Written By: - Date published: 11:47 am, July 11th, 2010 - 21 comments
“Why, if you are an international rugby fan, would you leave Eden Park and hop on a train, eschewing the delights of Kingsland’s cafes, going directly past the thriving night life of Ponsonby and taking a right on to a bleak windswept wharf instead of a left to the maelstrom that is the Viaduct?”
Indeed!
Written By: - Date published: 8:34 am, July 8th, 2010 - 29 comments
The Herald has a headline article on John Keys “Party Central”. But their cartoon really said it all. The question is:- How many ‘good’ ideas does it take before John Key manages to get one to actually work?
Written By: - Date published: 4:47 pm, July 7th, 2010 - 47 comments
I had to laugh at this comment by Mako about my least favorite wingnut… More desperate anti-Brown smearing from Slater. His latest allegation is that ‘Looney Len’ wants every school to plant 500 trees a year. A waste of our precious education budget! he wails. Child slave labour! he howls. ‘Surely one of his backers […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, July 6th, 2010 - 12 comments
There are a lot of risks New Zealand will face when more deeper water off-shore oil exploration goes ahead. The more you look, the greater the risks appear. Brownlee and the crazies at the MED don’t look like they know what a risk assessment is. Consequently they’re getting screwed. Perhaps they should read Gordon Campbell…
Written By: - Date published: 1:54 pm, July 4th, 2010 - 6 comments
The current incumbent of the Bagehot column at The Economist is stepping down with a few relevant comments about current relationships ebtween the politicians, journos, and the public.
The opinions could have been written about the poor state of journalism here.
Written By: - Date published: 8:00 pm, July 2nd, 2010 - 4 comments
Enigma have for a long time one of my favorite sounds to listen to while programming from the early 90’s onwards. There have been bug-hunting exercises where Enigma has literally been on my playlist all day. You can just queue all of their albums, knuckle down, and kill those tiresome and frustrating bugs. Since it is going to be a programming weekend, including some site tweaking….
Written By: - Date published: 5:55 pm, June 26th, 2010 - 25 comments
I’m tired of hearing about the ‘medieval warming period’ and ‘hockey-stick’, which are respectively almost two decades and a decade old. It came up in comments today again, and I get the impression that CCDs are firstly euro-centric and secondly never seem to look at the current evidence. There have been many studies that substantially support the ‘hockey-stick’ and none that support the MWP. The Crock of the Week did this video explaining it…
Written By: - Date published: 3:29 pm, June 26th, 2010 - 24 comments
Peter Sinclair in Crock of the week uses some old classic movie and TV footage to point out the debunking the ‘climategate’ myth. Quite simply this hack of the e-mails hasn’t changed any of the science of climate change and is as ineffectual as most of the anti-science inquisition has been over the last century. It really just shows how pathetic and ineffectual that the CCDs are becoming.
Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, June 22nd, 2010 - 14 comments
The New York Times has a excellent article on the failure of the last line of defense on the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Even as they are lambasting the regulatory framework that allowed the failure to happen, I’m looking at it and seeing how pathetic our regulatory framework is by comparison. Somehow I don’t think that Gerry Brownlee is capable of making it better.
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, June 19th, 2010 - 1,346 comments
The most comprehensive collection and analysis of global temperature trends comes from NOAA.Their global temperatures report for May 2010 makes sobering reading. Since 1880, the globally hottest 10 years have happened in the last 15 years. It looks like 2010 will beat the previous hottest year in 2005, and we’re still at the least energetic part of the sunspot cycle.
Written By: - Date published: 9:16 am, June 11th, 2010 - 37 comments
The sun is emerging from its deep sleep of the Solar Minimum. The increased sensitivity of human networks from satellites to power grids is starting to worry people who know what they’re talking about enough to cause them to have held a meeting on it. The sun produces sunspots in a reasonably regular eleven year […]
Written By: - Date published: 8:30 am, June 9th, 2010 - 28 comments
There has been a series of posts at Hot-topic and other sites looking at the actions and background of climate change skeptical scientists. But what is fascinating generally is that many are retired professors far from the cut and thrust of the peer reviewing of their work that is a major and critical part of the scientific process. Many people seem to imbue a larger mantle of authority over a title than its meaningless value deserves.
Written By: - Date published: 8:34 am, June 4th, 2010 - 6 comments
The Internet is a modern wonder. However if you have to run servers on it, often the biggest wonder is that it works at all. There are so many things that can go wrong with the transport of data from one place to another.
One of those glitches happened to us yesterday.
Written By: - Date published: 9:32 pm, May 27th, 2010 - 27 comments
During the weekend, amongst the other chores, the system will get an operating system upgrade. I’ll also be doing a general check for filesystem errors and look for stray files accumulating after its first 30 odd days of operation.
In theory, this should only result in a few minutes of outage. However…
Written By: - Date published: 1:17 pm, May 18th, 2010 - 12 comments
Apparently, President Obama has delivered a speech ‘ranting’ against technology. The opinion in The Economist is worth a read just for the joy of reading the hilarity between the lines. ‘WITH iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations—none of which I know how to work—information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather […]
Written By: - Date published: 5:27 pm, May 17th, 2010 - 26 comments
It is always amusing listening to Matthew Hooten being a spinster on politics. But it was rather ironic for him to be in a conversation about John Key’s “loose lips” on NatRad this morning. He talked about this site posting conspiracy theories, but he was talking about a post at Tumeke and attributing to us.
