Blog-gone

I'm changing jobs and the new one would appear to preclude political blogging. So, for the time being, this blog is going to have a breather.

I've got a new blog set up on Wordpress to talk travel, arthritis, hearts and random stuff. It is:

http://wandermythoughts.wordpress.com/

(note the word MY in there, an annoying concession to the fact that someone already thought of Wandering Thoughts).

Thanks to everyone who has read this blog and commented from time to time. Sorry to Matt who I owe a couple of posts.

For what it's worth, below are some of my favourite posts...

Development as Explained By 2 Cows in a Field
Turtles Can Fly - review
Why Treasury’s Got it Wrong on Tax Cuts
What’s the Matter with Libertarianism?
Raging Against Modernity
Trying to Muddle Through: Living (and Learning) with Disease
A Simple (but resilient) Definition of Power
An Ideological and Intellectual Wallace Line
My very own*, very succinct, definition of social capital
My very own, very succinct...
Gore's Law
Freedom of Speach and its Discontents

And, primarily because I still suffer from an addiction to Excel, here's some blog stats graphed (click on the graph to see it more clearly).

Pick Me! Pick Me! Me! Me! me me meme

Cool. Thanks to George, and the fact that my co-blogger Oliver is having an existential crisis at present, I get to answer my first ever internet meme.

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Following my heart and living in Long Island

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world

I live in that world. I mean I really have to try to put on weight. So...chocolate cake , proper pizza, cheese cake, the first good nectarine of a summer, and fejoas!

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Launch a speculative raid on a the Rai. Mwah ha ha.

Or, if I wasn't feeling evil, I'd set up a trust to fund a decent left leaning New Zealand newspaper or magazine. And with the change, I would fund research and work on ways of improving governance, protecting human rights and reducing extreme poverty.

Three of my habits:

Worrying, not rinsing dishes, a powerful fear of telephones.

Five jobs that I have had:

NGO researcher, writer etc...
University Researcher
Writer (kind of)
Reporting analyst
Assistant public transport planner

Five places I have lived:

Long Island
London
Sydney
Madeira
Wellington

Five things to do today I did yesterday:

Rescued a weta from the shower (why do they always run off the paper and up your arm?)
Agonised over buying ties.
Drilled myself a very smart tie-holder.
Filled out a tax return.
Started another blog.

Five people I want to get to know more about:

Rawls, Tony Judt, Samantha Power, John Kenneth Galbraith and Jurgen Habermas (or, at least, I'd like to know more about what they know).

People to tag:

I'm pretty sure that (once you subtract George and Nikki, who have already responded to the meme) there aren't five people who actually read this blog...so I think I might be tagging into space.

Simply Because

Simply because, like most everyone else who lives in the suburbs, I secretly long to be a cowboy...

Our leaders will save us...

...Johann Hari thinks not. (And I only partially agree, but that's the subject of another post).

Southerly Storm Blogging!

I have a soft spot for southerly storms. I grew up in Eastbourne, deep inside Wellington harbour, where for me and my teenage friends southerly storms were the main source of surf. Storms meant hail and blistering white-squalls but they also meant waves. And, as surf crazed kids, that was what mattered.

We would watch weather maps and hope. We would gaze south out of classroom windows and wait, our eyes scanning for the first clouds of the cold front. Anticipation would build all day with the rising gale.

We would talk loud on the bus home, everyone wondering why such miserable weather made us so happy. We would change into torn hand-me-down wetsuits in the shelter of battered Pohutukawa. And we wold run, jubilant, through the stinging sand into the sea.

I don't surf in storms so often now, but residual excitement remains. For this I'm lucky. What other emotion could better accompany days when the waves close Cook Strait, and snow starts to fall on the hills east and north of town?

And so, this evening, as dusk thickened the sky, tired and frustrated from a day of trying to write, I donned the raincoat I brought when I went to Greenland, and ventured out amongst it.

First I climbed to the top of the hill at the end of our road. On fine days it affords views across the south coast. But this evening I could hardly keep my feet let alone take in the view. I actually crawled to the summit such was my fear of being blown over. I then clasped onto the small trig that stands there and looked out to sea, my eyes stung by rain. Out in the Strait the wind tore white strips from the water. Waves met their end on the rocks, their explosions of spray mixing with the rain.

I didn't last long before retreating in an awkward gale-assisted stumble. From there I walked my regular road loop. Sheltered by houses for the most part I could hear the storm everywhere. Tormenting powerlines and coaxing trees into roaring song. As the daylight faded streetlights began to map out the suburbs.

