Posts by Kracklite
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<quote>__intended to protect the spacious and tree-filled qualities of sites characterised by generously sized lots, wide roads and lower densities often with period housing.__
It could be said that it's some of those qualities that have got Auckland into the sprawling, gridlocked mess it is now.<quote>
While I don't mean to slag of Auckland in particular (I have to slog past some appalling new terrace houses and then through the brain-meltingly awful 'Panorama Heights' on walks to my favourite Wellington lookout), I have to agree with Tom here. We are living in a fantasy if we think that we can simply keep on 'aspiring' (still hate that word) to a nice suburban house and section. It's a carry-over from the colonial dream that the working classes could live like kings in the new land in the South Pacific, while in Europe the norm even for the well-off is a long-lease apartment.
Bizarrely, the pursuit of a private detached house at any cost has led to absurd cost-cuttings. It's incredible that we have such poor building design standards - no insulation or double glazing to speak of for instance.
Unfortunately I don't see things getting better. The long rises in house prices (despite the recent stagnation) is likely to continue as a long-term trend and it will simply be a normalisation to match world trends. Of course because of our national mythology, affordable housing will be a political cause celebre and the populist solution will be really crappy housing or grants for everything. Neither is really tenable.
(Insulation I care about even when I'm not looking at my power bills - Scotland has the thistle, Wales the leek, England the Rose... and Aro Valley has as its emblem mildew.)
And of course, compact cities rather than sprawling suburbs are much more efficient.
Another peculiarity in NZ versus Europe is that European suburban sprawl was facilitated by good public transport, which on the whole we don't have here. For example, a lot of the early advertising for London's tube traded on Ebenezer Howard's 'garden city' concept for an ideal mix of work in the city and evenings and weekends in the almost countryside. In America the car facilitated this, and that is again something untenable in the long run.
We'll have to get used to dense housing, probably apartments, and we'll have to start demanding good apartments, not dreaming about suburban bungalows.
OK, rant over. If Don Martin were still alive, no doubt he could come up with a good onomatopoetic word that combined 'Grrrrr' with a sigh of resignation.
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And am I the only Morning Report listener who finds it regrettable that Sean Plunket is (occasionally) relapsing into 'hectoring' mode?
No.
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My condolences to Finn's partner and family too. What can I say but repeat what others have said? I suppose that the repetition si an affirmation of community...
Young, creative... damn. His posts were always so lucid and warm. I never met him either, but I'm still shocked by the sudden emptiness, the absence.
A wonderful eulogy too, Russell.
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Lesbian FemiNazis Go on Cocaine-Fueled Legislative Rampage, Further Undermining The Family, Traditional Values, Christianity and All That Is Sacred
The Windsors are actually anthrophagic lizards. Wishart is boring. We really need David Icke.
And now for something completely different.
And surprise, surprise, the computer starts discovering extremely powerful spam features that we have trained ourselves to ignore, like the color used in an HTML tag, or just exactly how often spammers use some fairly common word. And the nice thing about that is it's much harder for the spammer to notice it either.
Ah now, that's fascinating. I've noticed that a certain kind of businessman always says "ladies", "girls" and "babes" (or "b*tches") but never "women". Would all the tics and biases constitute a specific kind of cognitive pattern?
Sorry to go on about Watts all the time, but he's currently my fave sf living author (Wells and Lem being dead, Stableford too affectedly cynical, Russ too retired, myself too obscure), but there's a neat throwaway in one of his novels about an AI managing a subway system watching patterns of light and dark on the clock face of the train platform as an indication of the transport system's basic operation and ignoring things like oxygen levels...
In one of Temple Grandin's books, interviews, whatever, she said that she noted that the reflection of a rotating fan on a shiny wall could freak out a cow on its way to milking while no human could figure out why the cows were refusing to move. The fan was irrelevant, or so they thought.
Now Grandin's observations/interpreations have recently come under attack, but the criticism seems to boild down to the position that "autism is pathological but this is supposed to be the norm and therefore it cannot be" while forgetting that it's "pathological" or rather unusual in humans.
On cognitive difference, there is this interesting podcast from CBC wherein the analogy is made between high-functioning autistics and cast and dogs: don't complain that your dog has poor tree-climbing skills and good slipper-retching skills and never meows, because it's simply not a cat.
Now, two autism researchers in Montreal are arguing that maybe autism isn't something that needs to be cured. Maybe it isn't even a mental disorder.
It's a rather controversial position.
Anyway, I can't quite articulate what I'm on about, but I'd appreciate any input from someone who actually knows more about this debate. I guess my point is that there is not abstract, neutral Kantian logic, but rather systems of cognition conditioned by perception and therefore physiology. If wer're looking for aliens, let us look first at cats, AIs and other people.
Anyone else read an essay by J.B.S. Haldane, "Possible Worlds"? It is more or less on the topic of physiology-determines-perception-which-determines-cognition. "Quaint", perhaps (pre-WWII) but fascinating.
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Right, I am sooo out of touch with kayway culture. "ELV" means "Expendable Launch Vehicle", right? Could someone tell me whether the sacred ritual of Rhugbi is performed with a racquet or a bat?
The Herald's business pages don't necessarily bother with facts when it comes to climate science.
Well, I've always thought it indicative of the intellectual tone of the Dompost that the horoscopes are in the business section.
I wonder if journalists ever wonder why they are despised almost as much as politicians whenever polls are taken on the relative esteem of various 'professions'? It's pompous crap like the Harold's recent edict that tends to reinforce this impression, shurely.
