Posts by BenWilson
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Some flowery garden delights.
1. Sunflower, nearly ready to open.
2. Petunias, in brassica patch, with beans and nasturtiums
3. Alyssums and lobelias, amongst the chili peppers, chives and sorrel. I notice now there is also a predatory insect for the reader to identify. -
Mostly off-topic, but: For the private manned (wow, that's unashamedly gendered) mission to Mars, they are looking for a couple, since they'll be basically stuck in the same room as each other for about 500 days. A gay male couple capable of passing the tests may well be easier to find than a straight couple. Mars could get its first flyby from an enlightened species.
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Great shots, Jackson.
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Hard News: Photoshocks, in reply to Euan Mason,
I still think those are some fantastic shots. I guess astrophotography is pretty much screwed on those rules, the shot averaging being vital. Mind you, that's what the hardware is doing in an interpolated zoom...
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Had to laugh at this article. It's a "legal loophole" that you can actually drink and drive? No, it's actually just someone confusing a slogan with the law. The law is not that you can't drink whilst driving, it's that you can't drive whilst over the limit.
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Hard News: When the drug warriors turn, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Until there is widespread agreement on what the aim of any drug policy should really be (reducing harm would be a good start for me) then figuring our what works and what doesn't is going to be hard.
Totally agree on your main point here, aimlessness is really pernicious in policy. But I think the idea of harm reduction needs to be firmed up a lot, too, before I would not see it as having prohibition as a final resting state also. It's still a philosophy that treats the desire to do any drugs as an illness. If so, our entire drinking society is sick to the core, and over time the aim of such policy would be to cure us of our drinking.
I think it's an improvement on punitive prohibition, sure, but, as I see it, there still needs to be developed an angle which takes into account the actual positive reasons that people might want to do drugs. The idea that our society is a morass of various kinds of illnesses to be cured is still puritanically motivated, IMHO. It's a kind of thinking that has no limit to what kind of things it could cure - the only criterion is that they cause some harm somewhere. So people need to be cured of their BDSM, their enjoyment of extreme sports, their reliance on fossil fuel produced food...so it goes. If the counter arguments aren't to rely entirely on tradition ("Well, we've always been allowed to use a chainsaw before!!") then some kind of framework is needed that takes the positive side of the utilitarian equation (from whence the harm-reduction ethos first came) into account.
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Hard News: First, admit it's broken, in reply to Russell Brown,
That's just gross. A motel room at least.
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The other blindspot that it's well worth cyclists knowing about is that actual blindspot, which is any area that the driver can't see without turning their head backward. This is actually a very large area behind and diagonally away from the vehicle, but the further forward you are the closer it gets to the car. This can, depending on the angle of their mirrors, be when you are riding right next to their car.
It is very much worth knowing that car drivers can't magically see everything behind them with their mirrors. That's why driving instruction involves ingraining the head-check on all lane changes and pulling out from curbs. But drivers get lazy on it, so it's important to know the simple way of working it out:
If you can't see the driver's eyes in their mirrors, they can't see you.
Whilst a failure to head-check makes the driver culpable, it doesn't make you alive after being hit. Which is why it is suggested in defensive driving courses that you don't plonk your car in this spot and sit on it. Drivers will forget you are there, and change lanes right into you.
Cyclists unfortunately don't have anywhere near the power of a motor vehicle to alter their location forward, but you can always drop back if you're beside a car. Any time I'm going the same speed as a car (often happens downhill) I'm quite careful not to be next to cars for long periods (ie greater than 5 seconds). Either they pass me, or I drop back a bit.
Also worth remembering for cyclists: Your own blindspot is HUGE. You don't have any mirrors. This is particularly dangerous, because head-checking causes the bike to turn in that direction. There isn't really any solution to this that I'm aware of, short of mounting mirrors.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Also, the opportunities to look like Cyclops from the X-Men are endless. The dorkiest X-Man of all, whose fighting gesture is the finger pointed to his goggles.
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Hard News: First, admit it's broken, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Basically I think that the vast bulk of online left commentary in NZ is trapped in a degenerative research project, to adopt a Lakatosian framework, and it's really really annoying.
What's the project? You have some core auxiliary hypotheses in mind, that need to be reconsidered?
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