Posts by Tom Beard
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Where do you stand on killing possums, goats, deer, rabbits, stoats and feral cats, ConorJoe?
And I also have no problem with hunting when the result is either the culling of noxious species* or some very tasty sausages. And generally it's good when people enjoy their jobs. But people (mostly blokes) who enjoying killing for its own sake with so much relish ... scare me.
* Yes, I know that most of the noxious species in this country wouldn't be here if they hadn't been introduced for hunters in the first place. -
I don't need to tell you about the statistical folly of trying to declare an average or a trend on the basis of a single cluster.
Do you think there's any chance of passing a law that requires every media outlet to employ at least one person who has passed sixth form maths? We wouldn't require them to derive the Poisson distribution from first principles, but maybe, just maybe, they might be able to tell their colleagues that clusters of rare events do happen, and that one should not draw conclusions, let alone foaming opinion pieces, from their occurence.
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Mark: I think the Nerdiverse just imploded.
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I just make a point of de-following anyone who sends me more than a couple of tweets along the lines of "I'm off to the shops now" or "mmm, that was a great meal"
Funnily enough, that's more what I'm there for: keeping in contact with what friends are up to. In those two cases, I might reply "Hey, want to catch up while you're in town?" or "Where was that? I'm always keen to hear about new restaurants."
But then again, I've come to Twitter from Facebook, rather than seeing it as an information source.
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You can see why I'm not built for microblogging.
I just can't think of Twitter as "microblogging": I see it more as a slow chatroom with permeable walls. Much more about conversation than publication.
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I would love to expand my wine horizons beyond "The boss gave us a bottle of that for Christmas and it was nice" or "Hey, we had that at so-and-so's house". However, I am too chicken to actually speak to people in wine shops, and wine language appears incomprehensible to the untrained eye...
That's where places like Wineseeker are invaluable. They're more than happy to talk to people without much wine knowledge, and their motto is "matching people with wine". You can go in and say "I'm looking for something about $20 to go with Italian food" or "I quite like Riesling, can you suggest something similar?" and they'll dig out all sorts of gems for you. They also have free tastings every lunchtime, and "introduction to wine tasting" courses that can gently help you get informed. Plus, the singles' wine tasting nights are rather fun...
Note: I am not getting paid by them!
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Small independents of Wellington that I rate for the quality of their repartee as well as their product:
- Rumbles (wine)
- Wine Seeker (wine)
- Mandatory (clothes)
- Unity (books)Seconded on all of those, especially Wineseeker, which probably counts as my local and has introduced me to many wonderful, obscure varieties of wine. Though there's one thing that New World seems to do very well here, and that's beer: even the Metro has a better selection of Belgian, English and local boutique beers than most bottle stores (Rumbles & Regional excepted).
Apropos local food, the Waitangi Park market on a Sunday has ever more stalls from small producers of smallgoods, baked goods, preserves, and what-have-you. It's nice to get stuff directly from the producer.
It's great to see it becoming more diverse. I'm all in favour of markets, but having two dozen trucks all essentially selling the same range of veges is not particularly exciting, even if I did cook at home (and even if I did eat vegetables). But having sausages, bread, crepes and so forth makes it so much more of an experience, and the great advantage of the Waitangi Park market is that the fishing boats can pull up almost next door and fillet their catch for you.
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The odds of them working out that drunk people were trying to calculate the speed of light in Moro bars per micro-fortnight is pretty much nil.
Though at least if they manage to deduce the "moro bars" and "micro-fortnight" parts, then the "drunk" bit would follow rather naturally.
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the idea is that the easier you make it the more people are likely to cycle, but once they actually become proper keen cyclists they'll likely just do it the hard way instead on purpose.
Well, I'd say that it's good to encourage people to become regular cyclists, but not all regular cyclists have to become keen cyclists. In Wellington at the moment, anyone willing to brave the traffic is likely to be a keen cyclist, and may want to do it the hard way because it's as much about exercise as transport. But in a truly bike-friendly city it would be more than just the lycra brigade that cycle to work or the shops: in the same way that most people who walk to work don't wear tramping boots, it would be nice if people could bike in suits or frocks.
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much of it was due to people like Georges-Eugène Haussmann
I'm with Baudelaire in preferring the pre-Haussmannised Paris (or in my case, the remnants of it). The Champs Elysee is actually rather boring compared to the mazes of old alleys in places like the Marais, and considering that the rather overscaled grand boulevards are still vastly more attractive than any motorway, the difference between an environment designed purely to move vehicles and a city that works at a human scale is enormous.