I’m still pretty incensed about Larry Niven’s comment (from my last blog), so thought I’d put together this necessarily sparse little primer regarding finances. Niven thinks that a major cost haemorrhage for the United States are the “illegals” using medical facilities. However, if I may, I’d like to present the following financial reality:

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing the United States $5,000 per second. $300,000 a minute. $18 million an hour. $432 million a day.(*)

In view of that, do you really think that “illegals” using US medical facilities and then nimbly skipping out sans payment are costing the United States even the equivalent of ONE DAY of warfare? Let’s say, yes. In fact, let’s be really hard-nosed about this and state unequivocally that such payment avoidance is costing the USA a whopping One Billion Dollars a year. We all agree that’s a lot, right? Sorry, that’s only a little more than two days’ worth of warfare.

Whether you like to admit it or not, the war is the elephant in the room that nobody, apparently, can see.

One week’s worth of warfare is about $3 billion. What would one week of warfare funding do for the US economy? Do you think hospitals could use $3 billion? Schools? Infrastructure? Social services? Remember, that’s just one week of fighting we’re talking about.

The obvious objection to this is that this is American money and thus America should be able to dictate how it spends its money and “illegals” “sponging” off the system are really not on that list at all. Okay, but guys, I’m sorry to break this to you, but it isn’t American money. That $432 million a day? It’s not coming from US coffers. A lot of it’s on loan from other countries. As of June 2007, the US owed Japan $644,000,000,000, China $350,000,000,000, the United Kingdom $239,000,000,000 (now, that one raises some interesting questions for me) and sundry oil-producing nations $100,000,000,000. This comes up to a total of $1.3 trillion, on figures that are nine months out of date.

(As a side-note, from someone outside the US completely, this devaluing of the US dollar is a very smooth, sneaky trick on the part of the Fed that essentially devalues the Treasury securities that the foreign governments own (like [US government issued IOUs] on the money countries have loaned the United States). In other words, the $644 billion that Japan now holds in Treasury securities/IOUs is not worth what they were a year ago. Nyuk, nyuk to you, creditor countries.)

And, amidst all this, Niven thinks medical costs are an issue?! I suppose it’s just as well that he’s a science-fiction author because at least he can appreciate the view from that other planet he happens to be on.

Please note that I’m trying very hard not to make any moral statements on any of this; I’m looking at this purely in terms of finances. If you were a person doing this, then you’d essentially be borrowing massive amounts of money from whomever you could, to throw parties for strangers, while ignoring your own livelihood . While the grass grows, the car goes unserviced, the children starve, the mortgage debt increases, and the house slowly decays into the earth, Larry Niven comes along and tells you that someone’s sneaking into your backyard and using your barbeque. Really, is that the most serious problem you have?

I’ve been following the writings of Paul Craig Roberts(**) on the nuts and bolts of the US economy (Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan), and what he says has been consistent over the past few years, and backed up by other articles I’ve cross-referenced. The savings of US citizens is in negative territory. Health, education, public services and facilities are suffering. Jobs in manufacturing and export-type industries are down. Jobs in service industries (which don’t translate into import dollars) are the only ones that are up, thus encouraging further domestic consumption, which encourages further imports, notably from China at this point. And, at the same time, the United States is massively building up debt to other countries to fund “initiatives” in other countries, and it doesn’t look like it’s stopping anytime soon.

Seriously, I wish you only had the medical costs of “illegals” to worry about. The truth is much worse … someone shoot off a probe and tell Larry.

---

(*) Actually, the Washington Post disagrees with me on this. It says that the cost of the war on Iraq alone is equivalent to $720 million a day, or $8,333 per second (as opposed to my $5,000). I’m just trying to be as conservative as possible, to short-circuit any accusations of exaggeration.

(**) I like reading Paul Craig Roberts because he’s a conservative, and is a lot more difficult a person for Republicans to argue with than a liberal. Roberts still believes in Reaganomics, so if he’s sending a warning to Republican administrations regarding fiscal responsibility, then I certainly perk up. I, on the other hand, am neither Republican nor Libertarian nor Democratic (all of which shade the right side of the political spectrum).

