Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, March 4th, 2011 - 21 comments
One of the names that the self-inflated blogs who consider themselves to be the “taste police” give us is the unimaginative juvenile name of The Stranded. Typically this is when they are writing a silly post trying to tell us why we should think like them (I guess everyone is entitled to a unrealistic dream). Anyway I thought I’d give them some real bad taste to moan about in a Friday Fun post (warning – written in the Cactus Kate style).
Written By: - Date published: 11:33 am, February 28th, 2011 - 4 comments
They are doing pretty well on restoring the power. With the exception of some small outlying areas, along the strike line and the CBD most of the city has power again as you can see from this chart. At a guess it will probably take some time on the major remaining areas simply because these are the areas that had the most vertical acceleration during the quake.
Written By: - Date published: 3:17 pm, February 25th, 2011 - 36 comments
It is with a great deal of reluctance that I have to actually support Whaleoil on a post about a rather obnoxious website blaming the Christchurch quake on ‘depravity’. He actually proposes a course of action that has a good chance of getting rid of this offensive site. Of course being Whaleoil some of his other statements are just stomach churning.
Written By: - Date published: 9:51 am, February 24th, 2011 - 36 comments
When I looked at Geonet this morning, I found this image mapping the velocity of the earth movements in the 6.3 magnitude Lyttelton quake. It is astonishing.
With ground accelerations of up to 220% of earths gravity measured near the epicentre and 80% of gravity around the central business district it would have clearly exceeded the design specifications of many buildings.
Written By: - Date published: 3:36 pm, February 11th, 2011 - 35 comments
Archiving websites is a bloody good idea because the public debate and emerging history of NZ society is shifting more and more into these electronic media. So I asked NatLib about one of those political blogs that disappeared from the blogosphere – KiwiBlogBlog. It still exists…
Written By: - Date published: 12:27 pm, February 11th, 2011 - 7 comments
Skeptical Science has posted a very interesting video with Dr. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg running through the current known climate science and associated risks on oceans. Our civilizations have both direct and indirect dependence on oceans. The implications of destroying the ecosystems there is probably going to impact earlier than most of the other effects of our current unrestricted CO2 emissions.
Written By: - Date published: 2:27 am, February 3rd, 2011 - 13 comments
Periodically I run a scan to identify network parasites that are sucking up our bandwidth and processing resources in excess. Of course I leave the benign parasites that provide search facilities alone. But I stomp on the nasties.
Tonight the biggest parasite appears to have been a New Zealand government department – the Department of Internal Affairs.
Written By: - Date published: 1:34 pm, February 2nd, 2011 - 12 comments
Darn, we sneaked past the 7000th post without my noticing at the end of last month. We passed 6000 posts on August 25th last year, so we did that last thousand posts in 160 days. The comment growth is pretty strong as well.
The site is also now iPad friendly. Have a peek at the screenshots.
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, January 19th, 2011 - 74 comments
In 1951, New Zealand temporarily became a police state. Civil liberties were curtailed, freedom of speech denied, and the Government used force against its own citizens. This film tells the story of the infamous lockout of waterside workers and the nationwide strike which followed. The film won Best Documentary and John Bates was named Best Director, Documentary, at the 2002 New Zealand Television Awards.
Written By: - Date published: 2:47 pm, January 6th, 2011 - 30 comments
Over recent years the anonymous editorials in the NZ Herald have become increasingly variable. Some have been written by authors who I’d disagree with their ideas, but who clearly have examined the topic in enough depth to be able to argue for and against alternate ideas to arrive at their editorial judgments. Then there are others that have clearly been written by authors with little understanding of the topic and are simply coded dog-whistles unworthy of the editorial page. I have a look at one of the latter.
Written By: - Date published: 1:14 pm, January 2nd, 2011 - 25 comments
Why in the hell should I carry a passport or a birth certificate for the benefit of the state? There is no reason that I can see, but at least one DHB thinks that I should because it makes their life easier. If they want proof of citizenship or resident status then they should be prepared to pay for it themselves rather than throwing the onus to prove status onto us. If the government wants to introduce a requirement to carry identity papers then they should debate this in the political arena rather than trying to sneak it in through the back door.
Written By: - Date published: 4:44 pm, December 31st, 2010 - 9 comments
The slow round of extended family xmas locations has this year located Lyn and I in Christchurch. Which has made for an interesting boxing day with a certain amount of rocking that is not attributable to the results of the gorging the day before. I’ve been in earthquakes before. But never in quite the series […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:04 am, December 28th, 2010 - 32 comments
In 2007, Charles Stross a noted science fiction writer wrote a great essay on the known limits to space (without finding some kind of magic toolkit). This is worth reading in its own right. But it also implies why trashing our current life support system through laziness or stupidity is such a silly idea.
Written By: - Date published: 4:29 pm, December 26th, 2010 - 20 comments
Chinese manufacturing and state support is transforming the cost structure of solar technology. This in turn is helping to put in power support for the emerging use of wireless technologies in the developing world. This helps to ensure that less dirty carbon emitting technologies are not used in the developing world.It is hard to see a downside to this state initiative because it makes solar tech cheaper and more available earlier rather than later.
Written By: - Date published: 10:07 am, December 25th, 2010 - 37 comments
Kiwis frequently like leading the world in the many ways that outmatch our ‘weight’. I wish we weren’t leading the world in this one.
