Heatwave

The weather folk have promised us the hottest week in more than a hundred years. Today, and the next few days will all be over 40c. And it's my first week back at work after a couple of very relaxed weeks. But the last two days at work have been strangely energized. Things seem to be going pretty well at work, and Andrew, who runs our Economics team, and who filled in for me while I was away was perfectly suited to the challenges that came up.

Andrew is a true gentleman. Superficially we're very different - I consider myself an introvert, but he's much more reserved; there's at least a decade between us; and he's much more risk-averse than I am. It's not so obvious that our academic backgrounds are different - he's an economist; my background is in philosophy.

Is that so different? Not so much. I consider myself a belated child of the enlightenment and that Adam Smith is just a quantitative utilitarianist. I can never totally accept the utilitarian vision, being tempered by both Rawls and a belief in some values (like equity) that aren't easy to nail in a utilitarianst sense.

Even putting aside the obvious, Melbourne similarities we share (especially a shared love of Carlton Football Club), we've got a fair bit in common. Andrew is passionate about the rights of refugees (sisn't see that coming) and about the people in his team.

F was waving her new camera about last night, and encouraged me to pretend the camera wasn't there as I wailed about some misfortune at work. The result?

But today had its highlights. A conspiracy-theory enriched journalist we deal with all too often made the mistake, while interviewing a colleague, of narrowly avoiding the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy, but still drawing an analogy between something my colleague had done with the Holocaust. Colleague, who is deeply passionate about making the world a better place through his work, was staggered. Phone calls to editors etc later, and today journo makes abject apology, which is only as it should be.

Give me children to deal with before some journalists - at least they're either honest, or their dishonesty is so humorously self-serving ("I gave you the big slice") that they might as well be.

This particular journo thinks that if he's found out a fact, it must be a dread secret that is the edge of a deep, dark conspiracy. If other people find it, it was probably deliberately leaked to them by somebody perpetrating the conspiracy. A few people have suggested that this is the result of said conspiracy theorist being an only child, but I have no point of reference here. I don't know whether I even know any only children.