So there’s this group called SIGMA (the capitalisation is important, I’m sure), who are a bunch of science fiction writers making various suggestions to the US government on how to protect the nation. And one SIGMA member is Larry Niven. And Larry Niven says … oh hell, I just don’t have the calm state of mind necessary to paraphrase this. Just let me quote the National Defense Magazine:

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

Which just goes to show that Niven has never been in hospital recently. Even I, outside the United States, know how difficult it is to qualify for a doctor to even look at you without producing copious documentation and letters from your insurance company, saying the ocular once-over will be reimbursed. (Go visit Ashley Ladd’s blog, if you don’t believe me.) Does he honestly believe that so-called “illegals” really swan into hospital, get treated for spinal injuries, and then swan out again while agilely side-stepping the bill? “Illegals bankrupt Mayo Clinic!” Yeah, right. If I was in a foul mood, I’d sic Orcinus on these guys.

To his credit, Jerry Pournelle did comment that the suggestion was politically incorrect. Not morally reprehensible, mind you, just politically incorrect, thus confirming that form does indeed trounce substance in modern debate.

It does eventually get funny. Quoting from the magazine again:

… the writers used … [the 45-minute panel discussion] … to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.

Bwahahahahaha. And David Brin, who I kinda respected up till now, ranted on the “lack of funds being spent to support citizen reservists to back up the military” (right, just what the US needs, more guys with sanctioned phallic substitutes):

“It is impossible for you to succeed without us!” he shouted at the assembled officials, while banging his fist on the table and at one point jumping off his chair to wave a mobile phone in their faces.

Actually, I don’t disagree with what he’s saying, but, you gotta admit, the way he said it was less than … [*snort*] … rational. Put that together with the imagined antics of the rest of the esteemed group, and I can hardly keep a straight face as I type this.

Oh man, I love me some right-wing nutcases! Pity Heinlein is dead … that, ah, gentleman would’ve fitted right in.

(Via Schneier).

I had the pleasure of speaking with Sue Lange in the latest Radio Free Bliss podcast. Okay, I know it’s not April yet, but let me explain.

My original plan was to move to two interviews per podcast. I’ll be honest and say that this was a deliberate strategy in case something cropped up with an author and she couldn’t make it. Just as I was pondering this, Sue contacted a group of Broad Universe members on their use of technology in general, and podcasts in particular. We started a dialogue, and I told her what I was doing and she suggested hitting up the BU members for my interviews. Well, this fitted my revamped strategy perfectly! And, because she is such a gracious lady, she volunteered to go first (just like Ashley Ladd!), to reassure everyone else that an audio interview didn’t entail limb removal or any other sort of mutilation. Well, not most of the time, anyway.

As I was editing the final interview, I realised that a two-interview podcast would end up as a HUGE file, and would eat a lot of bandwidth for those listeners who download/will download the file for later listening. It would be an added pain if said listener/s had dial-up rather than broadband. So I’m breaking it up into individual podcasts again, although I’m still planning for two authors per month.

So that’s my grumble out of the way. What can I say about Sue Lange? She writes satirical speculative fiction, has held down a number of very interesting jobs (none of which I asked about in the interview!), and we had fun (I hope!) discussing labels in science-fiction, technology and Eastern Pennsylvania. Click here to go to the Radio Free Bliss page, and happy listening!

Sue Lange’s website: http://www.suelangetheauthor.com

It was something Ashley Ladd mentioned on March’s Radio Free Bliss podcast. (shameless plug!) She said she didn’t take a laptop anywhere to write unless she could be assured of a constant power supply. Man, does that eat me up too. I find I can’t write longhand/script anymore. After more than 20 years typing things, writing cramps the muslces in my hand if I attempt to write more than a paragraph. But there are times, usually when I’m waiting somewhere for the rest of the family to turn up, when I’d like to write something, maybe a scene that won’t leave me alone, or an outline for an upcoming story. What’s a geekgirl to do?

I have a nice little Toshiba laptop that weighs in at 1kg but the battery only lasts 2 hours, max. And I’ve been tyre-kicking the Asus Eee in the shops, but the keyboard isn’t made for a touch typist, much less a touch typist with long fingernails. I had two wonderful, full size portable keyboards for my Palm IIIx, but both of the Palms are now bricked. Still, the thought cropped up and nagged me, and that got me coming back full circle.

