Roger Parkinson
Mrs and I have been best friends for decades. We grew up in the same small town in Aotearoa/New Zealand, were kind of aware of each other at school but didn’t start dating until I was 16, she was 15. Married 4 years later, still married now. So this will be a bit rose tinted, I guess.
Mrs knows st...
This is the response I sent to the Government Policy Statement on land transport (GPS 2024). They are open for feedback until April 2 2024 (email GPS@transport.govt.nz). My original draft used much stronger language but Mrs (bless her) convinced me to tone it down in the hope they will actually re...
The Google Doodle today is about celebrating the flat white. When you look up the origins of the flat white it seems there is some contention about whether it started in Australia or New Zealand. It is supposed to be similar to the argument about pavlova. I can add something to this.
It wa...
I saw it a few days ago. Fantastic!
Some spoiler free thoughts:
Early on there are beam weapons used in a battle on the sands around a spice harvester. In the Dune universe these would be lasguns. The big problem with lasguns is they can't be used around shie...
In defense of working from home: a reaction to Robin Dunbar's piece in New Scientist.
I work in IT, there is no actual equipment in the office, it is all in 'the cloud'. So I can access that equipment from anywhere with an internet connection. This is true of many desk jobs today. So why would we...
From our new government's education policy:
"National will require all primary and intermediate schools to spend an average of an hour a day on reading, an hour a day on writing, and an hour a day on maths."
This looks like it is designed to appeal to old white men, like me. A lot of us feel o...
This another not-exactly-a-book-review. The book is Sabres of Paradise by Lesley Blanch, and it is also Dune by Frank Herbert, because I'm interested in the relationship between the two.
Dune and I go way back. The original story was first published as a serial in Analog magazine in 1965. A coup...
The new government seems very against recent moves to use more Te Reo in our daily lives. Currently all government organisations have prominent Te Reo names on their web sites, letter heads etc. It seems likely most of these will be removed soon. So I went onto this site, which lists the official...
Back in the 80s I used to go to conferences about AI, mostly because of my interest in expert systems, or rule based systems. Back then there was a list of general problems the AI community was hoping to solve. I can't remember all of them but expert systems was one, there was image recognition, spe...
This is not quite a book review. Instead it is adjacent to a book review, because the surrounding stories attached to the book are what I am interested in here. But you do have to know something about the book first so here goes.
The Gadfly was written by Ethel Voynich and published in 1897. It...