Leonard Cohen - Who by Fire

Sunday afternoon chillout.

How many books are there in the whole wide world?

129,864,880

communitychannel

I'm a huge communitychannel fan.

Blogging Heads TV

This is a great video blog site I recently discovered, although it's been around for about 5 years according to Wikipedia.

http://bloggingheads.tv/

Tyler Cowen's conversation with Peter Singer is interesting and sometimes amusing. Cowen's personal assessment of Peter Singer is that he's in a long and great tradition of a (secular) Jewish moralist asking for a better world.

You're a kind of secular Talmudic scholar of utilitarianism trying to do mishnah on the classic notion of human wellbeing and bring to the world this idea that we all have obligations to do things to make other people better off.

Singer is rather tickled by the idea.

Cowen also links on his blog to a great Esther Duflo TED talk.

Laibach - Across the Universe

A chillout for the Sunday afternoon blues.

Bubbles update

Courtesy of Fumiko (doraemon), via Wikipedia.

Futher to my May post on bubbles, Jim Chanos is still a strong China Bear [businessspectator.com.au]. There are plenty who don't agree, like Aussie journalist Michael Pascoe, who paints markedly different China picture in his recent SMH piece.

With the Aussie dollar approaching parity with the Greenback, I really don't know who's right in this debate anymore. But it sure is a fascinating ride!

TIME's 100 best English-Language novels

TIME critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present.

Hunter Valley Coal Mining

In today's SMH, a story titled Rush to introduce Hunter coal dust monitors:

HARD on the heels of its decision to block the Bickham coalmine, the state government is to suspend planning controls for a series of coal dust monitoring stations in the Hunter region, expediting their construction.

Interesting, but there still seems to be a question mark about whether they're going to be monitoring for the sufficiently small dust particles.

See my earlier post on the Four Corners documentary about Hunter Valley coal mining.

Euro bailout. Now banking risk morphs into geo-political risk

Good explanation about economic troubles in Greece and Europe and the bailout.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2010/05/euro_bailout_now_banking_risk.html

Cool zoom

This is cool - zoom from coffee bean size down to a single atom!

https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/