First Dog on the Moon writes a love letter to Australia: Hello Australia, I have always loved you. There isn’t space here to list everything as Australia takes up a lot of space. I love standing still in the bush when it is pushing 40 degrees… I love watching Test cricket. With the sound on the TV off and the ABC radio on… Geez we can be funny buggers though. I love that. And the way we talk, I reckon if the science could work out a way to weaponise an accent, Australian voices could blast a hole in the moon. Yeah nah ...

It’s the end of another week, and then I look at the calendar and realise it’s the end of the month. But then it’s not only that, it’s the end of March, marking the end of the first quarter of the year - yes, I think like a banker now - and in a way it’s what marks for me the end of the summer, where you know now that the seasonal change is truly underway and the hope for warmer days fade. ...

There’s an instinct that seems to drive people to want to be with a specific other person; “pair bonding” as the scientific term might go. It’s a natural instinct that you can explain away as pure biology, but of course humans have coopted this notion into something else entirely and put our own complicated spin on things. Finding “that special someone” is therefore a fairly uniquely human thing to do - the idea that there’s one person that’s specifically right for you, someone that meets the criteria of an ideal partner - sufficiently similar, yet sufficiently different to keep things interesting; sufficiently near, speaking the same or a similar language, of the same age… on a rational level, that’s a fools game. ...

I’ve started listening to podcasts recently, and one that seems to work really well for me is the Harvard Business Review Ideacast. Ok, it’s a little bit B-School, a little bit world-of-work, but it’s surprisingly interesting despite the apparently staid context in which it exists. Here’s some interesting episodes I’ve listened to recently, along with ideas in them: [The “Jobs to be Done” theory of innovation ](https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/12/the-jobs-to-be-done-theory-of-innovation.html)It's an idea that’s come up on my radar recently, but I had assumed it was a new spin on the Getting Things Done productivity method. Turns out, it’s a different way of looking at how people interact with things and companies. In brief, when you’re buying a product (or a service) from a company, it’s not because you want the product, it’s because there’s a proverbial “job” to be done - whether that “job” is satisfying your hunger, or getting to a place; framing it that way rather than buying a burger or jumping in a cab lets you identify better what the actual activity being performed is, and this helps identify areas and ideas for innovation. ...

Today marks the end of the Obama presidency, and in some ways, it seems to mark the end of an era - or perhaps more pessimistically, the respite from the decline of an era that effectively ended with the events of September 11th, 2001. Perhaps we’d been to unwilling to admit it over the last 8 years, but since 2001, the United States of America turned from being a leader for the multicultural, involve-everyone-everywhere sentiment to the navel-gazing self-interested country that its enemies had always accused it of being; where George W. Bush led the country into misadventures and tipping the delicate balance that had held for the 90s in the Middle East into the dumpster-fire, basket-case of a region it seems right now. ...