Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Sure, it would be great to have Youtube load in a few seconds and watch hi def streaming video whilst uploading your family pix to Picassa but are we willing to pay much more for that?
You're forgetting business users - who can use a great deal more data than residential users, think of the opportunities for companies like Weta - and population growth/uptake of broadband.
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It's no use having a fire hose to water the garden if your pipe at the street is a straw.
Which reminds me - can anyone here explain the point of those godawful Verizon ad (the water isn't even coming out at full pressure! The metaphor is thoroughly inappropriate for DSL! Gah!)? I've seen it far more times than is possibly necessary and I still don't understand what they're trying to advertise.
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Not a single Iraqi portrayed as anything but victim, coward or psycho killer. Only character in entire film who cares at all about Iraqi kids is the big ol' American - really, he asks the natives for help and gets none. And for his suffering and pain he is never thanked, but still does it again, cos that's the kind of world saver he is.
Wow. These days they normally manage at least a token nice Muslim or Iraqi. Extremely token, I'll grant, but none...that's depressing.
The other comment I've seen is that it's quite telling that the first time a woman wins Best Director, it's for a film that is not only seen as a men's topic (however inaccurate that is) but is almost exclusively about men and male experiences.
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Earthquakes where two plates are sliding horizontally past each other are generally not that powerful (relatively). The really big quakes are called megathrust quakes and occur when one plate is subducting under another. Both this latest Chiliean quake and the quake that caused the Boxing Day tsunami are in this category. The bad news is that the North Island is atop just such a subduction zone.
I think this is another of the things Russell is trying not to think about.
Calling Yellowstone overdue is really just fear-mongering.
Calling any natural disaster "overdue" is fear-mongering to some degree, given that they don't work to schedules. But the fact of the power and uncontrollability of that scale of eruption is real, and it *will*, at some point, happen. And we won't be able to do a damn thing about it. That's worth knowing about - and that's where the real fear lies, even if it's highly unlikely to happen in any given year.
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It just wasn't the line of work for him, and I don't know why he didn't just get a job that suited him better.
As someone who hates customer service as much as it hates her, yet did it for three years: because most entry-level jobs are customer service to some degree or description, and it's often not as easy as "just get a job that suits you better." If you need work, you need work.
That said, there's no excuse for going nuts at the *existence* of customers. They're kind of a prerequisite for the existence of your job, after all.
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Those two who broke into the chemist shop to get diabetes medication and were shot for looting - would that happen?
If it had been long enough, probably you'd get a few vigilante crazies. I'm more inclined to let that slide because it worked story-wise, and it was fiction.
Lucy: I saw that docudrama and I thought it was quite unrealistic that they closed off the Wellington region at Otaki and didn't let anyone near the Miramar peninsula or the main affected areas. People would walk, climb and clamber, or steal jetskis to get to their families.
I bought that. You'd get a few people through, but with the roads out it'd be nearly impossible, and the last thing you want in that sort of situation is people coming *into* the zone who aren't part of an organised rescue plan. They'd have to at least try.
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But that's just the Wellington fault. The nearby Wairarapa Fault last broke in 1855 and caused a magnitude 8.2 quake which would still be pretty, shall we say, exciting, in the wellington CBD.
On a technical level, how did you feel about the docudrama TV3 did last year? IIRC that was based on a potential Wairarapa fault rupture. Didn't address the wider region at all, though.
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Simulposted! But that docudrama was very liberal with the historical record and completely botches the scene of Pliny's death. Also, it's not at all clear that his was a rescue mission. A relative had sent for him but every other indication is that he was going there primarily to witness the event first hand.
Fair enough; I didn't know they'd fudged that bit. I did know they'd played a little fast and loose with the characters (using skeletons from Herculaneum as inspiration, etc.)
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Oh,,,and don't mention you play the position in Rugby known as ....hooker.
So I'm not allowed to tell people why Sean Fitzpatrick is one of our national heroes? Because that was definitely on the list.
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There was enough energy released in the Chilean earthquake to destroy buildings and landscape over a large region, slosh the Pacific ocean around, and speed up the earth's spin. Where did this energy come from? Is it new energy? And where has the rest of it gone? Could the earthquake have been caused or influenced in severity by the gravitational pull of the full moon?
Re: the moon, no. Not at all. Most earthquakes are caused by the plates of the earth's crust sliding past each other, getting caught, and then releasing and shifting (a little simplistic, but essentially correct). Energy builds up over a very, very long time. andvery long distances, which is why you can get so much releasing at once. It's not new energy so much as old energy which has been waiting around (though energy is constantly being stored as well as released in earthquakes.)
The energy ultimately comes from the fact that the Earth's core is very hot, creating the molten-ish mantle, upon which the plates float (sort of). One day it'll all be gone; places like Mars and Venus no longer have or never did have tectonic activity because their cores weren't big or hot enough to sustain it. But that won't be for a long, long time.
I know earthquakes can influence animal behaviour, but I've also read on some blogs that some autistic people also sensed something around the time of the earthquake. What could be the explanation for this?
If it's true, and not people rearranging their memories to accommodate the quake? Low-frequency noises, most likely. Autistic people might be more likely to hear them before the main shaking hits.