Also, a few other things

If anyone is in the market for a worthy charitable cause to donate to, may I commend to you the idea of deworming the world, which the evidence seems to indicate is ridiculously cost effective - perhaps the most cost-effective way of doing good for humanity, depending of course on your utility metric.

Personally, I'd like to see a charity that funds studies on the costs effectiveness of various forms of charity and aid. Would that count as a meta-charity?

Should your preference run to philanthropy more localised in its effects, and you are a fellow Sydneysider, then ROAM communities are an excellent choice. I have previously mentioned them in relation to Mental Health First Aid Certificates. ROAM's main focus is helping the chronically mentally ill, through traditional mental health nursing services like psychotherapy, but also in other ways such as brokering accomodation, educational and vocational placement, lifestyle advice and assistance, such as exercise classes (which are known to be a highly effective), and other such practical and effective aid. The organisation started as a project to find housing for some mentally ill homeless people, and has grown from there. Disclaimer: I am a client of ROAM, via my doctors at the BMRI. Toby and James are awesome guys, for whatever that's worth.

I'd like to formally welcome two excellent additions to my blog roll. Over at the insipring Meteuphoric, I may get around to posting a response in the ongoing debate on vegetariaism - or I may not, since doing so smacks a little of petty "Someone is Wrong on the Internet" oneupmanship. As for Capers of the Mind, I trust it will go from strength to strength after its promising introductory post, because I am intimately acquainted with the author's status as a philosopher of the first-rank (despite, or perhaps because, he has never come close to anything resembling the study of philosophy in a formal academic context).

On the topic of my blog roll, are you all reading Marginal Revolution yet? It's really very good - in fact it may well be at its best the more it strays outside the economics professors' natural home territory of the GFC and real aggregate demand shocks and the like. As a non-expert it's a little hard for me to say.

OK, enough sucking up to my fellow bloggers. I'm off to draft yet more posts of my own - hopefully, I can build up a buffer and thus get a regular schedule going here.