Here’s my personal opinion. If you need something to write on, with the way current laptop technology is going (or not, as the case may be), you’re really best off with a PDA and portable keyboard. The PDA’s battery life cannot be beaten, esp. when compared to a laptop. And there are all kinds of portable keyboards you can get for them according to your personal preference (and I am waaaay picky about keyboards), from physical links to infra-red to Bluetooth to projection. The money you spend on a PDA+keyboard is a fraction of what you would spend on a small laptop, and equivalent to what you’d spend on an Alpha Smart.

I don’t mean to demean Alpha Smarts. As I said in the podcast, many authors swear by them, and Ashley absolutely raves about hers. But if you’re after something in colour, and with a smaller form factor, I think the PDA set stacks up pretty well. The Alpha Smart Dana (which would be the only one I’d consider) starts from $350. You can get a decent colour PDA for less than $250 and keyboard from $20 to $250. I have an IR keyboard that I originally bought for my Palm m515 (battery life ~ several days). With a new AAA battery, and a driver download, I find I can use that same keyboard on my iPaq (battery life ~4 hrs; hmmmm. Still, it’s better and lighter than a laptop). So that’s what I’ll be using from now on when I’m waiting for the family to join me for lunch. It’s nice finding a new use for something I bought years ago. Long live technology … as long as it works!

Okay, I’ll admit I’m a teensy bit paranoid. I’ll also admit I love teh teknologee. And what I watched yesterday profoundly disturbed me. [EDIT: I tried to embed a YouTube video here, but I obviously haven't got it all worked out yet. Just go with the link; it will open in a new window.] Herewith, the Big Dog, developed by Boston Dynamics.

First, it’s kinda eerie watching a robot that resembles two skinny athletes stuck in a metal carapace with one of them constantly having to walk backwards, but if you can get past that, then the engineering is wondrous. That’s the only way I can put it. Having done Artificial Intelligence as part of my Computer Science degree, I have an inkling (or even a nano-kling, when I consider how out-of-date that little piece of education was) of what it would be like to design and program a robot such as the Big Dog and boy, am I damned impressed. Damned impressed! However … (if it’s a blog of mine, you knew there’d be an “however” there somewhere, didn’t you?). Well, let’s compare it to a real mule (the sterile horse-donkey hybrid) and see.

1. Cost. According to Boston Dynamics, the Big Dog was developed as a “mule” for soldiers, to help carry equipment in inhospitable terrain. I shudder to think how much the Big Dog cost to develop, and all that money for nothing more than a mule? I mean, come on people. You could drop actual mules into inhospitable terrain and have the animals function better than the Big Dog. How much does a mule cost? Maybe several hundred per animal (? I’ll admit I’m guessing here), almost self-replicating if you do your planning right. Whereas … well, I don’t know how much the Big Dog costs, but I doubt you’ll find it on special at K-mart for even a paltry $9,999.00, and they don’t make Tiny Puppies in their spare time.
2. Maintenance. The real mule needs some maintenance, of course, but it has pay-offs. You can form an affinity with the animal, and get it to exceed its capabilities for short periods of time if trust has been developed, for example. If push came to shove, you could keep your team alive by eating it. You can’t eat the Big Dog and it would probably be a bitch to maintain in the field. And who knows what its weight tolerances are?
3. Weight distribution. Did you notice the four packs of gear that the Big Dog was carrying? The things that make it resemble a mutant from “The Fly”? For optimal function, they would have to be evenly distributed over the robot. And if you’ve been anywhere near the military, you’d know that the weight distribution of your accompanying Big Dog would take precedence over even seeing to your own sustenance or hygiene needs, for example. Seems a lot of trouble to go to for nothing more than a hideously expensive robot. The real mule, admittedly, also needs some load-balancing, and I have no data on the relative load-balancing “intelligence” of a mule versus a Big Dog, so we might just call that one a draw.
4. The payload of the Big Dog. According to the video, the weight of the Big Dog is 235lbs (106.8kg) and its payload capacity is 340lbs (154.5kg). Mules weigh from 210kg to 400kg, according to Wikipedia. From a thread on the carrying capacity of mules:
   

   A light load for a mule is up to 230 pounds [100kg]; a medium load, 231-460 pounds [105-209kg]; and a heavy load, 461-690 pounds [209-314kg]. A mule can drag 3,450 pounds [1,568kg].

