Posts by James Green
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... and the only other death worldwide associated with BZP ingestion also involved MDMA.
The maths is pretty simple.
One(ish) death. 5 million+ pills sold in NZ.
4+ deaths. From how many hits of butane/lpg?So which is the bigger problem?
And which is easier to ban? -
I should add as a caveat to my previous post that the first author (Paul Gee) of the Christchurch ED study does think that BZP should be banned. I think the range of things taken with BZP, combined with 19 people overdoing it twice suggests that there are people who will just find something else to do....
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I'm still a bit sceptical about the badness of BZP. According to the lit review I have in front of me, there is a grand total of ONE recorded death in the entire world. And that person also took MDMA the same night, and is assume to have caused the cerebral oedema by drinking too much water.
As yet the biggest study of adverse effects of BZP (from the Christchurch ED for part of 2005) had 80 cases (from only 61 people; ie 19 went too far twice); and 65 of those 80 cases also involved alcohol/cannabis/nitrous/MDMA/ritalin/LSD. The number of pills taken ranged from between 1 and 25, with a mean of 4.5.
And there is a case study of 1 case of psychosis following BZP ingestion.There is also quite an amount of research still underway, but it doesn't seem like BZP is the bogeyman.
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Surely you could make a great case out of masturbation leading to lowering fertility? then you could finish with a thundering conclusion about porn.
That sounds almost fit for one of New Zealand's other leading exponents of journalism. Perhaps North & South should Investigate.
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The most obvious architectural precedent of the proposed waterfront stadium is Te Papa, which in spite of any of its other merits is truly uninspired in its external design.
slightly off topic, but I don't think that Te Papa is entirely uninspired, but that it does not address the street frontage, despite that being the angle from which most people approach it. It looks amazing if you are on the water, or further around and see it's side profile. However, if you're walking toward it, or driving past it in a car, you see a monolithic wall. Maybe it's a metaphor for modern seaside New Zealand. Fantastic houses hidden behind big walls that open out to the sea but are shut to the road...
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Hi Sarah, Danielle. I guess I'm number 3!!
I think Dave's written a fair number of songs that have tapped a little too deeply into people's psyche, and turned into 'albatrosses'. I'd single out Bliss, Slice of Heaven, and Loyal. Curiously, both Bliss and Loyal are also chronically misunderstood. The drinking satire that became a drinking anthem, and the break-up song that gets airplay at weddings. Odd.I still think Don't Hold Your Breath might be my favourite song of all time.
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A naïve question perhaps, and a little out of left field: What dollar figure would make the IRB forget about the capacity issue?
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Hayden Green: God ... can be removed from all scientific equations.
The kind of people that make arguments like Collins would never put God in a scientific equation to start with. That's sort of the point.
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Atheists don't believe in god. Anti-theists are against god.
I would have thought anti-theists were people that were against theists (ie, were annoyed by theists/those who believe in god)
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I admire a Christian willing to reject Intelligent Design. I was somewhat surprised to see he's called an evangelical christian in wikipedia. This sort of reasonableness I'd more associate with liberal theologians. What I think is important is that if a person chooses to subscribe to christianity and science (which I think should be possible), that faith shouldn't set boundaries on what is knowable. Faith is fine for the unknowable, but what is unknowable may recede over time with advances in science.