I recently finished reading “Mercy” by Jodie Picoult. It is a great book, but it made me quite depressed because I chose the wrong time to read it. The book is about a man convicted of murder after the mercy killing of his wife who in in the last stages of cancer. It was on the top of my “book to read” pile which is why I read it. At the same time my father died of cancer, so it was all a bit close to home. I finished reading it and then looked at the next book on the pile. It was called “1001 Places to see before you die”. I have moved it down the pile.

Psychologists are a weird bunch of people at the best of times, but what about one that studies the strange quirks of people. That’s exactly what Richard Wiseman does and his research methods are quite novel.
For example, if you want to know how honest people are, don’t ask them because they will all be as honest as the day is long. You have to test their honesty without them knowing. In one experiment he sent bogus refund cheques (claiming to be a refund on a piece of furniture the recipient never purchased) to two distinct groups of people. They were priests and used-car salesmen. Half of the used-car salesmen cashed the cheque, while half returned it saying there had been a mistake. What was the ratio for the priests? Exactly the same.
He holds fake séances and records how the people react to various “supernatural phenomena” and how even non-believers are fooled by simple conjuring tricks.
Interestingly, he explains how people can be persuaded to remember events that never actually happened. (I remember once having a discussion with some poms who swore blind that the characters in Captain Pugwash had names like “Roger the Cabin Boy”, “Master Bates” and “Able Seaman Stains”, when in fact it is an urban myth.)
He also discovers that women who have men write their personal ads have more success at attracting a man than if they wrote it themselves.
All of this and more is in a great book called Quirkology. Dr Wiseman also has a Quirkology website and be sure to watch the videos. “The Prediction” might keep you guessing for a minute or two.
Why the sudden fascination we psychologists? My daughter is studying to be one and my wife is just about to enrol in a similar course. I look forward to being there guinea pig.

I have just finished reading two books by Nick McCamley about bunkers and underground factories. Secret Underground Cities covers the history of the large underground military facilities that were built in England during WWII. I have visited the facility at Monkton Farleigh and once stayed in a house in Chislehurst that had an entrance to one of these facilities in its back garden. The book shows how largely these facilities were failures and cost huge amounts of money, often 20 times the original estimates. If nothing else it is a good study of poor project management. The book is not just dry history and contains the occasional anecdote. I particularly the story of the workers who clocked on when going underground, clocked off when they came to the surface, and were paid for the hours in between. Little did the timekeeper know, but some of these men had found another exit and were sneaking of to a second job for most of the day. Read the rest of this entry »

So says the plinth on which a statue of Captain Cook stands in Hyde Park in Sydney.
I have always had a difficulty with the concept (initially drummed into me at school), that Captain Cook “discovered Australia”.

For a start, the Kooris that Cook saw, had been on the land for at least 40,000 years, so it is a very Eurocentric concept of discovery.

But what about the Dutch who came before Cook?
By 1644, the Dutch had comprehensively mapped the Northern, Southern and Western coasts of Australia and the oldest European structures in Australia are the makeshift forts built by the survivors of the Batavia wreck in 1629. The place was even marked on the maps as New Holland.

Some argue that Cook “discovered the East Coast”. but given that the other three coasts had already been mapped, finding the fourth is hardly an achievement. Far from exploring, it seems as if Cook knew exactly where he was going. As soon as he left New Zealand he took a bearing that led him almost exactly to the most southern part of the east coast.

Read the rest of this entry »

The effective workings of a democracy is not limited to the putting a piece of paper in a box every four years. It involves having an apolitical public service that carries out its duty “without fear or favour” and this is particularly importrant for organisations such as the military, police and security organisations.
“Keeping the bastards honest” as the democrats used to say is also the role of various committees and independent bodies within the government.
However, in “Silencing Dissent” Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison argue that in the last decade these democratic institutions have slowly been eroded by the Howard Governement and how the situation has worsened since the Liberals gained control of the Senate. A number of writers are used throughout the book writing specialist chapters on the media, the Senate, the Military and the Public Service.
It seems the complete contempt for the rule of law expressed in incidents such as the “children overboard” affair, the AWB scandal and the illegal invasion of Iraq and just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course the greatest fear is that once these institutions have been eroded or politicised they will stay that way even if there is a change of goverenment. I sincerely hope this is not the case.
Silencing Dissent is published by Allen & Urwin. I highly recommend it.

