Third: Satellite
Second: Magneto
Winner: Canta

Judge Russell Brown said Canta was the clear winner. He praised the bold, simple design and use of colour and appreciated the small touches like the ‘Last 7 Days’ panel in the news section. A smart, well-kept website with a distinctive look.

Best Headline

Third: Canta
Second: Critic
Winner: Magneto—”Can you manage a trois?”

Judge Jim Curran said he’d unhesitatingly plagiarise Magneto’s headline. Extremely clever word play, guaranteed to pull the reader into the story. An instant smile of a headline.

Best Cartoonist

Third: Stephan Gillan, Critic
Second: William Sainsbury, Chaff
Winner: Sam Northcott, Salient

Judge Al Nisbet said Sam’s hand drawings were fresh and energetic. They were well layed out, with slightly manic themes – not to mention Al found himself smiling at them.

Best Original Photography

Third: Critic
Winner – first equal: InUnison and Sarah Burton, Magneto

Judge Mark Taylor said InUnison’s images were fun with clear lighting. Magneto’s entry was a great selection of studio shots.

Best Sports Writer

Third: Angela McGuigan, Magneto
Winner – first equal: Sebastian Boyle, Canta and Liam Mitchell, Craccum

Judge Steve Kilgallon says Liam’s entry demonstrated he has a good writing style and he covered an interesting range of topics. He says Sebastian made the effort to go and talk to people and find a real story on his own patch of direct relevance to readers.

Best Education Series

Third: Chaff
Second: Salient
Winner: Critic

Judge Nicola Kean said Critic was the clear winner. Critic tackled a complicated, important issue and did so with wit and style. The entry was engaging and interesting, full of dirt and scandal.

Best Humour

Second equal: The Rt Hon Winston Peters, Chaff and Spencer Dowson, Craccum
Winner: Brendan Kelly, Debate

Judge John Ong said Brendan writes punchy, clever and dark satire. It’s well paced and tightly written, which means it isn’t plagued with utter banality.

Best Reviewer

Third: Tom Ainge-Roy, Critic
Second: Adam Goodall, Salient
Winner: Richard Swainson, Nexus

Judge Margaret Agnew said Richard’s entries showed he was fantastically film literate. Although a little verbose, he has a nice overall reviewing style.

Best Columnist

Third equal: Harry Caldicott and Jim Wilson, Chaff and Saraid Cameron, InUnison
Second: Mrs John Wilmot, Critic
Winner: David Farrier, Craccum

Judge David Slack says David Farrier writes with verve, imagination and punch – like he’s thrown a party in a column.

Best Cover

Third: Nexus
Second: Critic
Winner: InUnison

Judge William Chen said of the 33 covers submitted, the the standout “What’s Your Carbon Footprint?” set the In Unison portfolio apart. This clever concept took centre stage, its handwritten masthead and cover lines mimicking the topic in slightly smudged charcoal lettering – a creative twist on a hotly debated issue to pique the interest via a fiery footprint. The strikingly topical “Sins” and “Guilty Pleasures” also impressed, with the whimsical and anecdotal humour of the latter punctuating the cover design. All three entries fulfilled the basic tenets of an effective cover.

Best Editorial Writer

Third: Art Robinson, Nexus
Second: Sebastian Boyle, Canta
Winner: William Muirhead, Chaff

Judge James Robinson said William’s editorials were a foot above the rest. They were well thought out, well researched well articulated and well organised. James felt like he was being told something concrete that even if he didn’t agree he could still appreciate the perspective.

Best News Writer (Unpaid)

Second equal: Vaughan Alderson, Debate and Stella Blake-Kelly, Salient
Winner: Teuila Fuatai, Critic

Judge Keith Ng said Teuila’s entry set the most consistent standard. She had obviously put time and effort in to her piece on a fatal assault at a McDonalds. In other entries, she showed humour and solid news judgement.

Best News Writer (Paid)

Third: Sebastian Boyle, Canta
Second: Matt Shand, Magneto
Winner: Gregor Whyte, Critic

Judge Graeme Baker said Gregor dealt with important issues in a clear and thorough manner, while allowing for humour. Gregor’s copy was tailored to its audience in both subject and tone. The entry was entertaining, educating and informative – Gregor’s writing style would easily fit into the pages of the Herald.

Best Feature Writer

Third: Sebastian Boyle, Canta
Second: Matt Shand, Magneto
Winner: Charlotte Greenfield, Critic

Judge Tim Watkin said that Charlotte’s features were above all else credible stories that offer a range of voices on a wide variety of subjects, subjects that will interest her readers. She does the basics well. The stories are local – even the one that isn’t – and tells the reader things they don’t already know. Importantly, the facts are accurate and the opinions well attributed.

Best Feature

Third equal: Jess Bignell, Chaff and Craig Robertson, Craccum
Second: Elle Hunt, Salient
Winner: Dr Z, Critic.

Judge Donna Chisholm said she didn’t want to like Critic’s entry, but it got her in the end. It’s not a new idea, but Dr Z delivered the story of his wasted weekend with real panache that lifted it from run-of-the-mill first person piece to the seriously funny. Perfectly pitched. And nutmeg – who knew?

Best Design

Third equal: Salient and Craccum
Second: Magneto
Winner: InUnison

Judge Sally Fullam says InUnison is a very professional, cohesive, well-designed magazine. There is a very high standard of photography, lovely use of illustration and beautiful, original and playful typography throughout this magazine. There is excellent attention to detail – the creative use of fonts, drop caps and pull quotes. The use of colour is nicely juxtaposed against white space. Designer, Mark Lovatt and his team of contributors should be very proud of their achievements.

Best Small Publication

Third: InUnison
Second: Magneto
Winner: Canta

Best Publication

Second equal: Critic and Magneto

The winner of the best publication award for 2011 is: Salient.

Judge Simon Wilson says Salient is witty, intensely self-involved in a rather endearingly self-deprecatory way.

Judge Jackson Wood says Salient is a humming magazine which has by far the best balance of news, features, humour, students’ association garbage and everything that makes up the quintessential student rag.

The design pops. 
On the cover every week it says “the organ of student opinion” and judging from the diverse array of content and debate on the letters pages it is fulfilling that role.

Pumpkin, Beetroot, potato and cottage cheese pie

So I had all of the above ingredients, with a hefty helping of pastry from Cafe Mamba, a cafe in the CBD that seem to love me enough to donate rad stuff to the family now and then. I don’t like cottage cheese. I don’t use cottage cheese. It was inexplicably in the fridge, so I figured why not add it to stuff and hope for the best.

• 1 beetroot, cut into 2cm cubes
• ¼ pumpkin, cut into 2cm cubes
• 1tbsp cinnamon
• 1tbsp salt
• 1tbsp ginger
• 2tbsp oil

Toss the above together and roast until fully cooked. Put into a blender with a 250g container of cottage cheese, pepper, and salt to taste. It will taste odd, and rich. Like it would taste good in exceptionally small quantities.

• 5 small potatoes, cut into 2cm cubes
• About 300g savoury pastry (the stuff I get is flaky and not really designed for pies, but tastes so much better)

Boil the potatoes until just tender, and mix into the pumpkin/beet puree. Roll out the pastry to about 3mm thick, and use it to line a pie dish. Save a bit to chuck on top. Add the potato mix on top of the pastry, then the last bit of pastry on top, and cook at 180 degrees until the pastry on top is browned and the sides of the pie pastry are starting to crisp.

The pie filling will be bright red and eating it will mess with your head a bit, because it looks like a sweet pie. Enjoy :)

Firstly, accept that your hair will need bleach. I’d say bleach it about 2 shades lighter than your hair colour, and no more unless going white. Why? Because you have to deal with upkeep and regrowth – if you lighten it any more, it will only take 2 weeks before your hair is obviously in need of dyeing, and dyeing that often is bad for it and completely unnecessary.

If your hair is naturally black, or you don’t take the above advice, consider dyeing patches instead of the whole head – e.g. the middle section in a band from above your ear to just below it, or dyeing your hair a tamer colour all over, then dyeing patches of extreme colour over the top in big sections.

Try to choose colour based on the assumption it will be about two shades darker than it looks in tube. Yes, your hair will lighten to the colour it appears in-tube, but it will do so unevenly and by the time that happens, it’ll need a re-dye. You will need about 1/4 of a tube left over, so if you have a lot of hair, you may need more tubes than initially assumed.

Bleach can be any blonde hair dye. For your extreme dye, I’d recommend one of:

Fudge - my favourite, especially because if you get rained on in town the colour doesn’t run all over your clothes! But their red selection is a bit crap, in my opinion. Also, Fudge doesn’t fade too badly and I’ve used it years at a time with no unpleasantness.
Directions - Stay out of the rain. Really wicked colours and probably best looking if you really keep on top of upkeep. But after 8 months or so of use, the colour didn’t hold well anymore, so I personally won’t touch it. Also, this one will rub off on clothes/bedding.
Special Effects – I’d say avoid rain, but it isn’t too bad. Can be pretty cruel to anything the dye touches in terms of removal. Colours are pretty cool. Fades pretty heavily the first week or so, which can be a pain if you really thought through your colour and got it ‘just right’.

If you have an inside day or can wear a big hat, start the process. You need at least 6hrs with colour dye in your hair. This is a long time. Consider covering your bed in towels and letting it dye overnight. 

1. Bleach hair. Look at shade. Accept your hair colour will not be magically lighter than this shade!

2. Moisturise with an especially oily moisturiser around your hairline, over ears, down back of neck.

3. Apply dye. If doing more than one colour, think through your order of dyeing. I do it all at once, but can only get away with this because I don’t do dissimilar colours.

4. Put hair in a comfortable position and wrap with gladwrap, leave about an hour, then after this unless sleeping you can usually comb and style hair, wipe off excess barrier cream and go about a day which doesn’t involve people touching your hair.

5. After a good 6+ hrs, shower and wash it all out- the water may never run completely clear but make sure as much residue as possible is out of your hair.
 
