Great to see the revamped Bruce McLaren Trust website back on-line with impressive new site. An amazing historic resource and lots of information on the Trust’s activities.
In July 1990 a small memorial trust had been formed to honour Bruce. Upon its closure in 1995, it was realised by the McLaren family and Ross Jensen that there was a need to form a permanent trust. Therefore in response to repeated demands to commemorate Bruce McLaren's achievements and honour him as one of New Zealand's international heroes, the new Trust was formed by Ross Jensen and Bruce's younger sister Jan McLaren. The overall purpose of the Bruce McLaren Trust is to be a living working memorial to Bruce McLaren and the McLaren Team heritage.
Never thought of antique TV game shows as source of economic inflation comparison. I grazed into a TVNZ Heartland repeat of an early 80s "It's in the Bag".
A contestant turned down $800 and took the bag. She won:
- Zip Appliance Package: Toaster, Jug & sandwich maker. Value $600
- A years supply of Petrol. Value $1500
Translate that to today and the appliances would be worth, say, $120? The petrol ~$6250!
I think I stole the title from an old Citroën 2CV advert: “All the car you actually need”?
The Tata Nano hasn’t quite hit the sales predictions but cheap doesn’t have to mean bad, simple is clever. As I said when it launched, this little car really embodies the thinking which created iconic cars like the VW Beetle, Fiat Nuova 500 (Bambina in NZ) and Mini. It’s certainly closer than their modern, marketing driven, parodies have managed.
Jay’s Garage is worth watching, if only to see how Tata have made the world’s cheapest car outperform a McLaren supercar. I also like his smile factor method of judging quality.
I looked up knowing a Boeing 787 Dreamliner was somewhere in New Zealand. I even knew earlier in the day @dannews had been fortunate enough to fly to Christchurch in it.
Immediately above a sleek twin engine jet was passing over glinting in the sunset. It's hard to judge the size of an aircraft without reference to the horizon, maybe it was the 787?
Web tech to the rescue as the Flightradar 24 phone app proved this was an Emirates 777-300 at 11,000ft. A very nice aircraft indeed, but not a Dream.
Fiat workers notice a Street View car filming in their area. So one staff member decides to drive right up to the door of VW's nearby headquarters and park a Fiat 500 there…
I’ve always regretted missing Richard Feynman’s 1979 Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures. I was 13 and although aware of Richard Feynman’s work — thanks to Isaac Asimov — a lecture on Quantum Electrodynamics probably wasn’t high on the priority list. Later on, having read his books and several about him, I sought out the lectures on VHS (this was before YouTube!). It was a treat to see Feynman in action, if only via a grainy video.
So, I couldn’t miss the chance to hear another brilliant science communicator. I haven’t read 'A Universe from Nothing' yet and only recently started Lawrence’s own book on Feynman: Quantum Man. Throughout the lecture (similar to the Richard Dawkins Foundation YouTube below) I was reminded of Feynman.
Lawrence’s ability to take a complex subject and make it understandable for someone whose formal Physics education ended at High School is remarkable.
“Lawrence Krauss will present a mind-bending trip back to the beginning of the beginning and the end of the end, reviewing the remarkable developments in cosmology and particle physics over the past 20 years that have revolutionised our picture of the origin of the universe, and of its future. In the process, it has become clear that not only can our universe naturally arise from nothing, but that it probably did.”
Throw in some social comment — mainly targeting US education, politics and creationism— and it was an entertaining and inspiring evening. It’s amazing how fascinating Nothing can be, even more amazing to think there is a plausible case it is responsible for everything.
While searching for the video above I also found this: “Join critically-acclaimed author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and world-renowned theoretical physicist and author Lawrence Krauss as they discuss biology, cosmology, religion, and a host of other topics.”
Siouxsie Wiles is a microbiologist and bioluminescence enthusiast who heads up the Bioluminescent Superbugs Group at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. I know her through the Auckland Skeptics in the Pub Meetup Group. BSG make bacteria that glow in the dark to better understand how to prevent and fight microbial infection.
She is currently fundraising for her RocketHub SciFund Challenge Project. The aim of this crowd funded project is to study bacterial evolution. RocketHub is not an investment or charity. It is an exchange; funds from you in exchange for rewards. The more you donate, the better the reward!
Any level of contribution is welcome but for us$50 you get your name ‘drawn’ in glowing bacteria. Invest more and the rewards increase.
Thanks for checking out my SciFund Challenge, Evolution in Action!
Bacteria are masters at adapting to their environment, rearranging their genetic material or gaining new genes from their surroundings. This has allowed them to colonise pretty much every conceivable environment. From boiling hot geysers to that pink scum in your shower. Even us.