When I was studying Microeconomics and Macroeconomics at university as part of my business degree I was always puzzled by the approach that this so called science took. It would use models that were based on unrealistic assumptions about a single product in a single market and then extrapolate the results to apply across the vast complexities of the real world. They would constantly speak of “the perfect market” in which no single buyer or seller could influence the market, there was no cost of entry to the market and all buyers and sellers had the same level of knowledge. They said the closest you got to this state was the stock market, by even a rudimentary glance slows that none of these conditions apply.
Clearly any science that bases its theories on such fantasies is bound to be a very flakey and non-scientific science. But it these theories on which our governments make decisions that influence the lives of millions of people every day.
In Debunking Economics, Steven Keen meticulously takes each of the modern dominating schools of economic thought and picks them apart exposing the gaping holes in the theories and the irrational adherence to easily disprovable concepts such as market equilibrium which prevade their beliefs.
It is not an easy book to read, as Keen makes clear at the start and in fact there are whole sections which he suggests can be skipped unless you are a glutton for punishment (I am).
A prior knowledge of the subject helped me through and for someone fresh to economics, the eye might glaze over quickly. This is unfortunate, because the average person in the street will probably take at face value the utterances made by expert economists on TV sound graps and believe what they say when their “expert” advice is based on a very flimsy foundation.
In this sense economics is very much like a religion. It adherents have rarely read the original texts or questioned their contents and simply follow the belief of their fellow economists.
If you can get through the slog of finishing this book it is well worth while. It is high time that the people running the world look for an alternative to neo-classical economics as an explanation for how the world works as its foundations are about as solid as a belief in virgin births and people rising from the dead. But then again , it explains why so many followers of conservative neo-classical economic are also devout Christians.

Dunking Ecomincs can be purchased on-line via http://www.debunkingeconomics.com/.

With all the time spent on planes during our holiday, I got a fair bit of reading done. Here is a rough outline of some of them.
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

Reading like a cross between Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams, this unique piece of fictional fiction (ie fictional stories of previously fictional characters) is a great read and refreshingly imaginative.

Fforde’s sequels include Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten, although when read in rapid succession (as I did), the ideas start to get a bit stale. Still I look forward to reading the latest offering (First Among Sequel) and the spin-off novels The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear

Plot Summary: (from Wikipedia)

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This is a beautifully written book and was the winner of the 1997 Booker Prize. It is set in India in the 1950s and gives a wonderful insight into life in that country in great time of transition.

Highly recommended. Plot Summary: (from Wikipedia)

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this tells the story of an intersexed person of Greek descent, living in America. The book is so well written that many who read the book think that Eugenides himself must be an intersex person, but this is not the case. He is simply an excellent researcher and brilliant writer.

Plot Summary: (from Wikipedia)

The Five People you Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom.

The premise of the book is that when you die, you meet five people who have changed your life, or whose live you have changed and they explain your life to you.

This is the only book I can remember that has made me cry. (I should never cut onions and read at the same time) I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Plot Summary: (from the author)

Giving three pages of text to each of 50 significant historical events, Days that changed the world by Hywel Williams is a great introduction to history. Starting at The Battle of Salamis in 480BC and going through to 11 September 2001, the book looks at the significance of many events not just battles and wars. The invention of the telephone, the publication of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, the OPEC oil price rises and the rise of Bill Gates all get a look in as well.

The book givea a small taste of many events, just enough to let you decide whether it is something you would like to read more about. I though I had a reasonable knowledge of history, but the section called “Tokugawa Ieyasu win the battle of Sekigahara” made me realised that I know nothing of Asian history.

The layout of the book is pretty straight forward and is practical rather than attractive. Regardless it is a very entertaining read, and since eacg section is only 3 pages, it is good for reading in situations where you don’t have time to complete entire chapters. Recommended.

I am not sure I have read any African literature before so Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto is not a bad place to start. The story centres on a small boy and an old man who are fleeing the war in Mozambique. They take shelter in a burnt-out bus and among the bodies they find the notebooks of one of the passengers.

The boy starts reading the notebooks to the old man and the book interchanges between the content of the notebook and what the other characters are doing. It all starts off OK, but the events in each world seem to get more and more unreal as the book progresses as if everything is in a dream.

The book is very well written, being tranlated to English from the original Portuguese and has some great pearls of wisdom and insights to life. I would not whole heartedly recommend the book, but I wouldn’t say it should be avoided either. If you are new to African literature and want something a little different, then this is the book for you.

NEO Power by Ross Honeywill & Verity Byth
Have you heard of NEOs? NEO stands for New Economic Order and is the type of person that this book is all about. I have always thought that there were two types of people in the world, those who split people into two groups and those who don’t. Honeywill and Byth belong to the former group, splitting the world into NEOs and traditionalists. NEOs have higher disposable income, spend more and savour the experience rather than the transaction. It is said a NEO would rather go to a small independent bookshop to savour the experience of talking about the book to the shop assistant than buy the book for a smaller price at somewhere like Borders. To my mind, the book doesn’t clearly define what a NEO is to begin with, but still manages to come up with an incredible range of facts and figures about them. In the end, you end up assuming that NEOs are simply people who fit into the category of NEO which is a little too self-referential for me. I have many NEO characteristics, particularly when it comes to travel and technology, however, since I don’t meet all the criteria I am clearly a traditionalist. The book may be handy for marketers who are trying to find a way of defining their market rather than the usual Gen X, Gen Y, age based criteria, and makes an interesting read. It is not a world changing book and if truth be told, I think someone who fitted all of the criteria for NEO would simultaneously tick all the boxes for pretentious wanker.