Upkeep

Don’t wash your hair daily, it’s so bad for it. Try weekly, or every 3-4 days.
When washing hair, use as cool water as you can stand.
When showering and not washing hair, wear a shower cap. This makes an enormous difference.
Add dye to your conditioner bottle. Somewhere between a quarter and a fifth of your conditioner should be dye.
Use leave-in conditioner or do similar lovely things to your hair so it stays healthy.
Look at the back of your head to determine if your hair is fading too much, not the front, as the back/sides fade much faster.
Redye every 3-5 weeks. You should be good enough at looking after your hair because of regrowth, not because of colour fade.
Treat different colour sections separately in everything you do to avoid muddying colours.

Once you know how to do it, it’s easy. It’s just learning how to make small changes.

Don’t open with a pickup line. You shouldn’t need, or use, a pickup line. The aim of a pickup line is to get someone you don’t even know to sleep with you, which is transparent and not particularly classy. If you are genuinely that single minded, try to see a non-sexual conversation as getting to know the person for basic reasons such as where they live, the likelihood that they will have a disease, whether you will be compatible and have the same intentions. Starting out with the implication that sleeping with them is your sole focus is offensive and degrading. Have a conversation. Enjoy casual flirting and the fun of the chase. That’s what people like. Being put on the spot is uncomfortable and intimidating.

Have no expectations. If you spend money or time on someone, you can’t view this as their ‘owing’ you anything. You have chosen to spend that time and money, so unless they have explicitly discussed expectations with you, you cannot place unwelcome expectations on them. For the same reason, be very wary of people expecting you to purchase them a drink early on- they are likely to ‘pay’ for it by spending a short amount of time with you, and then bugger off. Viewing interactions with people as transactions will only bring similarly minded people into your life, as opposed to people who want to see you because they like you.

Watch where your eyes are when conversation lulls. The single most offputting, upsetting thing (as a woman, I don’t know about men) to deal with when in the presence of someone you don’t know well is prolonged eye contact with no conversation. Unless faces are being pulled, prolonged eye contact often leaves your face frozen in a slightly off-putting, uncomfortable expression. Unless the person you’re talking to really likes you in a romantic way, they will glance all over your face, picking up every flaw that they dislike, and then look away. You will make them feel uncomfortable in your presence and they will struggle to understand your intentions. If you aren’t actively talking to someone, don’t stare into their eyes; if you find yourself staring into their eyes and aren’t about to lean in for a kiss, shrug it off by giving a bit of a laugh. This can also force the conversation into avenues you want to pursue, with little compliments when they ask why you’re laughing.

Don’t bounce from one person to another, trying your luck. In any situation, be it a party, lecture theatre, bar or casual hangout, if you are trying to get someone to like you romantically, other people will pick up on the vibes. Upon testing the waters and giving up, the best thing to do is remain the life of the party- you’re there to have some fun, try to at least pretend getting laid is not the end goal. Making it apparent that you are out to find a partner will severely limit your options- noone likes to be second best, or have others looking at them as if they are. Further, people uninvolved in your interactions will quickly label you with concepts which are not enjoyable. I have no objection to people (safely) having as many sexual partners as they please, but being known as the person who will try it on with anyone that will talk to them will quickly erode the likelihood of any genuine connections… or getting laid.

• If you don’t like something, work out why. Is it the texture (too crunchy/soft/firm), awkward to eat, does it remind you of a bad food memory (like the taste reminds you of that time you vomited black bean noodle?), are you aware that there’s something wrong with the food (when preparing it, you dropped a bit on the floor and put it back in, so you keep thinking you can taste hair…), or, a common one – is it too hot or cold?
• Have a fallback for your meals. If you made a crappy pasta sauce, try adding tomato or barbecue sauce to it. If your veggies are too dull and bland, try tossing them in grated cheese, breadcrumbs, a spot of melted butter, salt and pepper, and some crushed garlic (in any combination, but I do all at once and chuck it under the grill for a few minutes). If you bake a cake, think through ways to keep it interesting – like heated with ice-cream for dessert, when it gets a bit dry. In general, if something isn’t tasty enough, try it with something which will add a bit of salt or sugar to it.
• When cooking a meal, ensure that there is at least one vegetable which you know you’ll scoff down. For instance, in a stir fry you can add mushrooms, mini corn cobs (buy them canned), etc.. Or, if a meal is predominantly vegetables, eg baked potatoes, chop up some nuts or meat (something you’ll really enjoy getting to), to motivate your serving size.
• Look at things you can have with your meal that will help you eat the boring bits. Some people always have buttered bread handy (lasagna sandwiches are the best), and if you make sandwiches you can add salad to them and be healthier. Some people like mashed potato, and mix it all up.. it’s about finding what works.
• Mashed potato is great for hiding things in. For every three spoons of potato, you can hide in about one spoon of mashed broccoli. Also, if you hate baked beans and need a cheap protein source, mash baked beans up with potato and it’s delicious.
• Generally, spreads or sauces aren’t the best for you. Hummus, even, is high fat (and often high salt), so really get into reading the packet before you buy. What spreads and sauces are good for, however, is enticing you to eat boring things. This only works if they taste good with whatever you’re eating.
• If you need to eat, but aren’t hungry, get involved with preparing your meal. Get excited about your food. Think about what you’ll drink with it and get that ready too. If possible, cook it in a frying pan and smell it cooking – even reheated food. See if there’s anyone around to share it with. You’ll find yourself snacking on it before it hits the plate.

The biggest hurdle to eating often, well, and healthily, is pressure. Make it a joy to explore your tastes, ignore everything but your health, and you’ll do fine.

The official line from the International Energy Agency is that restraining global warming to 2^OC is now nothing but a pipe dream. 4^OC of warming seems realistic, on current trends. And that’s pretty bad news – most people agree that this would lead to huge disruptions in lifestyle and food supply for billions of people, and to ‘conflict.’ (Read: war.)

This is usually the part of the article where I start to say something conciliatory or to give another point of view, and I have to admit that this time it was a bit of a struggle – at the outset it looks pretty comprehensively negative. What I came up with in the end is this: It seems certain that human society will change dramatically in the next ten or twenty years. Either we change our energy use patterns a lot, until eventually a sustainable point is reached, or we could do nothing and simply wait for the catastrophic crop failures, sea levels rising and subsequent war. In both cases, at the end of the day we have to change the way we live.

And here’s the thing – the new society could be better. It could potentially be the case that after the dust settles, we live in a more peaceful and plentiful world than before. There are a lot of myths about climate change. It won’t destroy the Earth… our planet is a lot more resilient than that. It won’t kill all the humans either, or all the animals, although it will in all likelihood cause the extinction of a huge number of species. It won’t even necessarily result in a more meagre existence for those humans that survive. What it will do to humans is be hugely disruptive – which is a pretty gentle way of saying famine, pestilence and warfare.

I suppose, given that scenario, the best we might hope for is that the change in our society and in our climate comes gradually rather than suddenly. It’s not unthinkable that this might come about… human society (or at least Western society) has been pretty successful in reinventing itself on roughly a thirty year time frame for the last century or so, so who knows? Maybe this change might not be such a challenge as we thought it would be.

So what does it mean for you? I don’t recommend any more that you think about measures to stop climate change – I don’t think that it can be done. Think instead about measures to slow climate change, as slowing the changes in our environment is still a valuable task. There needs to be a realisation that we will have to adapt to a new environment, even as we implement measures to slow its coming. There need to be plans to live in the new hotter world, because it seems like that is the only option left. So ask your local MP or your local scientist – what is New Zealand’s plan for living in a post climate-change world? (Hint – NZ doesn’t have one yet.)

Bit of a downer of a column I guess, but one can’t ignore the evidence, and it’s better to plan for unpleasant parts of the future than to live in denial of them.

There has always been scepticism surrounding Lance Armstrong and his famous seven Tour de France victories. He is one of the most tested men in the history of sport and yet until just recently there has been no damning evidence against him. That was until former teammate Tyler Hamilton was forced to testify to a grand jury about Lance Armstrong and his link with the performance enhancing drug EPO which is a human blood-cell that can be taken out of someone and then put back in later to increase red blood-cell production. He then proceeded to be interviewed on 60 Minutes where he categorically stated that he had witnessed Lance Armstrong inject himself with EPO during the Tour de Suisse in the same year that he won the Tour de France.

Now Tyler Hamilton is a drug-cheat himself, and many drug-cheats have also accused Armstrong including disgraced Tour de France winner Floyd Landis. Typically the public do not readily trust these people and so Armstrong and his ‘no positive tests’ have been trusted by the public. But this time, Hamilton is not only telling his story to the Press put also to a grand jury. It is also thought that the clean George Hincapie has also given evidence which could be damning to Armstrong’s cause.

Now this would be a great shame on the sport of cycling if this ends up being true, especially as it is now suspected that positive tests on Armstrong were covered up by the governing body. So where would cycling go from here? Would this be the final nail in the sport’s coffin or could it mean the legal introduction of performance enhancing drugs into sport?

There are a number of arguments for and against drugs in sport and it would seem that with every new scandal you have to lean slightly more towards the ‘for’ side when it comes to cycling. There are so many drug-cheats and they all have the same excuse “well everyone else was doing it, so we just wanted to level the playing field”. It would almost seem now that just letting everyone utilise performance enhancing drugs would level the playing field in cycling. Because there sure isn’t a level one at the moment, assuming that everyone isn’t already cheating.

Another argument for drugs in sport is that it would allow people to witness humans at their fastest, strongest, most elite levels. Imagine how fast someone could run the 100m and all the home-runs we would see like in early 2000s baseball. And we might think the Tour de France was pathetic if we saw people struggle up hills once again if there were no drugs in sport.

But is this really what we want? Moving forward, it may seem impractical to not allow drugs into sport because we will never see a fair, level playing field. But surely we have a responsibility to at least try and keep drugs out of sport. Because for me, drugs and sport cannot co-exist within a model where the integrity of sport is paramount. I do not want to see people running fast because they have taken a whole lot of drugs; I want to see the natural height of human accomplishment.

It will be a shame to see such a great man like Armstrong brought down because of doping. The way he defeated cancer, triumphed in adversity, and has used his profile for the greater human good with the creation of the charity Livestrong, is the absolute embodiment of what people love about sport. However, this will mar his integrity just as he will have devastated the integrity of sport. It is essential, if Armstrong is found guilty of blood-doping, that sport and drug institutions utilise the profile of this devastating truth to try and enhance the anti-doping cause. I for one do not want to see another champion embroiled in drug controversy. We don’t need any more Marion Joneses and Floyd Landises. We need true champions.

