and write short sentences April 20, 2007  

The Virginia Tech massacres have sparked calls for gun control. As any sane person knows, this is absolutely ridiculous and a position only advanced by the feeble-minded. Why, he could just as easily have killed all those people with a cricket bat! It can happen - I've seen Shauno of the Dead. Of course, it would have taken longer, and he could have been overpowered more easily, but still: if you think guns should be controlled, you are logically committed to thinking that cricket bats should be too. And baseball bats. And anything that you can get a good swing at someone with. And skipping ropes - don't forget the garotte potential. And so if you think cricket bats and skipping ropes should not be banned, you are logically committed therefore to supporting the entirely sensible and just position that all guns should be freely available for sale to anyone. And if you think that gun control is a good idea but don't think cricket bats and skipping ropes should also be banned, you're not only stupid and insane, you're a logically inconsistent hypocrite.

Slightly more seriously: it's at least good to see the police responding to the media's "He had a history of writing disturbing things! They should have done something!" with a comment to the effect that if they locked up every university student who was a bit depressed and wrote violent stuff, they'd have to build a lot more jails. And this is in the US, where building new jails is practically the only industry keeping the economy from stagnation.

Other pithy comment on conservative response to the shootings by the inimitable Harry Hutton.

Have been having a lot of fun recently listening to the BBC's podcast. Particular favorite is the current series of The Now Show. The Now Show is very funny in and of itself, but I particularly like the little, podcast-only sections where they politely explain that the radio broadcast had a particular song, which they had the rights to broadcast on radio but not via podcast, so just imagine that you're listening to Westlife.

Hilarity with Google Maps. If you haven't tried this one yet, give it a go. Go to Google Maps, and get directions from Boston to London. Read through the list of directions. Note the obvious anomaly. Now that's funny.

Rule 1 of business writing: lose the adverbs.

filth-encrusted hands April 17, 2007  

Signs of the times, man.

The other day, Rebecca was being looked after by our friend Mary. So she was at a park in Karori, playing with Sorcha (Mary's daughter). Someone came up to Mary and said "Excuse me, but is that Jack and Heather's daughter? I've seen pictures of her on the internet."

Fortunately, the person turned out not to be a stalker, but Michael's sister Katherine.

We've just got a webcam so we can use Skype for video calls; primary driver being that my sister Charlotte is over in Geneva at the mo. So we got it all set up and working the other day, and made our first video call. It worked pretty nicely: lost signal a few times, a few teething troubles with the mic and so on, but it basically worked fine. So all the adults (including my mum, who'd come down to see if it worked) were sitting around going "wow!", and Rebecca was just talking away and showing Auntie Charlotte various of her toys. Of course, for her this is just business as usual: she's completely used to bits of the natural world showing unexpected behaviours, and being able to talk to someone through the computer is no more unusual than the idea that the caterpillars on the plants at the front of the house are going to turn into butterflies. So she took in right in her stride while we were sitting around marvelling.

So if anyone fancies a vid chat, drop us a line - we're the imaginatively named elder_family account on skype.

Go go Stuart O'Grady. Paris-Roubaix is not known as the Hell of the North for nothing; it's a race for real hard buggers, and it's good to see an antipodean winner.

I was interested to read that abstinence-only sex education is completely ineffective. I mean, it's what I'd always suspected. But the results in this survey are quite interesting. Because - since the group given abstinence only education and the group told how to use Happy Mr Rubber Hat turned out to have basically the same sexual behaviours, including age of loss of virginity, percentage abstaining from sex, use of safe sex, etc - this doesn't just imply that abstinence education doesn't do anything. Doesn't it kind of also imply that safe sex education is also a bit pointless? I mean, all the survey does is show that whatever you tell teenagers, they tend to behave about the same.

Of course, this criticism misses an important point: for abstinence-based sex education, the key message is a moral one ("It's GOOD to wait until you're married! It's the greatest gift you can give your future spouse!" etc). For actual sex education, the goal is communicating facts so the kids can make up their own minds. And knowledge is transitive: people pass it on. Proper sex education is about giving kids the real details, so all the half-truths and outright myths that circulate around teenagers are derailed. Even if you don't know how to use a condom properly, as long as your partner does you should be OK. So I think that erring on the side of funding education, rather than morality, is the way to go.

I am puncturing like a bastard at the moment. In the past week, I've had four punctures. Last thursday, I was barrelling down the gorge in a howling gale (literally) and pelting rain when I got a piece of glass in my rear tyre. Not a shard: a piece, about 5mm square - tore through the tyre and the tube, and ended up loose inside the tyre. Took me 20 minutes to fix the damn thing, most of which was getting the tyre off the rim so I could actually do the fix. I then punctured again on the way home on Friday, and again on Monday, and again tonight. The puncture on Friday was because I hadn't properly glued up the slash through the tyre left by the glass; Monday's was unrelated, but today's was the same hole again. So I've spent the last hour and a half swapping out a tyre from Heather's road bike (she's not using it at the moment, and it means I can get to work tomorrow!), then painstakingly adjusting my mudguards so the slightly larger tyre doesn't scrape. Big pain in the neck, really. And it's off to Torpedo7 to order in another tyre...