“Loose lips” appear to be rife amongst the right-wing politicians and political commentators these days.
Written By: - Date published: 9:48 am, May 17th, 2010 - 20 comments
Nope, it isn’t the budget. It appears that there is a bomb scare. At the beehive there is an evacuation. It appears that people in the rest of the parliamentary complex are not allowed to leave, and no-one is allowed to enter. Pretty freaky how easy it is to shut down the a core of […]
Written By: - Date published: 7:32 pm, May 15th, 2010 - 33 comments
David Farrar has finally made a comment on my “Hey Chubby…” post. It raises more questions than it answers. So I ask some of the obvious questions, and conclude that he has forsaken the principles of “free speech” that he so enthusiastically espoused only a few years ago.
Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, May 15th, 2010 - 20 comments
You sometimes have to wonder about headline writers sometimes (including myself). But take a look at this one from Bloomberg.com, a site with a focus on investment. Windmill Boom Curbs Electric Power Prices for RWE RWE AG is a power utility and wind farm operator in Germany. The reason that they’re getting reduced prices for […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:07 pm, May 13th, 2010 - 158 comments
There appears to have been a recent and sudden shift in the attitude of John Key and the National party towards Maori. Marty Mars has drawn my attention with a ballistic comment to the latest insulting and distasteful ‘joke’ by John Key about the Tuhoe.
Update: His ‘joke’ has now gone international. Our clueless Tourism Minister has just ‘lifted’ our profile abroad. Thanks John…
Written By: - Date published: 7:12 pm, May 12th, 2010 - 80 comments
It looks like Nationals favourite pollster and blogging spinster has been sniffing around trying to find out who our authors are. So I guess I’ll have to gently castigate him yet again. Such a child, always reaching for the cookie jar..
In the process it appears that he has pissed off some journos, and it appears that David has acquired a new nickname.
Written By: - Date published: 12:11 am, May 9th, 2010 - 53 comments
One thing that the election in Britain brought home to me, was how much I’m grateful for having Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation here. I didn’t start that way. Over time, I’ve grown to appreciate the gradual progress and stability offered by MMP. However the people at the Campaign for MMP could do with a little help in the Internet age. They’re operating like it was 1993.
Written By: - Date published: 11:06 am, May 2nd, 2010 - 9 comments
In Florida, a legislative plan to close as many as five state prisons and ship inmates to a private prison run by GEO Group was scaled back last month.
The feds may be searching to see if former state House Speaker Sansom received any kickbacks from the company. The GEO group are also contenders for running private prisons here.
Written By: - Date published: 9:52 pm, April 26th, 2010 - 12 comments
To paraphrase Muldoon – send a JAFA to Wellington, and we can only increase the average intelligence of both parts of the country. Needless to say, TV news chose to focus on a minor story in Goffs speech. If a future mayor of Auckland, Brown, can sit at the cabinet table on decisions related to […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:01 pm, April 25th, 2010 - 9 comments
While digging out the poppy that graces our banner this weekend, I also dug out this bit of history. Anzac Day notice, New Zealand Gazette, 1916
Point 5 particularly intrigued me.
Written By: - Date published: 11:28 am, April 24th, 2010 - 7 comments
I’m not usually envious of Sydney, but they have a newspaper that actually researches the issues that matter to their local audience.
The Sydney Morning Herald has been researching transport issues in their city. If newspapers are to survive the transition into the networked era, they’re going to have to relearn how to focus on local issues. Otherwise why would we pay the pay-wall for material we can get elsewhere?
Written By: - Date published: 10:08 pm, April 21st, 2010 - 6 comments
The new server seems to be doing the job.
However it will be going down for ten minutes at about midnight while it reboots to install upgrades including a new linux kernel.
Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, April 19th, 2010 - 10 comments
Over the last decade or two there have been some extraordinary claims about the cost of digital copying and counterfeiting on businesses and economies. However there has been little information that hasn’t had some pretty major and almost certainly incorrect assumptions. The upshot is that the cost of copying and counterfeiting has been hugely overestimated.
Written By: - Date published: 3:37 pm, April 16th, 2010 - 9 comments
There will be some scheduled maintenance tommorrow from about 10am for an hour or so. This is to move the site to a new server. I’ll be glad to get out of the 100% CPU that the current server is having.
Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, April 11th, 2010 - 24 comments
Rachel Maddow has a look at exactly how much Fox News just makes stuff up and calls it news. It uses selectively edited stories like the ACORN ‘pimp’ story, the ‘climategate’ e-mails, and many other highly inaccurate ‘stories’, and promotes them for ratings.
In effect Fox News is the (un)official spin channel for conservative activists to peddle garbage entertainment on. Have a watch of Rachael as she tears the facade of conservative story telling apart.
Written By: - Date published: 9:01 pm, April 6th, 2010 - 10 comments
David Slack says..
“Qantas passenger threatened to bring down flight with the power of his mind. Ten bucks says he’s wearing an ACT T-shirt”
But it made me laugh after a hard weekend. as it perfectly reflects that way I feel about the breed.
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