Sport of course has universal importance and attraction, but one of the special things about it is also the personal relationship we have it. This relationship differs from one fan to another and can be highly individualised and have myriad personal intricacies that only that specific person can understand. For me, I do not believe that I am obsessive about sport, but I might be close.

I read the ESPN football pages every day, I check the MLB and NBA scores constantly throughout the day and could tell you the win-loss record of the teams in the AL East, the approximate batting averages and pitchers ERAs for the Boston Red Sox, I also scrutinise cricket scorecards on cricinfo.com, until recently had my fantasy football team to manage and finally will check the potential All Blacks injury count after a weekend of Super 15 rugby. But I’m sure most people do that.

The reason my head is in this place is that lately I have been reading Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby which is essentially the quintessential book about sport fandom. Highly recommended as a much better source of sports writing than this blog. It made me think: what would I give up for sport? If I were ever lucky enough to get married, well the wedding could never on the day of the Champions League Final; if I ever manage to have children, then I would have to make sure the baby wasn’t conceived nine months before a Rugby World Cup Final… or any All Blacks game for that matter.

Perhaps with these two sporting events some would sympathise and understand that these are occasions not to be missed. But this morning I also woke up at 6am to watch a friendly testimonial football match for Gary Neville that had absolutely no bearing on anything whatsoever, other than a farewell to a player whose best days have passed and who I never saw play that much during his career. Surely that game would have been easy to give up? Surely I watched it simply because I had nothing else to do at 6 on a Wednesday morning. But I am not too sure. I wouldn’t have missed my own child’s birth for it, but it was still important to me.

That is how you measure a true sports fan. One that is ready to wake up at any time of the night in order to watch the meaningless games, so that the meaningful ones are even more so because you deserve to watch them. You have done the hard yards and so you are worthy. And this week I am worthy of the Champions League Final. Manchester United vs Barcelona at Wembley Stadium. Another page of history will be made, and I will be there to see it written. Majesty will be on show. The two best clubs on the planet will come head to head. And they will embody the beauty of sport. Just you wait and see.

Any scientist worth their salt will avoid pronouncing something to be absolutely true[1], and what we get instead are statements like those above. Understandably, this seems strange to some people. It’s not the way that people talk in casual conversation, after all. It sounds as if they have something to hide! Often this is interpreted by the public as being a sign that scientists aren’t really sure about what they are saying. Some people of malicious intent will then insist loudly that any findings of researchers that might impact them negatively cannot be trusted. Examples include climate change deniers (‘so there’s no need to use less oil!’) and politicians (‘no, 90% of New Zealand’s lowland waterways are not polluted!). A scientist might say that a particular aeroplane design has a failure rate in turbulence of one in ten to the eight. What they mean is: the plane won’t fail. I would like to explain in this column why scientists talk this way, and why it is necessary for them to keep doing so.

Now, in most cases I am a strong advocate of scientists exercising humility and being themselves the ones responsible for communicating clearly with the public. But this is one mode of speech which I believe that scientists must not stop using, even though it can be difficult to understand, and I’ll explain why. It takes a wee while to explain, so bear with me.

The source of this turn of phrase is a curious quirk of the scientific method. Science is our best tool for finding out what is fact, but it is only capable of proving general behaviours false – it is not capable of proving them to be true. We can show that Newton’s Laws of motion do not correctly describe objects moving at near-light speeds. But we cannot show that general relativity always gives the correct answer. It is impossible to test every circumstance, even in a well controlled laboratory experiment, so all that we can reliably say is that in all the times we have tested it so far, general relativity has given the right answer[2].

To complicate matters, many of the questions that scientists seek to answer involve processes that are either complex or statistically random. The best that the scientific method can hope for in these circumstances is to give an accurate statistical average. This number won’t be the actual figure found in any particular example set, except by chance or when the sample size is infinite – clearly not a physical[3] circumstance!

So scientists, when answering any question, must give only their best estimate or prediction. To do otherwise would be to lie to the questioner, and as I have said before trust in science rests on a foundation of honesty and reliability. If you compromise that basis of the relationship between science and the public, you can no longer expect people to believe you, and the public loses a valuable tool for predicting the outcomes of its actions. This is why I think it essential that scientists continue to use this language, which implicitly tells the listener that the speaker is not delivering fact, but prediction. (A reliable prediction mind you! – A prediction good enough for you to invest on.) So given that I don’t think it would be right for scientists to change this mode of speech, I do think that the public have a responsibility to understand it. If they want to get the most out of the science they pay for, they are going to have to.

If you are still concerned by the apparent lack of certainty displayed by scientists and engineers, let me assuage your fears by saying that absolute certainty has never been a necessary feature of technology or science. For example, we (humanity) understand aeroplanes with enough certainty to ensure that they very seldom fall out of the sky. We understand biology and agriculture with enough certainty to ensure that enough food is produced every year to feed us all[4]. We understand medicine with enough certainty to extend the average lifespan of humans in wealthy countries for decades longer than ever before. In fact, for any given application of science to our world there will exist some degree of certainty that is sufficient, and it is always possible for scientists to test to these degrees of accuracy. It may not be absolute certainty, but pretty good certainty is enough to work miracles.

[1] Not to be confused with the behaviour of some science teachers.
[2] Actually this statement is not true any more either, but I couldn’t think of another example that was both correct and well recognised outside of specialist fields. There have now been experiments with results which differ from those predicted by general relativity. So you’ll have to imagine that we’re in the nineties or so when you read this statement. My apologies for this!
[3] read: “realistic”
[4] I realise that people still go hungry. The tragedy is that humanity does actually produce enough food to feed all of us. It just isn’t making its way to countries where people are starving because no-one can find a way of making money from that.

This year’s Premier League has been the best in recent years. I say that not just because I am a Manchester United fan, but instead because for once we have had a season of which the last month will not be about the top four. It will be a relief, for once, that we can all divert our attention elsewhere, and enjoy the last fortnight of football without wondering who will be in the Champions League. We all knew it anyway – it’s the four richest clubs.
Though Premier League football is the best of the best and is also the easiest to follow, I can’t shake the niggling feeling that it’s slowly killing the heart of football – the ‘beautiful game’. The top six or seven clubs are the richest, the bottom four or five the poorest, and – in the end – clubs are rewarded for selling shirts, rather than playing daring and beautiful football.

Take Blackpool, for example. For me, they represent a breath of fresh air to the modern game. Most newly promoted sides would play negatively to secure another season in the top flight. Not Blackpool – they’ve played fearlessly, and attractively, but without the squad depth of the bigger clubs, they sit remarkably close to the drop zone. With a game against Champions-elect Manchester United on the final day of the season, Blackpool look set to go down.

It’s a side like Blackpool that I think would have flourished in a more even environment. Even from myself, a Manchester United fan, I would love to see a more open, and a more even Premier League. Every year, I would like to see the smartest clubs (both on and off the park) win the league, not just the wealthiest. So how do you make the Premier League a more even and fair environment? It seems to work in other competitions, even other sports – there are all sorts of regulations in place. The NBA has a draft system. Some leagues have regulations on the amount of internationals, or over-21s in a team’s squad. Most modern competitions have a salary cap, and the clubs that choose to ignore them (we’re looking at you, Melbourne Storm) are punished. And it works.

From a neutral perspective I, personally, find the NRL more competitive and more exciting to watch than the Premier League. Not just that, but it’s keeping the game within their best interests. The A-League operates in Australian football’s interests. Without it, there would be very small an avenue for young Kiwi and Aussie players to make it into the world of football The NRL is doing New Zealand and Australian Rugby League a favour. I don’t see the same behaviour from the FA. In 2009, a game between Arsenal and Portsmouth became the first top flight game not to feature an Englishman. At the time, it publicly spelt doom for the future of English football. A year later, a humiliation at the hands of Germany at the World Cup spelt doom for the future of English football. Am I the only one to see a correlation?

Manchester United will line up against Barcelona in two weeks in the Champions League final. I suspect their team will be made up of a three Englishmen, a Welshman, Dutchman, Frenchman, Serb, Brazilian, Mexican, a South Korean and an Ecuadorian. I might be fooling myself, but a win in that final is barely a win for Manchester. Instead, it’s a reward for the businessmen who poured their millions into the side.

Imagine an English Premier League season in which each club had a salary cap, had to include an under-21 player in their team, and could only have two or three offshore players in the line-up. Sure, the FA might have to deal with complaints from a few Manchester United and Chelsea fans, a few Russian trillionaires might get grumpy, but overall, they’d be dealing with a more exciting league, one which is creating a pathway for new talent, and the possibility of an English side competing admirably at a World Cup.

Of course, this is nearly impossible. The FA is unlikely to listen to reason, more the sounds of their wallets bursting at the seams. For every unhappy fan in Stoke, there are twenty happy fans in South Korea, each happy to purchase Chelsea’s newest alternative-commemorative-away strip. Every year the Premier League and the FA will continue to produce high quality, imported football, and every four years they will embarrass themselves at a World Cup. For me, it’s a no-brainer.

But wait.

Have they tried sacking the coach?

The reason this is so pertinent is due to a number of football calls in the past year that would have benefited from technology being incorporated into games. Specifically in regards to football, I am talking about goal line technology so that accurate calls can be made on whether or not the ball has passed the goal line and in turn if a goal has been scored or not.

Recently the English Premier League would have benefited from such technology when Chelsea mid-fielder Frank Lampard fired a shot towards Tottenham keeper Heurelho Gomes who fumbled it towards the goal but managed to stop it in time, yet the goal was still given. This was a vital goal in the title and Champions League spots race and the wrong decision was made. This is not the referees’ fault though and they were not blamed by anyone because it was a marginal call, but with technology the right decision could have been made. The conservative and out of touch FIFA however have not been very willing to move their sport into the 21st Century and allow technology into the game of football. Just another negative blight on Sepp Blatter’s resume.

The reason this feudalism is so confusing is because so many sports have incorporated technology without detriment to the functioning of the sport for players or spectators. Tennis has embraced Hawk Eye and under their system players get a limited number of challenges to line calls every set. These challenges are quickly placed on the big screen and the technology shows where the ball landed clearing up any differences in opinion between umpires and players. This technology is on all the major tennis tours and has been hugely successful in making sure that the right decisions are made when it comes to line calls. It does not intrude on the sport and players and umpires alike enjoy the accuracy it brings with it.

