Open mike 09/12/2010

24 comments on “Open mike 09/12/2010 ”

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1. travellerev 1

   9 December 2010 at 8:54 am

   For those interested I will be on Kevin Barret’s internet radio show. On Tuesday 14th December 6-7 am New Zealand time. I will be talking about my research into the possible way 911 could have been planned prior to 911.

   My working hypothesis is that software capable of delivering simulated demolitions based on physical and mathematical data was available before 2001 and used to plan the demolition sequences (both the anomalous top down demolitions of the twin towers and the controlled demolition of WTC7) reducing the amount of people needed for the operation dramatically and enabling the perpetrators to work from a detailed storyboard.

   I have done this research for a total of 2 years and my initial interest was based on my 16 years of experience as model maker and SFX engineer and my conclusion that 911 was a storyboard based event.

   I will post the link as it becomes available
   • Colonial Viper 1.1

     9 December 2010 at 10:57 am

     Cheers that will be interesting.

     I turned on the TV that morning and for the first minute I seriously thought it was a Hollywood movie.

     Further after the event I was surprised that each of those 3 buildings had fallen completely and precisely on to their own foot prints, given the assymetrical nature of the damage each one sustained.
2. Sanctuary 2

   9 December 2010 at 9:54 am

   I see John Key just re-elected Winston Peters and NZ First by giving him 5-10% of the National vote.

   Winnie won’t turn up the gift wrapped and gold plated opportunity to assess the cosy “constitutional review” by the easily manipulated old duffer Sharples and the double dipper of Dipton as an attempt by the brown and round tables to trade away our democracy and freedoms behind closed doors.

   It is a vote changing issue, and plenty of New Zealand voters would be inclined to agree that such an assessment is EXACTLY right – and punish Key and co accordingly.

   I think Key’s hubris may finally led him to over-reach himself.
3. The Voice of Reason 3

   9 December 2010 at 10:04 am

   Apropos of nothing; scientific proof of what we’ve all long suspected. Felix is a stud:

   http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/4438157/Its-not-the-size-of-your-boom-that-counts
   • felix 3.1

     9 December 2010 at 10:50 am

     Lolz!
     • prism 3.1.1

       9 December 2010 at 11:02 am

       Is Felix good at blowing loudly over the top of a glass bottle? I don’t understand.
4. prism 4

   9 December 2010 at 12:28 pm

   The predators are fighting over the weaker farms in the herd. Crafar’s farms were outliers easier to pick off by a mangy fighter from overseas. Why would we allow sales to speculative, uninterested, farming-ignorant foreign investors who aore likely to be lacking commitment to the nation and its quality standards and recognised brand. The farms should be sold speedily to Landcorp at a negotiated price.

   Crafars didn’t treat their animals properly and we don’t want that repeated by foreign landlords with the profits extracted and remitted to foreign owners which mucks up our current a/c further.

   (Interesting the USA was lowest on the list of countries for a bad Current A/c Balance for 2009 at No. 181 at -380.1 billion US dollars. That’s far below the next up, Spain -69.46 billion US$. NZ was at 168 with −10.557, I think for 2008.) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_current_account_balance
   • millsy 4.1

     9 December 2010 at 8:52 pm

     Quite frankly I think the government should buy the farms and then turn them into an agrarian version of CalTech or MIT – and made a mecca for environmentally friendly and sustainable farming.
5. Jim Nald 5

   9 December 2010 at 1:30 pm

   Taking a step back from all the shambles that John Key & co have created and are wallowing in, I am looking at the current state (pun) and have a comment, well, a question.

   Who is running the country?
   • Foolsgold 5.1

     9 December 2010 at 8:37 pm

     Mate it’s just on auto-pilot most of the time.
6. ZeeBop 6

   9 December 2010 at 1:53 pm

   Privatize the profit, socialize the risk. So when a former prisoner sues because they were denied the vote after they got out, exactly who will pay out, not National, or ACT, no! Even more tapayer money will be spent making sure the some people are banned from voting, and then WHO is paying out when they mess up! All because prisoners who engage in voting, who want to participate outside the jail but are already denied liberty to do so, will be stopped. How stupid is that, we pay good money to make sure prisoners remain connected, remain engaged to society, we pay then to skill up, yet we want to remove the vote from them! How completely crazy! Stop profiting by taking liberties away and shafting taxpayers with more costs! Prisoners already can’t leaflet drop, and if they could in prison that would be a good use of their time discussing social issues!!!!
7. Carol 7

   9 December 2010 at 1:55 pm

   There’s an extended question time today, with Labour MPs asking a load of questions to memders (Chairpersons of various committees) about submissions about several bills. Should be interesting, I think?

   http://parliamenttoday.co.nz/2010/12/questions-for-oral-answer-dec-9-2010/
8. Rosy 8

   9 December 2010 at 1:59 pm

   RIP Margaret Heaney, keeper of the New Zealand values many of us admire http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/4437973/Lotto-winner-leaves-generous-legacy
9. NickS 9

   9 December 2010 at 3:27 pm

   Damn thee Science, damn thee:
   http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/pagenum/all/#p2

   Yeah, so it turns out the claims of the arsenic incorporating bacteria are very dubious due to the team behind the claim not doing proper controls to ensure that there was actually arsenate (the arsenic version of phosphate) covalently bound to bio-molecules. Stuff like glucose, and smaller sugars where the presence of phosphate is key to transporting them and breaking them down for energy or putting parts together for building larger organic molecules in biosynthesis. Which allows us to design, and nature to evolve all sorts of wonderful poisons which to interrupt those activities.

