Gnus Comment. Written articles from New Zealand and around the world that are of interest.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Miniature Guide Horses for the Blind
Friday, June 25, 2010
A Puffin Comeback
The Six-Stroke Engine
More from our friends at "Damn Interesting"; the Holy Grail search for a better combustion engine goes on.
Only a little more than 20% of the energy released from the fuel in your gas tank is used to drive the car forward, the rest is merely converted to heat within the engine and exhaust. Imagine how miserly your fuel usage would be if all of the energy was converted to driving force and you could reduce the weight of the car significantly.
Of course this article is only about one new idea; you should also check out www.coatesengine.com/products.html and www.new4stroke.com for other angles on the search for the better internal combustion engine.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana
The world's most humble fruit has caused inordinate damage to nature and man. Seedless, sexless bananas evolved from a wild inedible fruit first cultivated in Southeast Asia, and was probably the apple that got Adam and Eve in trouble in the Garden of Eden. From there the fruit traveled to Africa and across the Pacific, arriving on U.S. shores probably with the Europeans in the 15th century. However, the history of the banana turned sinister as American businessmen caught on to the marketability of this popular, highly perishable fruit then grown in Jamaica. Thanks to the building of the railroad through Costa Rica by the turn of the century, the United Fruit company flourished in Central America, its tentacles extending into all facets of government and industry, toppling banana republics and igniting labour wars. But now there is big trouble on the horizon.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
A Night at the Electronics Factory - NYTimes.com
Why mass production in China works. Inside one of the world’s largest electronics factories, Yuan Yandong, 24, sits on a stool six nights a week, 12 hours a night barring meal and bathroom breaks, and assembles computer hard drives for an American company.
Mr. Yuan earns about 75 cents an hour. With overtime premiums, he takes home $235 a month. His rent is about $44 a month, plus $7 for water and electricity, and there are quite a few other expenses, but he said he manages to save about 40 percent. He also gets company subsidised meals and clothes, so from an economic perspective, he isn't doing too badly. The downside is that he has to work like a machine. Read the article from the New York Times.
HABODE: Home Can Be Anywhere : TreeHugger
Went to the New Zealand National Field Days at Mystery Creek, Hamilton yesterday. One of the exhibits is a news story in itself. New Zealand designer Rod Gibson has designed a cutting edge house called Habode that can be erected in 2 days or less, with all of the bells and whistles inside. Check out this article in Treehugger.com and then have a look at Habode's website if you are interested. www.habode.com
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Yangtze River Dolphin now extinct
Nice photo of a fellow planet traveller that we will never see again.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/05/scienceshot-the-last-sightings-o.html
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Trade deal must safeguard our sovereignty
Economist Bill Rosenberg in the Christchurch Press comments on the Transpacific Partnership Trade Agreement negotiations.
Are these agreements benefiting the people of the nations involved, or are they strong arm tactics from multinational lobby groups?
"This emphasis on opening markets with inadequate consideration as to the domestic effects of such agreements in weakening our ability to shape our own society and economy is distinctly 19th rather than 21st century. The globalisation of the 19th century ended with the First World War. The globalisation since the 1980s produced lower growth rates and repeated financial crises."
Trade deal must safeguard our sovereignty
Are these agreements benefiting the people of the nations involved, or are they strong arm tactics from multinational lobby groups?
"This emphasis on opening markets with inadequate consideration as to the domestic effects of such agreements in weakening our ability to shape our own society and economy is distinctly 19th rather than 21st century. The globalisation of the 19th century ended with the First World War. The globalisation since the 1980s produced lower growth rates and repeated financial crises."
"Prominent Harvard economist Dani Rodrik says he has an “impossibility theorem” for the global economy: “democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full”. Our trade and investment agreements have ignored this incompatibility in favour of increasingly intense global economic integration, resulting in the wilting of our national sovereignty – our ability to make rules that would assist our development. Our democracy has weakened as a result: we still elect governments, but they are increasingly powerless to change the rules."
Trade deal must safeguard our sovereignty
Monday, June 14, 2010
Our mother tongue affects how we think.
Ever wondered why some people have no sense of direction? (Note: I said "some people", not "women".) That's because they didn't grow up speaking the Guugu Yimithirr language from North Queensland. Another thought provoking article from The Guardian.
Washing machines: walk this way
From the creator of the Ig Nobel Prize, this article in the UK daily, The Guardian, explains a phenomenon that most of us have experienced.
Washing machines: walk this way
Washing machines: walk this way
Portrait of a country in crisis - Spain
For those who can read Spanish, an excellently written article by Pulitzer prize winning journalist Phil Bennett published in the Spanish daily, El Pais. I searched for the version in English (I am assuming he wrote it originally in English) but couldn't find it. If anyone knows of it, please send a comment.