Cricket has included technology much more slowly than tennis and is still trying to work out the finer points of how and when it is used, but they have at least shown openness to the idea. Of course there are people against it, usually purists who believe umpire mistakes are just part of the game, but the general consensus is that technology should be used to some extent. Most of the arguments are around how much technology will be available and for what purposes. Cricket has also not refined their system for challenging decisions and reducing review times as well as tennis have. But they are getting there. Once the technology is made available cheaply and the system has been refined, we will definitely see technology helping the umpires in international cricket on a continuous basis.

So why do football not go the way of these two sports? It seems outrageous to think that football has technology at its disposal that it is simply choosing not to use. Yes, people have created technology already which is accurate and unobtrusive for the very purpose of goal line decisions, but FIFA choose not to endorse it and include it in football. Slightly strange that the most popular sport in the world is so far behind the times and unwilling to accept change. They should be leading sport in these areas, rather than dragging behind. But I guess you can’t expect too much from a sport where people dive down in agony when no one has touched them and they get the ball back. Football can be so upside-down sometimes. Just fingers crossed that no such decisions will have to be made in the upcoming Champions League Final. We wouldn’t want such a day tarnished like that. But that’s the risk they run.

This week, GE Free NZ (along with a couple of other environmentally activist organisations) lodged a complaint against AgResearch, New Zealand’s biggest science research organisation. Normally in these situations, I side with the scientists and blame the incident on a lack of understanding about the science of genetics, the risks present and the measures taken to safeguard against these risks. However, on this occasion I have to admit the AgResearch has dropped the ball.

The substance of the complaint is that AgReseach has failed to carry out tests of a phenomenon called ‘Horizontal Gene Transfer’ (HGT) to a sufficient level in a herd of genetically modified cattle. HGT is the name for non-reproductive transfer of genetic material. This occurs relatively commonly in micro-organisms, and even more in viruses. There is documented evidence of this occurring in plants and fungi as well, but it is not something that happens between mammals and other complex animals. Still, it is possible that genetic material could be exchanged in this way from a GE cow to a bacterium, and then from the bacterium to another non-GE cow. Possibly a retrovirus or two would need to be involved in this process as well. This represents a potential risk to the environment/economy[1], and so AgResearch agreed to carry out tests for HGT as a condition to their research.

It is worth pointing out that in order for HGT to occur between two cows requires a hugely unlikely sequence of events under current understanding. It is also worth pointing out that even the release of genetically modified gene sequences into micro-organisms is a risk.

AgResearch did indeed carry out tests to try and detect HGT, but some of them had very poor methodology. Either someone along the line did not understand the problem, or someone did not consider the experiments important, but if I get the reports right, the experiments were flawed in two ways: First, the sample size was too small to effectively test for HGT (which is a rare event, so you have to look at lots of samples to expect to find it). Second, the samples were taken from the wrong place – rather than take samples from soil right next to dead animals, the samples were taken from soil some metres above the burial site.

My assessment of this situation is that there is no need to panic. It is very unlikely that HGT has in fact occurred, there’s pretty much no risk that you need to worry about. On the other hand, AgResearch made a promise to undertake tests to ensure reasonable precautions were in place when they started their research, and it is extremely negligent of them to have failed in that respect. Especially when you consider that they could have done successful tests simply by digging a bigger hole! Shame on you AgResearch! The public needs to be able to trust science, and every incident like this deservedly undermines the confidence we are able to have in it.

Next week, an exploration of some scientific terms, and how we should understand them!

[1] delete whichever is not your preferred measure of ethics.

Go whitewater rafting with your bestie?

Climb the Eiffel tower?

Or simply get your finances sorted?

Turning 21 is a big deal, and getting there is half the fun. To celebrate, why not check out ’21 things to do before you’re 21’ online at 21things.co.nz – there’s some great ideas and some great prizes up for grabs.

All you have to do is come up with your own list of 21 things you’d like to do before you turn 21, and share the top ones with your Facebook friends. The winner will be announced on 30 June 2011.

First prize is $500 for the winner to spend on the 21 things on her list, plus there are some great spot prizes from online fashion boutique The Thread Loop (http://www.thethreadloop.com). As well, everyone who enters will score a discount voucher for The Thread Loop – a perfect opportunity to pick up some great Kiwi fashion.

All the competition details are on http://www.21things.co.nz.

So come and visit the site, and tell us what you’d like to do before you turn 21!

To enter the competition you must be a female born between 1 January 1990 and 31 December 1996. Here are the nation’s current top ’21 things’, after about 500 people had voted:

Stay up all night and watch the sun rise…
Fall asleep under the stars…
Take a summer roadtrip with my besties…
Win something amazing…
Take amazing photos…
Go on an overseas holiday without your parents (and paid for by you)
Bungy jump…
Dance til dawn…
A ‘spa’ day with friends…
Swim with dolphins…
Have the date that I’ll remember forever…
Go camping with friends…
Get your driver’s licence….
Have a makeover (or help a friend with one)…
Be photographed with someone famous…
Change my hair colour…
Go to a music festival…
Get into that pair of jeans I never thought I’d fit…
Front row seats at the concert of my dreams…
Visit another continent…
Get my first car…

We’ll look forward to seeing what you have got planned between now and your 21st birthday!

http://www.21things.co.nz

It seems inevitable to me, that one day, Lionel Messi (Leo) will be depicted upon the back of a winged genius that is facilitating his apotheosis.

This may not seem clear, but bare with me. An apotheosis is the raising of a subject to divine level. A winged genius is the personification of a general divine nature that exists in everyone which is depicted in the famous sculpture of the apotheosis of Roman emperor Antoninus Pius. Understand now? Messi will one day become a God.

It would be unfair to assume from this that I have a strong belief in religion and God – because I do not. But how else can you describe someone with the talent that Messi has? And what higher accolade could you afford someone than implying he is some omnipotent and omnibenevolent being. In fact, you’re probably more likely to believe these powers of Messi than you are of God.

It is a pertinent time for such discussion, as Leo just became the first person to ever score 50 goals in a season in all competitions for a Spanish team. Those above him on the all-time season scoring lists are either from before WWII or played in lesser European Leagues. At only age 23, with much of his footballing life ahead of him (dismissing the thought of a horrific career ending injury), he seems well on his way to breaking the Barcelona all-time goal scoring record and a number of other all-time club scoring records.
On the back of his 50 goals, and counting, he is helping to create a legacy with Barcelona FC which may see them considered one of the best club teams ever. Plus they will win another League title this year and potentially another premier European Trophy.

There are some potential barriers to his apotheosis however. To go down as one of the true greats, many would argue that he must attain international success as well as his club successes. The names that resonate with most, even those not remotely interested with football, are Maradona and Pele. An Argentine and Brazilian who are both renowned for being successful club players, but also for their magnificent World Cup wins. Messi however, in his short career to date, has not managed to bring such success to his national team. He still has time to rectify this though, and knowing him, he will.

Another barrier could be Christiano Ronaldo – the other great player of our current generation and the talisman of Messi’s rival Real Madrid. The man who robbed Barcelona of another Copa del Rey victory last week with a magnificent extra-time goal. Although Messi probably has a slight edge on Ronaldo at present, he is another who could go down in history and overshadow the tiny Argentine.

What Messi will always have though, unlike Ronaldo, is solace in the fact that he is not a total douche-bag. The sometimes petulant, always worried about his hair, Christiano Ronaldo, will always take a dive under a soft tackle in order to set up a free-kick or penalty opportunity which represents the dark-side of football. Messi on the other hand, will not cheaply drop to the ground, maintaining his feet as often as possible so that he can score the goal that Ronaldo is obviously not as confident about scoring. A signifier of true greatness.

So will Messi one day fly on the back of a winged being to the divine heights on which he will spend his days basking in Apollo’s light and his own eternal glory? Will he be considered a God by future earthly mortals just as the Roman emperors were? In the future, will the earth only be considered as to have truly existed since after his messianic birth? Only time will tell.

For now, bask in his on-field magnificence, enjoy his deft touch, salute his electrifying speed and make sure you pinch yourself after he scores another goal. You just might think you’re dreaming.

This week, a little more on education and a realisation about growing up in today’s world.

One of the other things I noticed about Richard Feynman’s education throughout his college (that’s US for university) days was that he was always surrounded by other scientists. Physicists, mathematicians, chemists, oh my! In the universities he attended, there were always other people around who were enthusiastic about science, and colleagues who wanted to talk about science.

Maybe that sounds a little oxymoronic, but let me explain a little more. He was not just surrounded by this community in his classes. But he would go home to his fraternity at nights, and continue talking to scientists there. They would break for tea every day at 4pm at Princeton, and the physicists and the mathematicians would talk each other. They would bring up interesting new research in their fields and they would discuss it with everyone present. They would even compete with each other about things like who could compute cube roots the fastest!

These people would eat, breathe, and sleep science, and they made it interesting by turning it into a game that they all would play. Because of this, they became very successful.

Now, I remember in my undergraduate years I had a group of people who I would do very much the same thing with (albeit only while actually at university). Me and the gang would hang out between classes in the LABY common room, and we’d do assignments and make asses of ourselves by getting things wrong on the whiteboards in front of everybody. I know for a fact that I did probably more actual learning there in that room than in most of my time in lectures.

Well, everyone in that group passed all their courses, and got pretty good marks. I know that in some of these courses the pass rate was around 50%, so I think the fact that all of us passed the courses is a good indication of how valuable the group was to us all. I know this is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that the people in that group were there because they were interested in science, and therefore probably better at it. But I still think that it was a big part of helping us in our learning.

I hope that with the establishment of the science society, this kind of group will become a constant feature of the science schools at VUW. I also encourage any readers out there to join or start up such a group, I’m confident that your learning and enthusiasm will increase as a result.

My second little topic for today is just a small but worrying thought that occurred to me the other day. I was babysitting my younger brother of who has just started high school this year. He’s ten years younger than me. He was having a trouble of some sort with his homework, which is all administered through some kind of web portal (which had decided to display his homework in Hungarian for some reason). The students are required to have a little netbook computer so that they can do this stuff, and I think they also use them I classes. I’m not entirely sure how that works.