   But to the point, the people the journal Science got to review the paper should have noticed the issues with controls and basically got the researchers to redo the experiments properly. I, as others have voiced, suspect that the journal editors decided it was more important to get this scoop than to loose it to another major journal such as Nature, and published the paper despite the major issues with it. That’s assuming they sent the paper to people with the background capable of reviewing the paper properly and provided negative comments.

   This also serves as an example of how science generally works when major works have serious flaws, as in people with expertise in the methodologies and the relevant literature can provide strong criticisms of a paper’s claims. Generally though this typically occurs within university journal clubs, and between students and supervisors in terms of recommending papers, and which authors to avoid like the plague. The emergence of science blogging has helped to make this more visible, such as with Darwinius, and the more specialist blogs, but generally because it’s buried in technical blogs and comment threads, you don’t see it unless you go hunting for it.

   Now, a key tangential question here, is does the above apply also to climate science? The answer lies in whether or not the criticisms made actually get into the same level journals as the one that published the crappy paper. Either in the form of letters, opinion pieces or plain old full articles. As has occurred with Darwinius, and other bits, where as the vast majority of criticisms about climate change science never make it out of the crank blogs, and rarely come from individuals with the scientific background in the science and methodologies used. What does make it through is typically corrections to previous models and date plus improvements to statistical tools that further confirm climate change. Where as the cranks end up published in very low impact, non technical journals, interdisciplinary vanity journals, or journals which don’t even cover climate science.

   The same pattern is also observed with all the other science denialism crap, where in they’re stuck in ghettos and crank journals, it’s not to say peer review is perfect, as the likes of the contemptible hack Andrew Wakefield shows, along with the above stuff, but it does generally work. It just takes a while for post-publishing criticism to occur and often it’s invisible to those outside a given field. Blogs can also help, but when denialist twits are involved, finding scientifically valid criticism becomes difficult for newcomers, who often lack the tool set to pick up on whether or not someone’s an idiot.
10. NickS 10

    9 December 2010 at 3:32 pm

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4439928/Beer-ad-stirs-up-storm-in-a-T-shirt

    Thanks Stuff, that’s such a wonderful anti-PC headline, that just absolutely doesn’t capture the utterly banality and stupidity of using homophobia to sell beer. More so given that the homophobes don’t really drink small-brewery beers, instead they prefer the urine like taste of export gold et al.
    • Mac1 10.1

      9 December 2010 at 11:17 pm

      Agree NickS. What happens when a good small provincial product gets into the hands of the big city money barons and their ad-boys. Up-sizing to increase market share leads to loss of control and dilution of taste in beer and in ethics. Fuck-wit idiocy beggars description.
11. BLiP 11

    9 December 2010 at 5:41 pm

    Time to join the fight – get your low orbit ion cannon from here.
    • NickS 11.1

      9 December 2010 at 6:16 pm

      Warning, the first link in the above post should not be viewed with out an add-blocker, especially while at work and if you’re internets intolerant, we advise not looking further into it ED. Especially if you don’t have eye bleach on hand.

      Uh, also, try and find an ops page in future so potential minions know what to do. Not that there’s anything on partyvan.info other than hitting VISA where it hurts.

      NB: by engaging in a DDOS attack against douchebags you run a small risk of getting in shit, in the form of a smallish fine and/or banhammering from your ISP. Thy have been warned.
12. millsy 12

    9 December 2010 at 9:03 pm

    Another piece of the wefare state is chipped away…

    Quite frankly the only benefit this policy will have will be for slum landlords and rack renters, and will only have the concequence of putting rents up in the private sector – and they are already too damn high as they are.
13. ianmac 13

    9 December 2010 at 9:45 pm

    London:”Minimum sentences for murder are set to be abolished and thousands of people will escape prison altogether as part of the largest shake-up of Britain’s criminal justice system in decades.

    Overturning years of Conservative Party orthodoxy that “prison works”, Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, said he wanted to reduce the Britain’s jail population by at least 3000 by 2015.”

    Wow. That would upset the Sensible Sentencing Trust here, but maybe it is a trend in a more humane direction, (even if it is really a cost cutting exercise.)
    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/crime/news/article.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10693013
14. Colonial Viper 14

    9 December 2010 at 10:46 pm

    NZ RSA Outsources Fund Raising Poppies to Highly Unionised High Wage Country

    They will save $150K (even though wages are higher in Australia) and 30 Christchurch workers are losing their jobs.

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/4442429/RSA-sends-poppy-production-offshore

    yeah we suck
    • Lanthanide 14.1

      10 December 2010 at 10:11 am

      I wonder if they considered whether donations would drop by less than $150k when they made this decision. Presently it’s a very bad look for them.

      I’m not particularly concerned with it being made in Oz with Chinese components, what annoys me is that the jobs being done in CHCH were primarily by intellectually disabled people. People who will (generally) find it very difficult get jobs elsewhere, and for whom having a job would be quite gratifying and make them feel useful to society.
      • M 14.1.1

        10 December 2010 at 10:45 am

        ‘ People who will (generally) find it very difficult get jobs elsewhere, and for whom having a job would be quite gratifying and make them feel useful to society.’

        My thoughts exactly, L. For many people it will be a case of ‘so what they’re just a bunch of retards/handicaps’ but oftentimes intellectually disabled people will give you real service with a smile or work their hearts out because they’re so grateful to have some meaning and structure to their lives. Case in point is the trolley wrangler at our local supermarket who has a slight intellectual impairment but was always very helpful and kind to me when I used to go to the supermarket with two pre-schoolers as he would put the kids in the trolley for me and could hold a polite conversation.

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1. The Standard: posted on 8 December 2010 at 5:03 pm

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