Billboards on the Highway of Life

Driving men out of schools

rob — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:48:39 +0000

My son is twelve years old. This is the first year in his educational life - starting from age 4 - that he has had a male teacher, and it is only for about 1 hr a day. When I look back at my education and count the inspirational teachers, the great majority of them were men. Boys need male influence at school.

I think there are three factors at work here:
- teaching is treated and paid as a menial task, and women still predominate in such roles
- the radical feminism of education administration - at least in NZ. I'd go so far as to call them anti-male.

Falling child mortality

rob — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 10:55:02 +0000

The Economist is one our the few papers to report genuinely good news, such as the fact that child mortality is falling rapidly.

Ban carbon-14 in food

rob — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:51:12 +0000

Why doesn't the government ban foods containing radioactive carbon-14?

Fact: Carbon-14 (a.k.a. "radiocarbon") accumulates in the human body and releases damaging radiation.

Fact: Carbon-14 causes millions of cancers

Fact: Carbon-14 has a half-life of over 5700 years!!

Fact: Carbon-14 is more radio-active than Uranium

Why is nobody doing anything about it?

In fact their are signs of a government conspiracy about this. Why does the US Department of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms require a MINIMUM level of radiocarbon in alcoholic drinks?

Why we won't see solar-powered cars

rob — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 03:03:02 +0000

It is a simple fact of physics: the sun drops about 1kW of energy on 1 sq m of Earth.

Get the priroities right and the rest follows

rob — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 23:40:24 +0000

There is a road called the Karakoram Highway, a wild military road punched through an arm of the Himalayas by the Chinese army at the cost of 900 lives to connect to their ally Pakistan. It winds up the beautiful Hunza valley – full of warring Islamic tribes – before trekking across the plateau wastes of Xinshiang to remote Kashi, populated by the more peaceful Uygur people. It is not a road I expected to share with a portly young earth-mother from Hawaii, robed in velvet kaftan and dripping chunky jewelry, with two little blond pre-school children in tow.

the most politically important 4 minutes of video ever made

rob — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:59:33 +0000

This must be one of the most politically important 4 minutes of video ever made, surpassing anything Bronowski did

Orders of magnitude

rob — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:18:42 +0000

Never in human history have we seen another time when a technology increased it's price-performance by six or eight orders of magnitude within a lifetime. For that technology to be a technology of the intellect is doubly marvelous. Forget the Gutenberg press. Forget parchment. Forget the invention of language. Nothing, but nothing, has ever ever changed within one lifetime how we think and experience the way that digital technology has. Ever. This is a first. And you are alive to see it.

Rainbow Warrior - this Kiwi will never forget

rob — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:34:49 +0000

In 1985 the elected French government was exploding nuclear devices in the Pacific on the other side of the planet from France, despite concerted and strident objections from the surrounding nations that had to live with the fallout. They persisted in this practice from 1966 to 1996. This was not a major political issue for the government with their electorate in France.

(Note the Yanks did it too until 1966, and the Brits used the Australian desert)

Happiness

rob — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:54:51 +0000

I was asked how I define and achieve happiness.

Stability. I work harder on my family than anything else in my life: on my marriage and my relationship with my son.

The information barrage - blinded by the light

rob — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:50:56 +0000

There is a quite amazing new statisitic: information increases by 66% per annum, faster than any other artifact of the human race. Here I was thinking I was just getting slower at coping with it all, but indeed I am drowning in an exponentially increasing flow. What about you? How do you deal with it? It is exponential: how much harder has it become in the last two years?