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Friday, November 20th, 2009
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The last of the foundations and blockwork should be finished off today. There's three levels to the house, each dug back into the hill. The back half of the house is concrete; the front will be wood. It weirds me out that I'll never again see the back of these walls, once they've been filled in. And no-one will, hopefully not for several hundred years.
Anyway, huge (6000+ pixels wide) pans from last week, before the top level foundations and walls went in:
Middle level, view into the hill from the living area to the toys store, snug, and office. Stairs go up from the centre of the pic to the left.
Looking down at the middle level, from above the office. The bedrooms go on top of these walls and columns. The white slabs are insulation. Insulation is good. (At this point, many Kiwi's are going "insul-err-what?")
We're filling in the gap between the hill and the back walls with free-draining crushed rock, shoveling the rock down the chute from the road above (off to the right). This worked fine if the rock was free-flowing, but much of it wasn't, resulting in chain-gang style hordes of people with shovels and harsh language.
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Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
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Monday, November 9th, 2009
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For us, this weekend was mainly digging. House pics later, but for now, ( tieke demonstrating the size of the holes, and the view from the kitchen window, once we've got a window and a kitchen )
And progress on the other other project, ( plumbing, tiny, tiny plumbing )
We also went hunting for toilets. I wanted to buy the Evacuator 5000, with Turbo Vortex Action! Sadly, that product only exists in my head, we may end up with a Cygnet.
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Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
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Galleries are strangely sterile and passive places. Kusama's stuff should be at a festival, in a forest, at night, with huge sounds, excessive UV, being jumped on by five thousand ravers, all off their tits.
But then again, it was free.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Saturday, October 31st, 2009
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Friday, October 30th, 2009
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Spent most of my time at Te Papa's Formula 1 exhibition imagining the design meetings, and how the process has changed over time.
For the 1959 Cooper T51. A combustion engineer and a mechanical engineer sit at a table, drinking tea.
Combustion engineer: "I've got this new engine."
Mechanical engineer: "Right, we'll put it in a frame, wheel at each corner, place for the driver to sit, Bob's your unkle.
For the 2006 McLaren MP4-21. A manufacturing engineer sits at a table, an aerodynamics expert lies on the floor.
Aerodynamics expert: "Wings, right, and some more wings, then extra wings on top of those, and some winglets just sticking out, and some big swoopy bits here and some more whoopy bits there and some bits that aren't attached but they just hover near the car, coz like they're the car's best friends, man, and some extra bits just for no real reason and they'll all be these awesome swoopy loopy zoomy shapes. Oh man, I'm so high right now."
Manufacturing engineer: "I hate you."
( pics to contrast )
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Comments: Read 7 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
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I've just had laser eye surgery. I am slightly disappointed that it was not like this:
Their laser was weedy. Nothing caught fire, nor did anyone have to dive for cover in slow motion. While it lacked in dramatic impact (or car chases, coz that's the same thing) it made up for in improving my vision.
(Still, the anesthetic eye drops are starting to wear off now, so if you want me, voice is best.)
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
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I know it's just me, but I'm more excited by Elinor Ostrom winning the Nobel prize for economics than for Obama winning the peace prize. Who, you say? Elinor Ostrom, however, kicked off the whole school of community-based natural resources management. What, you say? CBRM is the idea that the Tragedy of the Commons is bollocks.
The canonical example is grazing land in Mongolia, it's a fixed resource, held in common, every individual has an incentive to put one more camel/horse/sheep on the land, so everyone should, so it should get overgrazed. Socialism tried to control this by telling the herders how many camel they where allowed and capitalism tries to set up markets in grazing rights. However, the herders where doing just fine before either socialism or capitalism came along, and had been doing just fine for hundreds of years. They had a community system that worked and Ostrom identified eight of the reasons why community systems work, such as individual resource use being obvious to the rest of the community, and cheap and easy ways to resolve conflicts between users.
(I'm also now even more annoyed that I didn't fight harder to get this stuff into my virtual water paper, coz it's all very relevant to water use by farmers in Canterbury, where these ideas are being put into place.)
