Posts by Aidan
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Super nice piece Russell. Chris Knox was the guy in the hawaiian shorts and jandals who didn't give a fuck what everyone thought. I think the moral authority you talk about comes from not buying into all the bullshit.
I noticed that Stroke is available on iTunes. Do you know if he will get more/less/the same if I purchase it there?
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What the TiVo deal signifies
Is this some sort of fill in your own story gig? You're on the cutting edge of this internetty thing Mr Brown!
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Quite. $500 dollars per year.
Sorry, got to call bullshit on that number. To save $500 dollars a year implies spending $625/yr on lighting (CFL bulbs use 20-30% of the electricity of a comparable incandescent, here I have used 20%, which is a very generous assumption).
According to this survey of household electricity prices most consumers pay between 22c and 28c per kWh. Let's be generous again and say 30c/kWh.
So $625/yr at 30c/kWh implies 2083 kWh/year of electricity on lighting, which is 5.7 kWh/day. If we assume (again upper bound) we're running all 100W bulbs, this equates to 57 bulb-hours a day, so about 10 bulbs running continuously for 6 hours every day. Is this realistic?
That survey of household electricity prices gives a figure for an average domestic consumer of 8,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per annum. The $500/yr saving implies that household lighting uses 25% of the electricity consumed. In the US 8.8% of household electricity use is for lighting.
I reckon that $500 figure is bogus and undermines efforts for energy efficiency when fair minded citizens do the right thing and install CFL lighting and find their electricity bill is nowhere near $500 less.
If we use the 8000 kWh per annum figure above, and assume household lighting is maybe 10% of electricity consumption, then the average punter is paying $240/year on lighting. So the putative savings are 70-80% of $240, so $170-$190 per year. Not chump change but not $500 either.
With respect to CFL dimmer bulbs .. they are expensive and they suck. When we bought one to try it out the dimming was very non-linear and it was incapable of dimming to a low level, it would just shut off. LED lighting is more efficient, more flexible (efficient electronic (Pulse Width Modulation (PWM)) dimming) and less environmentally unfriendly (no toxic lead). Unfortunately it is also rather expensive at the moment, but the prices will come down.
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I think you're sticking to an overly restrictive definition of "female" there. For starters, define "advantage". As I said, Semenya is no Usain Bolt; she's within the range of female competitivity, easily. If they're just really good, is that unfair, more than Phelps' slightly freakish anatomy? How much better do they have to be? How do you decide that?
Sex is a continuum, not a binary. Saying "oh, tough luck, they just can't compete" is basically demanding that anyone who doesn't fit neatly into a gender binary buggers off until we start having co-ed top-level sports (you'll be waiting a while). Athletic talent is, to a large degree, genetically mediated. This is just another form of genetic mediation.
I don't know, but someone will and that will be the line in the sand. If there are separate events for men and women and there is a continuum between what is a man and what is a woman there pretty much has to be some cut-off point.
With regards to this situation, I can't say for sure just how good she is. You have said her time wasn't earth-shattering but she did win by over two and a half seconds. That said, the best 800m runner in the last couple of years, Pamela Jelimo also ran a very similar time when she was 18 years old and then subsequently ran the 3rd fastest time in history (one and half seconds faster than Semenya's winning time at the World Champs).
(Jelimo is recovering from injury and did not make the final in the World Champs)
I agree that athletic talent is genetically mediated. As soon as Usain Bolt started rewriting the record books I reckon there were any number of elite sprinting programs who re-wrote their talent scouting guidelines to emphasise height as a more important criteria than they did before. If Semenya turns out to be a huge talent AND she has a disorder of sexual development that leads to an advantage you can bet athletic programs will be screening for those attributes.
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Grace said
My feeling is that if Semenya's physiological advantage is natural (ie. not caused by performance-enhancing drugs) then she's a legitimate champion, just as Michael Phelps is with his unusually long arms. And she sure doen't deserve the public humiliation. If she's freakishly athletic, it's hardly her fault!
What if the only athletes capable of winning women's sprint events where those with disorders of sexual development? This would pretty much guarantee that talent scouting for females sprinters would mean thorough genetic and hormone-based screening of potential athletes.
If a female competitor gains an advantage from abnormal testosterone levels as the result of a disorder of sexual development then I don't think she can race as a female. This is unfair, but is the result of having separate events for men and women. I don't think you can have the latter without excluding the former.
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I don't want to to get **too* secret squirrel about it, but there is no such address as Belconnen Road in Canberra, and 2233 is the postcode of some southern areas of Sydney. There is a Belconnen Way in Canberra (funnily enough it is in the locality of Belconnen) but there is no 16 (you can see why on the map).
Is it coincidence that a made up address happens to actually not exist, or has persons unknown who registered the domain chosen it quite deliberately? i.e. they might actually be from Canberra. Even live near that address.
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Re: U20 final
I thought Shaun Treeby looked pretty handy too. Nice distributor, clever runner, good in contact, no poor options that I can think of.
What is with England teams and man-boobs? It's like they decided they were losing matches because they weren't strong enough so they have hit the gym big time. These are U20s and they looked ripped. And yet the guy doing the damage for NZ (Cruden) is no colossus (5'9" 82kg).
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I think Singh may be from New Plymouth, not Palmy.
(Don't want the `Naki to feel .. umm .. shafted ..)
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The disco-ball-as-codpiece was brilliantly shiny (and funny).
Tell the fellas make it understood
It aint no good if there's too much wood
Make sure you know before you go
The dance floor bro/ho ratio
Five to One is a brodeo
Tell Steve and Mike its time to go
Wait outside all night to find
Twenty dudes in a conga lineThey still got it .. heh.
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Aidan, does that mean the farm runs from Makino Road through to Kimbolton Road? Might I know them?
Yes and maybe.
I'll email their name ...
The long way was a great ride on a sunny morning, and the winding roads were a lot more enjoyable than one long straight one. And riding up Cheltenham Hill was an excellent fitness challenge.
Teenagers think they're immortal. I was entirely unperturbed by cars hurtling around corners, and I enthusiastically soaked up the slipstream of truck and trailer units.OUCH! I just recalled meeting one of those brutes coming round a blind corner. I was left with that feeling that somehow the laws of physics had been violated as there was no way we could have both fitted on that road at that moment. Like I said. Respec.