Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: off-topic ranting
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I have always had a strong suspicion that the Pink Floyd song Wish You Were Here is a homage to Ivan Denisovich, the fictional figure of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous novel of the same name. This possibility doesn’t become clear until you’ve churned through Solzhenitsyn’s opus – A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The…
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China’s rapid economic rise has been the topic of much debate over the past few years, and I think that this rise has some implications for western political economic theorists that are quite fun to explore. The orthodox view of China’s rise seems to be that it is going to continue to grow rapidly for…
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The Guardian is doing a series on China this week, some of which is quite interesting – the article on Gansu’s solar revolution is quite fascinating to someone (i.e. me) who visited that province 10 years ago and saw nothing but Yak herders, for example. However, in amongst the interesting cultural discussion there is the…
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Answer: None, because punk never changed anything. And today, courtesy of the Guardian, we have an amusing interview with an Indonesian punk that confirms the truth of this cute joke: The first wave of Indonesian punk stretched from 1990 to 1995, and saw the arrival of groups called Submission, Antiseptic and the elegantly named Dickhead.…
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Many Australian public hospitals maintain a ban on circumcision. The Royal Australian College of Phsyicians (RACP) recommends against circumcision, and it is now so unpopular that 80% of Australian boys are uncircumcised. However, a committee of public health experts has recommended reversing this ban and moving to encourage circumcision, on the basis of the many…
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There are few things more entertaining in the world of politics than watching one of Australia’s main political parties airing its dirty laundry in public. This week we get to see this spectacle at its finest, as Australia’s foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, steps down from his position and challenges the Prime Minister (PM), Julia Gillard,…
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I stumbled on a problem with out-of-sample prediction in R, which I think is an example of idiosyncratic programming (and possibly insoluble) and, in the spirit of Andrew Gelman’s stats blog, I thought I’d put it on the internet to see if a) I’m just being stupid and b) it really is as much of…
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Today I sat through about 15 presentations, and in the x 100th of them, the powerpoint failed. Just stopped working. It was a disaster for everyone concerned, not least of the concerned being the master’s student whose grade depended on getting the software working again[1]. As the crash came down, I realized that actually Powerpoint…
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Continuing my series of posts on sex work, public health and feminism, I turn my attention now to the modern feminist response to sex work. First I’ll outline a common strand in modern feminist responses to sex work and pornography, which I think it should be pretty obvious contrast with the public health approach I…
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Continuing my series of posts on sex work, public health and radical feminism, this post will attempt to describe the public health issues surrounding modern sex work, and some common public health responses to it. For the most part I will be talking about developed nations; for a variety of reasons, different conditions pertain in…
Compromise and Conceit 