Posts by Bart Janssen
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This is just so horrible for you Isabel and you have my sympathy, not that its much help.
As for one in a hundred year events - to be clear that is a journalistic term ie a steaming pile of bollocks.
Basically we have no real way to know how frequent such a flood might be. As Lucy pointed out we have very good reasons for believing flood frequency will change after the quakes because of changes in the land. We also know Southern ocean weather patterns are being affected by ice melting in the Antarctic another good reason to expect change. And even if it really was a 1% chance event it could happen again next week and the week after - sigh.
All that means is that it's time this Government actually spent some money to help Christchurch instead of pretending Fletchers and the free market will magically solve all the problems. A National disgrace in every sense.
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I do regard a broader range of faces and voices as a good thing, though, and I’m intrigued by how many people seem to feel the same way.
It's easy to generalise about groups of people by cultural, religious, racial or any criteria if you don't have personal contact with them. When your really cool and nice workmate is purple it's hard to then mouth off at the pub about how purple people are all scumbag leaches on society and we need more purple-people eaters.
And yeah to blather on about restaurants again, when the Indian family cooking your dinner turn out to be just lovely people its hard to think the city would be better without them.
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For me the measure of cultural diversity is the food. When I first went overseas I couldn't understand why so many cities only had one cuisine. But if you eat around Auckland you can have almost any cuisine. Dominion road ranges from Santhiya's Sth Indian/malaysian, through Turkish kebabs, the whole gamut of chinese varieties in Balmoral as well as all along Dominion Rd, Sushi and Japanese at Banzai, great pizza at Gorgeous, a game restaurant at Cazador, through to classic modern kiwi international at Meridiths and Two Fifteen.
All over Auckland you get a huge variety of amazing foods all over the place, at Markets and little ethnic eating houses where two dishes are great and the rest of the menu is best avoided. And our top restaurants have all benefited from that influence, both in the huge variety of produce available now and in the staff coming through who just happen to have this great family recipe for ...
From my stomach's perspective Auckland is a hugely diverse city and that makes me very happy ... and quite hungry now :).
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Jack Cottrell,
in that you can’t think of anyone but yourself
Yup. Been there done that. Literally could not think beyond the boundaries of my head.
However, while that explains why the act is self absorbed it does not excuse the impact it has on others. In that sense it can be selfish. Sometimes.
I'm not saying that there aren't good psychological and even physiological reasons for that state nor suggesting society can dismiss any responsibility. Just noting that there are cases where the harm done to those still alive is real and significant and hence their (judgmental) reaction is understandable and even with some empathy excusable.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
phoning it in
Hmmm I wonder if there is such a thing as an automatic opinion column generator. We just think the authors are writing those columns.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’m pretty sure I know who at least one of them was and I think I might know someone who might still have the files – I’ll do some asking around tomorrow when my eyes go fuzzy from hideous excel spreadsheets
Oh! Please do. I have asked around in the past. I would dearly love to properly republish extracts.
Dammit the person who I thought might know didn't. He had actually written a couple of episodes for Shorty but didn't know about the script generator and he didn't think the other person I'd suspected to be involved had done it either.
So sorry doesn't look like it was any of our naughty CRI scientists :(.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Virginia Brooks,
I mean any type of suicide choice really that attracts judgement
One reason for the judgement is that some suicides are self obsessed and even selfish acts. Sometimes the things left behind cause a great deal of harm to those living. In those cases, yeah there is some judgypants going on.
But also I think there is an element of, “if I can judge this person as weak/defective/wrong/selfish/whatever then I can kid myself that I could never be in that state of mind myself”.
A kind of self defense mechanism that protects those left living from the possibility that they too could feel so bereft that ending all possibility of things getting better is the reasonable solution.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
two naughty scientists at a CRI
I'm pretty sure I know who at least one of them was and I think I might know someone who might still have the files - I'll do some asking around tomorrow when my eyes go fuzzy from hideous excel spreadsheets
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Still, I dispute that there is a fixed internet culture that we can't do anything about.
This blog site is absolute proof of that.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Tom Semmens,
people are taking it way to seriously as a medium of communication.
Twitter is now a major source of science. At work I use it to feed me tables of contents for the journals I need to read. I use it to follow key people in my field. It is a media where scientists feel free to comment quickly on their latest results or results from other labs that they find exciting.
Without meaning to offend, those people who dismiss twitter as a useless toy for children are doing it wrong.
Sure I follow @EmrgencyKittens because pictures of cute kittees make me smile but I also follow Jonathan Eisen @phylogenomics because, well if you know what his tag means you'll understand.
Twitter may have been invented for social media but it doesn't mean us science geeks can't make it useful the way we did with every other piece of the internet.