Did you know that the number of cells that make up our body are outnumbered 10 to 1 by the bacteria that live on and in us? The majority of bacteria are either harmless or pretty beneficial, but some of them have evolved to cause us serious harm. Around the world, one out of every four people that die are killed by a microorganism of some sort. That’s a staggering 14 million people every year.
And you know what? They just keep on evolving! That’s how we get antibiotic resistance and new diseases emerging. So what I want to know is, how do bacteria evolve to cause disease? And that is where you come in! Your contributions to my SciFund Challenge will help unravel how these amazing microbes keep outsmarting us.
Just how are we going to do it?
Bacteria have a number of really useful characteristics that make them ideal for studying evolution:
They multiply really rapidly so we can measure change in a short space of time They can be stored frozen in a sort of suspended animation. This means we can freeze bacteria from every step of our experiments, building up a living ‘fossil’ record which can be regrown and analysed at any time. Modern sequencing techniques have made it relatively cheap and easy to sequence whole bacterial genomes so we can unravel any genetic changes that occur during our experiments.
So as not to create some superhuman killing machine able to rampage around the world Contagion-style, we are studying the evolution of a bacterium that doesn’t infect humans and isn’t spread by the air. Instead, we are using Citrobacter rodentium which infects mice using the same ‘modus operandi’ as food poisoning strains of E. coli do in humans. They go in one end… and come out the other! And because mice like to eat poop (more technically known as coprophagia) they easily spread C. rodentium to each other. We allow C. rodentiumto spread from mouse to mouse to mouse to mouse to… you get the picture, each time freezing bacteria that are shed in the poop.
We use a glowing strain of C. rodentium so that we can track exactly where the bacteria are within the mice without having to kill the animals. We then carry out competition experiments between the original C. rodentium strain and the ‘evolved’ poop isolates to see which strains have gained a competitive edge. We do this by growing the strains in the lab as well as getting them to infect caterpillars. This gives a first clue as to whether the poop isolates are starting to change the way they outsmart the primitive part of our immune system.
Why is this important?
This work will give us a better understanding of how infectious bacteria adapt, and how they might evolve in people in the future. This is very important - in the fight against an ever-changing foe, forewarned is forearmed!
How can you help?
To unravel the genetic secrets of how Citrobacter evolves while it spreads from mouse to mouse, we will need to sequence the genomes of lots of our poop isolates. Your contributions will be used to pay for this sequencing, which costs roughly $100 per isolate. The more money we raise, the more isolates we can sequence, and we have hundreds to choose from.
Interested? Check out the rewards section [image below] to see what’s on offer in return for a contribution to this exciting project. Thanks for your help!
For those new to SciFund and RocketHub
RocketHub is not an investment or charity. It is an exchange; funds from you in exchange for rewards from me. The more you donate, the better the reward! Rockethub is an ‘all and more’ funding mechanism. If I don’t reach my financial goal I get to keep what I raise. If I do reach my goal, I get access to exciting opportunities. And if I raise more than my goal I get to sequence even more evolved bacteria.
Members of The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with guitarist Justin Firefly Clarke performing the track 'The Ride' from the Good for Nothing feature film soundtrack. Composed by John Psathas. Video by Bryson Rooney.
Not pretty like a Panda or iconic like a Kiwi, actually quite gruesome in their eating habits but Native Preying Mantis (with blue spotted arms below right) awesome little creatures well worth saving.
It was great to find Odd Todd on Twitter last night. Had been a while since I visited his site and I did not realise he was tweeting. Little did I know it would also help cure Alfie’s recent annoying behaviour of barking, seemingly at nothing, from about 19:00 till bedtime.
As I read Odd Todd’s recent tweets Alfie started barking, again. Then I saw this:
When I ask my dog 'What's 1+1?' He looks at me like I can go f myself for mocking his dog brain...
What is bizarre, ok maybe just Odd, was I said to him (in a normal tone of voice) “What’s 1 + 1”? and he was silent, with a puzzled look, for quite a long time.
I realise there could be other explanations but tried again tonight. 1 + 1 only worked for a few seconds but it has been over an hour since I followed up with: “What is the square root of 96”? Not even a whimper since…
Now it seems I will have to come up with increasingly complex math problems to silence the pooch. A bit concerning if it gets as far as algebra and calculus as he will likely leave me for dead.
A logical fallacy is usually what has happened when someone is wrong about something. It's a flaw in reasoning. They're like tricks or illusions of thought, and they're often very sneakily used by politicians and the media to fool people.
