Just a meander

A brief post tonight while I am working on my next Greek travel post.

In Can New Zealand catch up to Australia?, Winton Bates discussed whether or not New Zealand could bridge the gap in living standards with Australia.

I fundamentally disagree with the argument that Winton quotes from Philip McCann; McCann essentially argues that it is all due to relative city size. I think that Winton is right to reject McCann, but then I disagree with Winton's own conclusions. As someone who had been interested in New Zealand economic development for many decades, I feel a response coming on!

On demography.matters, Scot's analysis in Type II Diabetes and India looks at the reasons why India has had such an explosion of this type of diabetes. It's not just a change in diet, but also the exact composition of the previous diet.

Staying with the demography.matters collective,  Canadian Randy McDonald in his live journal kindly picked up one of my Greek posts, Rethymno and the complicated history of Crete, although he has it firmly in his mind that I am a Paul rather than a Jim! In turn Hans Connor, a Canadian from Prince Edward Island picked the post up in Islands Nations in the Pre-National Age. Han's describes his blog, Nissology, in these terms:

Nissology is a fancy word for Island Studies. Nissology PEI is a blog about Island Studies and Island Issues from my own personal lens as an islander and a Prince Edward Islander with an academic interest in Nissology.

It looks an interesting blog.

Like many bloggers, I have been wondering about Pip Wilson's condition. Pip was savagely bashed back in August. I see from comments on one of Lynne's posts back in early October, GLOBAL EVACUATED, that he was slowly recovering then. At that stage Bird Jensen asked if anyone was interested in helping buy a laptop for Pip to help his brain recovery. I don't know what has happened since. Anybody else know?

   Just at present, my Train Reading has switched to Paul Kelly's The Hawke Ascendancy. It's not a bad read. You can expect comments on it because it bears upon some of the things that I have been writing about, including a recent post, Scoping the decline in organisational performance. Sadly, I haven't had any response to my request for comments on that post. Anybody care to comment?

Looking at my Train Reading posts, they essentially collapsed after I stopped travelling by train end December. That's actually a bit silly. The need remains independent of the mode of transport. Expect more here.

Well, that's all tonight!