More on Shane Jones - this is good stuff
Tapu Misa is one of the better New Zealand journalistic commentators. I felt the following article was so good I have reproduced it in its entirety below:-
The worst thing that can happen to a Maori politician is to be touted as a future Prime Minister.
It's the kiss of death - more curse than blessing - as Winston Peters, John Tamihere and now "hapless Shane" Jones have found.
All that pressure and too early scrutiny. All those unmet and often unrealistic expectations.
The next worst thing is to slip and fall on the way to the country's highest office because of something as pathetic and private as a penchant for pornographic movies.
On the hierarchy of bad behaviour, Jones' charging of movies to his ministerial credit card (which he later paid for, long before any media hounds sniffed him out) counts as an administrative rather than a deadly sin.
It's not mana enhancing by a very long shot, but for all the faux outrage and saturation coverage, it's not a scandal of major proportions either.
Jones was slack and cavalier, but he wasn't fraudulent. (Phil Heatley's transgressions were arguably worse; he didn't reimburse his $1402 of private expenditure until he was forced to come clean.)
Most damaging to the Jones brand is the fact that he watched up to three pornographic movies a night when he was away from home on ministerial business.
But even that ranks at the lower end of human weakness. Not admirable by anyone's reckoning but not worthy of an inquisition either. Jones wasn't hosting prostitutes in his room or carrying on an extra-marital affair; he was watching TV alone. Sad and stupid, but not a capital offence.
(Just for perspective. According to American statistics, 55 per cent of movies watched in hotel rooms tend to be porn. The average time of watching is 12 minutes. Many polls indicate porn-watching is widespread; in one 2006 poll, 50 per cent of all Christian men and 20 per cent of all Christian women admitted to being addicted to porn.)
In Jones' defence, the former Labour MP Dover Samuels argues that if we're going to enter a debate about morality, "three-quarters of Parliament wouldn't be there".
I suspect he's right but I don't think this is about sexual morality.
If it were I'd be inclined to agree with Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, who recently defended a Republican politician forced to resign because of an extra-marital affair.
Gerson wrote that while sexual conduct isn't irrelevant to public service, it isn't everything either. Political character is more complex than marital fidelity. There are worse things than sexual vices.
"There is a difference between breaking a vow out of weakness and smashing it out of malice. Sexual behaviour can reveal our shared foolishness. Or it can reveal coldness, compulsion, cruelty, exploitation, arrogance and recklessness.
"Who can deny that these traits are potentially dangerous in a political leader? ... I have known politicians who are cold, arrogant, reckless - and faithful to their spouses. And I have known politicians who have been unfaithful and served the public well."
We ask a lot of our political leaders - and rightly so. But at a time of unprecedented transparency and media scrutiny, we may be asking the wrong questions.
Most of us want unblemished, high-minded, courageous visionaries who combine, as someone else has said, moral energy with bold public purpose.
We want politicians with big, bold ideas driven by a sense of justice rather than ideology or powerful special interests. We want leaders more concerned about long-term consequences than short-term popularity. Leaders with a touch of the maverick.
Instead, we're fostering a managerial style of political leadership that cares more for managing risk than solving our complex problems.
Is Jones worth saving? Though his predilection for blue movies is what will linger in the public mind, it's his poor judgment, arrogance and apparent sense of infallibility that should exercise us.
Jones has cultivated what he calls "a robust image" in his time in politics; he hasn't been afraid to challenge cultural taboos and other Maori.
That's earned him the admiration of the wider electorate, as it had with Winston and J.T. before him. But it may also have given him a false sense of security. There's something about being an anointed son - Harvard educated, skilled in business, truly bicultural - that gives one a sense of being bulletproof.
For all his intellectual firepower and apparent sophistication, Jones lacked the political antennae (possessed by Labour's squeaky clean top tier) that would have saved him from leaving a self-destructive porno trail for his enemies.
Being humbled and publicly humiliated may be the best thing that ever happened to Jones. While it's ruled him out of leadership contention for now, it may, ironically, have made him a better leader.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Bullfighting in France
That bullfighting exists in Spain is of course well known. What is also beginning to become well known is that there is a political divide appearing within that country, particularly in the northeast, in the state of Catalonia. There are many Catalans who say that bullfighting is cruel and is not a Catalan tradition and therefore should be banned. Animal rights activists from all parts of the planet can only agree. Something like 30,000 bulls a year in Spain are subjected to this "sport".