Don't be fooled! This website and poster have been designed to help you identify and call out dodgy logic wherever it may raise its ugly, incoherent head.
If you see someone committing a logical fallacy, link them to the relevant fallacy to school them in thinky awesomeness and win the intellectual affections of those who happen across your comment by appearing clever and interesting.
This website was set up as a free educational resource and general helping-people-to-think-better thing. Please help us spread understanding by sharing this site to your Facebook wall
This started as a comment on a blog post but got a bit long and involved. I’m not much of an expert on dieting as have only managed my own weight without formal dieting. I’m also far from perfect but perhaps lucky in finding lots of potentially fattening food unappealing.
If I have a flaw it’s probably eating too little, or at odd times, and a bit much fried stuff. I like most veg, love fruit and rare meat. Maybe that’s why the Paleo thing is of interest. A theory shot down by also loving pasta, rice, bread and grains!
Anyway, the comment went…*
I cant comment on the effectiveness, or not, of Paleo diet but am suspicious of magic bullet solutions. Especially if described with language like “Mother Nature has provided us humans with Natural Foods for human consumption”. Nothing was ever “provided” and humanity survived by fighting for every calorie.
Barbara J. King, a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, writes;
“You might think that, as an anthropologist, I'd greet this embrace of the human prehistoric past with unalloyed delight, especially in a country where a high percentage of our population is evolution-averse. Like most anthropologists, though, I don't think there's good science behind these claims”
I am aware, through an acquaintance, of a study on Paleo being done at Auckland Uni. Have no idea to what extent but can probably find out as know someone who was involved.
With regard to calorie counting, this post by Dr Karl has some interesting info on that and why losing, even maintaining weight is not easy;
“it seems that we have overestimated, by the amazing factor of up to three times, just how much weight you will lose if all you do is eat less.”
On today’s bike ride caught a Mito* at the lights. It looked great in gloss black, nice music audible from within, attractive blond at the wheel but something seemed strange, wrong.
Couldn’t figure out what until the light turned green. There was a burst of starter motor and off it zoomed. This Mito with a engine stop/start was sitting silent at the lights. I know it’s good for fuel economy and the environment but I think Italian engines should always be heard!
* Photo is another black Mito photographed at the dealers a couple of years ago when they first arrived in NZ
The Best of Car Magazine A blast from the past but still great reading today. From supercars to not super cars (Ford Capri), tales of CANAM and Formula One from the 60's, and when will the oil run out from the 70's (hint, it should have already) this is a great mix of nostalgia. One of the best articles is a "behind the scenes" look at filming the racing movie "Le Mans". Another highlight is the faithfully reproduced totally sexist advertising!
Karl Kruszelnicki: Great Mythconceptions: The Science Behind the Myths Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki is an Aussie "celebrity scientist". This book is a collection of his columns which expose the truth behind many commonly quoted "facts".
Do we really use only 10 percent of our brain? Read this book and you'll find out...
Jean-Michel Jarre : The Symphonic Jean-Michel Jarre (2CD Set) I've always liked Jarre's work, his live concert DVDs especially, but the thought of it done by a symphony orchestra had me wondering: "elevator music"?
This disc proves I was wrong. The symphonic nature of his compositions is expressed brilliantly by superb arrangements. Recommended for more than elevators! You can hear samples, or buy as mp3's, from the Amazon page.
Pat Metheny: One Quiet Night I liked Norah Jones hit track "Don’t Know Why", but not a fan of hers. Pat's solo guitar version on this album is lovely.
Anna Maria Jopek: Secret Anna Maria Jopek's first English album is a mix of original and covers. The voice is pure rather than powerful but refreshing.
Shane Jacobson: Kenny To say it's Aussie Toilet humour is, well it's accurate, but doesn't do this film justice. Wonderful script, brilliant acting and finely balanced, like a teetering porterloo, mix of humour and pathos. It's nearly as good as "The Castle", my favourite Aussie film.
Christopher Nolan: The Prestige I didn't know anything about this movie before seeing it but it's one of the best for years. About illusionists, it is packed with constant twists and surprises. Add a great cast, direction and production and you have a must see.
Todd Field: Little Children Don't expect a happy childhood story. It's confrontational and disturbing but also rewarding. Worth seeing for Kate Winslets performance alone.
, was giving a lecture at 
. Throughout the lecture (similar to the Richard Dawkins Foundation YouTube below) I was reminded of Feynman. 
What is bizarre, ok maybe just Odd, was I said to him (in a normal tone of voice) “What’s 1 + 1”? and he was silent, with a puzzled look, for quite a long time.
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