So my little brother has his own netbook computer. Someday, and probably pretty soon he’s bound to get a facebook account, and he’ll friend me of course. Now, this is a kind of scary thought in a way, because as soon as he does that, he’ll be able to see all of my posts and comments and such. And I don’t really censor myself in any way on facebook. It never really occurred to me that a young person may be hanging on my every word. To be honest I didn’t care much either, until I thought that the young person might be my own little brother!

In the end it was just a passing moment of panic – I’m actually okay with my younger brother reading all my opinions. But it did highlight something interesting for me, which is that a lot of the adult world will suddenly open up to children when they get a facebook account and start following people older than them. It’s going to be kind of a shock if they start taking it seriously all at once! I’m interested in other people’s experiences with younger siblings and facebook, or older siblings and facebook! What has it been like for you?

I love these—have found some new tips since my last post on them, and will blatantly steal from a list my Tumblr threw up..

1. Line the bottom of your refrigerator’s crisper drawer with paper towels. They’ll absorb the excess moisture that causes vegetables to rot.
2. To keep herbs tasting fresh for up to a month, store whole bunches, washed and sealed in plastic bags, in the freezer. When you need them, they’ll be easier to chop, and they’ll defrost the minute they hit a hot pan.
3. A bay leaf slipped into a container of pasta, or rice will help repel bugs. People say to do it for flour as well but I worry how stinky my flour will get.
4. Stop cheese from drying out by putting it in a muslin bag. One of the odder ways of stopping dryout is spreading margarine on the cut sides to seal in moisture. If you’re going to go to that much effort, though, why not just make sure you rewrap it in plastic properly.
5. When radishes, celery, or carrots have lost their crunch, simply pop them in a bowl of iced water along with a slice of raw potato and watch the limp vegetables freshen up right before your eyes.
6. Avoid separating bananas until you plan to eat them – they spoil less quickly in a bunch.
7. Put rice in your saltshaker to stop the salt from hardening. The rice absorbs condensation that can cause clumps.
8. Stock up on butter when it’s on sale – you can store it in the freezer for up to six months. Pack the butter in an airtight container, so it doesn’t take on the flavor of whatever else you’re freezing.
9. In order to make cottage cheese or sour cream last longer, place the container upside down in the fridge. Inverting the tub creates a vacuum that inhibits the growth of bacteria that causes food to spoil.
10. Microwave honey on medium heat, in 30-second increments, to make it clear again- it never goes off.
11. Prevent extra cooked pasta from hardening by stashing it in a sealed plastic bag and refrigerating. When you’re ready to serve, throw the pasta in boiling water for a few seconds to heat and restore moisture.
12. Instead of cutting a lemon in half for a few drops, stab it with a skewer or fork and circle where you stabbed it with vivid. It’ll keep in the fridge much longer. If you have enough ice cube trays, though, squeeze it all out, freeze in ice cube trays, and clearly label.
13. Work out cost per meal/serve and aim to make enough for that meal, then a small amount for a meal you won’t have time to cook for the next day- no more or less.
14. Get a nude food tube, or attractive tupperware-esque food storers, to motivate you into bringing snack food from home.
Good luck!

You know when you go to the supermarket and you find yourself searching aimlessly for your favourite brand of gingernuts? You cross between the aisles and gaze into the shelves, seemingly without real purpose. Then you march up to that fifteen-year-old kid stacking the biscuits, look him in the eye and say, “Arnotts. Where are they?’’ But he just stares back blankly and shrugs. You can still hear the music on his headphones, so you just turn around and head the other direction.

Traveling around the Netherlands can be a bit like this sometimes. It can be avoided by NOT…

1. Booking your tickets the night before.
2. Finding a place to stay the day of arrival.
3. Deciding that the public transport system is way too confusing to use.
4. Refusing to pay three Euros for a map.
5. Procrasti-pubbing.

Choosing to do any of the above will more than likely lead to…

1. Bed-less, sleepless nights.
2. Constant lostness.
3. Going to Rotterdam, splitting a beer with Randy Randall from ‘No Age’ mid song, discussing what to play next with him, then embracing him with a hug after the show.
4. Boogying with Belle & Sebastian on stage, meeting the band after. Walking out the front door with the official music festival bean-bags.
5. Running very fast.

Warning: The Red Light District in Amsterdam is not a tourist destination at two o’clock on a Friday morning. This will frighten you. You will not sleep for three days. I’m just kidding – but Jesus fucking Christ, when I heard these two British lads shout “Five Euros fo’ th’ botha us!” to the girl inside the window, I made quick haste for the other side of the canal before shit got weird.

I did laugh though when this 70ish-year-old, seedy-looking man came up to us and asked us if we wanted some marijuana. We were like, “Mate, there’s a coffee shop right there. You know it’s legal here right?” He smiled and then said “oh yeah, s’pose it is then” whilst pulling out an enormous joint from his pocket and lighting it as he turned away.

Meanwhile, I have decided where I want to retire. It’s a tiny village on the Thames, about an hour or two West of London. I have never seen a cuter place in my life. It hasn’t changed in about a hundred years. Nearly every person you meet on the street greets you with a warm smile and a quick witty comment about life in general. Most houses still use the old AGAs in their kitchen. There are no stray cats or gnarly pigeons. It’s a place where your name wouldn’t be Joe Smith. It would be ‘old Joe up-the-road” instead. You know, you’d go down to a good old Anglican chapel on Sunday, sing a few psalms, then trot back home for a nice cup of tea.

How perfect.

I’ve used this past week to jump firmly aboard the NZ Breakers bandwagon.

All season they’ve been the best in the competition. Now, in the post-season, they’re one home win away from a grand final. I’m writing this before their last best-of-three semi-final against Perth in Auckland. Even if they are eliminated, and even if this bandwagon comes off really disappointing, the bigger issue is still there.

I’m talking, of course, about the performance of New Zealander teams in their respective Trans-Tasman (ish) leagues; the NRL, NBL, and A-League.

For nearly two decades New Zealand fans have watched their professional teams in an Australian league, and for nearly two decades they have gone relatively unrewarded. The Warriors came closest, the Breakers and Phoenix have given themselves a small chance, but at the end of the day – no trophies.

The Warriors have been a mid-table side in the NRL. With the exception of their 2002 season (when they finished top of the table and were beaten in the final), they have gone about their work relatively unnoticed. Recently, they have been going through a rebuilding phase, during which they have been desperately underwhelming. While the under-20 Junior Warriors won last years’ grand final, the rugby league trophy drought (at least at a senior level) looks set to continue for a few seasons yet.

Football is even more depressing. The Kingz and Knights were a very well documented embarrassment, and before the Phoenix came along, New Zealand football fans were used to failure. In 2010, the Phoenix came within a win of the final, but still look four or five seasons (and a win away from home) away from genuinely challenging for the trophy.

And in the Breakers’ eight year existence they are yet to win the title, but this year are hot favourites, would have home advantage in the final, after winning the minor premiership by a country mile. They’ve beaten anyone they’ve come up against this year, losing only a few games all season and looking genuinely competent right from game one.

It is the expectation of New Zealand sports fans that the Breakers will finally break our duck in Australia.
But why has it taken so long? Sure, some of the Australian clubs are better established, but does that really take fifteen years to rectify? The travel’s not ideal, either, but in a professional environment must be dealt with. Not to mention that other teams from Perth or north Queensland have the same problem. In truth it’s almost inexplicable that New Zealand sides have not been able to break away and win in an Australian environment.

The Breakers are the first side to seem unaffected by this. They’ve looked professional, and they’ve looked relatively untroubled away from home. They’ve even won a few across the ditch. In many ways they’re probably better organised and better equipped off the court to win the league.

However, all seasons come with their speed bumps. I can only hope – from a Breakers’ perspective – that their minor late-season slump was their speed bump, and there’s no ‘C-word’ reminiscent of South African cricket sides, New Zealanders at Rugby World Cups, or English football in store for us.

Given the rivalry between New Zealand and Australia, I understand that everybody here is willing the Breakers to win the competition. Everybody is now aboard the Breakers bandwagon. Whatever happens over the next fortnight, this season for the Breakers has been one of the most important in New Zealand professional sport. It may be underplayed in the media but a win in the Australian NBL would be not just a huge breakthrough for the Breakers, but also for New Zealand sport.

So all the best to them. New Zealand will be watching.

There are a number of great rivalries in sport: the Yankees and Red Sox; the English and Australian cricket teams; the All Blacks and Springboks. These rivalries are what make sport more than an entertaining game. They are placed on a divine pedestal as they are the finest and most exciting examples of sporting prowess. This is because it is not only two teams against each other. It is colony defying empire, city fighting city, a national culture struggling with an oppressive State. There is no bigger rivalry than that between the Spanish football teams of Barcelona and Real Madrid. No rivalry is more passionate or more understandable, and no rivalry is more pertinent right now than this one.

The rivalry between Barcelona and Real Madrid is a multi-faceted one. They are the two best teams in the national league, but more than that, it reflects the cultural and political differences between two peoples: the Catalans (Barcelona) and Castilians (Madrid). The Catalans were oppressed by the military dictators of Spain who banned the expression of the regional cultures and languages (until about 1975). Because of this, Catalans rallied behind FC Barcelona as it was the only place they could safely express their nationalism and culture which was in opposition to the fascist regime of the Spanish government. Real Madrid however, embodied this regime as they were the dictator, General Franco’s club.

Every year the El Clasico is played between the two clubs and it is still a fierce competition between two vastly different cultures. Within the next 6 weeks the clubs could face each other up to 4 times in La Liga, the Copa Del Rey final (King’s Cup) and possibly the semi-finals of Europe’s most prestigious competition the Champions League. If the game earlier in this season is anything to go by then Barcelona will be hot favourites going into this game. They defeated Madrid 5-0 in one of the most embarrassing displays of football many would have been witness to. Madrid was outclassed in all facets of the game, Barcelona seemingly running rampant over their exuberantly-priced stars. Madrid then, humiliated, acted out in disgusting fashion with Christiano Ronaldo shoving the Barcelona coach on the sideline and Sergio Ramos being sent off for pushing Carles Puyol in the face. Although their pay-cheques suggest otherwise, Madrid were left throwing a tantrum like petulant children.

