Posts by Peter Ashby
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Ventral Capital funds
<i>They grow out you stomach?
(Sorry)</i>no need to apologise I cringed when I saw it. As a scientist who is strong on Anatomy can I say I was having a Cajal moment?
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Yes as Russell says it is better for foreign investments to come back in from our investments overseas than to attract foreigners to invest in NZ as the their profits leave the country.
NZ could do with better Ventral Capital funds too. It is the country that gave the world the jetboat, the automatic rotary milking machine etc, etc. One of the good things about being at the arse end of the world miles from anywhere else is that necessity often has to be the mother of invention. We should be investing in those.
I often wonder exactly how much the recent hitching of science to the 'Knowledge Economy' has actually yielded vs the previous situation as well.
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What exercises me is that buying music online is barely cheaper than going into a shop and purchasing the CD. Yet by my doing the former I have saved the record company all that CD burning, sleeve notes printing, jewel case assembly and distribution etc.
I note that there is a new phenomenon whereby on iTunes etc you cannot buy individual songs from certain albums as people were cherry picking. I can see this as viable, but only if the price is reasonable.
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Helen Clark strapped to a gurney in the background about to be cut in half by a Laser?
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Is it just me or does all Key needs in that photo is a white cat to stroke? I bet it's one of a series and in the next shot he is stroking that white cat.
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The other thing to remember about Iceland here wrt govt guarantees is that Iceland has a population of 300,000 (Christchurch). Which is not much of a tax base on which to reimburse UK public bodies playing fast and loose with council taxpayer's money.
A bit like if I took on John Key's entire fortune and invested in the stock market and now he wants his money back...
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Actually Matthew Poole if the world economy crashes then being a producer of foodstuffs and NOT consumer electronics will turn out to be a good thing to be. Provided we can afford to ship them to market that is. How good is Pinus radiata at being turned into tea clipper style ships?
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The 'authorities'* here in the UK can use 'anti-terrorism' legislation in all sorts of ways many people in NZ would find appalling. Down South of the Border a member of Her Majesty's Constabulary can arrest you, just because. If you ask them for the time or directions, beware, you could be arrested for interfering with a police officer in the execution of his duties (you distracted him from spotting terrorists).
Be very careful of carrying any more photographic gear than a small digital camera as well. There are increasing reports of people carrying camera bags being detained by the police for questioning. As someone who not infrequently totes such an item (I am still resolutely using slide film in my manual focus Canon A1 (yes, it DOES have a battery, for the shutter/metering) this concerns me.
Beware.
*pretty much any public body and private companies contracted to deliver services to or on behalf of public bodies. Both info to be put on the biometric ID cards and ALL your medical records from the soon to be centralised NHS database will also be available to all of the above. Boy do I want to come home after writing all that.
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Remembering number sequences used to be soooo easy... with the advent of cell phones I'm totally deprogrammed. Seriously, I used to have the photographic memory for phone numbers, whether they were spoken aloud or written down.
I know exactly what you mean. My solution is that the programmed in numbers on the house phone are for other people. Me I just dial them.
My wife, whose memory for people's names is wonderful, relies on me to remember almost everthing else. I can remember the phone number of everywhere I have lived, no problem. And the street address, and what year and month moved into and out of. What year we went to Finland/St Petersburg/Talinn etc. etc. Names? only if I see them written down frequently.
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Oh say, what do you guys do when someone you don't know (or don't recognise perhaps) taps you on Facebook?
Oh that one is easy. I don't have a Facebook account, or a MySpace or a Bebo or any 'social networking' site account. That helps a lot.
However I did once get an unexpected email from 'myself'. A Nominative Dobbleganger noticed my name on usenet and dropped me a line. It was a bit weird initially. Turned out the name was the only thing we had in common so the correspondence didn't last long.
There's another one who also publishes Biomedical journal articles. Which is why in most of my later papers I am Peter R Ashby.