I was searching for the lyrics to Randy Newman’s excellent Political Science after listening to it on the excellent BBC “Old Grey Whistle Test” DVD
Probably best avoided if you’re a fan of Bush.. 🙂
Category Archives: Writing
French bus company sues car-pooling cleaning women, wants to confiscate their cars!
Cleaning women working at the European Union get fed up over a shody bus service and start car pooling to save costs and the environment. Bus company gets upset and sues them for “unfair and parasitical competition” – demands they are fined and have their cars confiscated!
This is over a service where “we didn’t have the right to eat or even to speak” and instead of coming to get us at 9.30pm, the bus would arrive at 10.30pm. If you made any comment to the driver you’d get a mouthful of abuse.“.
Found via this Groklaw article, reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (subs required) and also this Google News search.
Supercomputer/Grid Systems Administrator Wanted
We’re hiring at VPAC down here in Melbourne.
We’re after a systems administrator to “take an active role in building the national APAC Compute Grid” and “assist with the day to day operation of the VPAC SuperComputers“.
You can find the job details here & even apply online. We’re after someone who groks Linux/UNIX, HPC/Grid and Java, but will consider talented people with a subset of those skills (though the Linux/UNIX thing is pretty crucial).
Trust me, it’s fab and you get to play with cool things.. 🙂
Breaking Things
Stewart writes:
Every year our heating breaks. Every darn year. Aparrently the way to get a reliable central heating system is to have one that’s 15 years old.
Don’t count on it, our 15-year old hot water system self-destructed over the weekend..
Photos from the goldfields of Walhalla and Tarra Bulga National Park
I’ve just finished putting up the photo album from our trip down to Gippsland to the old goldfields areas around Walhalla (including the Goldfields Railway and the “ghost” town of Aberfeldy) and to Tarra Bulga National Park.
A grave at Aberfeldy Cemetery
How Safe is Your Car ?
Here’s an interesting site with crash reports on lots of recent cars, you can ask for a table of the safest cars in a number of categories for less than 5 years old and 5 years and older. Of course they won’t have everything, but it’s a good start nontheless.
I think it’s good that one of their categories is the “Pedestrian Rating”, i.e. how dangerous they are to pedestrians in an accident.
How Safe Is Your Car ? – http://www.howsafeisyourcar.com.au/
Response to Leon on Suicide Bombers
Leon seems to suggest that I’m proposing a solution to suicide bombers, but I’m not (and apologies to Leon if I’m misreading him).
All I was doing was pointing out that the stereotypes that the pollies and media propogate of the people who carry out suicide bombings (of which London probably was not one) being people who are poor and uneducated is incorrect.
I certainly am not suggesting that the fact that they generally are educated is the problem!
I have no idea if there are any solutions, let alone what they may be. But I certainly think that it’s worth bearing in mind what Menken wrote:
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Melbourne Student Accomodation :-)
The above is RMIT Building 19, which is the former Police Watch House.
The larger original by Jeremy is here. The place is now a building site..
Stereotypes of Suicide Bombers
Leon Brooks writes about discouraging suicide bombers:
At first glance, a look under the surface of any terrorist will show someone with nothing left to lose. But there is almost always a second layer of people who have plenty of physical resources, directing things. It seems to me that the answer is simple: enrich them.
Sadly this will not help, its basic premise that suicide bombers having nothing left to loose is incorrect.
New Scientist published an article called The Making of a Suicide Bomber (you’ll need to be a subscriber to New Scientist or willing to pay to view the entire text) back in May 2004 dispelling myths such as this on suicide bombers, citing a growing body of work showing that suicide bombers generally come from a higher than average economic and educational level than the population they are drawn from.
To quote the article purely on the economic argument that Leon raises, it says:
Yet in a study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad suicide terrorists from the late 1980s to 2003, Claude Berrebi, an economist at Princeton University, found that only 13 per cent came from a poor background compared with 32 per cent of the Palestinian population in general. In addition, more than half the suicide bombers had entered further education, compared with just 15 per cent of the general population. And in a paper published last year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (vol 17, no 4, p 119), economist Alan Krueger of Princeton University and the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and Jitka Maleckov�of the Institute for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, showed that Hezbollah militants who died in action in the 1980s and early 1990s were less likely to be impoverished and more likely to have attended secondary school than others of their age.
You can find more with this Google Scholar search.
At least 2 dead in London, rescue operation in Kings Cross station
BBC News has a continually updated page on the bombings, which currently says:
1215 The ambulance service says there are people still trapped at King’s Cross station, and efforts are being made to rescue them
and:
1125 “We have at least two fatalities, but still unconfirmed,” a police spokesman tells the AFP news agency