So what can we expect from the upcoming games between these teams? Obviously there will be no love lost and I feel some blood will be exchanged. Madrid are the obvious underdogs but no one could predict that they will perform as atrociously as they did against Barcelona last time round. Or is Barcelona just too good for their great foes? They boast the world’s best player, and you would struggle to find anyone who would suggest that it is possible – even if there were other life forms somewhere deep in space – someone could even come close to matching Lionel Messi’s mind-fuck footwork, pace and finishing ability. But ‘the special one’ will not roll over and die that easily as he chases another Champions League, League, Domestic Cup treble.

Jose Mourinho’s tactical nous will be pushed to the limits in the upcoming weeks if he is going to achieve this uphill battle. If anyone knows how to beat the juggernaut that is Barcelona it is him. How enjoyable it would be however, to see ‘the special one’ humbled once more to mere mortal significance, just as he was on the weekend when his unbeaten home record which spanned four clubs and nine years was destroyed by the La Liga minnows Sporting Gijon. Barcelona however, are flying high as they have extended their League lead to an almost unassailable 8 points.

Real Madrid will have to break down the stonewall defence of Puyol, be as classy and sharp as Xavi, and shutdown the deadly finisher that is Villa and the majesty that is Messi. To beat Barcelona who are so far ahead of them and is possibly the greatest ever club team to grace this planet would be like the Chicago Cubs winning a World Series… it’s not gonna happen.

Before I left New Zealand to embark on my new life in La Rochelle, a former exchange student gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received since I first decided to live in France for a while.

“Psssh, don’t worry about your schoolwork. Exchange is for parties and travelling around Europe, not for schoolwork.”

And although I have, at times, taken that advice quite literally – choosing to miss a final exam if it falls within the same week I plan to be in Spain – it is impossible to avoid acquiring at least some sort of education, whether it occurs in, or outside of, the classroom.

Enrolment: Enrolling at the university, like many other aspects of French bureaucracy, is, in no uncertain terms, chiant. I arrived in France on the 4th January, having been informed that university would start on the 5th January. But unlike in New Zealand, when all faculties and courses start the semester on the same day, La Rochelle prefers to stagger their starting dates over the first few months of the year. The 5th was simply the date for languages and management; my courses in history and law didn’t start until the following fortnight; our French for foreigners course kicked off late January; another friend studying literature wasn’t beginning until March because her professor was away, and one science student has no classes until May, after the rest of us will have finished our exams.

This penchant for the arbitrary, we soon found, permeates every aspect of the university. We couldn’t even enrol for the first two months, because the enrolments supervisor had decided to go on holiday, just in time for the beginning of the semester. This same woman is also charged with the important task of emailing students their timetables each week, because the time, day and location of classes changes AT RANDOM every single week.

Degrees: Of course, this complete bordel makes a little more sense when you understand that the French university system works quite differently to New Zealand’s. The first thing you realise is just how much freedom of choice we have in New Zealand. The Bachelor of Arts does not exist in France – you must choose to study languages, or social sciences, or literature. Double degrees are very uncommon here – telling someone I study politics, law and French is always met with a lost look. Timetables are largely pre-determined – students generally take the same courses with the same group of students throughout their degree, with the exception of some optional courses. Students spend way longer at university – students can expect to have 20-28 hours of classes per week.

So, with all that in mind, changing the timetables at random seems less of a hassle when all of the students are in the same classes, have the same free periods and, with the number of courses they have per week, chances are they will be at the university for most of the day anyway.

Going to class: If France is a nation of style, power-points are SO last season. They are simply not used by lecturers. Although this means students actually have to go to class, it also means that every two-hour lecture is spent frantically taking notes. One of my greatest regrets about not yet being fluent in French is that it is impossible to be able to instantly ascertain what information is and isn’t necessary, which results in my brain going into panic-mode and writing down every detail I can understand, realising later that “I was reading in the paper the other day…” will probably not be covered in the exam.

This is not helped by the fact that one of my lecturers speaks largely “in brackets” – an hour of lecturing will be made up of an introduction; one or two sentences of useful information; thirty-five minutes of rambling, stream-of-consciousness speech; finished with the actual point he’s trying to make, delivered in five succinct sentences. Obviously quite easily distracted, he once left the room for five minutes to retrieve his cellphone because it had a picture of Socrates on it, who we were discussing at the time. After passing the phone around the entire lecture theatre he launched into yet another tangent on why Socrates is always depicted with a beard. (Symbol of wisdom, in case you were wondering).

The second major difference at university in France is an issue of punctuality. Most classes start ten minutes after they’re meant to, or whenever the professor decides it’s time to show up. Sometimes they just don’t. However, pay careful attention: this leisurely approach to the timetable is not a freedom that is also extended to students. I learnt this the hard way when, arriving five minutes late to class one morning I tried to slip in quietly at the back of the lecture theatre, as I would do in New Zealand. Not bothering to focus on what the lecturer was saying until I could sit down and take notes, I didn’t realise he’d departed from his current topic until I heard students laughing. And, sure enough, turning slowly to look to the front of the class, I see my lecturer sarcastically waving me in, “Yeah, yeah, go on, go on. Did you have to kiss goodbye to your mum and dad?” Putain de merde! After smiling awkwardly and quickly taking my seat, I vowed never to go to class again if I was even a minute late – I now wait until the half-time break instead.
Organic education: As part of my application for this exchange programme, I was asked what I would do if I wasn’t doing well in my courses on exchange. My answer then remains the same now; I wouldn’t be too worried because the most important things I can take from the exchange are the language and culture, which I’m surrounded by every day. Outside of the simple fact that I can now understand and speak a lot more French than I could before, my knowledge of gros mots and other slang has also impressively increased. In terms of French culture, aside from stereotypically drinking coffee and wine, buying croissants from the daily markets, and inhaling a ton of second-hand smoke, even getting your head around how university works here gives you a great insight into the French way of life.

On top of being immersed daily in all things French, being on exchange has also given me a much more international education as well. As an exchange student you inevitably spend a lot of time with other exchange students; as a result I can now say ‘Get out of my house now, slut’ in Portugese; speak like a porn star in Spanish, and I know that the Chinese use a small piece of sticky-tape to rip the top layer off a piece of paper instead of using twink. In return, I recently sung ‘Ahakama’, the Maori vowel song, at a open mic night in a tiny town in the French wine and castle region of Dordogne; have carefully explained that ‘Morepork’ is a type of bird named after the sound it makes, and therefore its name cannot be translated as un peu plus de porc (a little more pork), and have told a shocked and disgusted Belgian that yes, our national dish probably is fish and chips.

So although I may be failing some of my classes because going to Italy’s that much more exciting than sitting a test, I can certainly leave France knowing that I’ve learnt a lot more than my Academic Transcript will ever represent.

For more gros mots and other exciting tales of life in France, follow my blog www.frenchletter.tumblr.com

Glossary of Gros Mots: (swear words)

Bordel: A mess/shambles, brothel. One of the first words I learnt in France, it was used in reference to the university.
Chiant: Annoying, literally ‘shitting’. Also see: Tu me fait chier: You’re pissing me off, literally ‘you make me shit’, which is probably one of the most graphically satisfying insults ever.
Putain de merde: Fuck, literally ‘prostitute of shit’.

I’d like to take a slight aside today, and talk about education and growing up as a scientist, and about the differences between the present and the past. And I guess gripe about education in general!

I’ve been reading about the life of Richard Feynman, who is one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century. There are a lot of quite interesting things about the way he lived his life, and how he grew up and went through the education system, and I’d like to pick out a few of them. I think that learning about how an extremely successful person grew up can be of use to everybody, and particularly that it can help guide our approaches to the education of our children.

Feynman started playing around with electronic circuits when he was around eleven or twelve. He had a little ‘laboratory’ in his bedroom with a bunch of little lamps and a little heater. He later started to play around with radios, and learned to be pretty good at fixing them. Electronics has always been a little bit of a weak spot for me. I managed to avoid doing any classes in it at university, and didn’t even do any in high school either. So I found it fascinating that at the age of twelve he was learning and actually experimenting with electronic circuits! When I was twelve, the closest thing I was learning was wood shop.

At first I thought that twelve was a very young age to be playing with electronics, but when I thought about it I realised – well why not? It’s not as if children become smarter as they grow up, and the earlier you start working with something the more experienced you’ll get at it. So I started thinking more seriously about the idea of introducing school children to electronics much earlier in their education (let’s say in third form science) and I became really fond of the idea.

I think maybe that electronics was seen in education as mostly a trade skill, that it’s something that an electrician should learn, but that for most people it wouldn’t help them in life. And so with electrician training not being part of the general school system, it just stopped being taught. But I think that there is another group of students who would benefit greatly from learning electronics, and that group is science students! And I don’t think this because I think that most of them will be using electronics in later life, or even that the lessons learned are more valuable than those in other fields. I think that electronics is an important thing for science students to learn because it is such a playground.

Students learn best by far when they are interested in the material they’re studying, and one of the best ways to engage students is by getting them to do things in real life. Electronic circuits are easy to set up, have great measurable results (I made the bulb light up!) and have endless combinations of things you can do with them. And so, like Lego, it becomes very easy to play with electronics. Often in general, experiments have to be very carefully set up, and are a little limited in scope. But in electronics, you can give a student a breadboard and a boxful of components and they can easily take control, change things about and see the effects for themselves.

The syllabus for physics education in New Zealand is very heavy on theory. This is partly because of how crowded things have become under NCEA, and it means that there is less time for student led learning. You have to learn all of the things that will be in the test or you don’t pass, and there are tests all the time. So play turns to chore, delight turns to fatigue and experience and enthusiasm with experiments is lost.

Somewhere along the way, it seems that we have forgotten that the whole reason we have theory is to explain and predict experiments – not the other way around! In schools you perform the experiments only to verify the theory.

In actual fact, I would be an advocate for a complete overhaul of the science education system, from high school all the way through undergraduate degrees, but in the absence of large-scale changes I think that it would be very constructive for year 9 (third form) students to start learning – and even more importantly playing – with electronic circuits. It’s those two years before assessments begin that you still have time to play like this, and just maybe in doing this we could show students why they ought to give a damn about the theory we will proceed to cram into them for the next six years.

