Scales of tragedy
How tragic is a ‘natural’ disaster? Does it depend on what is lost? Or when it happened? Is sadness about natural disasters another tilt at preventing inevitable change?
Tag: 2025
What’s in a Font?
The USA is mandating all diplomatic documents use Times New Roman 14 pt font, reversing the previous administration’s change to Calibri 15 point. Why the fuss?
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?
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?
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?