What is less well known is that bullfighting exists in France as well. Primarily in the south, there are on average 100 "corridas" (bullfights) a year with about 700 bulls killed. In the southeast of France, the region known as Roussillon, is where the main aficion for this activity resides (though it is also in the French Basque country). Roussillon was historically once a part of Catalonia, and the French tourist office proudly trumpets this fact, though hardly anyone in Roussillon these days can actually speak Catalan, France being the one other country in Europe (together with the English) that ruthlessly eliminated virtually all of its regional languages over the last 300 years.
So while the Catalans south of the Pyrenees are horrified by bullfighting and want to see it banned, the "Catalans" to the north are promoting it as "part of their culture". It was introduced to the Roussillon by the Empress Eugenia de Montijo, wife of Napoleon the 3rd, in 1853 and has taken root there.
In an article today in the Barcelona daily newspaper, La Vanguardia, the response to the idea of eliminating bullfighting from the Roussillon was sent in a letter from a group of French mayors and parliamentarians to the Catalan Parliament in Barcelona.
"In many localities (in the Roussillon) bullfighting, together with rugby, represents one of the most important signs of Catalanism." Incredible.
Incidentally, if you still harbour the illusion that Europe is a civilized place (despite Scandinavians still slaughtering dolphins and whales legally), the penal code in France prohibits the maltreatment of animals except where it can be demonstrated that it is an "uninterrupted local tradition". In other words if the torture of animals has been an ongoing situation for some time (since 1853 in the case of bullfighting in southern France), then it's OK. In the north of France, cockfighting, where roosters have razor blades attached to their legs and attack each other in events which are staged for betting purposes, is still legal.
More on offshore drilling in New Zealand
The governator, Mr Arnold Schwarzenegger, said it first; "The money is not worth the risk."
Coal mining in national parks, drilling for oil in deep water off the coast of New Zealand. If the USA can't fix the problem when it all turns to custard what on earth does the NZ government think they can do?
"In any sane world, this accident should make governments, especially that of the United States, give immediate priority to investment in technology that will, as soon as possible, provide non-fossil ways of fuelling the vehicles the world cannot, seemingly, do without. Some, especially in the US, seem to imagine that if BP is made to pay for everything, then the matter is resolved. It won't. Deep-sea drilling needs to be reassessed, and some measure of responsibility needs to be accepted by anyone who gets in a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine and turns the ignition. This is not just wicked BP, or nasty Americans trying to do down our pension divvies. It is far, far bigger than that."Good article in NZ Herald June 13
Saturday, June 12, 2010
“We’ve socialized risk and we’ve privatized reward.”
The New Zealand government has signed an agreement with Petrobras to allow the Brazilian energy giant to drill off shore. Who carries the can (honestly, no pun intended) if it all goes wrong?
"The Government will do "all it can" to ensure there is adequate environmental protection before future deep-sea drilling in New Zealand, Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee says."
"Prime Minister John Key said on Monday the Government would outline its position on environmental standards for deep-sea drilling soon."
NZ Herald 4:00 AM Wednesday Jun 2, 2010
The opinion article in this weekend's New York Times clearly outlines the problem: The taxpayer takes the risk and the corporate takes the reward.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Dark pulse laser
Just when you thought that you were beginning to understand science, along comes this sort of thing:
In an advance that sounds almost Zen, researchers at NIST and JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder, have demonstrated a new type of pulsed laser that excels at not producing light.
Where does the gold come from?
The recent news about illness and death and the horrifying conditions that many Africans work in to grub out tiny grains of gold to supply an avaricious world begs the question: Where does New Zealand's most successful jeweler source his gold? Michael Hill Jeweler is on track to own 1000 retail stores and is a very wealthy individual. Does the gold in his jewelery originate in the "killing fields" of Africa. And how do we verify if gold is "Fair Trade" or not?
Read NZ Herald article June 12, 2010 "Chance to make money becomes silent thief of children's lives". http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10651281
Economist article "Public waste in France"
Shane Jones is totally outclassed. His $2500 spending spree on porn movies is peanuts (I liked his apologising style, but it calls into question his lack of IQ. I mean, stupid...stupid...stupid). In France politicians get a NZ$120,000 per year "expense account", no questions asked about how they spend it. This is on top of their accommodation allowance and the free travel perks they enjoy. Paying politicians more doesn't necessarily get you a better class of MP, in fact the reverse may apply.
Check it out: 31 paid weeks holiday per year (yes you read that right!!!), retirement age 50 on 75% of their salary (and while they are working their retirement deductions are 7.8% of their salary as opposed to the private sector of 10.5%), and they can never be fired.
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