By the time I got home the sky was dark, dark grey except for two pale strips in the western sky where the cloud was less thick and maybe the storm less intense.

I stopped for a moment breathing in the smell of smoke from someone's wood fire and then hurried in out of the rain.

She'll be Right

They call him the Professor, although he's not an academic as far as I'm aware. In the world of Wellington surfing even something as simple as the ability to read a weather map can garner you a reputation for bookishness and a moniker to match.

He's a slightly portly, balding middle aged man who rides a boogie board and the first time we met we didn't get off to a great start. We were surfing my regular spot when a wave came through. In all fairness it was probably his, but I hadn't had a wave for a while so I tried to nab it off him. I was the regular, I figured it was mine. He figured it was his. And quite some grumpiness and nasty stares ensued.

Did I ever tell you that I can be a dork in the surf?

It could have been the beginning of an ongoing enmity - the sort that spoils numerous surfs - but the ocean had other plans for us. A few days later the two of us ended up surfing alone in very good waves at another nearby spot. Now I'm a dork but I'm not that much of one. Neither was he and, rather than wreck the best surf we were both going to have in a while pretending not to notice each other, to our credit we both did the sensible thing. We smiled and talked.

And since then, we've done our best to be cordial in and amongst the desperately scare resource that is good Wellington waves.

Sometime last year I was driving to my favourite local spot, when I saw him walking along the road. The last section of that drive is on private property and he took the "No Driving Beyond This Point" signs seriously. No one else did. I stopped and offered him a lift.

"Sure. Thanks"
"Looks like that wind's swung round to the north"
"Yeah, real clean. I think it was westerly earlier so we've got lucky"
"Swells a bit small though."
"But hey"
"There's waves."

By that stage we'd parked the car and were walking to the beach. And I thought I'd broaden the discussion. "So, how's things been otherwise", I asked.

"Oh, not so good, I've been diagnosed with cancer. I start chemo next week"
"Sh#t. That's not good. What's the prognosis?"
"There's about an 80% survival rate."

In my defense, it wasn't the sort of conversation I was planning on having that afternoon. And, really, I'm much wiser if I have a chance to jot down a few speech notes ahead of time. So my reply was pretty much stock standard.

"Oh well. 80 percent's pretty good. She be fine I'm sure mate."

At 80% the odds are in your favour. They're even better at 95%. And better still at 99%.

And it's these latter two numbers that are following me round at present. For someone young and fit like myself the risk of dieing in a simple aortic valve-replacement operation is probably under one in one hundred. If my aortic root needs to be replaced it's more like 5 in 100. The risk of a stroke or some sort of brain damage, or other unpleasant complications, is somewhat higher but the numbers are still on my side.

Which is good. But not good enough to stop me from feeling frightened. When it's you contemplating lying on the operating table, even a small risk of disaster starts to feel uncomfortably large.

Hhhhmmm...so what was my point? Oh, yeah, I figured I wanted to blog about open heart surgery honestly. And being honest - I have to admit I worry. And I suspect that, over the coming weeks, my ongoing battle with this worry will be unavoidable. Something I need to get on top of. And I imagine this is the case for most people in my situation.

And my other point: being on the other end of those stats now, I'm pretty sure that my "she'll be right mate" response to the Professor wasn't the right one." I've had people say the same to me, and I really appreciate them trying to be reassuring, but I think if I were in the same situation again I'd say something like "oh, how do you feel about that?"

And maybe I would have, that afternoon, with the Professor, if given more time. But right at that moment a particularly good wave came through. And we were both racing to get into our wetsuits and out into the water before the sun started to set behind the Kaikouras.

Internet Argument

Oh - could this be the best XKCD ever?

Internet Argument

hhhhhhmmmmmm...well the competition for 'best ever' is tough. But this cartoon rings true to me.

Not about everyone I've ever argued with, but for a certain type of internet adversary (hello Neal are you still out there?). These people infuriate you at first but, while you may never end up agreeing with them, at some point in time, through some mysterious mechanism, you end up realising that they're just another person like you. With different - mistaken! - beliefs, certainly. But also with their own fears and hopes, cruelnesses and kindnesses, and all those other shared things that get lost in between servers.

Once you realise this it's much harder to be ruder to someone online than you would be in person...

Asymmetric Information

Sigh. Life would be easier as an agent in an economic model.