Apologies if the thoughts in today’s column are a little scattered. I feel pretty strongly about education, and I really ought to sit down some time when I have a lot of free time and put all of my thoughts together sensibly. But that may be a long time from now, and in the mean time I thought I would share a little.

Call it ambitious, call it optimistic, call it plain patriotic blindness, but it wasn’t all that bad.

Considering prior expectations, in fact, it was quite good – nobody expected us to go this far, even on the lucky side of the draw, and that quarter-final against South Africa was one of our best performances in recent years. Bundled out in the semi-final (again), the Blackcaps exceeded expectations, and equalled their best performance at the tournament.
But is it reasonable to look back on this happily?

Look at our progression through to the penultimate match. We thrashed Canada, Zimbabwe and Kenya (bravo), were soundly beaten by Australia and Sri Lanka (twice), and stood up against a decent opposition on two occasions – in the group match against Pakistan and the quarter-final epic against the Proteas. On that logic, it’s hard to give much more than a pass mark.

Mind you, it was very satisfying to finally see New Zealand show a bit of hunger in that quarter-final. For too long they have seemed slightly disinterested, their minds on the paychecks of IPL and Twenty20 cricket. Even if at one point the aggression boiled a tad too far, it was still heart warming to see – at last – that we do have a cricket team that want to play for our country. But it was too little, too late.

A quarter-final exit was the largely expected result for New Zealand. Semi-finals were a long, long way away for the team that entered the tournament. It was a typical ‘one game at a time’ effort. So most New Zealanders will look back on the final result and say, well, we exceeded expectations. Having said that, no losing semi-finalist will ever be happy.
In my mind, the Blackcaps can take a lot from this World Cup. Looking towards their next effort, there are a few young blokes in the team who can learn a lot – Williamson, Southee, especially – and the promise of some new leaders in four years’ time. John Wright’s style is logical, and – when correctly applied – effective. Some tactics, like Brendon McCullum opening the batting is, in my mind, a failure.

But what has previously plagued New Zealand Cricket is the failure to learn from such exploits, and I for one sincerely hope this is a habit the governing body wants to put a halt to. Look at the last four years; the national team underwent overwhelming changes at far too regular intervals. Coaches swapped, the captain’s job became more and more complex, and the selectors table was a merry-go-round. The focus of the national body seemed to be on a short-term, rather than long term goal.

New Zealand sports fans are now craving more World Cup success in our major sports. I think few rugby fans in the country, for example, would turn their noses at a World Cup win, if even at the cost of the Tri-Nations for three years. Cricket ought to take a leaf out of rugby’s book, and maintain a World Cup focus. The Blackcaps have constantly proven to be a force at World Cups, but are just lacking at that last (well, technically, second to last) hurdle. A touch of long-term preparation might well see them push just over that line.
There was a time not too long ago where the Blackcaps might have considered themselves one of the best limited overs cricket teams in the world. Somehow that faded before this World Cup, a mixture of poor preparation and declining talent. No doubt there’s some skill in the country’s cricketers. If only twice, we did show glimpses of that capability. I don’t think the idea of a World Cup in four years’ time is too impossible, especially one held in here and in Australia. It will take some serious focus from the national body, but it’s doable.

And, if I’m wrong, well, we always have the All Blacks.

Spain isn’t really known for its wine. My first experience with Spanish wine was a 98-cent bottle of what was described as simply ‘red wine’ and, while I’m not really fussy when it comes to alcoholic beverages, I was well aware of the quality (or lack thereof) of what I was drinking at the time.

In Spain they have a convenient way of getting around the issue of not-so-enjoyable, cheap wine by way of a drink called calimocho, which mixes red wine with coke. Wine connoisseurs, scoff away – but if you have a 98-cent bottle of wine you can’t really go much further downhill. It’s a bit like sangria. But cheap. And not quite as yummy but on a yumminess-to-price ratio basis, calimocho wins hands down. Popular amongst young people (of course), you’ll often catch people drinking it at an event that Spanish call botellón and that in English we call “drinking in public places”.

The reason I’m explaining all this? Well it all began one Thursday morning in Politics class. I’m sure that classes here aren’t supposed to be brutal. This morning, however, the lecturer began the class by asking if we’d done the readings she’d posted online. I was positive she hadn’t been referring to the 150-page article she’d posted two days before, but my certainty began to dwindle when everyone else began taking out stack after stack of what looked suspiciously like a horrible reading I’d neglected to do. One especially opinionated student, who I think the other exchange students have aptly named “militant girl”, had her copy bound and ready to go when we were told that we were each giving five minute presentations on different sections of the text. Then. That day. In class. Needless to say I was THAT foreign student who stands up in front of everyone and tries so hard to explain something that they obviously don’t understand. I got through about two minutes of ‘um’s and awkward pauses before explaining that I really didn’t know what I was talking about and returning to my seat.

In a spontaneous decision fuelled by confusion and the overwhelming feeling of foreignness, a group of us decided the only logical response would be a weekend drinking wine. Good wine. And so we rented a car – I wish I could say without any issues but trying to rent a car in Spain from a German company wasn’t exactly the easiest of tasks from the get-go – and headed up to La Rioja, one of Spain’s contributions to the wine industry.

For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be an appreciator of wine. Suddenly, the drink that for the past two years of my degree has come packaged in a goon was transformed from a drink into a beverage. I learnt about how wine is made and different wine-related terminology (admittedly, it was all in Spanish but I’m good for the time being) and even had a tour of the life of the corkscrew: from an impossible-to-use mechanism that vaguely resembles a torture device from the crusades, to the novelty-penis corkscrews of today.

We finally made it to this little town on a hill called Laguardia – imagine a tiny version of Minas Tirith, churched up a bit and in the middle of the desert, and you have a pretty good idea of what the town looks like. Famous for being built on top of a hill that’s been hollowed out in order to fit in dozens of wineries, it was perhaps the strangest place to go wine-tasting.

Of course, after learning how to properly enjoy wine and drinking some of the best that Spain has to offer, I remembered that I’m still a poor student and ended the tour by stopping by the local corner store to pick up one of the 98-cent bottles that I’ve come to love. ¡Viva Calimocho!

In our lifetimes we all move on from jobs or careers as we search for more financial security, our dreams evolve, or even as we are made redundant or obsolescent. It is something that will occur on average 7-10 times in our lives. But something we aren’t usually faced with is inevitable retirement from something we love, until of course we reach 65, but honestly most of us will be in underpaid jobs that we hate anyway. However, this is something that nearly every sportsperson will have to deal with in his or her career. For some it is a simple decision, for others it proves mightily difficult. Some make the decision at the height of their greatness, others fade into obscurity. When then is the best time to retire? And who made the right or wrong calls? Because this is something that can define your career as much as all the great feats you achieved during it.

A man who is about to retire in maybe the form of his life, but at least at the top of his game, is 40 year old Manchester United goalkeeper, Edwin van der Sar. At the end of this season he will end a career spanning over 20 years in top-flight club football. Most would think footballers were past it by this age, and most are, but van der Sar will be sorely missed by his Manchester club. He was the star of the show a couple of weekends ago in the FA Cup quarter-finals against Arsenal, when he nearly single-handedly kept his team in the game with a number of cool and classy saves. Some would describe them as miraculous, but that would imply some greater force at work, which would not pay due respect to this Dutch Giant.

It is clear that van der Sar will leave the game with the respect of his team and supporters. He is under no pressure to retire by either of these two parties and would be good enough to carry on but he has decided that it is time to respectively bow out of the game. But should he retire when he is such a good player? The fans obviously don’t think so as they chanted “one more year” to him at their last League match. Stephen Fleming was a New Zealand cricketer who retired under similar circumstances to Edwin van der Sar when he was arguably still New Zealand’s best batsman. This was a huge disappointment for New Zealand cricket and for many months afterwards people were calling for him to return to the Black Caps outfit. Of course no one can resent the decisions that such great players make, especially when they have given so much to the sport. But do players have a responsibility, or do they at least owe it to themselves to carry on for as long as they are successful?

Sometimes I feel as if they should, but there is another side to this precariously perched coin. Some sportspeople carry on until they have disgraced or embarrassed themselves within their particular field. A good example of this is the infamous rugby league player and now boxer – John Hopoate. He led a successful but controversial career. He was once known for putting his finger up mean’s arses during games; he played international and State of Origin League; and finally finished his career after being banned for 17 weeks after a shoulder charge on an opposition player that meant he got dropped by his club and so he retired. A former great, disgraced by the fact that he didn’t really end things on his own terms and becoming the most banned player in the modern era.

There is definitely a fine line between retiring when you are still respected but at the top of your game and taking it too far that you end up the enemy rather than a hero. Of course it is important that sportspeople retire before they are absolutely past it, but we are always going to want to see quality players for as long as possible. This dilemma is something I am sure that NZ boxer David Tua is either pondering or will have to very soon. He is 38, clearly past his prime and there is very little chance that he will ever get a world title fight again. But unfortunately for him, even if he did want to retire, his financial situation is one that means this is impossible, for now anyway. At least these sportspeople have a taste of some of the same worries as us who are not so athletically gifted. But still, 38 years old is hardly 65.

Aside – before I start I’d just like to celebrate a research success from New Zealand regarding climate change. One way to reduce carbon entering the atmosphere is to catch it as it leaves smokestacks from coal power plants. It turns out that many common minerals are actually very good at capturing carbon, but they can only be used this way once. Researchers at IRL have found a way to regenerate one of these materials so that it can be used for many cycles. Well done New Zealand scientists!

In the past week I have seen a lot of scaremongering in the media (to be fair, mostly in stuff. And the amount of respect I have for stuff’s journalistic integrity is only marginally higher than my respect for fox news). Not only tales of impending doom from the troubled nuclear reactor in Japan, but also of predicted quakes in Christchurch by Moon Man Ken Ring. I had not lent much credence to his predictions, and so I was quite surprised to learn just how many people fled Christchurch on the 20th. An aunt of mine visiting from the Canterbury region told me that there was not a single airplane seat out of Christchurch unbooked on that day, right down to light aircraft.

I guess it is understandable. People in Christchurch have been really suffering through the recent earthquakes; they’re more than a little weary with the whole situation. I can definitely understand why someone would want to not want to take any further risks and just get out, not have to deal with it anymore. But I think that that only makes the actions of Ring more indefensible. He is feeding on the suffering of Cantabrians.

