Posts by Marcus Turner
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I'd just like to put in a word for walking. I know it's not feasible for everyone (but then, neither is cycling). By simply parking further away from work, and walking more each day, you're doing something for yourself and for the planet - and you don't need to shower or change when you get to work.
But these Japanese bikes do look tempting....
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Hard News: Mercury Special, in reply to Russell Brown,
Russell. I got rather trapped on the NZ On Screen Site. Nostalgia can actually be a bit painful.
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Hard News: The Political Lie, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Bart: interesting reference to what you mention in your second paragraph on page 8 of the new Scientific American ("An Epidemic of False Claims").
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My Friday contribution - from the Faroe Islands.
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Hard News: Friday Fever, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Communists really do great things with concrete, don't they? I remember driving through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria in about 1985. In Bulgaria, in particular, we weren't allowed to stop in many places, but we passed lots and lots of concrete structures like this. It's another testament to just how different people can be, that someone actually liked the designs enough to commission them.
We were warned, in advance of going to Yugoslavia, that the petrol was awful. Something about the additives made it very slippery when it dripped (inevitably) from the Zastavas and other "behind the Iron Curtain" cars onto the roads. We were told that the roads could be as slippery as ice during rains. Indeed, that turned out to be the case. In about three days of driving up the Dalmatian coast, we saw, I think, 12 major accidents involving many, many vehicles in each case. In one event, the driver of a little car had attempted to overtake another vehicle while going through one of the many long raw-rock-lined road tunnels, and went directly under an oncoming large truck.
The road was much like a paved provincial New Zealand highway with one lane in each direction. Consequently, the traffic jams were huge. I remember one was at least 3 kilometres long, on just one side of an accident.
We came very close to involvement in a pileup ourselves: somewhere ahead of us, two vehicles collided and those behind braked. Each slid into the next. Our brakes appeared completely ineffective, as our aged kombiwagen continued in the direction it had been going, with no loss of speed. I'm still not sure how we managed to avoid hitting another vehicle; most other vehicles around us seemed to collide, in a series of soft "krumps", followed by expletives - mainly in German.
In recent years, I've noticed that NZ petrol smells more like the Yugoslavian petrol of those days.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to nzlemming,
Trying now italics.
(Why didn't it do that before?.... I thought that's what I did.)
Thanks for your help.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Islander,
Thanks. I love to hear about etymolygy in Maori language (_pace_ diacritic enthusiasts). It's not something we hear a lot about.
(Italics not working as I expected: what am I doing wrong?)
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Russell Brown,
And all languages change, and keep changing, whether we like it or not.....
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Something very classy, with ukuleles:
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This is harder to follow than the report of Westen's work, and there seems to be more subjectivity involved, but it's interesting.
When Cognitive Science Enters Politics