Food prices

Here's another demonstration of how the New York Times can span the globe with its understanding and interest. This article links the drought in Australia with food riots in Haiti, showing how interdependent the world is at a time of climate change.

Writing books, by computer

Here's an interesting little article I found. A professor has developed an algorithm for a computer to trawl around and find all the publicly-available information on a topic, compile it, and turn it into a book. He's actually done it. Not once, but 200,000 times. On topics such as rug manufacturing in India. Quite amazing.

Worst President ever?

Historians are starting to debate the current Bush Presidency. 98% of 109 historians surveyed thought President Bush's presidency was a failure. There's a character on The Simpsons who makes very definite statements but 60% of historians polled actually thought yes, he was the worst President ever.

Who will be the Democratic nominee?

In the US, things are close between Barrack and Hillary. What will happen? Will events mirror those in the 'West Wing's final season where things are deadlocked and only some intense arm-twisting is required? Lawrence O'Connell, a West Wing writer, has written a possible scenario with a screenplay treatment. It starts with a sex scene and ends with a deal. A great read.

Elevators in free fall!

Elevators (or lifts) free-falling; mass panic; death and destruction. Fear, absolute, mind-numbing fear. But how often does it happen? This fascinating article tells all! I was in a lift once when the phone rang! But that (fortunately) is the end of my exciting lift stories.

Google Earth for Melbourne, 1945!

You can look at Google Earth to zoom to any place on the planet. But you can't zoom into the past ... The University of Melbourne has got some great aerial photographs from 1945 covering most of metropolitan Melbourne. Check it out!

Reverse outsourcing

American Express is to take jobs back from India to Australia, because it says more of the calls its call centres are dealing with are more complex than they used to be, and require local knowledge. This is part of the trend of the Internet is says, with people now making routine enquiries by email. Very true. Is Amex's move part of a bigger trend? Will the recent experience of ringing up "Ian" (real name Sanjit) in "Melbourne" (real city Bangalore) asking about "them Collingwood Magpies" cease to be a subject of laughter amongst Australians?

The religion of the Mac

Here's a very funny column by one of my favorite columnists, Danny Katz, about marshmallows, PCs, and Macs. Enjoy!

Shredding and its impact on Tasmanian politics

The Tasmanian Deputy Premier has had to resign after misleading parliament. He claimed that he hadn't appointed a certain person as a magistrate but was then forced to admit he mislead parliament after a Greens MP went through his garbage, found some shredded material, and stuck together all the little bits and pieces to form the image you see. This is not the first time that sticking back together the little bits of shredding from shredding machines has come to prominence. Back during the US embassy hostage crisis in 1980, Iranian revolutionary students put together all the secret documents that the US embassy had shredded immediately before being stormed. Still, I wonder whether the Greens MP, Kim Booth, has a habit of going through shreddings, or whether maybe there was a tip-off?

US heading in wrong direction?

A poll by the New York Times has found 81% of Americans think their country is headed in the wrong direction. Wow! Even more staggering, this percentage kept pretty constant amongst all sorts of demographics - Republicans, Democrats, young, old, city, country. You can see the full results here (PDF document). The question to ask I guess is whether they all have the same idea of which direction it should be going. The answer here would be almost certainly no. Conservatives think it's not going conservative enough, progressives want things to go away from the direction President Bush has taken the country. But it is staggering that 4 in 5 Americans think their country is heading in the wrong direction.

The future of the English language

New Scientist last week had an article about the future of the English language. If you're not a subscriber you'll only be able to read the first part of the article, but basically it talks about the impact on the language of English being spoken by more non-native than native speakers (i.e English is a second language for more people than a first language). Two thousand years ago, Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, but now it has disappeared as a 'living' language, with languages such as French, Italian and Spanish evolving from it into fully fledged languages in a relatively short span of time. What will happen to English? Will it become like Latin and go into Australian English, Indian English, African English etc, or will we all understand each other? The article of course is at pains not to completely predict the future, an inexact science! One interesting aspect that could demonstrate what happens is irregular verbs. Irregular verbs are those that don't take on an '-ed' ending when in the past tense. The report quotes from a study in the magazine Nature (you can read the abstract here in which an evolutionary mathematician at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erez Lieberman, tracked 177 irregular English verbs from ancient times. Most common verbs are in fact irregular (be, have, go, do, say, take, get, will, see) but over time 79 irregular verbs have become regular. The last one - help. Now it's helped but it used to be 'holp'! The next one to go - 'wed'. Fascinating stuff. It's interesting to hear different age groups and people with different accents and see how things have changed. Unlike French, English has no central authority to 'control' its use - if such a thing were indeed possible. This means our language is constantly evolving into what we, the users, make it into. Let's see what we've made it into in 50 years' time.

New Melbourne train timetable

The state government has announced a new metropolitan train timetable for Melbourne with 3-stages of improvement. Much more improvement and infrastructure is needed but it's good to see things heading in the right direction. No details on the 3rd stage which is for "off-peak" improvements but I hope it would be to standardise daytime offpeak frequencies to 15 minutes across the network, not just on the Caulfield and Burnley group of lines. With the movement of Werribee trains to run Flinders Street direct, the North Melbourne loop should now have the capacity to operate more services for the remaining lines (Broadmeadows, Sydenham and Upfield). Biggest improvement will be to the Stony Point line from 27 April with the introduction of Sprinter trains and much more frequent services - type in 28 April into the link above and see the new timetables.

Bloggers killing themselves for their posts

Well this is a good first thing to post from The New York Times: In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop. Bloggers earning upwards of $30K? Killing themselves so someone else doesn't get in front of their post by a nanosecond? Seems a little extreme!

Welcome

Well hello, welcome to my blog. What's this all about? Well at the moment it's a place for me to write what I think and what I find interesting. Over time, I hope it will develop into something a little more sophisticated, but for now, it will focus on the items of interest that I find in my life around me, and in the multiple newspapers, articles and magazines I read. I live in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. My interests are very eclectic and strange. Hopefully you will share enough of them to join me on my journey. Some of the things that interest me include:

• news
• gardening
• cycling
• movies
• politics
• maps and geography
• trains and public transport
• demographics, change, population
• cities and how they develop
• history and how history is occurring now

Come back later to find out some of the things I've found out. In future posts I'll discuss things like:

• postcode boundaries (suburbs) in Melbourne and how they've changed in the last 30 years
• reaction to Prime Minister Rudd's trip across the world
• storm damage in my local area last week
• Rod Eddington's transport plan for Melbourne
• interesting links and articles

Bye for now!