Funny reading my sister's comments about her year. She lives her live all over the world quite literally as she is flight crew. A few days here, a few there, a great deal of time in no particular time zone at all. What time is it? Where are we? Passengers ask these questions seeking reassurance, but they are questions with no real answer when you're in a plane.

Anyway, in contrast to my sister, I spent almost the entire year in New Zealand, and most of that in Christchurch, and really all of that inside my head. Which is where I hang out a lot.

Life isn't really elsewhere: it's here too. But I wonder how much difference it all makes. I wonder if that is worth exploring. I feel it might be.

Since I no longer post much of this kinda stuff, here's an executive overview of the year:

• Broke up
• Met world's rarest parrot
• Updated weblog from tent on remote island  
• Took favourite photograph
• Drove all night
• Fell in love, foolishly
• Finished children's book I abandoned reading when I was 12: could see why
• Broke up again
• Found solace in supermarkets
• Salvaged a friendship
• Was shocked by natural disasters
• Wrote 97000 lines of code in spare time
• Lost uncle to suicide
• Visited Australia twice but only spent a total of five days there
• Completed 2005 winter project despite everything
• Created web community with thousands of users
• Discovered preserved lemons, sumac, and caper berries
• Saw one cockatoo in Australia and a flock of them here in New Zealand
• Sold a house
• Taught a class at school with limited success
• Had crippling outgoings and debt
• Boarded a Russian ship and met somebody I knew unexpectedly
• Discovered the world's biggest ice creams in Culverden only to find them gone on the way back
• Almost stopped blogging for good
• Met someone face-to-face after meeting online
• Accrued mountain bike accessories but no bike
• Decided to try photographing people
• Lived alone
• Tramped more often but not often enough
• Press ups every morning
• Learned a card trick
  

The chair I unfold,
anticipating summer,
fills with rainwater

If you think about it, a river is as much about moving rocks as it is about moving water. Or at least, the rivers in these parts are. The Canterbury Plains were built by rivers of stones flooding down from the alps, not by rivers of water. I guess we see things in terms of what's most important to us, and what suits our time scale. On a human time scale, the Plains are more or less static. However if we lived for a billion years, then I'm sure we would see rivers as moving stones — and we'd never build next to all those volcanoes.

Richard Brautigan's novel, In Watermelon Sugar, features rivers running all through the landscape, and breaks down ideas of interior and exterior, placing sofas under trees, and hallways under creeks, whatever that means. There, the rivers vary from regular sizes down to less than an inch in width. And they remind me of fractures on an icy planet, as though the world had expanded and cracked.

Conventionally, the river is a symbol of both time's arrow and the autonomy of nature — all that water's moving and yet there's no human involvement. Follow a river back to its source and you find raw nature, just lounging around in some rocky amphitheatre, raising it's eyebows at you, asking, what did you expect? It's a good thing to do.

The title of Andy Goldsworthy's film Rivers and Tides alludes something interesting about time. Tides are cyclic and rivers acyclic. And human processes too I think are largely acyclic. We build things and they decay. Perhaps if we could step back a little, we could see those cycles of birth and death, building and decay, as I guess historians and archaeologists do (and as geologists, who see cycles of erosion and orogeny, do). But we each get only one cycle to play with. It's like trying to photograph a room from inside it: you stand on a chair and back yourself right into a corner, but you still can't do it, you need to step outside the room. 

Yesterday I was talking to somebody about belief and whether you have to believe something and whether believing nothing is believing something.

Bazarov was the hero (anti-hero, he might prefer) of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and a famous literary nihilist. In the end, as all good heroes, anti- or otherwise, do, he died for his beliefs, ironic given he was a nihilist. But you have to take into account his definition of nihilist, which was that he did not follow the accepted beliefs of the time. I guess that's what people often mean today when they say "I don't believe anything." They mean they have passed their eyes over the buffet of Western beliefs and come up with only Salmonella and Escherichia coli.