   So, right there, even allowing for a generous margin of error, a real mule trounces the Big Dog.

5. Noise. Yep, real mules make noise, but have you heard that buzzing, like a silencer on a chain-saw coming out of the Big Dog? I’m sure Boston Dynamics have done something with it since but, on a quiet day, I bet you’ll still hear it coming.

So, if it makes no sense to have a robot mule when there are cheaper, organic alternatives around, what could it possibly be used for? And the idea, even before I knew the Big Dog’s intended use or who funded Boston Dynamic’s research, flashed in my head as the video unrolled.

Imagine, if you will, hostile, enemy terrain. You want to clear the area, but you don’t want to use your own soldiers to do it. Wouldn’t it be so very very easy to equip a Big Dog with a ring of motion and infrared sensors, mounted weaponry on each corner, and snakes of ammunition in the packs below? Watch the Big Dog delicately manoeuvre over piles of urban-like rubble, and jump agilely over the equivalent of small walls, and tell me that I’m in Cloud Cuckoo Land on this one. If any civilians get killed in the cross-fire, the Big Dog has the advantage of being a robot, and you’re not going to put a robot on trial, are you? Besides, robots don’t take incriminating photos of other robots doing nasty things to people, or blog about it afterwards, so there’s another complication nipped in the bud right there. And robots, sure as hell, don’t do things like this. The solution to all this embarrassment is quite militarily elegant when you think about it.

It may be that I’m really reaching here because I’m such a science-fiction lovin’ geekgirl at heart and maybe I’ve watched the Terminator movies a few too many times for my own mental health, but the final frame really stayed with me for a while:

Big Dog is a product of Boston Dynamics, with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Have a nice day, folks.

We’ve recently moved our kids from the international school to one of the local ones. We did this for various reasons, including my dissatisfaction with the teaching qualifications (or lack thereof) of international school teachers, what I perceive to be a wishy-washy IBO curriculum framework, and lack of basic grounding in maths. I’ll be honest and say that our decision is not a common one, but both J and I are the result of strict schooling systems and, being hard science graduates, we value maths ability and literacy above all. Some may say we’re too obsessed about that, and they may be right, but that’s the way we are.

Anyway, the first parent-teacher meeting came up recently, and we attended it, and might I say right here that I get immense amusement and enjoyment out of interacting with the school prefects. Whenever there’s a meeting on, you’ll find the school buzzing with prefects, wearing their prefect sashes. You are always given a card or ticket or slip of some kind prior to the meeting and this is what the procedure generally entails:

As you walk through the school gates, the guards will wave you through with a cheerful word of greeting. After all, they’ve seen you come and go for the past few months. You wave back and walk through, ticket in hand. Now imagine you come to a long straight corridor, with a flashing sign reading “HERE!” at the far end. Imagine six older children spaced along this corridor, each asking to see your ticket, then directing you further along the same corridor. Imagine there is no other way to go along this corridor, except back the way you came, or onward to the flashing neon sign. Welcome to the role of prefects at a Singapore primary school parents’ meeting.

Next time, I’m going to throw a spaniard into the works(*) by looking puzzled and saying earnestly, “Are you sure? But someone told me I had to turn left here.” They’ll look serious, call a colleague over to adjudicate, have a hurried discussion, then just wave me along, and consider it a job well done. As Harry Harrison would say, it’s a win for all parties concerned — the prefects get to feel like they’ve averted a national disaster by guiding a greying woman along the right path, a post-event retelling will convince teachers of the utility of having prefects around, and I get secret amusement by watching the aching sincerity in their actions.

And J got caught out recently when ordering a coffee from his local beverage bar. There’s nothing we like more than watching B grade movies and yelling things at the screen. “No, don’t go in there!” or “Switch the light on, switch the light on!” and making gurgling and crunching sounds when someone gets crushed or eaten. B grade horrors are our favourite, and the kids bring all their pillows from their bedroom and form little enclosures on the sofa so they can hide behind them when something scary happens. It’s a fun night for all the family.

