Posts by B Jones
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Ah, I see pausing to consider one's thoughts risks someone faster of thinking getting there first.
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We've had a pretty poor record with the CFLs we bought in mid-2007, when there were a lot on the market at very cheap prices. About half stopped working at all within the first few months, one developed a weird purple colour, and one flickers a bit randomly. The replacements we've bought since are also a mixed bag - two look fantastic after 5 mins or so, and even have the classic old-school lightbulb shape over the squiggly and a warm golden tone, but are so dim when they start up as to be very annoying. Another one has a bright white glare that makes everything else look helplessly dim. I'm looking forward to my product knowledge catching up with what's out there.
But the boots theory is dead right. I'd never have bought CFLs when I was renting, because the chance of me being around to cash in on the (supposed) longer life benefits was low. Even though in the long run I spent far more on downlights that also burnt out after a year, and were so inefficient you could feel warm patches on the floor upstairs where there was a light on below.
Steve, that's way selective reading of the New Scientist article, which talks about natural climate change, not human-induced changes to the atmosphere over the last hundred years.
This proves that rising CO2 was not the trigger that caused the initial warming at the end of these ice ages - but no climate scientist has ever made this claim. It certainly does not challenge the idea that more CO2 heats the planet.
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Everyone knows that Secretary for Education Roslin's standards-based testing reforms resulted in the rapid decline of training options for Caprican youth, leading to the influx of civilians into the military ("I just signed up to pay my way through dental school") and the unpreparedness of the colonies for the second Cylon war.
Don't get me started on trading in tilium options and working conditions in the refineries.
At some point after this weekend's extravaganza I'll be fit to deal with the real world again.
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Without having read the study, I'd guess that a very large % of these solicitations are spam, of the sort that I used to get before my ISP's filters kicked in. You know, someone sets up an adult website and spams the universe pretending to be a bored lonely housewife seeking a little action/a Russian blonde/insert cliche here, in order to get users to log on.
As soon as you realise that the sender neither knows or cares who you are beyond you having a live email address, they're not particularly disturbing. But I can imagine that the younger and more naïve you are, the longer it takes to reach that conclusion (I remember wondering why it would occur to anyone to post a photo of their butt to news.announce.newusers, when it clearly said No Binaries).
Unfortunately parents can also be naïve, and if they're not aware of that nuisance of an advertising model, they could easily freak out over why some bored lonely housewife is propositioning their underage son or daughter.
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That's spooky - the very afternoon I look up the wikipedia page on Apples (to find out why Braeburns taste so much better than Red Deliciouses, and why the last Cox's Orange Pippin I ate was disappointingly inferior to the ones I remember from several years, and if there was any specific nutrient they're known for that could explain why I'm craving them in unreasonable quantities right now), I see Emma must also have done.
Or so I deduce from the biblical Latin apple/evil link. It's not something that comes up in everyday discussion.
*crunch*
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I first saw the Melbourne Casino during one of NZ's power crises. The gouts of fire were particularly impressive given the presumed cost of all the gas they'd need to fuel them, and the contrast of flying back into a Wellington with all the lights switched off. Conspicuous power consumption.
They also do a neat little timed fountain and lights thing inside, to what I think is Holst's Mercury.
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You're a little flag??
A little flag is a pennant.
Or perhaps it's just getting meta around here.
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Māori is a language with a relatively short alphabet and a whole lot of homonyms that aren't actually homophones, by virtue of one or more of their vowels being pronounced as long or short. While most of the words that have been adopted into NZ English don't have that distinction, it's there and using macrons or doubled vowels to mark the long vowels helps with learning the language, in the same way that tonal marks help English speakers begin to learn Asian languages.
And yeah, if you're distracted by errors when you're reading a document, you're less likely to take its contents seriously, however unfairly. Bad typos don't necessarily mean sloppy thinking, but they do show that perhaps not enough people have reviewed a document and considered/improved upon its core messages. A classic example is how we spot spam. Badly worded or spelled emails are a big clue that they're not actually from your bank/the estate of your long lost great great aunt etc.
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TracyMac, those HTML macron codes are wonderful - thank you for making my life considerably easier.
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Russell, there are lots of very good internet resources on the subject of mihi, whaikorero and so on. I hate to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, but have you tried googling?
You might also want to drop by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Maori to see if they have an online dictionary for new tech words. I particularly like piripiri for velcro.