just for the kick April 10, 2007  

Had the in-laws down for Easter: Jim (bro-in-law), Jo, and wee Evelyn. Rebecca and Evelyn got on like a house on fire as per usual, spending huge amounts of time running around the house playing. Rebecca immediately went into bossy mode, telling Evelyn what to do. She was very keen on reinforcing any message we gave her: if we told them to stand back from the side of a pond, Rebecca would grab Evelyn's t-shirt with both hands and haul her backwards. She also picked up on Jim & Jo's habit of using both Evelyn's first names as a way of emphasising a particular request ("Evelyn Rose, you put that down right now!") and started doing it. Rebecca is all of three months older than Evelyn. But she clearly considers those three months to lay a heavy burden of responsibility on her shoulders.

But it was very cute. My favorite moment was at about 6:45am on Easter Sunday. Rebecca had come through to our room at 5am and then gone back to sleep in our bed. At 6:30 she got up, announced that she had to go back to her own bed, and wandered off. We heard a series of giggles and muffled thuds and scraping noises (as of a chair being dragged around), followed by a click and Rebecca clearly saying "There, Evelyn, the lights are on! Now whose Mummy shall we go see?"

And man, can Evelyn eat chocolate. We gave them each a 50g easter egg, and they sat on the front steps and did woodchipper impersonations. Evelyn knocked hers on the head in about four minutes - Rebecca had a game attempt for five, ate 3/4 of it, and then said she'd had enough and asked me if I wanted some. She's a good girl.

Here's a useful training resource for the masses: ActiveSmart. It's a free training tool. Most online training diaries are, basically, intended for the sort of person who shaves their legs, knows their current bodyfat percentage, and measures their resting heart rate each morning. ActiveSmart is aimed at the rest of us. It includes a training calendar, customised workouts based on your current fitness level and goals, dietary advice, etc. It's a joint resource between ACC, the Ministry of Health, and a few other public health bodies. Log on and take a look.

Probably time to mention that I'm on my yearly two months off the booze. After a slight false start, I've been going for the better part of a month. No issues, and it's cheaper, so that's a plus. But I'm noticing what I always do - I get a lot hungrier when I'm not drinking.

This is a particularly interesting page, detailing how the first inhabitants of New Zealand were not the Maori, nor the Moriori, but the Scots. I love the way that it starts out asserting a contentious, but vaguely plausible archaeological scenario - that other groups arrived in New Zealand prior to the Maori - and descends from there into a frothing sea of conspiracy theories, madness (cf the stuff about the stain of cannibalism being upon ancestors to the seventh generation) and racist drivel about Maori savagery and treaty claims (because, you know, the Treaty is based on the theory that Maori were the original people of the land! And it turns out that it was actually us Scots who got here first! So the whole country is really ours!, etc). For value added fun, note how they decry archaeological evidence and allege cover-ups - except when it's evidence of cannibalism, when they accept at face value the conventional theory that this was perpetrated by Maori (rather than, say, their purported Celtic immigrants). Note the lurid depictions of cannibalism! Note just plain how many times the word cannibalism is used! Yes, Maori cannibalism is pretty well documented, but they're focussing on it to the exclusion of any other Maori social habits. It's people like this that give insane fringe science a bad name. As someone who - when forced to define an ethnic identity beyond "Pakeha" - tends to say "Celtic" (it's easier than saying highland Scots, English, and a wee bit of Spanish for luck, and it's slightly more descriptive than the proper answer for basically anyone of European descent i.e. mongrel), it's a bit grating to have loons like this carrying the banner for the Celtic revival in NZ.

Anyway, the Celts weren't exactly tea and cucumber sandwiches types. We were head hunters too, you know.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

Earnest Hemingway, quoted by Matt Seaton in the Guardian.

"lorem ipsum" - ten letters. Human hands - ten knuckles. Coincidence? Or perfect tattoo?

8 inches of fun April 02, 2007  

Having spent Sunday afternoon exchanging most of the contents of Rebecca's room with the study, I got to spend a fair chunk of this afternoon under the house redirecting the cable connection. Previously it came out in the study; after the swap, we needed it to come out in the back room. This involved a certain amount of minor faff - removing the F-connector head, drilling holes in the floor, etc. Then I got to go under the house to actually pull the wire out of one hole and push it up the other. Ever seen The Great Escape? Like, that bit where they're digging tunnels? Like that. That part of the house is only a few inches over the ground. It wasn't so much a matter of crawling around, as lying completely flat and inching around. At one point I had about 8" clearance - I nearly got stuck when my fleece bunched up slightly. Not a good job for claustrophobics (nor arachnophobics, given the spiders down there). Still, I got the cable shifted, as is evidenced by the fact that I'm posting this. Offline for about 24 hours; not bad for a full room shift. Of course, we've still got to finish the shift off by moving the two giant bookcases, but we can worry about that at the weekend.

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