Though I’ve been wrestling the dreaded PowerPoint more than I’d like to recently, I haven’t posted for a while on data presentation. So I’m stealing this absolute gem that Environmental Graffiti ran under the title “World’s most expensive place to have sex” and Presentation Zen relayed under the title “When bar charts go bad”.
What I [...]
The bill allowing another US$ 50 billion of US taxpayer’s cash to be spent on HIV in developing countries has finally been given the thumbs up by the Senate. There’s good and bad drafted on to the PEPFAR legislation. The good is the dropping of a law which forbids foreigners with HIV from sullying the [...]
Bush may be quacking around with a limp, but the fundamentalists that support him are squeezing all they can out of these last, lame-duck months. For me, the first sign that US Christians were prepared to terrorise people into dropping contraception was this poster in the Tanzanian capital Dar Es Salaam. But it now looks [...]
I’m spending a few days making hay with friends in the hills near Geneva. I leave you with this priceless image courtesy of the rectal microbicide folks. What can Ana have been thinking of?
If you live your life among people whose lives, jobs or natural curiousity open their minds to the world, it is easy to forget how rigid some people are in their views. Today, I was sent a shocking reminder of the vitriol that comes with a small mind; it made me understand why some of [...]
The PEPFAR authorisation circus drags on. Senate leader Harry Reid is trying to force a vote on the bill. A handful of stubborn Republicans continue to stamp their feet about it. One of their worries is “mission creep” — PEPFAR money might be used to do things that are not 100% related to showing America’s [...]
“What motivated you to write this book?” interviewers like to ask. And I give all the worthy, change-the-world type answers, though what I really wanted to do was to write a cracking good book about sex and drugs that would make people laugh and perhaps save some of their tax money. Of course if I [...]
So a Russian girl is worth twice as much as a girl from north China, huh? And Malaysian girls are discounted fairly heavily. There are 460 million young adult women in China. That’s 60 times more “girls” that you’ll find in Malaysia (even if you count the Chinese Malaysians). My rudimentary understanding of economics suggests [...]
One of the things I noticed on the left hand side of the Atlantic was how many people took the dust jacket off my book before taking it out in public. No one wants to be seen in the company of “Whores” on the subway. But who is the word offending? Both left and [...]
Still on the topic of sensible policies to prevent disease among drug injectors, I’d like to pass on the idea of Wisdom reader Pierce Wetter. Pointing out that blackmailing brothel owners delivered very high levels of condom use in Bangkok’s brothels, Pierce suggests we use the same technique for drug dealers. Enlist them to sell [...]