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Can't resist, considering the ridiculous claims of heroism deniers attribute to themselves:
Behold! Before you stands Denius the Mighty, scion of the Clan Zetetic, guardian of the dread portal of the Moving Goalposts, wearer of the Impenetrable Helm of Tinfoil and Wielder of the Magic Talking Sword of Specious Rhetoric! Be enchanted by his adventures as he stalks the flat plains of the earth, avenging the persecution of the unclean tribe of the Unh-Ipicc mind-benders! His task will be arduous and victory will be uncertain, but he knows that he will vanquish the filthy Unh-Ipicc. His quest for justice will begin as he penetrates the Labyrinth in Inta-Necht and pores over the runes of ancient and unfalsifiable abstracts hidden therein without moving his lips! In those venerable and fusty documents he will find the map revealing the hidden Citadel of the Conspirators from which he will pluck the Cherries of Truth! His quest will not be easy, and along the way under the faces of the molten glaciers, he will have to confront the Dragons of Celsius, but he will be guided by the wisdom of the great sage Crichton and the wealth of the Clan of Exxon! Now if only he can get rid of that ringing in his ears...
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So who's buying "Nexus", "Uncensored", and "Investigate?"
And books by Richard Hoagland and Michael Crichton.
And there were plenty of mobs willing to burn witches. That's what motivates me - the fear of a society which will embrace such deadly illusions.
Kracklite, you do go above and beyond the call of duty banging your head against this particular brick wall.
I do it for pleasure. It feels soooo good... when I stop.
I know that I shouldn't even start - my First Life commitments are starting to line up at my door to have "a little talk" with me about time management. If I disappear, you can be assured that the Men in Black, Mr Guilt and Mr Paycheque, have taken me away to a top secret installation called Victoria University to befuddle innocent young minds with talk of volutes and mullions.
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Iran-contra. WaterGate. Prez of Ukraine poisoning by Russia & so too the Russian Billionaires in the UK...
True, to which I add the Gunpowder Plot and any secret cartel-type arrangement, including recent revelations of shady practices with ticket surcharges by BA and Virgin (Virgin fessed up).
However, one can't assume an equivalence of validity in conspiracy theories because some conspiracies have occurred. Eg., Nixon conspired to bug the Democratic Party headquarters and there are evidence and witness and convictions to support that and in any case, such a conspiracy is plausible - as is its cock-up. An implausible conspiracy is one that violates the laws of nature and involves a web of influence that seems both infinite in extent and in effectiveness (Majestic 12, the Trilateral Comission, Roswell, NASA covering up evidence of Martian civilisations, faking the Moon landings and so on).
There certainly are strange things flying out of Area 51/Groom Lake, but the hypothesis that they're technology demonstrators (not even prototypes, let alone operational squadrons) built by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works has a higher value of probability than flying saucers from Zeta Reticuli made by Greys as an explanation. A conspiracy theorist will say however that if there are secrets therefore there must be Greys and then get into a bizarre orgy of confirmation bias where every aquarium and streetlamp is proof of the Greys' influence.
The odd thing about the loopier conspiracy theorists is that they assume both infinite extent and infinite competence. Real large organisations certainly aren't like that!
As rules of thumb, I'd propose three indicators: first, the plausibility of a conspiracy theory is in inverse proportion to its supposed extent in space and time and effectiveness. Second, the more evil the conspirators are just for the sake of being evil, the less likely it is to be true and third, the greater the number of stages of concealment, the greater the likelihood that it's so shadowy it doesn't even exist (OK, Bankers manipulate markets, but a cabal of Jews behind the banking system, who pursue a still deeper, millennia-old agenda which is at another level transcending capitalism and communism in order to manipulate both? Not likely).
Some, alas, are downright dangerous - eg., the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That in fact does seem to be a real conspiracy, but the supposed documents were almost certainly concocted by the Tsarist secret police to incite and justify pogroms and seizures of assets within Russia (no doubt there's a good Wiki article that I can't be bothered linking to right now). To that I can add the 'conspiracy' by Satan to corrupt souls on earth and generally spread wickedness through witches. We all know where that went too...
It's not the conspiracy that's the problem, it's what the conspiracy is used to justify.
1stly They great fun.
Well, not to rain on your parade... maybe just drizzle a bit... some are, indeed: The Church of the Subgenius, the Illuminati and all that. As you might guess from my references, I do enjoy reading about them myself. Foucault's Pendulum is a fun read (it's about the last novel by Eco that didn't just irritate me).
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Not a conspiracy of course, just a straightforward commercial arrangement.
Reminds me of what Peter Watts has to say about his working history:
He spent ten years getting a bunch of degrees in the ecophysiology of marine mammals (how's that for unbridled optimism), and another ten trying make a living on those qualifications without becoming a whore for special-interest groups. This proved somewhat tougher that it looked; throughout the nineties he was paid by the animal welfare movement to defend marine mammals; by the US fishing industry to sell them out; and by the Canadian government to ignore them. He eventually decided that since he was fictionalising science anyway, he might as well add some characters and plot and try selling to a wider market than the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
Headlining his site, this dubious testimonial:
"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." —James Nicoll
Jolly fellow. Likes cats though.
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Comment of the week!
I'd like to thank the Academy, my agent, my parents, Stanley Kubrick who is a true genius as a director (even if he is dead), the costume designer, Frank my poodle, the make up artists, the lighting technicians, the best boy (what does he do anyway?), my publicist, Nokia, all other corporations who had their products placed in this movie, Napoleon Bonaparte, the largest moon of the planet Saturn, Titan and its methane lakes as well as the planet Saturn itself and of course its rings... and above all, God.