesman : The 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith wasn’t the free-market fundamentalist he is thou...

Continue reading →

True - at Three Quarks here .

Continue reading →

Salman Khan's Khan Academy is an amazing labour of love, if you haven't come across it. Over a thousand video tutorials, each around ten minutes long, on subjects ranging from calculus and statistics, through biology, to modern history. But this is what's really mindboggling:...

Continue reading →

It wasn't in any deliberate attempt to celebrate Anzac Day last night that I went to see Beneath Hill 60. (My spellchecker wants me to respell 'Anzac' as 'Antacid' but I'll press on!) Eva and I just wanted to go and see a film and she'd heard good things about it. It's a good...

Continue reading →

The Festival of German Films 2010 is now open in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, with Brisbane and Adelaide to come. It's the 9th year of the festival and this year there are 33 films to be screened. I spoke briefly to festival director, Klaus Krischok from the Goethe Institute,...

Continue reading →

Economist and blogger Andrew Leigh has won preselection as Labor's candidate for Fraser . Saturday saw preselections for both ACT federal electorates -- Fraser and Canberra, with Canberra going to communications consultant Gai Brodtmann . According to the Canberra Times ' Jess...

Continue reading →

I'd firstly like to thank Nicholas for inviting me on board Club Troppo. This is not my first appearance here - some of you may recall Alison Croggon from Theatre Notes , who posted here my article on Pedro Almodóvar's Volver in 2007 (which seems to have evaporated from Club T...

Continue reading →

President Obama's 'Wall Street' speech on Thursday was good news for the future of capitalism and for civilisation as we know it. He seems to mean business, urging finance leaders and their Republican servants to accept the main elements of the bill now being prepared for the...

Continue reading →

I wanted to post this video of Ronald Reagan (not to be mistaken with Ronald McDonald) and James Dean. However WordPress's new software strips the code away - ostensibly because it will handle it all without the code. But I can't master what I'm supposed to do. Anyway, click t...

Continue reading →

OK, it's a little bit rich and it's not any of its owners. Kaggle has just given away a netbook for an idea for a data competition which we intend to host. How easy was that? Will you be next? Prizes, Prizes, Prizes, out they go. Below is my post on Kaggle: Here at Kaggle we d...

Continue reading →