Grading

We’ve just registered Chatterboy for his first soccer season – he’ll be in the Under 6s. We thought long and hard about it, as we’re not sure he’s going to enjoy it at the beginning, but think it’s really important to learn a social sport that you can continue throughout life.
So we found a few [...]

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The greater good

We’ve been watching a depressing British TV show called Bodies – set in a hospital with an incompetent senior obstetrician. The storyline of the first series follows the various ways different doctors deal with the incompetence – from ignoring it, to trying to stop it happening subtly, to reporting it and then being suspended and [...]

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Mrs Macquarie’s Chair

This morning, first thing, I cycled around to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and back. The city was just waking up, with volunteers out early getting ready for various Australia Day events. There were bunches of volunteers meticulously sweeping the streets ready for the Australia Day 10k wheelchair race.
There were queues of vintage cars patiently waiting to turn [...]

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Pohutukawa

My grandmother had a wonderful tree in her garden – a pohutukawa.  The pohutukawa tree, native to the north of New Zealand, is the tree I would design, if I was given the job.
It grows along the edges of the sands of most beaches in its range. It branches very low (as you can see [...]

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Another Green meme

This time from Jennifer (ponderosa).
Think of the plants (trees, flowers, etc) which grow within 50 yards of your home. Which is your favorite?
Port Jackson Fig, Ficus rubiginos. This is a big tree (as tall as our three story house) that grows in our very tiny backyard (big enough for two cars to park in if [...]

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Workforce participation

A friend sent me a link to the productivity commission’s latest survey on workforce participation rates. It is a look at different age groups, and their degree of participation in the workforce.
 A few interesting trends:

the participation rate of men at nearly all ages has dropped fairly uniformly over the last 25 years – by roughly 5% [...]

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The Green Meme

From Charlotte via (un)relaxed dad:
. What do you for the birds and the bees? According to the report in Newsweek, we need to plant a pollinator garden to counteract the effect pollution, pesticides and habitat destruction are having on birds, bees and insects. Bees, for instance, like yellow, blue and purple flowers.
Well, living in the inner [...]

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Cycling to work

I cycled to work today, which is not that much of an achievement, given its 4.5 km, but I still feel proud. A few observations:

there are heaps more people cycling to work these days – I reckon twice as many as when I last cycled to work more than a year ago
it’s still really annoying [...]

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Book Review: The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

Today’s book review is The complete Polysyllabic Spree – the Diary of an Occasionally Exasperated But Ever Hopeful Reader, by Nick Hornby (interestingly only available on Amazon UK, not US). This is a collection of Nick Hornby’s monthly essays on the books he’s read that month, from Believer magazine (a US magazine which I had [...]

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Insurance – public and private

I went to a fascinating talk on insurance risk from a former Florida insurance actuary recently. He was talking about the public policy issues involved in insuring people against natural catastrophes.
Basically, insurance fulfils three main functions in the economy:

transferring risk from the risk averse
providing capital in the event of risky events
(and this one is often [...]

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