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Way back in 1995, before anyone was thinking much about constitutional conventions, Jessica wrote her undergraduate thesis in government on the topic of republicanism in Australia.

Once upon a time I had it posted on the web at an old ISP, but my account at that ISP is long gone and I was too lazy to work through my old Zip disks to see if any backups had survived.

As it turns out, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine had taken a copy. So I have cleaned it up a little and restored it on this site under the link Australian Republicanism.

Something is wrong.

I’m sitting in front of two computers that sit next to each other. Both have Windows update turned on, and both say that this patch is installed:

Update for Windows XP (KB912475)
Australia has changed the regularly scheduled end of Daylight Saving Time in five Australian states from March 2006 to the first Sunday of April 2006 due to the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Install this update to enable your computer to automatically adjust the computer clock on the correct date. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.
[...]

But one claims it’s 7:15pm and the other says it’s 8:15pm.

Both were showing the right time yesterday.

Yes, they’re in the same timezone. Yes, they have the same NTP server set up (time.windows.com). Yes, they’re both Windows XP Service pack 2.

The only difference I’ve thought of is that the one that’s reverted to standard time early is XP Home, and the one that’s holding out until the correct date to make the change is XP Professional.

More sleuthing required.

** Update 27/3: After checking the time this morning on each PC and finding the same disrepency I discovered that McAfee SecurityCenter’s was disabled. I turned it back on, and five minutes later (I didn’t check at the time) both PC’s clocks are in sync. I’m not blaming McAfee, but this is a strange coincidence. **

** Update 2 27/3: Experiences with another computer running Windows 2000 I found unpatched (my work computer #2): I downloaded the patch and rebooted, but the time was still 1 hour too early. I went to the timezone selector and clicked “Automatically adjust for daylight savings changes” off and on and pressed the OK button. Voila! The time is “correct.” **

Yes he is. He’s sorry you’re wrong.
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“Primetime” set up a seemingly impossible challenge for six pairs of people in different locations all over Manhattan: Try to find the other couples — all complete strangers — with no clues or additional information, just $100 to spend as they wished.

Gillette is a model of innovation in marketing, sales strategy and engineering. I would like to pay homage to their contributions to humanity.

The first legacy I would like to acknowledge is the razor pricing and sales strategy: Give away the razor, and charge a friggin’ fortune for the blades.

Printer manufacturers owe a lot to Gillette for this strategy. Most consumer-end printers are so cheap these days they’re practically free! Printer manufacturers price replacement cartridges such that they make up any initial losses quickly. These days it is possible to buy a $59 ink jet printer where refill cartridges are a mere $89 each. Early in this printer-manufacturer adoption of pricing policy this presented a loophole - savvy buyers would simply buy several printers at once, and dispose of them as they ran out of ink rather than pay for expensive cartridges. Printer manufacturers countered this strategy by producing special “low capacity” cartridges to ship in the printer box. These lower capacity cartridges run out after a very short time, making buying a new printer to get a cartridge less desirable.

Other slings and arrows, like 3rd-party replacement cartridges and refill kits have helped printer manufacturers lead the way in innovative application of DRM technology, but that’s not something seen in shaver technology yet.

The other important legacy I’d like to acknowledge is the benefit of marketing increased numbers of features as “improvement.”

I’m fond of the story of the Gillette G-III. After a decade of shaving appliance dominance with the two-bladed Gillette G-II(R) it was time for a new product. Apart from anything, the GII blade had been successfully cloned in many markets, and the pricing of the Gillette originals left plenty of room for 3rd-party replacements to profit. Adding digital rights management to shaver blades was probably not an option that would preserve the profit margins required to maintain the sales model.

Millions of dollars and years of R&D later the boffins used good-ol’ American ingenuity and wowed the world with a third blade!

That was my hope for the new design for the World Trade Center. Show the terrorists how America does things by rebuilding the original two towers and adding a third.

Some years back, my adopted grandmother, Olivia, passed away.

Last weekend we celebrated her birthday with a few of her favourite songs. Olivia was always very proud of her sister - Jesse Mae Robinson - a composer of songs made famous by Elvis…


Party, by Jesse Mae Robinson

I feel it in my leg,
I feel it in my shoe
Tell me pretty baby
If you think you feel it too
Let's have a party
Let's have a party
Send it to the store
And let's buy some more
And let's have a party tonight

Some people like to rock
Some people like to roll
But movin' and a groovin'
Gonna satisfy my soul

I've never kissed a bear
I've never kissed a goon
But I can shake a chicken
In the middle of the room

Now Honky Tonky Joe
Is knockin' at the door
Bring him in and fill him up
And set him on the floor


…and Nina Simone.


The Other Woman, by Jesse Mae Robinson

The other woman finds time to manicure her nails
The other woman is perfect where her rival fails
And she's never seen with pin curls in her hair

The other woman enchants her clothes with French perfume
The other woman keeps fresh cut flowers in each room
There are never toys that's scattered everywhere

And when her baby comes to call
He'll find her waiting like a lonesome queen
Cos when she's by his side
It's such a change from old routine

But the other woman will always cry herself to sleep
The other woman will never have his love to keep
And as the years go by
the other woman
will spend her life alone


I’m with Bruce Sterling - what planet is this again?

