Posts by B Jones
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For the love of Mike, can someone fix the extra long links that are messing with the page width?
What are the limits of the 'freedom of choice' case?
The limits are that as the FSANZ points out, it hasn't really worked. People who need it (actually, the mothers of people who need it) don't know it could benefit them half the time because they're not expecting to be pregnant. And the kids, of course, have no choice either way. It's the same with kids drinking fluoridated water - their dental health is dependent on the choices of others.
The benefits are demonstrable, the risks negligible, as even Kate Wilkinson agrees.
What I'm most worried about is that all this scaremongering will put soon-to-be pregnant women off taking supplements because they might get cancer.
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I'm disappointed. I thought that here at least I'd find a decent fisking of the whole debacle. This is no more sensible than the kerfuffle over the lightbulbs. They're carrying on over at Kiwiblog as if it's a conspiracy by female bureaucrats to give prostate cancer to men.
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I don't really care for the quotes around "trapped", John.
To me, their self-esteem and dignity should drive them out of the relationship, but sadly, even some don't know any better than to stay.
There are two things you're not taking into account - it's not about an absence of self-esteem or dignity. One, women in violent relationships face the most danger when they try and leave them. As a dozen or so women a year in this country find, protection orders notwithstanding. A lot of them stay because they literally fear for their lives if they leave. And two, you care for someone and you can develop a misplaced sense of responsibility for them - you're scared of what they'll do to themselves if you leave. It's unhealthy but it's a real relationship dynamic, especially in a world that holds women primarily responsible for the quality of their relationships. Which is kind of what we do when we despair at them for staying.
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There's a better links to the Land Access report here. It's mostly about all land, but the second link goes straight to the water section, which seems to back the headline of the Herald article.
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I intend to replace my perfectly good but a bit boring black wool coat (ankle length, flared from the waist) with something along the scarlet lines, but it would be even better if someone did a version with a hood. Hoods are so useful and never a pain when you don't need them, but hardly any high-end winter coats or even raincoats have them.
But I saw the coat of awesomeness on the bus the other night. It was a lush jadey green, with a matching green feather boa collar. I've never seen anything like it, and I'd guess it was custom-made.
The problem with DIY coatmaking is not so much the sewing machine action, but all the pressing and interfacing and tailoring you have to do as well. I've tried it and the results were disappointing, and you don't want to be disappointed with large quantities of fabric at $40+ a metre.
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And given the way that our species is treating the planet I see us as a temporary construct only.
Even if we were the best planetary custodians in the universe, there's bugger all we could do if an asteroid hit us, or the sun burned off the atmosphere. Unless we find ourselves another planet to wreck/terraform, we're toast no matter what we do. Given a long enough timeframe, that is. It's like the ad for Survivor - all of the people on this episode will die....eventually.
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It was The God Delusion, and it was more about how religion makes claims about reality all the time, and we should call it on it. Not quite what you're after.
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Dawkins has a go at the non-overlapping magisterium thesis Giovanni's just expressed. Can't remember the details, but it made sense at the time (a brave atheist reads Dawkins on a plane).
And I'm not a Mr, Rich. Most blokes don't get homeopathy foisted on them via pregnancy care books. Unless there's been a miracle of modern medicine, of course :-)
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Favourite science passage from a work of fiction (Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Mars):
About a year later Nirgal and the other children began to figure out how to deal with the days when they were taught by Sax. He would start at the blackboard, sounding like a characterless AI, and behind his back they would roll their eyes and make faces as he droned on about partial pressures or infrared rays. Then one of them would see an opening and begin the game. He was helpless before it. He would say something like, "In nonshivering thermogenesis the body produces head using futile cycles," and one of them would raise a hand and say, "But why, Sax?" and everyone would stare hard at their lectern and not look at each other, while Sax would frown as if this had never happened before, and say, "Well, it creates heat without using as much energy as shivering does. The muscle proteins contract, but instead of grabbing they just slide over each other, and that creates heat."
Jackie, so sincerely the whole class nearly lost it: "But how?"
He was blinking now, so fast they almost exploded watching him. "Well, the amino acids in the proteins have broken covalent bonds, and the bonds release what is called bond dissociation energy."
"But why?"
Blinking ever harder: "Well, that's just a matter of physics." He diagrammed vigorously on the blackboard: "Covalent bonds are formed when two atomic orbitals merge to form a single bond orbital, occupied by electrons from both atoms. Breaking the bond releases thirty to a hundred kcals of energy."
Several of them asked, in chorus, "But why?"
This got him into subatomic physics, where the chain of whys and becauses could go on for a half hour without him ever once saying something they could understand. Finally they would sense they were near the end game. "But why?"
"Well," going cross-eyed as he tried to backtrack, "atoms want to get to their stable number of electrons, and they'll share electrons when they have to."
"But why?"
Now he was looking trapped. "That's just the way atoms bond. One of the ways."
"But WHY?"
A shrug. "That's how the atomic force works. That's how things came out-"
And they would all shout, "in the Big Bang."
They would howl with glee, and Sax's forehead would knot up as he realized that they had done it to him again.
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I had a form 1 teacher with a guitar and a taste for top 20 hits. Back in the days before the internet, there was plenty of scope for eggcorns, though - Thorn in My Side had a line about "just put down the phone" rather than "shiver to the bone"; I Knew You Were Waiting had a bit about "when I paint the walls of disappointment", instead of thinking of all the disappointments.
Before that, we had several waiata, lots of songs about rainbows, and Sailing Away. My sister's class had Lily the Pink.