Sorry for the paucity of posts – real life, and specifically preparation for another semester of teaching, intrudes!
However, I’m excited that Larvatus Prodeo has been revived for the 2013 federal election, and I’ll be contributing posts there for the next few months.
I may still have the occasional post here for material that doesn’t fit on LP, however.
Well, thanks to Russia’s corrupt cops and dodgy insurance, we have an abundance of footage of the most damaging (and spectacular) meteorite impact in at least a century:
This kind of headlinedrives me more and more up the wall:
Gillard’s school plan a costly failure
A $16 million federal Labor commitment to stem the shortage of maths and science teachers by fast-tracking bankers, accountants and engineers into classrooms has been an expensive failure with just 14 participants recruited.
I agree that it didn’t work. But costly?
This is a simple one – but, nevertheless I reckon it could be very useful.
Taking the bins out, and bringing them back in again, is a pretty simple task, one that children the developed world over are tasked with. It’s also a pain in the neck if it’s cold, raining, you’re away on bin night, or worst of all if you forget to take the bins out!
It’s a simple enough task, in fact, that it just screams out for a robot to do it.
Warning: this post is about a new type of gun. I’ll explain what it is and how it works before discussing the moral questions it poses.
Firing a rifle accurately, even over relatively short ranges, isn’t easy. Firing a rifle accurately over long ranges takes a certain amount of talent and a great deal of practice.
In Part 3, I noted that one of the most time consuming tasks in the modern kitchen is simply moving objects from place to place; the utility of high-performance but specialized kitchen tools is limited by the time it takes to retrieve them from the cupboard, set them on the bench, wash them, then put them away.
Self-described “transit geeks” from around the world are starting to think about driverless cars, and what they might mean for their vision of a less car-dependent world. Ron Kilcoyne, manager of a public transport system in Eugene, Oregon, has some interesting points to make, though not ones I would all necessarily accept.
As the statistics from part 1 showed, cooking is the most time-consuming part of housework. While cookery can undoubtedly be enjoyable, but for a lot of people, a lot of the time, it’s a routine chore that they would prefer to avoid, or at least minimize the time spent on the boring parts.
Outsourcing the work
The housework survey from the introductory post in this series didn’t break down cleaning tasks other than washing dishes. In my experience, keeping the floor clean is a not insubstantial fraction of that. But, perhaps, not for too much longer:
John Quiggin’s excellent essay The 15-Hour Week argues (to simplify what was already a somewhat hand-waving argument) that foreseeable economic growth and policy decisions distributing that growth evenly enough, the entire world’s population would need to work only 15 hours per week to enjoy a comfortable standard of living in perhaps 2060 or so.