Posts by st ephen
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
Farmer Green regards the NZ Forest Dept decision to go with Pinus radiata rather than Cupresssus macrocarpa (or lusitanica) as one of our worst national decisions.
More accurate to say that by planting species other than radiata pine, NZ lost out on billions of dollars worth of revenue. Radiata wasn't even in the top ten by 1913, with plantings of larch alone outnumbering it by 100 to 1. Long after commercial investors had switched to almost 100% radiata, the State persisted with other species (stopping only when Treasury imposed a ROI hurdle). A bit harsh to blame the dominance of radiata on the NZFS then.
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Just noticed that today's ODT editorial repeats the spin from the government's press release on pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol - that NZ will instead join the alternative Framework Convention on Climate Change because the KP only covers 15% of emissions so it's just symbolic, whereas all the big player are in the FCCC.
Thing is, we were already a party to the FCCC - it pre-dates the KP. The KP came about because the FCCC was totally symbolic - there were no binding commitments and as a result nobody did anything. The KP (for all its faults) was an attempt to change that.
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Hard News: Reviews: #NZGT and the Herald,
I knew it was fake, but not how incredibly fake it was.
I happened to be in the Octagon on the day, and saw the limo pull up outside the theatre. It was only then that I noticed the red carpet and the rope holding back a somewhat bemused crowd of at least ten teenage girls. I guessed that the chap who hopped out of the limo was Ben Lummis. Or someone off the GC. Or an afternoon TV host. Anyway, he stepped onto the carpet, the cameras zoomed in extra tight, and (three-two-one) the "crowd" screamed a little and waved their flags. Then I think the limo ducked around the corner to pick up the next celeb and repeated the process. It was kind of cool, like watching actors do their thing in front of a green screen.
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Speaker: The gathering of the small tribe,
…a prominent ANZ author…
Surely the production (and consumption) of poetry and short stories involves a far tinier clique than the NZ Post Book Awards. Fair enough for not wanting to play the game – most scientists and sportspeople also hate endless rounds of grant applications and publicity – but shitting on those who do make the effort seems a bit off.
[I did a small edit above. I don't want a scrap unfolding while I'm away from the keyboard. Let's all be nice. It's Friday. RB]
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Yeah. Communicating science is important. Accountability is important. Budget forecasting is important. Stakeholder engagement is important. Quality science is important. And human nature being what it is, within our CRI's each little group of experts think they're at least as important as the others, if not more so.
NZ could be doing so much more science , dammit!(Or maybe - given that slick marketing actually trumps all - we could just close up shop and hand the budget over to Saatchis et al?).
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There should have been time to set up a clean, professional default font, and get someone to cast an eye over it to tidy up the heavy boxes and clashing colours.
What about using the CERN house standard? New Zealand's CRI's have certainly spent time over the years developing style guides, selecting fonts and colour schemes, engaging design consultants to refresh and road-test them with stake-holder focus groups, rebranding, creating templates for presentations, brochures, posters and umpteen different types of reports etc etc.
Perhaps that's why we didn't discover this particle thing first?
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Cracker: Audience wanted for lively TV discussion, in reply to Martin Roberts,
Thanks for that link. Looks like we're doing better than Denmark and the Netherlands, despite their cycle paths and public transport...
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Cracker: Audience wanted for lively TV discussion, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I couldn’t find CO2 per capita numbers for Auckland – if you have them please post.
Sorry, I don't have them either but (as your linked article pointed out but then seemed to forget) using estimates based on a production rather than consumption approach is silly; the reason that western cities have low emissions per capita is that they've pushed manufacturing out of the city boundaries (often as far as China) and don't produce things like rice or milk either. So instead of factories consuming fossil fuels they have people consuming food produced elsewhere (eg. NZ). But whereas fossil fuel use is counted against the region consuming it, food fuel use (and wood, wool etc) counts against the producer.
Our emission accounts (total and per capita) would look much better if the extra 15 million people were spread across our farm land and we just imported our food. But these people have to come from somewhere - if we added them to our cities Earth Inc would only be better off if they came from countries with even more extravagant lifestyles than ours and they accepted a "lower" standard of living once here. -
Cracker: Audience wanted for lively TV discussion, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Barcelona carbon emissions p.p. = 3.4 tonnes, NZ approx 18t
Weird comparison - surely Auckland versus Barcelona would be more relevant? It's easy for a city to show low emissions if they're importing everything they consume from some other place that cops the emissions incurred in production.
If you only include emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel use (eg. ignore methane from agriculture) then Spain and NZ come out about the same per capita emissions. -
Hard News: The war over a mystery,
There was even a pop song about the case.
I'll add a shout out for Wazzo Ghoti, who in two-and-a-half busy minutes fingered AAT for every unsolved crime known to humanity but cleared him of the Crewe murders. Can't remember the name of the song, but looking at the track listing for their album I'm picking it was Who killed John Paul I?