Tag Archives: Life in General

I haven’t done a fundraiser for a while, but this seems like a good time. Like everything, the Brissie to the Bay cycle fundraiser for Multiple Sclerosis isn’t going ahead as usual. It’s been replaced with a challenge where participants record their own efforts and set targets for distance and fundraising. I aim to cycle at least 400km in June (my average is around 200), and raise $1000 or more in the process. Feel free to suggest challenges of your own, with a donation to back...

I haven’t done a fundraiser for a while, but this seems like a good time. Like everything, the Brissie to the Bay cycle fundraiser for Multiple Sclerosis isn’t going ahead as usual. It’s been replaced with a challenge where participants record their own efforts and set targets for distance and fundraising. I aim to cycle at least 400km in June (my average is around 200), and raise $1000 or more in the process. Feel free to suggest challenges of your own, with a donation to back...

A couple of days ago, Adam Creighton had a piece in the Oz, downplaying the risks of the coronavirus pandemic, under the headline “Under 60, in good health? Crossing the road is more risky” Authors don’t choose headlines, but in this case, it’s an exact quote from the article. There was no supporting analysis, so I decided to do the numbers myself. I looked at Sweden (quoted as a success by Creighton) which seems reasonably comparable to Australia, except that they haven’t gone...

A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a video presentation about the likely employment effects in Australia, as part of my university’s response to the pandemic. The sound quality wasn’t great, what with reliance on my computer microphone, a spotty Internet connection and my accent, which is too strong even for some Aussies. The communications people at the Uni got back to me and said it might have to have subtitles, but they could improve things by lowering the volume of the background...

Lockdowns work. That’s the evidence from many different countries now, including Australia. To be more precise, lockdowns reduce the effective reproductive rate of the virus to the point where it is below 1, meaning that, on average, each infected person passes the disease on to less than one other person. As long as this is sustained, the number of new cases will keep declining, as we have now seen. Potentially, as has been claimed to be the case in China, it will reach zero....

As soon as the government released its modelling of the pandemic a few days ago, I realised something was badly wrong. The modelling showed infections increasing even under lockdowns, which obviously wasn’t happening. The crucial parameter here is R, the number of new infections generated by each existing infection. If R is greater than 1, the number of infections grows exponentially, but if R is less than one, it declines, eventually approaching zero. The knife-edge case is R=1, when...

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on. Like this:Like Loading...

I’ve had my say on the election, and don’t intend to engage in post-mortems. The only question of interest for me now is: what to do next? I can’t see any useful contribution I can make to Australian politics for the moment, though I’m happy to take suggestions. Serious policy development is going to be off the agenda for some time, and I’ve got nothing new to say about political strategy or day-to-day politics. ‘But the big issues I’m interested in (climate change, and the...

Back in the Paleozoic era of blogging, I wrote, in relation to a prediction that latte drinkers would soon be in the majority I would view this prospect with horror, but I think it will not come to pass. Latte is the Cold Duck of the 21st century, and like Cold Duck will be shaken off with a shudder as people realise what real coffee is about. Recent research from the Australia Institute suggests I was, at best, half right. Latte drinking hasn’t become the norm but it has...

After a gap of several months, I finally got around to writing up an update on my recent activities, only to discover that the Contacts application on MacOS had lost most of my contact list.  Following the advice of helpful readers, I decided to switch to MailChimp to manage my mailing list. If you would like to receive my regular email news, please sign up using the following link http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX For those who’d rather read it here at the blog, here’s a link. Like this:Like...