Steve Bowbrick takes a sensible line on what works in weblogs in his Guardian column. I hadn’t previously encountered his own weblog, which is well worth a read.
News organisations are generally bad at reporting stories that develop over long periods of time. But few issues are more important than the so-called demographic time bomb. Today’s Financial Times provides valuable insight into what changing demography means in Japan, which faces the most dramatic changes over the next decades.
“The Keidanren calculation only serves to highlight the scale of Japan’s challenge. Its model assumes that Japan will have to admit millions of foreign workers to make up for a 6.1m shortfall in the workforce by 2025. Japan’s history suggests it is far from ready even to contemplate such an influx.”
Kevin Drum has an excellent, concise demolition of the creationists, provoked by the Dini affair at Texas Tech.
“It’s the collapse of inconvenience. It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn’t realize it,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University, in a worthwhile addition to the growing canon of writing on Google.
I asked a friend who would know whether Bloggus Caesari was a daily translation or a sustained work of the imagination. Imagination, he replied, noting that you can tell because Caesar always wrote in the third person, not the first. He also provided a helpful rule from his school days: “When doing unseen translations of Caesar, if you don’t know a word and it is lower case it is a type of siege equipment, and if it is upper case it is a Belgian tribe.”