Posts by Keith Ng
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Exactly... not to mention all the unburnt oil/hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and nitric oxide you could wish for (and before anyone gets excited: nitric oxide is the uncool one, which makes you dead rather than high).
Interesting. I totally get some geek cred deducted for not knowing this. Is the two-stroke engine used because of size? i.e. Is there a minimum viable size for a four-stroke engine that limits how small vehicles can get?
Also, does it mean I shouldn't buy a scooter?
(That's a curious trade-off, actually. Is reducing my carbon footprint desirable if its means polluting locally?)
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Very, very cool, David. As for radical vehicles not being a reality in New Zealand, that a political/marketing problem that doesn't seem particularly insurmountable. The "Smart" cars are everywhere in Europe, afterall, and even straight men are allowed to drive them.
The idea of radical fuel efficiency is pretty cool, too. Prompted by your piece, I was gutted to discovered that my last (first and only) vehicle, a very humble 1984 Honda City, only rates at around 4-5L/100km. I use to be so impressed by its fuel efficiency.
Still, how does the Loremo compare with, say, a scooter or a tuk tuk? It strikes me that those are radically fuel efficient vehicles that already exist. And they would be far safer if only there were fewer SUVs on the road!
Ultimately, isn't it a marketing/design/purchase problem? That people drive a 5-person long-distance road vehicle for 1-person short-distance travel, and drive a 8-person off-road vehicle for 2-person on-road driving? I conclude that a technological solution to this problem would have to involve an energy efficient death ray. Where are they at with that?
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I got myself some leprosy. 75% discount - score!
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Oh, a good 28 to 30 hours, I reckon. I am a master of the Sleeping Log technique.
With the gentle chugging of the train, it's really quite nice. Of course, after the first 16 hours of continued sleep, your mind goes into power-saving mode, and then after 20 odd hours, your limbs spin down. By that stage, you become unable to move *and* unable to care that you're unable to move.
I really want to go on a fancy train journey one day, with dining cars and all that jazz, though. Do they still have them?
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In India, they've been having issues with elephant attacks. Now *those* make good television. They get poked with a stick or starved one time too many, and they just go ape, chasing people around, flipping over cars, flinging people like, you know, it was a big angry friggin' elephant.
Great television, I tell ya.
(Apparently it's all part of a labour dispute. The fees for festival elephants are skyrocketing, so owners are trying to get their elephants to put in more hours by poking them with spears and dehydrating them to make them a little more... active. They get active.)
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Ben: The Karuna faction is the result of regionalism among the Tamil community in Sri Lanka. Their raison d'etre is the perceived dominance of northern Tamils in the LTTE, and that the LTTE have continued the conflict when it should have settled for peace.
The government lets them operate with impunity (and might even supply them with weapons, intel, etc. - nobody knows for sure), and in return, they do the government's dirty work, intimidating the local community, assassinations, etc. So yeah, it's convenient for both sides.
Che/Ben: I thought the homemade airforce was a pretty good "hey-look-at-me!" effort...
Sam: Yes - The Herald told me they were running a piece from the Observer. I thought it was quite a good piece - I guess the Herald deserve to be let off the hook. 8-)
Bob: Heh, I gave the Fonterra story a miss so I could go to Batti. Now that you mention it, it does sound like a good hook for the story.
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Stephen, Reece: The conditions required for the admission of prior convictions was discussed on a OnPoint post in April.
In situations where the defendant is charged with [offending that] is strikingly similar to [something that] the offender has been convicted [of], the prosecution can apply to the court to be able to admit it. A classic example of such a striking similarity is the English case of Boardman - an accused charged with a burglary in which the offender left at the scene an esoteric symbol written in lipstick on a mirror and it can be shown that in all the accused's prior burglaries he had left the same marking.
(Heh heh, dumbass.) So what does the prosecution need to prove to be able to admit prior convictions in circumstances like this?
It's not really a question of proof. The judge obviously has to be satisfied that an accused actually committed the earlier acts, but this usually won't be too difficult (if there are convictions this won't be a problem), and the judge will have to consider that the earlier acts and the offending currently charged are 'strikingly similar', but that's not the end of it.
Even if these things can be shown, this isn't enough to allow the evidence in, a judge really has to question - 'what does this add to the prosecution case?' and they have to balance that with 'and how will this impact on the defendant's right to a fair trial?'.
The question a judge grapples with, not just when deciding whether to allow similar fact evidence but all sorts of evidential questions, is 'does the probative value of this evidence outweigh its prejudicial effect?"Strikingly similar" is a pretty strict test, and unfortunately, "penetration with foreign objects, the group/gang nature of the assaults and the age of the complainants" describes a class of crime, rather than "strikingly similar" details that can be used to link one from the other.
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Craig: Indeed, the vernacular was flavoursome. Not quite as flavoursome as Elections, though. Having worked as a translator, I got so miffed when they translated a line as "There's nothing I can do", when the original was literally "He's holding my little brother" (which means: He's got me by the dick, or, as we would say, balls).
Cross-cultural profanities is a tricky, tricky business. It's very easy to sex it up.
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Still, I guess it's mostly faithful. Unlike the Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai... grrrrr...
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It's been done - and amazingly done. Check out Workingman's Death, it was on at the festival last year.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478331/
Absolutely jaw-dropping.
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Well, the problem isn't sewage per se, but raw sewage. It's got the microbiological contamination, the chemical contamination and the heavy metals (the latter two from industry upstream).
Sure, using shit to fertilise fields is fine, but you might want to kill off the parasites, etc. and get rid of the heavy metals before you do, because otherwise it all goes into the crops and onto the farmers...