Not really a blog post, more a collection of interesting essays of the role of different crops in the development of some civilizations. Inspired by a conversation with Sunny at Yum Cha!

Via Brad Delong, The Economist has an interesting history of wheat:

It is time to pay tribute to this strange little grass that has done so much for the human race. Strange is the word, for wheat is a genetic monster. A typical wheat variety is hexaploid—it has six copies of each gene, where most creatures have two. Its 21 chromosomes contain a massive 16 billion base pairs of DNA, 40 times as much as rice, six times as much as maize and five times as much as people. It is derived from three wild ancestral species in two separate mergers. The first took place in the Levant 10,000 years ago, the second near the Caspian Sea 2,000 years later. The result was a plant with extra-large seeds incapable of dispersal in the wild, dependent entirely on people to sow them.

A few years back, Umberto Eco wrote an excellent article attributing the rise of European civilization to the humble bean:

But what I really want to talk about is beans, and not just beans but also peas and lentils. All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of the lords). And as I mentioned earlier, this poor diet begat a population that was ill nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields. So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and repopulated a continent.

We believe that the inventions and the discoveries that have changed our lives depend on complex machines. But the fact is, we are still here — I mean we Europeans, but also those descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Spanish conquistadors — because of beans. Without beans, the European population would not have doubled within a few centuries, today we would not number in the hundreds of millions and some of us, including even readers of this article, would not exist. Some philosophers say that this would be better, but I am not sure everyone agrees.

Brad Delong’s lecture notes have some interesting things to say about the effect of corn on Amerindian development:

[...]in less than 500 years, we think, the Americas were settled–no longer a resource-rich frontier. Food was scarce, infant mortality ferocious, immune systems frequently compromised (but people–hunter-gatherers–still relatively tall).

New World Agriculture:

Corn miraculous: 40-to-1 yield ratio, compared to 5-to-1 for contemporary wheat or rye… but corn not nutritionally complete. People get short. Farmers all get short. And farming carries you across a mammoth organizational shift. Thugs with spears. Thugs with incense. Maya, Toltec, Mound Builders, Chimu, Inca, Aztecs

30-100 million people in the Americas in 1490. Compare to 100-150 million each in Europe, China, India. Tenochtitlan at 100,000+ larger than Paris at 70,000.

I know I said I don’t talk about work.

I’m reviewing a very long semi-technical document. I keep reading the same pieces of text repeated over and over with minor variations.

It’s as though it was written by a million goldfish armed with typewriters.

Does that count as a constructive comment?

I need to warn you people that art and the ancient discipline of yo-yo fighting do not mix.

I was at a birthday party on the weekend. Liz (if that’s her real name) is quite an artist, and her back yard was strewn with brass and copper sculpture.

There were yo-yos lying around without their safeties on. Another birthday attendee, my wife’s cousin, was recklessly “walking the dog” with one. There were children present. I wanted to make my move with a fast “cat’s cradle” to knock him off balance then follow up with a flawless one-two combination of “round the world” and a “flip.”

It’s important to describe myself at this time. I know I don’t have an image of myself up on the site, but a word picture will do for this vignette.

I’m like a combination of Keanu Reeves and Lawrence Fishburne, in that I’m a terrible actor and I have a shaved head.

I ducked and moved forward. I was planning my move and rotating my lithe body to snatch the “yo” as time slowed down, and my mind’s eye rotated around me.

A wire on a hanging sculpture dragged its way down my scalp in bullet time, throwing me off balance and making a very nasty looking open wound right along my scalp.

What could have been the worlds finest opening up of a whole can of yo-yo takedown whup-ass on my wife’s cousin, turned into a week of explaining my embarrassing injury away with increasingly embellished yo-yo fighting anecdotes.

I was in the US recently.

One of the news factoid stories I saw on my hotel’s cable TV was about bird flu. I can’t remember if it was CNN or Fox News. It was a story that highlighted the role of “avian migration corridors” in the propagation of bird flu across international borders. Insidiously, it turns out that birds fly the same route every year in what’s called a “migratory pattern” along so-called “migration corridors.”

That’s right folks, cable TV has discovered that birds fly and flock. Sometimes birds fly a long way. Birds don’t queue at airport customs. Birds of a feather, it is said, flock together - spreading bird flu. (Cue dramatic music)

This deadly combination of flocking together and flying, is what’s threatening mankind.

I had to turn off the television before I could hear what I thought would be the story’s inevitable conclusion: the US needs to build a big fence to keep out foreign birds. Or do a lot more quail hunting.

It was the same week Dick Cheney accidentally shot his 78 year old friend, Harry Whittington, in the face while hunting quail, making Harry one of the first US citizens to be hospitalised with bird flu.

“The bird flu right in front of Harry”

Is there a word for the act of exterminating everyone of a particular Myers-Briggs personality type?

Just askin’