Getting the word wrong
My family arrived in Canberra at the beginning of 1943, and we lived in Reid, already well-developed as a suburb, full of trees and hedges. I started school a few blocks away, at Ainslie Infants. Not...
View ArticleIf we wanted a new cultural policy for Australia, is this it?
A working lifetime spent in the knowledge of what happened to the arts in the former Soviet Union has made me leery of cultural policies promulgated by governments. As Minister Crean correctly said in...
View ArticlePride and Prejudice is 200 — well, sort of.
I first encountered P&P in 1953, as a set book for the Leaving Examination of that year. Since I obtained honours in English, I very likely read it, but I remember Macbeth, the set Shakespeare...
View ArticleSome further thoughts on music and Australia’s education systems
A couple of weeks ago Canberra had a visit from the Ichijo Senior High School band, from Nara, Japan. Nara is the ancient capital of Japan, and the two cities signed a sister-city agreement in 1993, so...
View ArticleNorth Korea talks about war, but it will it walk the walk?
North Korea is a classic ‘rogue state’, and it is the only ‘Communist’ society to have produced a dynasty, the current ruler, Kim Jong-un, being the son of the former one (Kim Jong-il) and the grandson...
View ArticleWhy are academics the way they are?
Academics are back in the news, protesting about cuts, and the coming ‘crisis’ in funding. As it happens, the first postwar use of ‘crisis’ in universities came in 1947, I think, and there has been a...
View ArticleClimate change: what consensus?
I have come across a long and most interesting report published by a Norwegian think-tank/consultancy called SINTEF, about the question of ‘consensus’ with respect to ‘climate change’. It is well worth...
View ArticleIs a ‘prat’ the same as a ‘ratbag’?
I’ve come across a new blog, Pointman, that contains good essays, some of them on ‘climate change’, and one post published a year ago has come to my notice. It was about the ‘prat principle’. Now I...
View ArticleAlfred, Lord Tennyson meets Richard Strauss
My earliest memory of Tennyson’s poetry was my father’s singing lines from The Lady of Shallot to the tune of Mowing the Barley. ‘On either side the river lie, long fields of barley and of rye, and up...
View ArticleHow should you deal with ‘wing nuts’?
I came across a couple of articles about how best to deal with the passionately deluded. ‘Wing nut’ is a relatively new expression to me, and is explained by one of them like this: ‘A wing nut is...
View ArticlePeer review: a caution
From time to time I come across journal articles whose quality is so poor that you wonder how they passed peer review. Two that I have mentioned here are by Cook and by Lewandowsky, and I will say no...
View ArticleThe jokes of the former Soviet bloc
Coincidences are funny things. Yesterday I read an old joke from Stalin’s time: Stalin has lost his pipe, and sends off Lavrenti Beria, the head of the KGB, to find it. A day later Stalin summons Beria...
View ArticleWhat should ‘progressive’ mean?
I came across a small debate on the web last week about what it meant to be ‘progressive’, and that’s as good a place to start as any about the themes in the coming election campaign. ‘Progressive’...
View ArticleNot Everyone Knows This
I have kept a file of of oddities and quiddities for many years, and the importance of science today means that is now time that I shared this gem of research and science with you. It comes from the...
View ArticleAcademic writing
Cleaning up in the loft, I came across a file I started many years ago that contained both awful examples of academic language and writing, and some delicious spoofs of same. A Saturday post seemed the...
View ArticleHow to speak about ‘climate change’ as a politician
A lot of things puzzle me, and one of them is why there is not, in our current Parliament, a single politician who can speak calmly and sensibly about dear old ‘climate change’. It’s not so hard, as...
View ArticleWhat do we want? SOMETHING! When do we want it? NOW!
As a young voter, I handed out leaflets, I knocked on doors, I was even a scrutineer, and later I did election-night commenting on TV. But I’ve never been in a demo in which people shouted out their...
View ArticleFree speech, respect, and honorary status
Anyone interested in the AGW issue will know of Professor Bob Carter. He is probably Australia’s leading sceptic, and held that status before I became interested in the matter six years ago. Until very...
View ArticleWhat has happened to the humanities?
In Quadrant last month I read two serious pieces about what I call ‘the decline in the humanities’ in our universities. The first was by Peter Coleman, a former editor of the magazine and a former...
View Article‘the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time’
I don’t make this stuff up! The quote that is the title of this post is a phrase Kevin Rudd used, so far as I can make out, both before he became Prime Minister in 2007 and after taking office — but...
View Article
