A Saturday Miscellany

* A fascinating story on what it is like to visit North Korea was on Foreign Correspondent this week. If you missed it, there's repeat at 1pm on ABC TV today, and the story should be available on broadband at the link above sometime soon.

* The SMH reprints a David Brooks piece from the NYTimes on his understanding of human nature and why it means school based sex education doesn't work. While his assessment seems plausible, it also seems to me to have fairly pessimistic implications for how you change an individual's perceptions and behaviour. It's an interesting read anyway.

* Michael Duffy has an interesting column in the SMH too, talking about why experts can be bad at forecasting. Two thoughts:

1. If correct, it's a good sign for the future of blogs, as we are all qualified to guess abut the future;

2. Does this also explain why Michael Duffy wrote a book that was half about the political future of the self -detonating Mark Latham?

* They use about 8 tonnes a year of human antibiotics on farmed Tasmanian Salmon? Does not sound like a good idea.

* Matt Price confirms that the puzzlement political journalists have always expressed about Kevin Rudd's public popularity is due to their knowing him better than you and I:

And let me let you in on an insider's secret. Most of us know, or feel we know, Rudd too well. He's a decent and intelligent fellow who has nonetheless grovelled and scraped and dissembled to get to the top, earning the wrath of colleagues and the suspicion of journalists. While the rest of Australia falls under the spell of Kevinism, his stratospheric personal ratings seem faintly surreal to those acquainted with the baby-faced Messiah, and that includes many Labor MPs.

* If you have missed it from Boing Boing, you really should spend the 5 seconds it takes to watch the dramatic chipmunk (even though it's a prairie dog):