After my valve replacement surgery, assuming everything goes to plan, I'll be taking blood thinners for the rest of my life. Being on blood thinners doesn't mean that if I knick myself shaving I'll bleed to death. But it will increase the hassle of this activity. And, to be honest, it's a hassle enough as it is. So I'm thinking of buying an electric razor.

Easy enough.

Or not.

For a start I have no exact idea how much I'm willing to spend (or, to be more specific the worth of the extra utility I'll gain for it). But I'm guessing I'm aiming for something mid-range.

The main thing though, is that I want to buy something at least semi-decent. But, every different shaver I've seen makes that promise. The trouble is I have much less idea how true these promises are than the people who make them. I have, in other words, an asymmetric information issue.

I've tried to correct this by:

1. Consumer magazine: nothing on shavers.
2. Choice magazine: nothing on shavers since 2004 and even that was pretty crappy.
3. Which magazine. Something on shavers in 2007, which claimed that even quite cheap ones can do a good job. The problem is that I need a subscription to Which to find out any more. Which I'm willing to get except that the F'ing magazine only offers online payment options to people in the UK or Ireland.

So I still don't know what to get. If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them...

[Update: sigh...no comments. Which might mean this blog has no readers. But I doubt it. I suspect something quite different.

Typical Laanta Reader]

The Butterfly Effect

If a butterfly hadn't flapped its wings on a warm autumn morning somewhere in New South Wales, then that small low pressure system floating in the Tasman might have never picked up extra water.

And if it hadn't picked up the water, maybe it wouldn't have rained so hard as it crossed the lower North Island.

And if it hadn't rained so hard. I mightn't have driven my car slushing over the melted gravel roads to a river mouth in southern Wairarapa hoping to catch waves at a spot that never breaks.

And if I hadn't found those waves, I might never have surfed in the gritty water around the bar as the storm run off mixed into the sea.

And if I hadn't surfed in that water I might have never picked up that ear infection.

And if I hadn't got the infection maybe my arthritis wouldn't have come back so bad.

And if it hadn't, maybe it wouldn't have damaged my aorta.

And if my valve wasn't damaged then I wouldn't be worrying about open heart surgery.

...

And if I ever find that butterfly, trust me, there are going to be some strong words.

Really smart religious person thingy

A common criticism of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is that they only ever argue against a dumbed down version of religion, and that there are more subtle, sophisticated arguments out there which they have no answer for. As an agnostic I'm open to this line of attack; I've no dog, or god for that matter, in the race really, and I'm genuinely interested in whether a better case can be made for the various divine beings of the various holy books.

So I listened intently when Kim Hill interviewed respected religious philosopher William Lane Craig this morning (link to audio and will break after a few weeks unfortunately). To be fair to Mr Craig, Kim Hill, in between her rapid-fire thinking and interruptions, isn't the easiest sparring partner*, but I thought he was really, really weak. He had no satisfying answer to the problem of evil, nor the existence of other religions. And his 5 key arguments (or however many there were) were shot full of holes. At other times she just clobbered him with his own disingenuous debating points (like how he stays out of politics except on abortion which is an ethical issue, to which Ms Hill kindly pointed out that most people would consider at least some of the other stuff covered in politics ethical).

Really, if this is as good as the theists can do**, then the New Atheists do seem to be pitching their arguments at just the right level.

___________________________________________

*And, to also be fair to Kim Hill I should point out, for her faults, she's still pretty fab. I could do with out the how to cook duck stuff. And the interruptions every time the interviewee pauses for either breath or thought are infuriating if you're trying to actually understand the subject at hand. But, despite all this, she's smart, knows her stuff, and has covers some excellent subject matter.
** I had a hack at trying to make the case for a kind of Christianity here.

Fun

Two comics which made me laugh.

One

Two

oh my

I've just been to see the Warren Miller Ski flick, Playground. The skiing was interesting enough to me, a non skier. But then the movie ended with something called speed riding or something. Here's an example...

Two Great Blogs

Kathy G

Simon Bidwell (wonderful Wellington based musings on international development).

Burke's Law*

States that:

The trickier the driving maneuver you are attempting, the greater the number of cars that suddenly appear on the scene will be.

I was reminded of this today as I tried to turn right out of a partially obscured side alley. No sooner had I nosed the front of the car out into the previously empty street when, 2 SUVs, a van, 3 cars and a weird sit-down cycle came plunging at me from different directions.



