I watched Question Time yesterday and Question 6 was a pearler. The hits just kept on coming and even Moana Mackey joined in with some supplementaries to help Phil Heatley slap Phil Goff all about. Thanks to Bryan Spondre at interest.co.nz for the video.
Michael Jackson has died. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
Apparently it was a ventricle not a testicle that did him in.
To commiserate this is a joke thread for readers to contribute their Michael Jackson jokes.
Container-cell contentment – Corrections boss Barry Matthews has defended shipping container prison cells, saying they are warm, roomy and prisoners “couldn’t get out of them with a sledgehammer”. [Stuff Politics]
Readers of this blog know that I have about as much time for Barry Matthews as Phil Goff has for appearing on Close Up with me. However today Barry Matthews has it dead right.
Asked what prisoners thought of them, he replied: “I’m not interested in what prisoners think.”
Good stuff. Perhaps he has had some rather unpleasant close encounters with his minister to put some steel into his back bone.
Mathieu Bastareaud, the French Player who claimed he got attacked has admitted to making the story up and in fact, was blind drunk, fell over a table in his hotel room, and hurt his cheekbone.
There are two points I wish to make.
Firstly, the police should have picked up on the fact that Bastareaud’s three wtinesses to the attack were Jim Beam, Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels.
Secondly, the NZRU should interview the table on how to tackle French rugby players.
As an aside I was drinking (yes it hurts) last night with some friends in Wellington and the dirty little secret about all this was supposedly it was gay gang-bang gone wrong. Perhaps Bast-bang-bang wouldn’t swallow and so copped a facial.
Isn’t it obvious?
It is to me as the world’s expert on diagnosing Silly First Name Syndrome. Your baby died because you doomed it when you named her.
Yet another victim goes to the grave from Silly First Name Syndrome.
A mother whose 3-day-old daughter died hours after a doctor prescribed paracetamol for flu and sent her home is demanding answers.
Westcare White Cross medical centre in Henderson has started an internal investigation into the care given to Patience Aroha-Tae Kahaki, and her death has been referred to the coroner.
The child was born two weeks prematurely on April 5 at Waitakere Hospital after her mother, Nicole Kahaki, was admitted because of bleeding and high blood pressure.
A pod of Orca visited Auckland Harbour yesterday and it seems that the stingray of the harbour have caught Phil Goff’s chickenitis.
They didn’t want to play with the whales!
So cool to have Orca visiting Auckland Harbour.
I heard an Orca expert on the radio yesterday who said that stingrays are like chocolate biscuits to Orca.
Anyway, I’m off to Wellington for a couple of days, will go and see if Phil Goff will talk to me off camera.
Probably won’t, the list of Labour MP’s too afraid to talk to the Whale is building.
Christchurch mayoral hopeful, not this term though, Lianne Dalziel is in a snit and started whaling on the Christchurch press for daring to use this blog as a source for a story.
But is she really in a snit? Just the other day she told the Christchurch press she had a good laugh (see image left)
I had recently posed the question following an email to the tipline about her possibility of standing for the Christchurch Mayoralty. It seems though it wasn’t that post that upset her even though the original source of the rumour was someone out on the town in Christchurch who bumped in to Lianne who was being very loquacious, Lianne apparently had a good shine on so may not remember it.
No, it was this post about her comments to the select committee that was meeting when she was gently teased by other members.
In her nasty little post though she continues to cast aspersions on the integrity of Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga who is perhaps the most honest MP in the current parliament.
She also tries without naming anyone to lay the blame on another member of the select committee for leaking me this information. She is wrong on all her suppositions and that is all I will say on the matter of who leaked the information to me.
Lianne appears to be yet another Labour MP who runs scared of the Whale. She refuses to link to my site or evcen to mention my name. Perhaps I am Labour’s Voldemort, where even to mention me is to risk catastrophe. She really must ask Trevor, though, about linking, it is common courtesy to link to the blog you are talking about and Trevor linked through to me earlier on his temper tantrum post. I do note though that Trevor has taken to maligning Lianne’s cooking skills. Boy Trevor, you better hope the sisterhood forgets that comment before the next caucus meeting.
