Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Chuck is probably worth catching up on, and while I don't watch Supernatural a friend who does tells me that the second half of season 4 is pretty good (and she was extremely disillusioned with season 3 to the point of giving up on it, so.)
I've just taken up Castle as a replacement for the crime/comedy slot Bones used to fill before their character decisions made the annoyance factor outweigh the enjoyment. Early days yet, but it seems promising, and they're managing so far to avoid the annoying professionalism-is-because-you're-too-uptight line I was worried they'd take after the first episode.
I really hope they have a story arc in mind. The best shows in the genre over the past decade have got over the idea of being episodic and have the whole story scoped out (ok, BSG and Lost are both criticised for weak endings, but you get my point).
Funnily enough, I find myself missing episodic sci-fi; there is something to be said for not having to catch every single episode to watch a show. There's a balance; the show I can think of that struck it best was season three of Buffy, which had an excellent overall story arc but kept each episode largely self-contained plot-wise until right near the end of the season.
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I've often though that the Web would be the ideal place to publish novellas and novels in instalments
Well, it is used this way, all the time - in fandom, anyhow.
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I think the best quote so far from someone on the news was 'just because two things happen at the same time, doesn't mean they're related.' You're kidding me?
You're telling me we can't solve global warming by all becoming pirates? Damn.
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In the real world, information must be able to be shared in confidence sometimes. Innocent people who oppose their governments -- or decently serve the US government -- could suffer in the case of an indiscriminate leak of communications like that.
There was a very good BBC Radio 4 Analysis (or possibly File on 4?) podcast not so long ago (read: in the last year) which dealt with the concept of discretion - i.e. the idea that just because you could spread information doesn't mean you need to - and how that has been lost somewhat as a value, especially around government-related information. This is certainly a case where this applies.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that this is a war where there have been massive and concerted attempts by the governments involved to obfuscate, hide, and lie about information which was materially important, not just to the operation of the war, but to the *justification* of the war. The concept of accepting discretion and secrets in government relies on the idea that those who are deciding what to keep secret or quiet about are doing it for the right reasons. It's about trust. It requires trust. And when it comes to the US and their foreign adventures of the last decade, that well is long since run dry.
Which doesn't mean that there isn't stuff that still needs to be kept secret. It just means that there is *huge* motivation to want everything out in the open - and no-one, at this point, who is legitimately in the know *and* can be trusted to determine what should and shouldn't be released.
(TL;DR - when governments lie, the subsequent destruction of trust royally screws their ability to keep secrets long-term.)
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Or and here's a killer idea. We could replace Steven Joyce with M.C.Escher and have all of our roads go downhill. That would save a fortune in fuel costs. (thinks, Will this crop up in one of John Key's speeches soon?)
This whole line of thinking reminds me of a colleague who demanded to know whether this Kafka guy was some sort of famously bad architect, because he seemed to have designed so many confusing buildings. (I had just described the Charles de Gaulle airport as "Kafkaesque".)
Come to think of it, sometimes it's not a bad adjective for aspects of the current government, either.
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I just went and looked at the actual numbers - it appears that last year more people used just about every public amenity from the library to the theatre to public toilets than attended Carisbrook - just about the only thing that people used less than Carisbrook were actual playing fields.
Fair enough - saying it's now almost the least-used public amenity is more meaningful.
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No rugby's definitely in decline, the local city council released a survey last month that shows that more people visited cemeteries in Dunedin last year than went to Carisbrook. Even fewer people went to a city park to watch a game. They get about 5000 to a Highlanders game these days
Which tells you mostly that lots of people have friends/relatives who they like to remember by visiting their graves; which, given the 100% mortality rate of humans in the long term, is...somewhat less than surprising? Unless you're suggesting that graveyard visits are a hot new alternative to watching rugby?
(Or, alternatively, that rugby attendance is declining in one smallish city with one really crappy Super Some Number team. It's a bit hard to generalise that to "rugby is definitely in decline" for the whole country. Which doesn't mean it *isn't*, but doesn't prove that it is.)
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I took that to mean the employer paid for a doctor to visit you at home and examine you and issue a certificate (if appropriate). I.e. I took "the doctor's visit" to mean "visit of the doctor".
Did she not mean that?
If she did, she is so grossly out of touch with the medical experiences of most of the population that....no, it doesn't surprise me.
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Thinking of our ancestors Islander, obviously they didn't have to contend with evils such as the opossum, but it's almost an admission of ineptness and the inferiority of our species to argue that we can't deal with these creatures without firearms.
You want to take on wild pigs with a spear? Or a blow-dart? Be my guest. I'll watch. From a safe distance.
This is a basically fallacious argument; our ancestors also dealt with the winter cold and outdoor living without modern tools, but I hardly feel that my oil heater, sunscreen, or felted merino jacket are admissions of ineptness.
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And they seemed more sane than the one who recommended the copious amount of vitamin C
Blame Linus Pauling for that - he got it in his head back in the fifties that it was some sort of miracle cure, and because he was a Nobel laureate it's never gone away even after it was conclusively disproved (that massive amounts of vitamin C were good for *anything* in particular.)
Observation is the first and most important thing in science and medicine, but there are people whose relationship with it is fraught.
It's that fine balance between relying on accreted evidence and subservience to orthodoxy; in medicine, where mistakes can be deadly, and nonspecific conditions easy to dismiss, it often gets tipped easily in the latter direction. How that gets changed, I'm not sure.
(Of course, it also has to be *accurate* observation, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.)