Previous Posts
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May 24, 2013
No CommentsOn materialism
We live in a world of material abundance, to the point where few Australians experience what would have been regarded in my youth as real poverty. To be without shelter, food and clothing is now uncommon and indeed unnecessary, which is not to say that there are not homeless and ill-clad people. My guess is...
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May 23, 2013
1 CommentA sane view on the ‘climate change’ issue
The Oklahoma City tornado brought forth a few excited claims that this was all due to ‘climate change’, but even IPCC Chairman Pachauri has pooh-poohed that notion, which saves me from the task of showing how tornado frequency is historically low in the US (as is cyclone frequency here), and that it has been geographic...
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May 22, 2013
2 CommentsLabor and the Liberals— the real differences
Labor’s Penny Wong is not one of the most excitable politicians on show today, but she said something the other day that suggested that an Abbott Government would do something dreadful, like tax birthday presents, or abolish Santa Claus — I don’t really remember. And I thought to myself that we still had several months...
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May 21, 2013
1 CommentThe Internet as a forum for discussion
In the field of ‘climate change’, which has been an abiding interest of mine for several years now, there is a sharp division between researchers and the lay public. Researchers insist that peer-reviewed journals are the only place in which serious discussion should take place, and by and large they simply avoid the Internet. The...
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May 20, 2013
2 CommentsThe magic of Gavin Bryar’s music
Most people know of Gavin Bryars through hearing Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, a remarkable and deeply moving piece of orchestral music built around a looped tape of a London tramp’s singing, quite musically, a little hymn fragment. It is one those works whose first hearing is powerful. I heard it first when the...
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May 18, 2013
No CommentsAlfred, 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 and down the people go, waving lilies to and fro.’ One or both of us didn’t remember...
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May 17, 2013
4 CommentsShock, horror! It’s true, there is consensus on global warming!
The ABC ran a radio news piece yesterday about how scientists really do have a consensus about global warming, and it even mentioned the author of the paper, John Cook, of the University of Queensland (but didn’t mention that he is the founder and active presence of the oddly named Skeptical Science, a website that...
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May 16, 2013
1 Comment‘Climate change’ gets the heave-ho in the Budget
As has become usual, much of the news in the Budget had already been offered up as teasers and stories over the weekend and Monday, but I hadn’t found anything much there about ‘climate change’. And the Treasurer didn’t say a lot about it. No longer are we hearing glowing accounts of how investing in...
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May 15, 2013
1 CommentIs 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 think ‘prat’ is an English term, though you’ll hear it in Australia from time to time. Exactly what...
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May 13, 2013
1 CommentScience has a problem — no, several problems
I laughed out loud when I saw this cartoon. It speared the situation so well, and with such a funny outcome. My thanks to Bob Carter, who sent it me and others, and to his nephew in the US, who sent it to him, and to the brilliant Jorge Cham, who drew it, and was...