We have one of the worst youth unemployment rates in the world as The Economist shows.
Written By: - Date published: 7:32 am, December 19th, 2010 - 19 comments
NIWA has had some of their data, methodology, and results checked by the aussies. As expected by anyone who knows something about the subject, they came back with substantially the same result. For the others like the nutters at the CSC and their political allies – well I can just see another conspiracy theory arising…
Written By: - Date published: 6:01 pm, December 18th, 2010 - 25 comments
Phil Twyford is selected as the new Labour candidate for Te Atatu from a strong field.
Phil Twyford is a formidable campaigner, as I know from past experience. I almost pity whatever sacrificial lamb that National put up in that electorate.
Written By: - Date published: 10:54 am, December 18th, 2010 - 12 comments
Ok this is seriously weird, too cool, and as bad as the elevator music is. But at least it is not John Key mangling songs with syncophantic radio announcers declaring it to be music.
The band running on iPad’s and iPhone – North Point’s iBand
Written By: - Date published: 9:49 pm, December 13th, 2010 - 32 comments
How journalists make a hypothetical question based on a nutty claim and manufacture a sensational headline out of it. The really sensational headline is that western journos appear to have picked up the story from that world renowned nutter Anthony Watts raving about a fictional war between Russia and Poland. It looks like you can only rely on hard checked science news from some of the rational blogs, and a Chinese news agency…
Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, December 12th, 2010 - 26 comments
A documentary that aired in Sweden last night. Fascinating. The origional can be viewed here. The following is from YouTube as it is more likely to handle the load.
Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, December 8th, 2010 - 27 comments
A fascinating side-effect of the attacks at various levels on Wikileaks in the last week has been a demonstration of exactly how tough it is to take out a site without widespread support from people on the net.
renesys.blog has a excellent post looking at what has been happening to keep Wikileaks alive on the net.
Written By: - Date published: 1:21 pm, December 8th, 2010 - 10 comments
ISOC – the internet society that is probably the closest thing that the internet has as a governing body said “Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence, and appropriate actions taken to pursue and prosecute entities (if any) that acted maliciously to take it off the air.”
We can probably expect that domain to be back on the air shortly.
Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, December 8th, 2010 - 50 comments
Now that the Swedish prosecutors have finally given the British police a document that they can work with, Assange turned himself in, and has gone before a British court on the extradition request from Sweden. The court has remanded him without bail. I have already commented on exactly what I think of the charges – […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:28 pm, December 4th, 2010 - 218 comments
The Wikileaks release of US government diplomatic wires is less interesting to me than the behavior of the Sweden’s director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny. Her charges and actions against Julian Assange indicate that she is driven more by the politics than respect for the law. I fail to see why Interpol is involved for such a minor charge. Apparently the charge is question is something pretty weird called “sex by surprise”
Written By: - Date published: 8:47 am, December 1st, 2010 - 10 comments
There has always been an inherent design conflict in giving widespread access to information. On one hand it allows better service for people and organisations. On the other hand it means that less material can be kept secret because giving more people access to information and more opportunity to whistleblow when people see a problem or an ethical conflict. That has always been the inherent conflict.
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, November 29th, 2010 - 5 comments
“New Zealand investors are facing an accounting crisis. This is because domestic companies have rejected many of the new international financial reporting standards (IFRS) and are declaring “adjusted”, “underlying”, “operating”, “excluding non-trading” and “from continuing operations” profits that vary significantly from audited IFRS-compliant profits.”
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, November 27th, 2010 - 2 comments
One of my favorite Bruce Springsteen tracks from when I was somewhat younger is “Tougher than the rest”. As heresy I’d have to say that I like the version by Everything But The Girl somewhat better. It has been coming up a lot on my playlist while pushing through the last month of coding. It was also the track that was playing when I heard the news about the second explosion at Pike River earlier in the week. I’d guess that will stay embedded as an association for a while.
Written By: - Date published: 5:01 pm, November 24th, 2010 - 116 comments
There has been a second explosion at the Pike River mine.
“Superintendent Gary Knowles told the Herald the miners couldn’t have survived a blast of that magnitude, which occurred at 2.37pm. Family members were seen crying as they left a police briefing a short time ago.”
My heart goes out to the families.
Written By: - Date published: 8:40 am, November 24th, 2010 - 36 comments
Reading the news on the current plight of the Irish with a economy in a tailspin and a tottering government. I can but reflect that it was a bloody good thing that the National party wasn’t in power after 1999. For instance, John Key as recently as 2008 was praising the fragile economic model that […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:59 pm, October 25th, 2010 - 41 comments
One of the strange things about helping to run a left blog like this is looking at the varied opinions of those on the left of the political spectrum, and then looking at the monolithic opinions that the right seem to have of the left. I was musing on this while reading Matt McCarten’s excellent Saturday article. Now you have to understand that Matt and myself are almost at the ends of the spectrum when it comes to politics on the left….
Written By: - Date published: 12:17 am, October 17th, 2010 - 30 comments
Simon Power is ‘consulting’ on regulating the on-line communities to prevent violations of normal societal and legal standards. Clare Curran asks ‘hopefully’ that this isn’t simply a reaction to the idiocy of ex-National party member Whaleoil in how he chases readership. But I suspect that is why this foolishness has come back on the agenda again. Plus National would prefer that there wasn’t so much criticism of their wimpy leader.
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