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Saturday, October 10th, 2009
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"It would be irresponsible in the extreme for my department to encourage bold, radical change when it is obvious to all that we have no idea what the outcomes would be. We urge extreme caution and insist that any change be carefully assesed and based on empirical evidence, not some crackpot ideology."
My fantasy about the Treasury Secretary - oh Dim Post, I want your babies.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Sunday, October 4th, 2009
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So, so wrong: "The Diary Of Ann Frank", filmed by Jerry Bruckheimer:
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
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This was going to be a comment in response to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tatjna's comments on penal policy, but been thinking about Dame Sian Elias' speech, which caused a bit of a tiff back in July. Given that she's Chief Justice of NZ, she probably knows what she's talking about.
So, what's the purpose of prison and does it work for that purpose?
Rehabilitation
There's several questions I've got about rehabilitation and I'd love to see some evidence. How well does it work? Does it have a stronger effect than the negative effect of being locked up with other criminals? Who does it work for? How well can we separated people into those that can be rehabilitated and those that can't? If we can't answer those questions, then rehabilitation isn't going to help change criminals into law-abiding citizens.
Given that half of prisoners in NZ re-offend within five years of release, it clearly doesn't work well. Then again, half don't.
Retribution
Similarly questions exist for retribution, are criminals making rational choices and will they be deterred by a some risk of some punishment at some point in the future? Here's the Lord Chief Justice of England on the life histories of typical offenders:
"He is usually male, and often of low intelligence, and addicted to drugs or alcohol, frequently from an early age. His family history will often include parental conflict and separation; a lack of parental supervision; harsh or erratic discipline; and evidence of emotional, physical or sexual abuse. At school he will have achieved no qualification of any kind, and will probably have been aggressive and troublesome, often leading to his exclusion or to truancy. The background will be one of poverty, poor housing, instability, association with delinquent peers and unemployment."
We can add to that higher rates of mental illness. The idea that criminals are making rational choices looks like a fairly silly one, leaving retribution looking ineffective at changing the behaviour of criminals.
Isolation
And the third option - isolation with any attempt to change criminals - is expensive ($100k per person per year) and only prevents crime while criminals are locked up. At some point, most will be released and be free to commit more crimes, unless we want car thieves to get life sentences.
One conclusion from Dame Shirley:
"Penal policy is largely irrelevant to reduction of crime and to making our communities safest."
Given that NZ spends over $700 million on prisons, it's a tad embarrassing to hear that they are irrelevant.
There's a more fundamental question in Dame Shirley's speech that points to a long-term solution:
"What turns 'blameless babes (as all criminals once were) into the stuff of nightmares?"
If the roots of criminality lie in early-childhood education and health, or the lack of it, then there lies the solution. There is good evidence that support for parents and caregivers in deprived areas improves life chances for those kids. The UK is one of the leaders into research here, thanks to Thatcherite polices that gave us an underclass. Here's one example of the research. So this kind of approach may well reduce crime, but not till those kids grow up, so there'll be little effect upon crime for fifteen years.
It's also a social democratic, 'Government knows better than parents' approach, pretty much the definition of a Nanny State intervention, so I can see a push for that going down like a tonne of bricks in NZ.
[EDIT - Then again, maybe there's hope? "Back to class for bad kids' parents" from the Dom Post today.]
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Comments: Read 15 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
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Monday, September 21st, 2009
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Was fun, even if I hardly got to do anything outside the makerspace room. People seemed to like the Mitochondrion, they gave me a prize for it. Mostly, I was scratching my head wondering why the i2c bus had crashed yet again. Here's me poking it:
pic by Br3nda
Prize is an Arduino, which I was planing on getting when I start the Mark 4, i.e. in about two years time, after the Fannies*, My Dick**, and possibly the Horrible Instrument***. Oh yeah, and building the house. So if anyone has a use for it until then, please ask.
* - uses Picaxes instead, coz smaller
** - uses no computers at all. I know, that doesn't seem possible, right?
*** - thinky bits undecided, possibly a PC
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Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
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Thursday, September 17th, 2009
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Sins of emission - from Dim Post:
"So if I have this right – and I think I do – the Labour Party’s Emissions Trading Scheme left it up to industry and consumers – ie the free market – to pay for carbon emissions while the National government has socialized the cost and transfered the burden to the taxpayer."
