Posts by giovanni tiso
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Even suicide is a bit over the top as an analogy, it seems to me. Showing somebody having a cigarette is really much closer to showing somebody having a glass of wine.
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Maybe Joanne McNeill will also turn out to be wrong, but in the meantime she explains why she doesn't think that Ping will amount to much.
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And one only has to look at the death toll recently in places like Chile and Haiti to know every structural engineering expert in the land should get a free drinks at the pub tonight.
Friuli, 1976: 6.1 magnitude earthquake kills 978 people. Irpinia, 1980: 6.8 magnitude earthquake kills 2,980 people. Last year at L'Aquila: 6.3 magnitude kills 308. 7.1 in Christchurch and two seriously injured. So, yeah.
But wait: small medieval town perched on the side of a mountain at the epicentre of L'Aquila's earthquake: not so much as a stone out of place. So maybe it's the buildings in cheap concrete built in the post-war period that are the real killer. And NZ historically has lacked the population pressures and periods of savage poorly regulated development that led to those. So I'd thank urban planners, good economic fortune and other factors beside the engineers alone.
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Heard TV One dropped the ball on early coverage again, though?
We only have the pictures on. I can tell you that the graphic keeps shouting at us 7.4 EARTHQUAKE when it has been downgraded to 7.1/7 for a couple of hours now.
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In Wellington I was woken by the shock - enough to wake up and get under a doorway, and later by an aftershock. Thought no big deal as that is quite common here. Couldn't really believe it when I heard at 7am that it was Christchurch that got the big one this time.
Because of the Friuli earthquake when I was a child, that I felt peripherally, whenever there's a litle shake here I automatically think I hope it's not a big one somewhere else. Didn't feel this one though... Hope everyone is okay.
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But there's cause of death and cause of death, no? It's rare for a disease to have a single certain cause - there are plenty of non smokers who die of lung cancer. But when you get flattened by a bus, it's a little more clear cut. And besides people killed by tobacco use are on average a lot older than the people killed in road crashes. So it really more of an issue of life expectancy being shortened and quality of life being reduced in smokers, rather than a sudden catastrophic outcome.
I'd like to get back some of those years my dad lost for sure, but he still died in his sixties. And Mum's eventual cause of death is likely to be smoking related, but she's still pushing 80. Her non smoking mother died of Alzheimer's at 87. Which would you pick?
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Yep, never abandoned Winamp. I love how it cannot calculate the length of the tracks in your collection unless you scroll over them on the list. Awesome.
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I think that's something we can all agree on. Right?
No. In fact I think that when they started showing grisly medical pictures on cigarette packets I might have made the point that it would be like painting pictures of cars wrapped around trees on the side of vehicles - but not because I thought that either was desirable. And I neither drive nor smoke.
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Apple's massive new data centre in North Carolina, which doesn't fully open till the end of the year:
It kind of looks like a motherboard, doesn't it?
It would be a hell of a lot for any CEO to hold down, let alone one who's had pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant and still doesn't look vey well.
If you have pancreatic cancer, let alone a liver transplant, I think "looking well" goes way down your list of priorities, or indeed prospects. I applaud him for being alive.
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Thanks, makes me feel like I got my own personal shout out :-)
I had to take powerful stimulants to get through that. Ping: it's a whole new way to ( falls unconscious )