Well, anyway, J was waiting for his morning dose of Nepalese masala spicy coffee (I’m not kidding you), and watching the TV just near the bar, and he told me there was an absolutely great show on, with a Chinese group of paranormal investigators (he thought), and a giant snake rampaging through the city, eating everyone in its path. Doesn’t it sound like fun? Unfortunately, he was in “family B grade movie night” mode, which meant that when the snake happened upon an hysterical woman, he told her to run, and then made the obligatory sounds of sympathy when the snake got her. It was then he realised that he was now the focus of a dozen pairs of bemused eyes. “I forgot you weren’t with me,” he told me later.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Just smiled at them, collected my coffee, and continued on to work.”

And that’s how you make some fun in Singapore.

EDIT: (*) Yes, I know the term is really “spanner in the works”. I’m quoting from one of John Lennon’s books. Yep, he wrote a couple, and even illustrated them himself.

I was putting together a blog on a serious topic that I might post later on this month that touches briefly on education, and I happened upon a survey about the decline of literacy in Western English-speaking countries. Whenever a survey comes out about the decline of literacy in a country, you can bet that the newspapers will be full of the usual suspects. In this particular round of finger-pointing, computer games were singled out as particularly heinous.

What absolute poppycock! I am a firm believer in computer games. I’m also rather partial to comic books … ah, graphic novels. It was a computer game that gave The Wast the motivation to read, that tones his fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, that gave him ideas for artwork, that builds his expertise in problem-solving, and contributes to his decided preference for electronic (techno) music. No downsides here.

When we were talking to his teacher recently about him (at the parent-teacher meeting), she mentioned that TW tends to get perturbed when he gets something wrong, and she worries that he’s taking things too seriously. We told her he used to be a lot lot worse, and we mitigated the problem with computer games. She looked at us, confused, until we explained. In the past, every time he did something wrong, TW would burst into tears and be inconsolable for up to an hour. He regarded every mistake as some kind of personal slight and would obsess (hmmm, wonder where he gets that from?) for an entire day over every little error. J and I knew we had to do something about it. So, as one strategy, we started playing computer games.

Our deep affection for Hamumu software originated from this era. We downloaded Spooky Castle, a terrific FREE game that we recommend to anybody btw, and began playing it ourselves. It wasn’t the first game we’d ever played, but it was the first that caught TW’s eye. From watching us, he moved to co-controlling (”You control the firing button and I’ll move Bouapha around, okay?”), then he took over with us sitting by his side, then we moved away completely and let him play by himself. To our utter amazement, we discovered that he would attempt a difficult level time and time again, until he defeated all the monsters, usually without asking for help. Where was the young boy who collapsed into fits of tears whenever something went wrong? Here he was, quite serenely restarting levels and explaining his strategies for defeating the Super Zombies. Over the course of months, he finished Spooky Castle and we bought him Dr. Lunatic Supreme with Cheese and Kid Mystic, and the latest is that he’s bought Loonyland and the Legend of Sleepless Hollow with his own money and happily plays them all hours of the day. He writes stories around the games he plays (another firm favourite is the Czech game, Jets ‘n’ Guns Gold … good stuff!), creates his own comic books, and draws his own posters. It has helped his problem-solving and built up his persistence. In all, he plays computer games for around 4 hours a day, I think, although I haven’t taken that much notice.

By now, I’m sure I have many parents up in arms, but hear me out. Has his schoolwork suffered? He gets up at seven o’clock in the morning on weekends (on his own initiative) to complete his homework, sits down with me to discuss his worries over his Malay language classes, and gets straight As in class. So we see absolutely no need to restrict his game-playing in any way.

I’m not saying that this solution will suit everyone — every child is different. But that’s exactly my point. Just as I wouldn’t try to force every parent to sit their kids in front of computers for 4 or 5 hours a day, I also resent being told that game-playing is bad for every single child on Earth. These sweeping generalisations, and knee-jerk attempts at curtailing certain activities, cause more harm than they’re worth.

If I was in a particularly verbose mood, I could also launch into a discussion on the narrow-minded tactic of solving the symptom of a problem, rather than its root cause, and the beauty and creative energy from diversity, but I’m not up to it at the moment.

And lastly, speaking of games, rest in peace, Gary Gygax, from an old-time occasional D&D player. (And thanks xkcd. Great strip.)