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Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
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My latest, on the water used in growing food, which turns out to be quite a lot:
Yup, two and a half tons of water for a hamburger*. But so what, it rains lots in NZ, it's not like we're short on water. Well, true**, but how do we go about proving that to rich, overseas consumers? And that's what the paper is mainly about.
Paper got a good reception, helped by the Science Media Centre's briefing Virtual water – what is it, and what does it mean for NZ?. Here's the press coverage so far:
Otago Daily Times - “Virtual water measures – NZ’s low rate of exploitation could lend competitive export advantage"
The Press - 'Footprint' for water
NZ Herald - 'Water footprint' as pressing as carbon dioxide emissions
Radio NZ - Scientist measures 'virtual water' used in food crops
* - These are global average figures, should be less for NZ, coz our beef eats grass, not wheat, and wheat takes lots of irrigation.
** - NZ has plenty of water, in comparison to South Australia. Doesn't mean there aren't issues with managing it, but we're not too bad here, so let's blow our own trumpet for once.
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Comments: Read 10 or Add Your Own.
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Monday, September 14th, 2009
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Imagine you want to buy the perfect dress. You know what you want the dress to do, but you don't know what size, design, colour or material. You have never bought a dress before. You don't even know how the sizes are measured. Googling for "dress" is just silly. It's possible you need a skirt instead.
Saturday evening was like that, only I was trying to find the perfect valve.
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Comments: Read 8 or Add Your Own.
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Friday, September 11th, 2009
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Just back from a talk by Richard Newland, leader of the JetBlack team, the NZ attempt to break the land speed records for:- NZ - 347km/h
- OZ - 801km/h
- UK & World - 1,228 km/h
I started by thinking "I hope they run out of money before someone dies" and ended by thinking "this is pretty cool". They have a new design from that on the website, the design seems to make more sense and looks even faster.
Feel free to give them all of your money.
Sorry, but my bets are still on Bloodhound, backed as it is by the British military-industrial complex. Rockets beat jets any day.
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Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
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Thursday, September 10th, 2009
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You remember that slope we all hauled the firewood up, with the tractor and the rope and the pulleys? Yeah, Cliff & Marty got the diggers down it, without killing anyone.
It's looking like we'll be able to create a decent size flat area at the bottom of the gulley. Hopefully, with the right drains, it'll be suitably dry and useable.
Concrete poured for the foundations for the main level. What is it with cats and wet concrete?
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Comments: Read 14 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
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Monday, September 7th, 2009
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This weekend looks substantially like the last, more planing wood, more moving heavy things, more wiring and coding on the Fannies.
V0.3 works and fakes a log brightness response (which is a good thing), v0.4 is built, needs checking before turning on. Oh, and then a major code simplification is needed, but the bare bones of the code are done.
Main level of house is nearly ready to pour concrete. Much steelwork is in place, but then, we're on the side of a hill, about a hundred metres from a major faultline:
Anyway, another view of progress:
"What's this then? You're not going to put up these ugly stone blocks here, are you? ... A henge? Well, what's a henge? You may call it megalithic culture, I call it vandalism. You realise this is about the last nesting place for mammoths in the whole of Wessex?"
[EDIT - Squee! Picaxe 20X2 released. Twice as fast and saves me 50 square milimetres over the 28X2. Hell yeah! (Also, my geekiness quotient may have just levelled up)]
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
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From Morning Report on Radio NZ this morn. It's a pretty good summary of both the report from the Royal Society of London, and the local commentary that we provided:
"Royal Society calls for research in 'geo-engineering projects' (3'38″ mp3)
A new report from the Royal Society of London says work needs to start now on projects to pull the planet back from catastrophe if greenhouse gas emissions run out of control."
Quotes from Tim Flannery, Phil Boyd of NIWA, Andrew Cleland of IPENZ, all pointing out that our best approach is to work out how to cut emissions from agriculture, not to focus on geoengineering. But still, it's worth some research dollars to get a clearer view of the risks and costs.
Apparently there was TV coverage last night too. Anyone see that?
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