9 June 2025
I would like to discuss an article from Environmental Research Letters. The author is Gerrard Wedderburn-Bisshop,and he writes for the World Preservation Foundation. The title of the article is ”increased transparency in accounting conventions could benefit climate policy”.
21 March 2022
No true Scotsman…buys souvenir plots
12 July 2021
I enjoy playing computer games, and own both a gaming PC (RTX 3060 Ti, i5-10400) and a VR headset (Quest). So when I heard about an ambitious new game for PCs, VR and phones, it piqued my interest. The game is called Earth2, and is pipped to be a 1:1 copy of earth, with a faithful reproduction of the entire planet in software. Their website makes comparisons to the movies The Matrix and Ready Player One, both of which feature VR environments that are indistinguishable from reality. This sounds pretty ambitious... maybe too ambitious.
28 June 2021
There's a lawyer in New Zealand called Liz Lambert who thinks she has hit upon a legal loophole that allows people to claim any piece of land as their own. As background, there are two main forms of land ownership in many countries - Fee Simple and Allodial. Fee simple is the type of land ownership you or I have access to. As archaic legal terms, Fee in this case means ownership, and Simple means without any kind of time limit (freehold rather than leasehold). Governments, on the other hand, usually have Allodial ownership of land, which is more of an absolute ownership without a requirement to pay anyone rates, etc (although in some cases there may be private allodial ownership, such as church land in some european countries). So, in New Zealand's case, the Crown has Allodial Title over New Zealand, and we citizens can then purchase a Fee Simple Title to part of that land. It still belongs to the Crown under their allodial title, but we've purchased a right to live on it forever (barring certain circumstances like compulsory acquisition).
3 September 2017
The Herald published an article about someone's prediction that the world will end in a few weeks. David Meade, described as a Christian numerologist, claims that on or just after September the 20th (my birthday!), the world will meet a fiery end.
1 February 2010
Some claim our society is too materialistic and lacks spiritual values. But what would it be like to live in a society that rejects materialism?
1 February 2006
Research scientist Hamish Campbell spoke of his experiences as Te Papa's museum geologist at the 2005 NZ Skeptics conference.
1 May 1991
About this time every year some diligent journalist trawls through all the year's events that made news and matches them against a list of predictions published a year earlier.