If you need this instruction, good luck using a razor:

Before use remove the tamper evident seal located under screw top cap. Do not consume!

I'm more than a little envious of that garden.

Her new album Extraordinary Machine is stunning, surely the freshest and the best album I've heard this year (of the -- oh — three or four new albums I've heard). It's wordy and smells a little like Kurt Weill. The funny thing is that she's touring with Coldplay next year and opening for them. Ha! They should be opening for her. And perhaps they should get her to write them some lyrics.

You came upon me like a hypnic jerk
When I was just about settled

And you looked as sincere as a dog
Just as sincere as a dog does
When it's the food on your lips, with which it's in love

 

Wayfinding is the study of human interactions with unfamiliar architectural landscapes and how the landscape can best be designed to help them get where they're going.

The issues are very similar to those found in application usability: help people who have never visited before to orient themselves, but don't overwhelm the user, and don't hinder those who are familiar with the landscape.

Beyond signage, various techniques are suggested, such as placing landmark items (such as fountains) around the place. Also encouraged is use of non-written symbols and icons to support illiterate folk.

The local Christchurch Hospital is an interesting example. They've clearly thought about these issues with their cute "Riverside" and "Parkside" icons denoting the key exits. Curiously, these two exits are in opposite directions, and on different floors.

The problem I have is that the hospital is completely surrounded by park, although of course the river runs by on just one side. Logically then, the "Parkside" is the side that is not the "Riverside" — but I have to deduce this each time. The reason I think I struggle is that the "best" part of the park (the Botanic Gardens) is on the "Riverside" (the official "Parkside" is just playing fields). So when I hear "Parkside" I automatically think of the side that is actually the "Riverside" and I don't realise there's any question in the matter. What happens next is that I get out on the wrong floor and then walk into a wall where the exit isn't.

I have a simple solution. I stay well away from that crazy place. Apologies in advance to any friends or family who might come down with something.

When I descend my staircase, as I do many times every day, the descent takes about two seconds and the handrail heats up due to the friction against my hand. Except of course, when you think about it, the handrail doesn't heat up -- well it does slightly, but it doesn't experience the cumulative effect of two seconds' worth of friction. The body that heats up is, in fact, my hand. The detector is detected. 

I guess the point of this remark is that we are used to our senses facing outward: detecting physical changes in the world. When my hand detects heat, I assume that the world is heating up. In fact, it's just my hand.

I watched The Terminal last night, which is a rather funny film where Tom Hanks is stuck in limbo, in an airport departure lounge for several months. However, Grace tells me today that it is in fact based on a true story — but the real terminal man has been living at Charles de Gaulle for almost 18 years! He is still there!

...and in 1992 a French court ruled that Nasseri could not be expelled from France as he had legally entered the country as a refugee. However, the court couldn't force the French government to give Nasseri refugee status or a transit visa, and so Nasseri continued to remain in limbo within the confines of the airport terminal building.

Bourget now approached the Belgian government in an attempt to get them to re-issue Nasseri's original refugee documents. However, the Belgian refugee officials refused to mail them to him in France, stating that Nasseri must instead present himself in person so that they could identify him as the same man to whom they had issued the original refugee documents. Under Belgian law, a refugee who voluntarily leaves the country is not allowed to return, and so, in something of a contradiction, the Belgian government refused to allow Nasseri to travel back to Belgium to claim his identity.

Most Americans and a majority of people in Britain, France and South Korea say torturing terrorism suspects is justified at least in rare instances, according to AP-Ipsos polling.

ABC News quoted CIA sources last month as saying that six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" had been instituted for top al Qaeda suspects, including slaps and extreme cold.

Note the word "suspects." Do most Americans and friends realise they are approving of torture techniques on innocent people?

The leading cause of death is not terrorism but heart disease. Shouldn't we be torturing that clown from McDonald's? After all the link between diet and heart disease is still only "suspected."