Posts by Bart Janssen
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Up Front: Stand for... Something, in reply to william blake,
I love the Pleiades as a symbol of unity. It spends six months of the year in the Northern sky and the other six in the South. Matariki is our own new year.
But the southern cross is all about the Southern Hemisphere. No messy history from those pesky Greeks. All ours - well except for all the other people who see it :).
I guess I'm not hating it just that it doesn't feel as "New Zealand" to me as it does for other folks.
Now if we could get this on the flag
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Oh and just to point out that I agree with Craig
While I am not that invested in a new flag and while I might prefer money be spent elsewhere and even if it is some weird right wing plot ...
this could be turned into something good. We could either affirm that we all quite like the connection with England and our history OR we could create a new flag the makes people happy in some way.
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Up Front: Stand for... Something, in reply to Penny Ashton,
I just want to say I am disappointed in these comments. Nothing but polite, erudite, intelligent discussion.
Thems fighting words!
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Up Front: Stand for... Something, in reply to George Darroch,
Of all the designs submitted so far, this is the one that most compels me: “Matariki at midnight”.
Except for me this is always The Pleiades and don't feel really New Zealand. But that is probably just me.
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Been thinking about this more than I thought I would.
I can see the argument for creating a genuinely New Zealand flag that separates us from the colonisation issues. I personally don't feel that strongly about it but I recognise that others do.
I can see Bevan's point about us folks who don't feel this is a worthwhile exercise raining on the parade of those who do.
BUT
I'm worried. And bear with me because even I feel like I'm being vastly more batshit paranoid about this than I should be, but I kind of think this is a marketing conspiracy.
Imagine for a second a room with some very dedicated National strategists considering how they are going to ensure that they stay in power for ever. Set aside their motivations, good or bad. Now clearly the strategy of treating elections as a campaign based around a presidential leader has worked really well. Also the strategy of using back channels to discredit opponents has worked really well. And the strategy of discouraging those groups who normally vote for opponents from voting at all has worked really well.
All those strategies come from the US right wing playbook. So what else works really well for the US right wing ... blind patriotism. Invoke the US flag and a huge number of folks just roll right in behind you.
But that doesn't work well in NZ - because frankly half the folks couldn't give a rats arse about the flag - and as for blind patriotism well we're kiwis - we don't do that.
But if New Zealanders could be convinced to do that, wouldn't it be a really powerful tool for the right to use?
Hence the flag.
The above is a bizarre batshit crazy scenario, but honestly is it more bizarre than using Slater to tar your opponents?
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basically saying that changing the flag is a fucking stupid idea.
I would have said "changing the flag is a fucking trivial idea"
You want us to have a debate about what?
Really?
You don't think perhaps there might be other things a bit more important?
Oh, I see, you want us to ignore the important things and spend our time this trivial flag thing ...
Well FUCK YOU and the blue painted horse you rode in onI kind of think New Zealanders have a pretty good sense of the important things, patriotism isn't important, neither is the flag you wave.
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Envirologue: Multi-no-choice –…, in reply to linger,
You really think National are quite that fruitbat?
It's a difficult question. Certainly National and the PMs office seem to have an uncertain relationship with facts. Whether that would extend to blaming a whole continent for their own inactions is up for debate.
However, the lack of attachment to the real world and the ability to deny the existence of anything that disagrees with their ideology does suggest certifiable fruitbattyness.
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It's also interesting that for a government so quick to tout it's innovation (snort) policies they are clearly don't believe New Zealand could contribute at all to global innovation in the energy and global warming fields.
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Envirologue: Too Big to Fail – Why…, in reply to Alfie,
I know this is slightly off-topic, but can I ask if this is the reason some people can smell asparagus pee and others miss it altogether?
This is from memory but as I recall there are two things going on ...
First only some people convert the compounds in asparagus into those really smelly compounds in urine. So only some people make the smell. The ability to produce smelly asparagus pee appears to be a fairly simple genetic trait.
Second only some people can smell those asparagus pee compounds. Again it seems to be a fairly simple genetic trait.
The fun thing is that both traits appear to be independent. So it is entirely possible to produce the smell and not be able to smell it yourself :). Or not ever produce yourself but if you walk into the loo after a producer ...
Full disclosure I'm ... nah ... probably TMI
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Envirologue: Too Big to Fail – Why…, in reply to Russell Brown,
“What is truth, anyway?”
So in a completely random side track. I work at PFR* one of our Crown research institutes and as much as I bitch and moan about the state of our CRIs I do get to work with some amazing folks.
One of these Richard Newcomb (now our chief scientist) did some really lovely work with the people in our sensory group at PFR that has relevance for "THE TRUTH".
Two papers in Current Biology, a journal which is sadly pay to view, looked at the ability of people to detect odours, the odours typically found in fruit. They found, as you might expect, different people can smell different odours with different sensitivity. Then they genotyped all the people and looked for and found evidence that the ability to detect some odours is a fairly simple genetic trait.
In short, it is your genes that determine what you can smell.
That means since your genes are different from everyone else's, how you perceive the world, in this case how you smell the world, is unique to you.
Your truth is yours and yours alone.
* as a complete aside one of the pictures on our website at the moment - the one with the blue light shining on some fruit swirling in water - is a machine called The Turbulator - which is bloody noisy and is right outside my office door!
