Well the author copies of Donna’s 9th published book The Jumbled Jigsaw have arrived with a fab cover featuring a lovely painting by Donna called the Music of Beingness!
Hopefully it’ll stir up the autism field into realising that there is far more diversity in the causes of the symptoms that get labelled as “Autism” and that a diagnosis of autism confers no magic resistance to things like Tourettes, OCD, bipolar or anything else that the rest of the population gets.
Just a quick post to say that we’re back and alive and well, more later when I get a chance to write.. 🙂
Thursday morning Donna and I fly off to New Zealand where I’ll be attending LCA 2006 in Dunedin and Donna will be doing a number of talks in Aukland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin (and I’ll be travelling with her to those).
Updates will be occasional, if at all, to the site until we get back to Australia..
Now these guys really have grokked the application of the dynamics of complex systems and gravitational physics (from video.google.com – thanks Rich!).
The BBC is soliciting for questions for the UK music industry about “Digital Music” – so if you want the chance to quiz them about what they’re doing then here’s a chance.
They’ve got some questions up already, though whether that means they’ll get asked – and if they are, whether they will get answered – is not clear.
From today if someone walked up to you in Australia and told you they were dieing and asked about what they could do to end their suffering (not a likely situation I hasten to add) you could freely speak to them, but if they telephoned, emailed or wrote to you asking the same question it would be illegal to reply, unless you were going to try and tell them not to do it, or to tell them to do nothing.
At least they’ve not made debating euthanasia illegal yet..
Hoorah, common sense prevails and Ukraine and Russia settle their dispute over gas pricing that resulted in Ukraine’s gas supply being cut and supplies to the EU being disrupted.
Well what a suprise, the ABC is reporting that Australian “Exports plummet in post-FTA trade” with the US.
In the 12 months to October last year, Australian exports to the United States fell by 4.7 per cent while US imports rose by 5.7 per cent.
So we signed over sizeable chunks of sovereignty in return for what ? Worse economic standing & future ? Doesn’t seem like much of a deal for Australia..
Predictably the Russia-Ukraine spat over gas supply has started to affect supplies to the EU, with Russia claiming that Ukraine is stealing the EU’s gas and then there’s the odd question of the Turkmenistan gas that Ukraine is supposed to receive, that BBC report quotes Gazprom as saying “Today the Ukrainian gas transporting system is receiving nothing but Russian gas” which begs the question is Russia blocking the supply of Turkmen gas to Ukraine as well ?
To go along with this there’s an editorial at the BBC looking at “Energy and the new world power play” which makes a couple of nice counterpoints to the current state of play in the middle east, saying:
Oil played its part in a 1953 coup in Iran – organised by the US and Britain. They overthrew an elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh and installed Shah Reza Pahlavi instead, a move that still reverberates in relations with Iran.
and:
We learned from British archives released a couple of years ago that in 1973, the US drew up a plan to seize oilfields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi in response to the Arab oil embargo.
It’s well worth a read if you want to find out things like why China tends to block UN resolutions in Sudan and the like..
The BBC is reporting this case of Russia apparently trying to strong-arm Ukraine into accepting much higher gas prices than other customers of Gazprom.
Ukraine insists that the planned price rise is politically motivated, in the wake of Kiev’s Orange Revolution and the election of its pro-Western President, Viktor Yushchenko.Other countries which remain in Russia’s sphere of influence continue to receive gas at below-market prices.
Europe worries that this will also affect Russian gas exports to it as they go via Ukraine, but Gazprom say it won’t.