________________________________
*Burke's law is not named after that conservative thinker bloke, but rather its inventor, and surfing buddy of mine, J Burke.

You're Banned!!!!

A while ago I made a promise to myself not to comment on anymore of Poneke's climate change threads. Doing so had clearly become pointless. Poneke maintains a certainty of opinion completely unjustified by his or her understanding of climate science. And he or she just gets offended when you point out the errors in the posts.

Foolishly, though yesterday I commented again, lured in by a discussion of William Nordhaus and discounting (something that is worth discussing). Of course I couldn't resist the usual error correcting and, lo and behold, there I was - banging my head against a rock again.

So that does it. I'm banned! Or, at least, I'm banning myself. I know it's meant to work the other way in the blogosphere. But I really need to learn to focus my time on things constructive. And arguing with climate change deniers (as opposed to genuine sceptics, who might actually be swayed by evidence) achieves nothing.

[Update: Oh, it looks like Poneke has beaten me to the draw. My last comment on that thread (from last night) never made it out of his/her moderation queue. Assuming it didn't get deleted by accident, it would appear that Poneke is about as keen on me commenting on his/her website as I am. Which is great in the sense that it provides me with help in observing my ban. Not so good perhaps in what it reveals about Poneke, who claims to be opposed to any attempt to silence debate on climate change but possibly isn't so willing to apply the same approach to their blog.

This is fair enough, up to a point: freedom of speech is a society wide principle and people's blogs are their own property. They needn't give a platform to those they don't agree with. Nevertheless, given that my comment was neither abusive nor trolling - it was merely a response to Poneke's response to me - to disappear it with out any comment or acknowledgment just seems rather dishonest. Creating the impression that I had no response to Poneke's Homer Simpsonesque comeback on the subject of statistics.]

[Update 2: Anyone seeking a detailed critique of the Great Global Warming Swindle should have a look at this. Hat tip and thanks to George Darroch]

Links

Just so I remember...

Sweden
Pigovian Taxes
A good book to read

Long May You Run (on three cylinders)

A couple of weeks ago our old car ended up at the wreckers. As a tree hugging greenie I'm surely not meant to care about a car. And as a rationalist, no doubt, I'm not supposed to hold the belief, like some sort of animist, that it had spirit. But the car had heart. And it loved empty gravel roads. It was slow (even my mother, who owned it before me, thought it gutless) but it fit my surfboards, and me when I needed to sleep in it. My wife and I are aiming for something much more fuel efficient in the next car (it wasn't a SUV but it was old). But none of this will change the fact that I miss the ol' car.

Anyhow, Neil Young does car eulogies much better than me.



Goodbye blue streak.

Blogs, Learning and the Minimum Wage

It always intrigues me to read print media pundits writing off blogs as shrill, derivative and poorly informed. It's true that a lot of blogs use articles from the print media as the basis for their posts (and so are, in a sense, derivative). But to me this seems to be a good thing; removing barriers to entry in the ongoing conversation that ought to be democracy and ensuring that large media outlets don't inevitably have the final word on that which matters.

As for being shrill and ill informed, this is very true - of some blogs (and New Zealand, alas, has more than its fair share of these). But, in the same way that the Sun is not the Financial Times, some does not mean all, and there are plenty of bogs out there which are incredibly well informed and also well mannered.

Crooked Timber is a case in point. To give but one example, this recent post on labour markets and the minimum wage by a guest blogger there is simply excellent. The author knows her stuff, as do most of the commenters. Which means that you'll read the post and learn more about the topic than you would in a year's worth of newspaper articles here; or a first year economics text book for that matter.

That does it! I'm leaving!!

Over at Public Address Danyl is contemplating a move across the ditch, tempted by the mountains of money he could be earning. For me the desire to emigrate is driven by something else entirely: the newspaper deficit. Ok, so the Age isn't the Guardian or even the New York Times, but it's

(a) well written
(b) somewhat socially aware
(c) not a pamphlet for the tax cut lobby

...which puts it in a league of its own compared to the Dom and the Herald.

Reminder

Use these posts to write something on Pigouvian taxes (and learn how to spell that word while you're at it!):

http://blog.greens.org.nz/index.php/2006/04/12/the-polluted-hand-of-the-market/
http://tvhe.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/why-is-the-nz-government-buying-the-rail-lines/
http://capitalismbad.blogspot.com/2006/04/invisible-hand.html