Posts by richard
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Hard News: Cultural Heroes and living memory,
Wow. This is quiet. Everyone must be reading twitter.
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Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero, in reply to Yamis,
Sure. Just sign up with Mega and wait.
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Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero,
Maker or taker, parasite or host?
Another question is what sort of advertisers would buy space that had been, um, liberated from Google? Am predicting it will be all classy stuff – you know, Make Money From Home, Free iPods, Cheap Viagra, Meet Your New Russian Girlfriend, Machines in Your Basement to Make Free Energy, One Simple Trick to Help you Lose Belly Fat, Vaccine Denialists…
That’s going to be just wonderful for Brand New Zealand – 1% Pure.
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I suspect this comes under the heading of feeding the trolls.
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Hard News: Calling the race before it's over,
Watching this from a distance, I can see why Labour members might want a bigger say in electing the Labour leader.
On the other hand, the much larger number of people who vote for Labour might prefer that the Labour leader (the leader of the opposition, and potentially the prime minister) be chosen only by the members of caucus who are actually elected by voters like themselves…
The Labour party can of course run itself as its members see fit – but there is an interesting question of ownership here, in that many Labour voters may see themselves as having a moral stake in the Labour party, even if they are not paying dues – in much the same way that Cantabrians see themselves having a stake in the Cathedral, even if very few of them actually bother to join the church…
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Speaker: Who No : Letters From Alice May…,
I had a guy call me from Damascus last year (when I was still working in the US), to say he had worked out that the moon actually orbited the earth in the opposite direction from the one you find in the textbooks.
He was very polite, but also insistent, so eventually I had to cut him off and get on with my day.
But if he really was from Syria, people were being shot dead in the street as the revolution there got underway that same week.
There is a surprising volume of this stuff out there. Some of it is merely eccentric – I am sure there are more “armchair cosmologists” with their own theories of how the universe works in New Zealand than paid professionals (although the latter list is fairly small, so it not that surprising I guess), whereas others are clearly mentally ill.
When I was a post-doc one of my senior colleagues was the writer of several high-profile popular books, and another edited a major journal. They got this stuff by the boxload, and had a friendly rivalry as to who got the most :-)
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Speaker: Who No : Letters From Alice May…,
I get letters (well, email, these days) all the time. I just hit delete.
One person's occupational hazard is another person's museum exhibit.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Romney-esque dog-fucker analogies either
Surely that is Santorumesque? He is the "man on dog" guy. Romney is the "dog on car" guy.
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Busytown: “Glory! Glory! There’s the salt!”,
One amusing fact -- The Catalogue of the Universe is also THIS book http://www.abebooks.com/CATALOG-UNIVERSE-MURDIN-Crown-Publishers/1363595292/bd
Mahy must have liked it enough to inject it into her own book (and borrow the title). Any self-respecting geeky young astronomer in Christchurch would have owned both. And the luckiest geeky astronomer of all got to have his Angela, as well :-)
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Russell Brown,
Who knows where that knowledge will lead? Next they will work out how to control the particle, then they will remove it to enable things – people – to travel at the speed necessary to explore the galaxy.
Wow. Who knew? (Where did this come from -- I mean it comes from the Herald, but where did Roughan get this idea from?)