Posts by rodgerd
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Buy Snow Crash, go to a decent second-hand bookshop (Browsers if you're up this way) and just buy it. You'll be reading it more than once anyway.
Pity the last third is loses the plot and the 'facts' about linguistics are complete crap.
I made the mistake of the starting the heaving, turgid mess that is his Baroque Cycle. Neal Stephenson must be the smugest, most self-satisfied, and hugely over-rated sci-fi author working today. I find his cult even more annoying than Dan Brown's.
(And to the person who asked what Dan Brown did wrong: well, there is, I suppose, 'produce bad versions of Umerto Eco books that people take far too seriously', but he seems to be fullfilling the role of allowing some of us to feel enourmously superior to others quite nicely.)
Anansi Boys
I found that quite dissapointing, really. One thing I like about Gaiman's work is that he generally provides rich sketches; rather like Rennasiance paintings stuffed with symbolism there's a good time to be had in picking apart which references he's chucking in. Another is that his work generally allows a bit of room for the reader to fill in gaps and come to their own coclusions about things; American Gods is certainly an exemplar about the former, and has a bit of the latter. Anansi Boys TELLS YOU WHAT IS GOING ON AT THE TOP OF ITS AUTHORIAL VOICE WITH REMINDERS AND HANDY DIAGRAMS TO MAKE... err, sorry, to make sure you get it it, in excruciating detail.
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D'oh. Wrong thread. Administrator, hope me!
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Buy Snow Crash, go to a decent second-hand bookshop (Browsers if you're up this way) and just buy it. You'll be reading it more than once anyway.
Pity the last third is loses the plot and the 'facts' about linguistics are complete crap.
I made the mistake of the starting the heaving, turgid mess that is his Baroque Cycle. Neal Stephenson must be the smugest, most self-satisfied, and hugely over-rated sci-fi author working today. I find his cult even more annoying than Dan Brown's.
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Of course, the pure espresso is a bit of an exaggeration - there are still old-style cafes (as in "cafs") around that will do filter coffee, and quite a few of the Turkish places around Wellington will do delicious Turkish coffee.
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(Given that we don't have a huge Italian community?)
Either your assumption is flawed or Wellington had more than other parts of the country. There are plenty of big/influential families of Italian origin around here - the Bresolini, the fishing families of Island Bay, the guys who set up the Medeterranian Food Warehouse, to name a few.
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Which would be fine if Howard had acted according to the report's recommendations. Instead he's attacked the problem as if it's a purely aboriginal issue, inferring that they're the authors of their own misfortune. Refugees throw their kids overboard, aboriginals abuse their kids.
Howard may be a racist twat - personally, I think it's more likely that, like Winston Peters, he is happy to appeal to racist twats for votes - but this does not somehow (as some people here seem to be suggesting) mean that there aren't some pretty serious problems that need to be tackled. And it seems like the people keenest to kiss Harawira's arse have the least to say about concrete ways of tackling those problems.
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Fantastic news. Congratulations to you both.
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BreakSpa for Kids also links to your story as part of its discussion of the topic.
There's a certain irony that one of the first terms of abuse to be rolled out by vaccination flat-earthers in these debates is often the idea that 'pill-pushers' are on the payroll of 'big pharma', yet in the case of the autism scares, it turns out that the people most financially compromised are the ones whose work is being used to decry vaccination.
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Well, sure, and I've said before I wish, with 20/20 hindsight, that I'd done a lot more science and math post-School Cert
As an aside, you may need to add Latin to that 8).
Seriously, though, my high school had, as part of Social Studies and English course, analysis of advertising and the language of politics, which seem to me to be crucial for navigating the modern world; in a similar vein, I don't think anyone should leave high school without having been given the chance to get a decent grounding in statistics and the scientific method , and why they'd want them in day to day life. The world is full of snake oil salesmen of one stripe or another, and Orwell, Hooke, and Huygens are our best defence.
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Ironically, it's parents -- the so-called Mercury Moms -- helping drive misinformation on the other side.
I wouldn't mind so much if their misinformation resulted in them dying or being crippled by preventable diseases, rather than their kids. Or, with a breakdown of herd immunity, everyone else's.
...but is remarkably tolerant of folks reporting on science and health issues who are basically scientifically illiterate and innumerate.
Sadly, this is hardly unique to the Observer. The Economist (which seems to have been creeping futher and further from its supposed classical Liberal principles) ran a piece recently denouncing the reclassification and discovery of new specieis essentially because, umm, Linneaus didn't recognise them and he invented the modern system of taxonomy. Yes, let's ignore the last few centuries of discoveries in biology because modern molecular biology and genetic assaying tells you things you don't want to hear.
Popular science reporting is basically crap, and, as Craig notes, this is in large part because it's handled by scientific illiterates. I don't think one needs a PhD to report on science, but a few years beyond the mandatory 5th form minimum wouldn't go amiss.