Of course Lianne Dalziel has been in trouble before with her propensity to be less than honest in 2004 when she was forced to resign from Cabinet when she misled NZPA over whether she knew who leaked documents about a controversial immigration case to the media. That said, I have heard many a National MP talk fondly of her time as Assiciate minister of Immigration, before her “troubles”.
So it is interesting that she should post about “trustworthy” sources…nah… interesting is the wrong word, how about ironic? Yes that’s it. Ironic that she posted about “trustworhy” sources.
I bet this comment doesn’t last long at Red Star, or Red Rag or whatever pinko name their silly blog is called.
Just spoke to Sonny Shaw, he is an All Blacks fan and travels to every match, as well as every Black Caps match and is a very seasoned traveller. He was also one of the few that got onto the Jetstar flight to Wellington.
He made it onto the plane and was willing to speak to the media because he reckons the people left outside got a raw deal. He stated to me that Jetstar started boarding the plane early at 3.01pm, he was surprised and quickly went through security and boarded. While he sitting their they annouced over the plane intercom that the flight was “very full”, overhead lockers full, and so could people please store things under their seat. He flight was so full that it left 20 minutes late. He did not see ANY empty seats on the plane, which would strongly suggest it was overbooked. The last person who boarded did so at 4:01pm. He suggests that if you look at the manifest that it would probably show a full plane, or at least a plane which would not have enough room to fit the stranded jetstar passengers.
Sonny also told me that he is travelling with Jetstar next week and they have already changed his flight details and schedule twice. He is currently re-evaluating his trip. Another person with whom he works was planning a wedding in Queenstown and has had their flights rescheduled more than 8 times.
There is seriously something wrong at Jetstar and they also seem unable to tell the truth. Time for the Commerce Commission to get involved I think.
I found this cool video and explanation of the math/science of traffic jams at Boing Boing. It is pretty cool. The seriously interesting part is about phantom traffic jams, that is jams that occur for no apparent reason.
Phantom jams are born of a lot of cars using the road. No surprise there. But when traffic gets too heavy, it takes the smallest disturbance in the flow – a driver laying on the brakes, someone tailgating too closely or some moron picking pickles off his burger – to ripple through traffic and create a self-sustaining traffic jam.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematicians have created a model to describe how these frustrating snarls form. With this understanding, engineers could design build better roads to minimize the odds of them happening.
That’s pretty cool. They even have a cool name for the incidence of traffic jams.
The mathematics of such traffic jams are strikingly similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosions, said Aslan Kasimov, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Mathematics. Realizing this allowed the reseachers to solve traffic jam equations that were first theorized in the 1950s. The MIT researchers even came up with a name for this kind of gridlock – “jamiton.” It’s a riff on “soliton,” a term used in math and physics to desribe a self-sustaining wave that maintains its shape while moving.
The equations MIT came up with are similar to those used to describe fluid mechanics, and they model traffic jams as a self-sustaining wave.
“We wanted to describe this using a mathematical model similar to that of fluid flow,” Kasimov said.
How did they find out about phantom jams?
The researchers hit upon the equation after an experiment by Japanese researchers demonstrated the formation of jamitrons on a circular road. In that experiment, drivers were instructed to travel 30 kilometers an hour (18.6 mph) while maintaining a constant distance between cars. It didn’t take long before disruptions occurred and phantom jams formed. Denser traffic brought quicker jams.
The MIT team found speed, traffic density and other factors can determine conditions that will lead to a jamiton and how quickly it will spread. Once the jam forms, the researchers say, drivers have no choice but to wait for it to clear. The new model could lead to roads designed with sufficient capacity to keep traffic density below the point at which a jamiton can form.
Kasimov found that jamitons have a “sonic point,” which separates traffic flow into upstream and downstream components, much like the event horizon of a black hole. This sonic point prevents communication between these distinct components so information about free-flowing conditions just beyond the front of the jam can’t reach drivers behind the sonic point. Ergo, there you sit, stuck in traffic and have no idea that the jam has no external cause, your blood pressure racing toward the stratosphere.
And the finale, the video of how the phantom jam works.
Trevor Mallard is still throwing his toys. Look at this video and see what you think. Trevor needs seriously to control his anger.
