Posts by Peter Calder
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Just spent a few days cycling around Kyoto, which is ideal for cycling, but hostile to cycle-parking. There are designated cycle parks - few and far between - but if you just lock your bike to a lamppost the cops, when and if they feel like it, just cut the cable and take the bike on one of their periodic roundups. Bike are also banned from the CBD. On the other hand, many shops and all supermarkets, have dedicated customer cycle parks right outside the door. Needless to say, nothing ever gets stolen, from anywhere, by anyone.
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Authenticity alone does not make a movie great. If it did, the James Bond franchise would have been stillborn. Conversely, of course, the lack of authenticity does not make a movie bad, though I have a lot of trouble liking movies in which journos who take no notes for weeks write front-page leads in three minutes and write (in big letters) their own (really crap) headings, like "Scandal Exposed".Think Russell Crowe in State of Play. For the record, I thought Everest, which I did not review, a good movie, but far from a great one. But the fact that mountaineers use "summit" as an intransitive verb does not make the use of the word in a movie script a good idea: Scientists use polysyllables of Greek origin all day long. You never heard a doctor in a movie ponder issues of the relative bio-availability of different generic drugs, but real doctors do all the time.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to william blake,
Well I'll be fucked
Are you the same William Blake who wrote Songs of Innocence and Experience? I liked your earlier stuff better. More nuanced. ;-)
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Pete George,
A 4.9% result has other critical information associated with it. There’s a +/- 1.4 margin of error giving a 95% confidence of it being in a range from 3.5-6.3% which is slightly less than a fifty fifty chance of making or breaking the 5% threshold.
Sorry, Pete. Balderdash. If a poll has a margin of error of (let's make it easy) plus or minus 2% that means that 50 could be anywhere between 48 and 52. But it does not mean that 3 can be somewhere between 1 and 5. I don't know the actual figure but there will be a formula and it will be something like 3 can be somewhere between 2.87 and 3.13. The 2% is equal to two percentage points only when n=50. I failed School C maths but since having done a story on this in the 90s, I have had to explain it to a dozen political editors. I will forbear to name the ones who have shrugged and said "like, whatever, dude". It should go without saying that when a political journo says a party polling 1.9% is polling below the margin for error, he or she is uttering meaningless poppycock. Feel free to run this by any statistician you know and you'll find I am right ..
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Hard News: Poll Day 2: Queasy, in reply to Sacha,
John Armstrong channels the National Party's advice to Labour. Shameless hack.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=11229836</q>
Sorry, can you elaborate? -
Having worked often alongside Alison in the subbery, I can attest to her precise and painstaking professionalism and (important) her abiding respect for writers' intentions. No copy leaves her desk without having been (usually invisibly) improved. She will be hugely missed. And Finlay's right about Tom McWilliams ...
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Emma, you are driving me wild with passion. I want you to whisper in my ear about subjunctives, dummy subjects, misrelated participles and the misuse of the word "irony".
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Deborah,
Then you should read it again.
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Paddy Gower is to political reporting what Glasgow skinheads are to street theatre ...
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I fondly recall signing off then leaving the studio while [Jon Stephenson] was still at the desk tearing strips off his fellow panelist and serial plagiarist Garth George)
So Jon has something to learn about the definition of futility, then ...