This blog courtesy of The Volokh Conspiracy, entitled pithily “Don’t Sell Ads on Your Blog”. This is particularly apropos since Ashley Ladd was only musing on this subject mere days ago. Here’s the good oil from a bona fide professor of law, people:

…many homeowner’s insurance policies cover you for libel, invasion of privacy, and the like, including for the costs of defending the lawsuits. But they generally expressly exempt liability [my emphasis] that’s based on your “business pursuits,” which may include even those pursuits on which you make a pittance.

It appears this applies to blogs/sites that host ads and those that also just have a tipjar. According to the insurance companies, even a few pennies constitute “business” and thus whatever you pay in home insurance is disappearing into a giant hole, without the requisite protection should/when the need arise/s. This aspect of your insurance (and please check your policy carefully to be sure) is particularly pernicious if you’re blogging about anything controversial. (And, these days, who’s to say what’s controversial and what isn’t?)

The obvious next question regards “sponsored links”, like the type that appear next to many free web applications. But, from what I gather, if you aren’t making any money from it, then you’re okay. I’ve posted a comment to the Prof (Eugene Volokh) with this very question and will report back when/if I get an answer.

ASIDE: Y’know, until I checked on the Prof himself, I thought the site name (”Volokh Conspiracy”) was some kind of secret reference to a science-fiction passion of some sort. (Maybe I was thinking of Vogon? And every s-f alien name that ends in “kh”!) In any case, Professor Eugene Volokh is A Real Person, and that’s his real name. In fact, he even looks pretty normal, even though he teaches within that Babylon city of the USA, that pit of vice, that nest of vipers … I am, of course, referring to Los Angeles. (I must be getting old because professors are starting to look younger and younger nowadays.)

POSTSCRIPT: No, I don’t really think that of Los Angeles. In fact, it kinda reminds me of a grown-up Brisbane, Australia, which is where I spent many a halfway happy year. Didn’t appreciate being profiled at LAX by a roving Immigration officer, but that’s another story.

POSTSCRIPT^2: Considering I’m Malaysian by birth, it would be remiss of me not to mention the Malaysian General Election that was held over the weekend. Although the ruling party, Barisan Nasional, retained a parliamentary majority, that majority was slashed to a 40-year minimum. Malaysians are (rightly) sick of the continuing corruption, apathy and lack of initiative under the current administration, led by Abdullah Badawi. However, a brickbat also to Opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, who was quoted in the Singapore newspaper, “The Sunday Times”, as saying:

Why am I here in Singapore? Because I will not get fair treatment by the Malaysian press.

That would, honestly, be like a US presidential candidate praising the freedom of press in Saudi Arabia. I wish Anwar would stop sucking up to foreigners (he’s been doing it since Al Gore was VP) and get on with actually trying to improve Malaysia. Anwar’s due to move back into politics in mid-April, all coy remarks to the contrary. I haven’t forgotten previous comments he made while Deputy PM during Mahathir’s reign, so I’ll certainly be watching what he does in the future.

POSTSCRIPT^3: Prof answered everyone else’s questions, but not mine! Once more, teh romance author getz dissed! All I can say is, read your insurance contract.

Yes, I know. Three blogs in three days. Don’t get used to it, is all I’m sayin’.

I am interviewing the lovely Ashley Ladd in the March edition of RADIO FREE BLISS. I caught her at her local Borders, and was lucky to get half an hour of her time. We covered writing, Florida, and Alphasmarts. Please pop along to the Radio Free Bliss site for a listen.

Our household celebrates International Women’s Day faithfully every year. It’s one of our family traditions. When I met J, good socialist boy that he is, he surprised me with a dinner and present on our first 8-March together, and some treat has always been in the offing every year since. When Little Dinosaur came along, the tradition extended to her, and J is educating The Wast on the fact that he must also contribute in some way to the day. J also phones home to wish his mother on that day, although that won’t be necessary this year as she’s visiting with us at the moment.

So, what is this International Women’s Day? If you’re interested, there’s an entire site devoted to it. According to the site, it was originally the initiative of the Socialist Party of America in 1909 (back when America had a strong and viable Socialist Party, I suppose). It took off through Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland in 1911, before finding a firm home in Russia, which is where the date got finalised in 1917. It has spread worldwide since.

There are hundreds of events planned for IWD in countries all around the world, from sparkling-wine breakfasts to night-time concerts, so go have a look, participate, celebrate, maybe jot a note to plan something of your own for next year but, whatever you end up doing, HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY!