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only I spell it Nature.
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Recent posts
- Household inventory management (20 Jun)
- Music recommendations and information retrieval (19 Jun)
- Grameen Bank (1 Jun)
- Rieff on Sontag (28 May)
- Queer times pudding (23 May)
- Morality is complicated (9 May)
- I'm your man (8 May)
- Catching a cold from the cold (4 May)
- Apple / Microsoft marketing philosophies (3 Apr)
- How to build an accelerometer (30 Mar)
- Subverting the fairy tale (9 Mar)
Recent media
- Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (*** Film 6 Aug)
- Matthew Barney: No Restraint (*** Film 6 Aug)
- Team America: World Police (* Film 10 Jun)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (*** Film 28 Apr)
- Among Friends: Who we like, why we like them, and what we do with them (*** Book 1 Jan)
- 84 Charing Cross Road (**** Film 20 Dec)
- Boogie Nights (** Film 19 Dec)
- Garden State (*** Film 10 Dec)
- One Soul Now (*** Music 11 Nov)
- Hearts in Atlantis (*** Film 7 Oct)
- House of Sand and Fog (**** Film 17 Sep)
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Sunday, 20 January 2008
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Gull killings
The South Island colony of rare black-billed gulls has been decimated in an area they flocked to as a safe haven.
Hundreds of dead birds and their chicks have been discovered on the banks of a North Canterbury river.The carcasses of the protected native birds cover both sides of the Conway River.
Rangers do not know for sure, but they believe they have been shot.
"From the looks of it they've been killed by shotgun," says Craig Alexander, the biodiversity Doc ranger.
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Saturday, 19 January 2008
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Day alone
This morning, I discovered the music of British Sea Power and listened to the story of Bartholemew Roberts, whose death marked the end of the golden age of Caribbean piracy and opened the region up for slave trading.
I bought boxes for seashells at the craft store, and the young woman with piercings gave me generous discounts.
At the beach, the breakers were rushing in white and violent, sucking southward relentlessly. But the water was warm and I swam, if one can swim in chest-deep water, for an hour or so. Try as I might, I could not push out past the breakers.
I headed to Sumner to watch Once at one of the last theatres still playing it. Out of the movie and still light, the patrons were a gas cloud of late middle-aged chatter boxes, and I jammed earphones in and headed down to the water.
I wandered along the Esplanade, watching gulls break into shells, climbing for old time's sake onto Cave Rock. A few people gazed down off the side and I came to see that Peter Donnelly was just wrapping up one of his sand art works. I sat, hanging my legs over the edge of the void and he called up to me to check if he'd missed any bits. In the name of love, two sinuous forms on a field of waves strung between the rocks. Talking to him afterwards, he said this was his first work at Sumner. He normally works beneath the pier at New Brighton, but I said I thought this was a good place to work.
It was quite beautiful up there. Yellow sun catching the tips of the waves. A dog with its head in an Elizabethan medical collar tottered along the beach in the distance.
I rewarded my fortune with raspberry and chocolate torte and coffee at the cafe, chatting to the barista about music. He tried to convince me to have whipped cream, pointing out that nobody was around. Indeed.
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Sunday, 13 January 2008
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the 5+ senses
One of the great realisations of my early life was discovering that we had well more than five senses, and that (as a child) I seemed to be unable to convince anybody that this was the case. The facts of seven colours in the rainbow, four tastes and five senses are so well ingrained in common knowledge, yet all wrong. Aside from the commonly known exteroceptive senses that tell us about the world, there are the interoceptive senses that tell us about our bodies.
Here are a few senses you may have forgotten:
- balance (organs in the ear);
- pain and temperature (skin);
- internal pain (sensors throughout the body);
- proprioception: your body's configuration in space (sensors within muscles);
- bladder and bowel status updates (stretch sensors);
- hunger and thirst (perhaps the hypothalamus).
By the way, in the right circumstances it is possible to see the polarisation of light. The phenomenon of Haidinger's Brush is quite easy to see with a blue sky and a polarising filter.
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Monday, 7 January 2008
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We are sliding along
the boundary between water and air:
frozen, cracked, scraped.
We are learning
it takes a delicate touch. -
Commute
Sometimes it takes me two hours to get from home to the office. This morning I was slow — it took me 3.5 hours. However I did wake up in Auckland, so it was a 750km commute.
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