Posts by Peter Ashby
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As an early teenage Southerner (via an early start in Scotland) I found Auckland an, interesting, place. The shallowness you describe was present in the late '70s. Mind you that you had to go all the way South to go fishing is an indictment. As a teenager in Auckland I fished both harbours regularly. Last time I was back the BiL took me out on the Waitemata and I managed to catch all the fish. We even swapped sides of the boat but I continued to haul them aboard by myself.
Also technically you only hunted. Gathering is for eg going and getting your own mussels instead of buying them in the supermarket. Or ditto wrt mushrooms or sundry other comestibles freely and deliciously available in the wild for those with the gumption to seek them. I can recommend the wild strawberries here in Scotland, though they are never numerous enough for more than the odd delightful morsel. The blaeberries aren't bad either. I haven't been fishing here, its a bit different where you can etc but I know people who do so fresh salmon and trout are not uncommon in the house. You cannot buy food as fresh as that which you hunt/gather/grow yourself.
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@Jeremy Gray
Ooh, thanks for the headsup on that. I adore the Masha Qrella version of Pink Frost. I am seriously tempted to buy a number of those off iTunes, the advantage of being here in the UK.
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Russ, don't make the mistake of thinking that 'everyone' is into social media. I have no Facebook, Bebo or any similar account, I have never tweeted or read a tweet (that hadn't been reposted to a blog or news story). I use an RSS reader, but only because having a page open in Safari for too long slowed the whole computer down.
The internet is just as useful to me as it ever was*, as an information conduit. I was arguing with far flung folks on usenet for years before I made the jump to the web (I still miss threaded discussions). I was an email subscriber to Hard News for years before the jump to Public Address made commenting possible. The mode changed, my consumption only slightly as I gave up usenet and soc.culture.nz for here and Mr Litterick's musings (which again, I used to consume via email).
I bother to watch about 3 video clips a week, almost all embedded and only go to YouTube itself when I need a blast of The Clean (must buy a CD, must buy a CD).
*GoogleEarth has increased the utility of the internet for me enormously. For eg, all the pavements around here are covered in tramped snow that has frozen solid since before xmas. Which means going for a run has been problematic. Seeking runable terrain i drove across the Tay to Tentsmuir forest on the Southern tip of the mouth of the Tay Estuary and ran around the beach while the tide was out. GoogleEarth allowed me to plan the route and find the 3 and 6 mile points on my run enabling me to work out my splits. The introduction of StreetView has enabled me to check if rural roads without pavements are wide enough to make running along them safe enough without having to drive out there. I can similarly use it to help our youngest plan runs in Auckland or Tauranga from a computer in Dundee. The feature I want next is live update on conditions, so I can see exactly how far out the tide is NOW! and would have warned me that the access path at the Tayport end of Tentsmuir was similarly a strip of solid ice (I hopped from frozen salt marsh tuft to tuft alongside) and I would have gone to the southern car park instead.
So the net is only disappointing if you bought into the hype that blogging would save the world. Anyway I disagree that the taking down of icons was only negative. If it makes the MSM more careful with their facts since they know they will be found it, it will be a good thing. However I fear they don't care about facts, assuming any mistakes will be caught by others and so are becoming shameless instead.
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@Ross Mason
We played Goons tapes while my wife was in labour with our eldest back in '86 (Just). It was deemed ideal for taking the mind off things . . .
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WRT league tables, there is a world of difference between 'everyone knows its a good school' and being able to point to 'official' figures that prove it. Those schools that do well out of the league tables will not be able to resist using the fact. Those below them will feel the need to catch up and those at the bottom will find the league tables being used as a stick with which to beat them. It is called human nature and relates to game theory.
Here in the UK* they tried to address issues of low decile schools not doing well by introducing a 'value added' measure. Since they measure kids at 11 just before they leave primary you can take that and see if they have improved at 14 and later during national exams. It has not helped.
Also all the research on what enables 'good' schools to be good schools shows that it is all about selection. Whether that is achieved by the school having a high decile intake or by actively excluding the 'wrong' sort of pupil (which is how the religious schools do it) doesn't matter.
*England and Wales, here in Scotland they do not do such testing. The teachers know where the kids are and they communicate that to the education depts so the stats can be crunched, but that is pretty much it until at 15 and national exam data are made public and the media go mad for it.
Comparing kids from wildly differing decile schools is just madness and a real nonsense from a statistical p.o.v.
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I have recently finished reading Marc D. Hauser's book Moral Minds. It reviews not the philosophy but the state of modern science on how a moral sense actually develops in children and that the building blocks of our morality, such as a sense of fairness, are displayed by many animals. IOW we don't get morality from religion, religion gets its morality from us, particularly as social animals.
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The Hogfather is indeed a deeply wise book. I especially like the bit towards the end where Death points out to Susan that you can take the universe and grind it down to the finest particles and sieve them but not find a single molecule or atom of Justice or Fairness or Love yet Humans carry on as though they are set in stone or super hard impervious metal.
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@Islander
It is one the quirks of this paticular iMac that it wont do capital qs...
The left hand shift/control/alt keys on this one are nonfunctional. The command key is weirdly partly functional. Mind you since this is iirc the third keyboard we have had due to drinks accidents* I suspect this defect is externally inflicted.
A bigger problem is the flaky hard drive, a new bigger one is on the way though. Then I get the joy of opening a G5 iSight iMac (look it up) and doing a drive swap. I am no neophyte on such things (done one on a RevB iMac that is some surgery). But this one has me a little worried.
*We have horrible cheap Logitech job up in the attic for the next time one completely dies while we source a proper keyboard (no local Apple dealers sadly).
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@Just Thinking
Yes, us atheists and agnostics are seen by the proselytising religious types as some sort of absolutely empty and obviously naive spiritual vessels that just need telling about the 'good news' so we should be easy to convert. What they need to consider is that many of us were brought up to believe and had to work to lose that belief. So we are in effect immunised against the 'good news'. I am getting jaded arguing with believers on the net because you get ones who claim to have a 'new' argument/evidence for the existence of god, which almost never turns out to be true, it is just new to them. I have seen/heard all of them and dealt with them. I'm a 9th Dan Black Belt in defeating arguments that any deity exists (though the IPU does of course, don't pay attention to that arriviste deity the FSM). I specialise in delving amongst the foundations of arguments and undermining them by showing the premises to be false. But after a while it all gets very samey.
Once more into the breach, dear friends once more . . .
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One of my concerns about David Shearer's proposal is the non stated assumption that the populations in New Zealand are an evenly distributed sample of the populations in the Islands. I am not at all sure that this is true. So if you are going to do this then you need a system both to determine if you are giving the aid to people whose relatives are indeed in need AND to determine those who do not have access to those remittances and so will need other assistance. This looks extremely messy and inconsistent way of ensuring that all who need aid will receive it.