Demonic Eggbeaters and Democracy
Shane Jones says regional councils should be disestablished because they’re full of demonic egg beaters. What are demonic egg beaters? Should they be disestablished?
Author: Jane Shearer
Compromised
I finally got some work to do – a good thing! Or a bad thing? Because the work I do is fundamentally about growing the economy, which I don’t believe in. How do I deal with being compromised?
Real Music, Real Musician
Is classical music more ‘real’ than popular music? There are biases in music, as in every aspect of life. How justified are they?
Gold Fever
There’s gold fever in the air in Central Otago as Santana Minerals pushes their gold mining consent forward in the Fast Track application process. Why do we love gold so much?
Cat bonds
Jamaica will soon get a USD150 million payout from their parametric cat bond insurance as a result of Hurricane Melissa. So what is a cat bond?
Being polite
Should we be polite to large language models like ChatGPT? There are good arguments on both sides of the debate.
End of a career?
Changes to the New Zealand research funding meeting may spell the end of my career but, more importantly, what do they spell for research and science?
Lawyers & Bears
What do lawyers and bears have in common? I’m not sure, but given the choice, I’ll pick the bear.
All About Toilets
Japanese toilets are something else! So were Mongolian toilets, through in a different way. Given their fancy toilets, why does Japan have such awful toilet paper?
The Japanese Rubbish Mystery
When in Japan, where do you put your rubbish, given the complete lack of public bins?