Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Horizon of Predictions: Princess of Payne

Take the epigraph Conrad gave to his 1913 novel Chance, from Religio Medici: “Those that hold that all things are governed by fortune had not erred, had they not persisted there ..."


For the well-versed in behavioural science, Melbourne Cup is poetry in motion

MICHELLE Payne has created history at the 2015 Melbourne Cup by winning on outsider Prince of Penzance.Michelle Payne with her brother Stephen [ no relation to Trevor Payne]
MICHELLE Payne has created history at the 2015 Melbourne Cup by winning on outsider Prince of Penzance. Like Media Dragon, Payne is the youngest of more than 6 (six) children whose family is steeped in racing - [Youngest of 10 children]
Her brother Patrick was a Cox Plate-winning jockey, while her brother Stevie was the strapper for the horse and picked barrier one. Payne was having her second ride in the great race.

For the record, the victorious horse was the 100-1 shot Prince of Penzance, whose form was nowhere near as bad as all that. But this race will be remembered for a person rather than a horse, and that person is of course Michelle Payne. Get Stuffed

When it comes to making predictions, most experts are no more accurate than a dart-throwing chimp. But forecasting can indeed be taught... On the Horizon  »

Elements of racy and Good  Writing


JSTOR Daily offers a fresh way for people to understand and contextualize their world.  

This project proposes a comprehensive mapping of contemporary geographies of knowledge. Information is the raw material for much of the work that goes on in the contemporary global economy. As such, it is important to understand who produces and reproduces, who has access, and who and where are represented by information in our contemporary knowledge economy.

Time to swim at the dam and soccer time at Capertee
Shapingtomorrow.com Virtual Reality

One day in 1987, Patricia Highsmith, recently diagnosed with cancer, toured a crematorium. She put her hand inside a furnace, feeling "the warm of that retort" Highsmith 

Photo by Andreas Cappell/Flickr
His first pass at the tweet went like this: “My writing improved when I learned the difference between reports and stories.”When she was a fellow for Poynter this summer, Gurman Bhatia emerged from Roy Peter Clark’s office one day looking very excited. And she was, she told me then, because she’d just watched Poynter’s senior scholar for reporting, writing and editing compose a tweet

Peggy Guggenheim is known for her wealth and sex appeal. Biographers overlook the intelligence of one of the great heroines of 20th-century art Peggy ... »


The Saker interviews Cynthia McKinneyVineyard of the Saker ...Anyone who can make Rumsfeld squirm is worth listening to


Along with 60 other Australians, mostly more eminent than me, ( John Quiggin) I’ve signed an open letter to world leaders calling for a moratorium on new coal mines and coal mine expansions. The letter focuses particularly on Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine but it’s important to be clear that this is part of a global movement to stop new coal mines everywhere in the world.


EU takes member states to court over ‘bail-in’ laws to protect taxpayers Telegraph. Ah, that pesky problem of curtailing national sovereignity.



That new book Winter is Coming has the subtitle Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must be Stopped.  In addition to its critique of Putin, there is a good deal of political economy in this book, including some hypotheses which are worthy of further investigation.  For instance:
Unfortunately, Putin, like other modern autocrats, had, and still has, an advantage the Soviet leadership could never have dreamed of: deep economic and political engagement with the free world.  Decades of trade have created tremendous wealth that dictatorships like Russia and China have used to build sophisticated authoritarian infrastructures inside  ...