Posts by Andre Alessi
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And to add to my previous post...
"F**k off! We're not the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers! We're the Taxpayers and Consumers Association!"
Splitters!
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Peer review isn't about truth, its about being decent work. Truth is what hopefully emerges when people read it and argue about it.
Although peer review (when done correctly) requires that the work being done is also justified to a reasonable extent by the evidence available and by the arguments presented, which does tend as much towards truth as any position can that is not unarguable. It weeds out the "This is true because I say so" types by definition.
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NZCSC will present expert scientific evidence (possiobly including world heavyweights) to debunk NIWA
I can't wait to hear what powerful arguments the brilliant scientific mind of Mike Tyson will do to those puny NIWA pseudoscientists!
Perhaps Rick Giles will show up for the knockout blow by simply standing there and saying nothing.
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Next we'll see all that gravity nonsense in court. And not a day too soon!
Perhaps the NZCSET can start the ball rolling by hiring Gene Ray to help them out with all this "science" stuff.
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Dr Luke Goode
If that isn't the best possible name for a French cosmetic surgeon, I don't know what is.
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Ms Kopu felt she was in Parliament as a Māori woman to represent Māori women. She accepted that she wasn't the important part in this (at 12 on the Alliance list, who had heard of her?), but she felt that what she represented was important (people voted for the Alliance in the knowledge that if they got X votes there would be two Māori women MPs representing the party, and more Māori women in Parliament than otherwise).
I don't know about that. I mean, I certainly understand that that is how Kopu presented what occurred, but the events at the time, and subsequently, never really bore out her version. She was quite adamant that she had a huge amount of support in the community that actively supported her wish to go independent, and thus justify the fact that she was being paid to stay in parliament.
I don't think this would have been such a problem except for the fact that Kopu's voting record after she left the Alliance was not consistent with the Alliance's policies, so there really was a negative effect on the efficacy of the votes of people like myself-we suddenly had one less MP representing our interests in parliament, and no way to rectify that situation until the next election. (Mana Wahine supported the National goverment most of the time, and it would be hard to argue that that was the political wish of most Alliance voters OR Maori women pre-Maori Party.)
There were several attempts at polling Kopu's supposed electorate (held at the time by Tuariki John Delamere) to see if this groundswell of support she talked about was a significant as she presented, and virtually every one came back negative. The final nail in the coffin though, was her 1.7% electoral vote tally in the next election-it's hard to argue she could have been completely ignorant of how badly she was doing representing what she saw as "her" electorate prior to the fact.
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I had high hopes for it but walked out half-way through
In all honesty, you missed the pay off that would have made the exposition worthwhile. I saw it for the second time the other day, and the person I saw it with said that it probably would have worked better as a book because you could avoid the exposition in the first place, whereas you have the time pressure of film to contend with.
Overall I felt that the hype was justified to a degree. It's a fantastically interesting film, though not perfect, and apart from the slight slowdown in the midway point, it's perfectly crafted-not too long spent in any one setting (which must have been a real temtation for Christopher Nolan.)
I also felt like the story of Cobb and Mal was much more delicately handled than I've come to expect from blockbusters.
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21 on the test. I'd probably have marked myself higher, but I got really annoyed while reading the question about remembering phone numbers (I work in telecommunications, of course I remember phone numbers easily!) and then I had to go back up the thread and see whether anyone had mentioned that the test's creator, Simon Baron-Cohen, is Sasha's brother.
I don't know quite what that said about me, but I think it's worth a couple of bonus points.
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I was horribly socially awkward up until I was forced by necessity to work in hospitality. You haven't experienced pure terror until you've had to wait upon a table of drunken, jovially belligerent middle management types at the Royal Oak branch of Pizza Hut for an hour.
(I was never reliable or smart enough to work out the back-they always made me wait tables.)
Now I give as good as I get, though I still prefer solitude when I'm out and about.
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I've just been reading through the transcript of the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill (First Reading). Quite interesting stuff, given subsequent events.