I grabbed a copy of an odd little book yesterday – it’s called Books vs Cigarettes by George Orwell. It’s a collection of six essays. They’re all pretty good (Orwell is always pretty readable), but I don’t see a lot of logic in assembling these particular essays into one book (the title essay is excellent […]
I subscribed to Kristin Hersh today. That probably sounds a bit weird, so let me explain. If you’re not familiar with her, Kristin is pretty much a genius. She started making music over 20 years ago with her first band, Throwing Muses. The Muses have made around 7 records in that time, plus she has […]
Actually, when I first typed that, it said ‘shameless elf promotion’, which would probably be better… In any case, I’m giving a talk on the evening of May 25th as part of Brisbane’s Innovation Festival. It’s going to cover fairly basic stuff, like what innovation is and why it is critically important especially in tough […]
In my previous incarnation as a blogger I mostly wrote about entertainment-related things. But one of the themes that quickly emerged was a discussion of the various projects that my cats got up to – including building a particle accelerator, starting a management consulting company, computer repair (see above) and making a trebuchet. I probably […]
I was working through one of my papers today with Neil Kay, and we had this discussion: Neil: I wrote a paper which essentially says ‘I’m not sure if dynamic capabilities exist, but if they do, they probably look like this’. Me: So dynamic capabilities are the Higgs boson of economics? Now I guess we […]
After John & I yelled at him for an hour last friday, our PhD student Sam MacAulay was still gracious enough to continue talking with me. In the course of discussion he asked a good question – what actual impact complexity science has had on management studies? We talked about it for a while, and […]
When I started university I thought I would be a math major. I had always been pretty good at math, and, just as importantly, I had always enjoyed it. Things went well reasonably well until the second semester, when we started working with n-dimensional matrices. Because I couldn’t visualise n dimensions, I had real problems […]
One week after I told my class that I thought that either China or India would build infrastructure for hydrogen fuel cell cars before any of the western countries did, the New York Times reports that China is trying to become the world leader in electric cars. So I was close! My reasoning was that […]