Posts by Ian Dalziel
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Put a sock on it...
What is really interesting (if you are a science geek) is that the capsasin receptor (the actual molecule) is the same receptor that responds to physical heat and chemical pain.
I'm guessing this is the basis for the
old Cayenne pepper in your socks
cold (chilly) feet remedy, too... -
Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to Joe Wylie,
grassroots and groundswell...
...and was probably not the right sort
of activity for the Botanic Gardens.What better place to plant the seeds of a revolution?
I suggested that they move it on down to the Council funded Fanzone for the private company IRB's Rugby World Cup, people are allowed to gather there... -
Spatial orientation to the stars. It’s a big thing.
You might then enjoy The Revolving Boy by Gertrude Friedberg (1966).
I remember getting this out, as a kid, from the original (old brick) Chchch library, and really liking it and the ideas therein - even though someone stole my bike while I was in there! -
Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to DCBCauchi,
It is older than Stonehenge, and made the same way as Stonehenge (not to mention many other things), no matter when that particular one was made.
and nowadays we have The Long Now Foundation
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
with folk like Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly and Esther Dyson amongst others on the board, it gives ya hope…
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Lilith __,
Friended on PhageBook...
and the Conquistadors had cultural contact with the Americas?
England had cultural contact with Australian aborigines?I think that cultural contact was mostly Smallpox...
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Rich Lock,
reneedling the thread...
Sean Lock on Twitter (QI) From YouTube
...and it's priceless that we get to watch!
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Lovin' Spoonful..
Proper chefs use a new spoon ...
I think I've heard that some chefs are
born with a saliva spoon in their mouth!Do you believe in magic...
But are there any restaurants that
put Salvia (divinorum) in your food? -
Tales from midden earth...
Pre-European Maori culture was an extremely highly sophisticated stone-age culture, an off-shoot of the culture that explored and colonised the Pacific, from Taiwan to Hawai’i to Easter Island to New Zealand. All by knowing how to use flax and stone, the sea and the stars.
Ditto for Australia's Aboriginal people...
An egg-shaped ring of standing stones in Australia could prove to be older than Britain's Stonehenge - and it may show that ancient Aboriginal cultures had a deep understanding of the movements of the stars.
Fifty metres wide and containing more than 100 basalt boulders, the site of Wurdi Youang in Victoria was noted by European settlers two centuries ago, and charted by archaeologists in 1977, but only now is its purpose being rediscovered.
It is thought the site was built by the Wadda Wurrung people - the traditional inhabitants of the area. All understanding of the rocks' significance was lost, however, when traditional language and practices were banned at the beginning of the 20th Century. -
Revisionists...
Or what this nation could be like by now if our Pakeha ancestors had worked together with Maori rather than fighting to take their land...
Christchurch has been offered a chance to rectify this by rebuilding with a Maori perspective...
Christchurch could become "the Machu Picchu of New Zealand" if it is rebuilt with a Maori perspective, city councillors have been told.
At yesterday's draft central-city plan hearings, Maori designers and architects called on the Christchurch City Council to make better use of the city's indigenous culture.Not quite sure how Machu Picchu relates to that vision, unless they are saying that Chchch is truly a lost city or perhaps that Thor Heyerdahl's theories of Polynesian origins are correct...
Re-iterating and altering reality...
that whole field of fictional Alternate Histories and other multiversal explorations can be interesting and entertaining. PK Dick's The Man in High Castle, Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union are stand outs, for me, in Godwin's Theory of Re-evolution. Harry Turtledove has been prolific and I've always had a soft spot for Nigel Cox's Tarzan Presley (reissued as Jungle Rock Blues after ER Burroughs' lawyers finished with them - iirc)What is it good for...
The whole idea of war being a thing where you go and fight people a long way away with whom you have little cultural contact would have baffled everyone right up to, oooh, Napoleon. There just wasn’t any point to it. (Not much point now, come to that.)
Edwin Starr aside, you obviously aren't in the munitions business...
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O quel cul t'as! - Oh! Calcutta!
Do you have to undress to go there?
Waiter, there's a Hair in my soup...At least we now know where the foreigners are...
...they are all in the catering trade in Auckland!