But Ring is not the only one to blame in this situation, because the media have been playing him up and portraying his predictions as science. Less people would have heard of these predictions and far fewer would have believed him if not for the way the media treated his stories. I honestly don’t know if this is because the journalists who published these stories were largely ignorant of science, or if they did know he was a quack and simply wanted to ‘publish the controversy.’ But either way, as a result of their actions thousands of people have been terrified and stressed.

I’d just like to clarify what I believe here – I don’t at all believe that it was wrong of the media to publish Ring’s beliefs. I am not advocating censorship of our press. But the way they treated his story was wrong, in that vastly more airtime and page space was devoted to his view than was devoted to the findings of science. It’s the same situation as climate scepticism, as I wrote earlier. When one’s only contact with science is through news networks – as is the case with almost everybody – one relies on the accuracy of the network, and I think they have a responsibility to provide that. Giving more press time to experts, or even better, allowing both sides to be interviewed together would be ways to address this.

As is the case with Ring, so is currently the case regarding the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Much of the newspaper columns of this week have been devoted to shocking stories about radiation levels and cooling system failures in the plant. Although there may indeed be dangers for those within the 20-30km (depending on who you listen to) evacuation zone, it seems fairly clear that those in Tokyo, and elsewhere in Japan, are safe.

In the nuclear power plant case, although the same media-science problem does exist, there are many additional factors leading to public misunderstanding. After all, who really knows how nuclear reactors work? I’m a physicist and I don’t even really know! Without the work of experts to rely on, I would definitely be worried. I think nuclear power has an extremely bad reputation, which these days is largely undeserved.

People think of nuclear power, and particularly of the word meltdown, and they immediately think of either Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Perhaps even of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe they are also concerned about Iran or North Korea (and I apologise for listing those two countries as if they were similar). In reality, modern nuclear energy generation is considerably safer than fossil fuel energy. This is in some ways analogous to the way in which air travel is in fact far safer than travel by car – regulations have made air travel very safe, but people still fear stepping in a plane much more than they do stepping in a car, or crossing a street.

All of the talk about the danger from Fukushima Daiichi I fear may be overlooking the fact that perhaps 30 human lives are actually in danger, even in the worst case scenario. Those are the 30 that are working there to bring the reactor under control. Evacuations have been made in the immediate vicinity, radiation levels are being monitored. Safety protocols and nuclear technology have come a long way from the mid eighties, and multiple redundant systems have been put in place. The worst thing that can happen in a nuclear meltdown these days is not that hundreds or thousands of people’s lives are put in danger from radiation, merely that there will be a large clean up bill. And even the clean up is well understood too. Nuclear waste can be, and is being dealt with safely.

In fact, the overall impact of nuclear energy on the environment is overwhelmingly positive, because of the amount of carbon emissions it does not produce compared to fossil fuels. In all of the developed nations of the world, there is a strong correlation between GDP and carbon emission. They follow a pretty rigid straight line. All except France, which has lower carbon emissions per unit GDP than the others. The reason for this is the use of nuclear power plants in France.

XKCD published yesterday a graphical chart showing the meanings of various levels of radiation which I strongly suggest you have a look at: http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Nuclear energy is, if you look at the facts, actually a very safe and clean method of energy generation. I would be disappointed if countries were to fall back upon fossil fuels as a result of the scare in Japan.

Sorry all, I have not been in the mood to dispense advice lately. One of the strange things about this world is often we aren’t as good as the advice we give.

Strength is not an easy thing to find. The world will only kick you when you’re down, but people will only kick you when you’re strong. Pity those people, and don’t feel guilty for feeling weak when you’re at your weakest.

Sad people do not ask to be sad. Depressed people do not need someone to tell them they need to cheer up. You keep telling people this, so stop fishing for it. Sometimes, we all need another human being to look you in the eyes and tell you they feel bad for your situation- that your feelings are legitimate. But why, out of all of the ups and downs in your life, should you focus on the bad of every situation anyway? Why do we have such a vehement reaction to the words “cheer up,” when we spend our time trying to pull sympathy out of our friends?

Our landlords are reneging on the previous agreement and kicking us out to sell the house. I am broke. I had to smash a window to get into the house last night, rendering myself more broke. But damn, it was great to smash one of my landlord’s windows. If anyone asks how I am, I will begin with the great feeling given by throwing a brick through a window co-owned by myself and a landlord who I would like to hurt. Never smashed a window before. Glad to tick it off the ol’ bucket list.

What is strength, really? When a person is ’strong,’ what do they have that lesser humans have? They have the ability to keep on living.

Strength is turning up at the same lecture as the girl who just rejected you and feeling miserable the entire hour. But damn, will it feel good to make that girl think asking her out meant nothing to you, that you are the type of person who is open and caring enough to want to get to know her, while she couldn’t see beyond her immediate reaction to want to connect with another human being. (She probably rejected real human contact for facebook. And you feel bad for yourself?) Strength, to others, is seeing you go on although you feel unable to. Strength, to you, is the payoff, the elation you feel when you realise you made it through some tough times and stuck to your guns. Strength is feeling like a confused, quivering mess when people pat you on the back for your strength. The easiest thing to do when you want to give up, is to keep on going- you’re doing it already.

Actively try to find things that will take your mind off the situation. If all else fails, avoid repetitive actions such as checking email or playing simple computer games like solitaire/minesweeper, and don’t walk the streets waiting for a miracle chance meeting to change your life. Find odd things to google on the internet—toilet paper roll art is a good start. And be strong. You don’t have to feel strong, but be strong.

“Where did I hide my daughter this year?”

This is a bit of an encyclopedia of common terms for child care and education, mostly up to 5 years. It’s amazing how confused even parents get.

“My child is at…”

Creche: Where you pay to put your children while you go to work. It will usually not have more than 16 children under 2 years old, by law, and there has to be a minimum of one carer to every 3 children. They will usually have children over the age of 2 as well, in a semi separate part, where there has to be a minimum of 4 children to every carer. Many or most carers will have a university degree in childcare.

Home with the nanny: Nannies will usually come to your home and look after your child, as well as maintain the house- that is, if they make a mess, they will generally clean it up. They will use your food to feed the child and sometimes cook dinner or similar for the family- it depends on the nanny.

An in-home educator’s house: In-home educators have to sit a training course, which is usually about eight weeks part time. You will have dropped the child off at their house, usually provided the food your child will eat, and they will have a maximum of four children- no more than 3 under 2 years old.

A babysitter’s: generally they will come to you, not have a qualification, and may not have regular hours. Usually a babysitter is an informal care arrangement, where the others require registration with the Government. If a ‘babysitter’ is earning over a set amount per week, or has more than a few children regularly who aren’t their own, then they may be reported and have the Government knocking on their door- they are running an illegal creche!

Kindergarten: most kindergartens begin taking children at 2 years old (or when they are mature enough, and steady on their legs- depends on policy). Often they are free or substantially cheaper than other forms of care. They will often separate out into mornings for 2-3 year olds, and afternoons for 3-5 year olds. Kindergarten is optional but highly recommended, and was initially designed to prepare children for primary school. There’s no curriculum as such but a set of formal requirements- eg, they are still Early Childhood Education providers and as such have to include some Maori culture and language, and try to scaffold (assist) learning in ways relevant to each child’s development. Parents are often required to attend with their child at least once a week, and the child may go 2-5 times a week, it depends from place to place.

Preschool: This may be a kindergarten, Montessori, or Rudolf Steiner, (the last two have different learning philosophies and methods) based centre. Parents generally pay for these services, the term itself doesn’t refer to any specific type of learning or centre in New Zealand, but does usually refer to some form of education for children 2-5 years old.

Nursery: Usually in terms of childcare this refers to a place for children legally under the age of 2 but usually under the age of 18 months (usually who don’t speak or walk yet). So, your child may be at the nursery, which is within creche, for example.

SPACE or Playcentre: This is a childcare centre focussed on giving parents the skills to help their child learn from birth. Parents stay with their child, and are taught how to maximise every learning opportunity they have, which supposedly will aid development. It is great for babies under 10 months, in my opinion, because often parents are at a loss as to how to interact with a young baby. You generally pay for this service and it is generally once a week.

Mother’s group: This is a group of stay at home parents who get together, either at a cafe or home, drink coffee, eat biscuits, and let their children run amok I mean play with each other. These are often set up by Plunket or an antenatal class about a month after the child is born, and is great for the parents, as well as important first socialisation for the children. (Yes, I know the term is sexist, but that’s what it’s called and after a year of helping run them- I haven’t seen a man yet. Sorry people.)

Playgroup: Mother’s group usually becomes playgroup once the children reach an age where houses or cafes are destroyed by a bunch of mobile children. Some are set up by organisations but they rarely cost and are just friends meeting. It is more often at a playground, Te Papa, or similar. Again, hugely important for a parent’s sanity- generally a stay at home parent, or parent of a young child, will have a load of “is this normal?” questions, and be quite lonely, hanging out with a child who can’t have adult conversations!

Music and Movement/Rock ‘n’ Rhyme, or similar: Children love, well, music, and movement, from an early age (read: pre-birth!). These are usually organised by church groups or the local library and are a lot of fun for the kids but often quite awkward for the parents, who get to sing loudly and do things they’ve only previously done that one time at El Horno at 2am after a bottle of tequila (this is not a paedophile joke! Dancing and singing, get your mind out of the gutter!).

My personal opinion? Most of us will have fond memories of kindergarten, and it’s often free- out of everything listed, I will firmly recommend that every family try to get their children to one! Creche is great for very social children, in fact, I know some parents who have put their children into one solely to give them more socialisation- but you need to pick one that really suits your child and you, as they will usually have much less adult interaction, and your child needs to be very confident within themselves. In home educators are great for shy children, and are very competitively priced- your child will often get more one-on-one time, but choose a carer who your child likes well, and watch them in action. I have been an in home educator and can vouch that some creches I have looked at on their best day, are worse care than I was on my worst. I have enrolled my daughter at creche, however, and few parents could provide their child with such a wealth of fun experiences in one day than this creche on any given day. Take from that what you will- pre investigation, I had very definite ideas on what is best for children, but now I have some experience, it is clear that each family will have a different perfect situation. <3

In search of wisdom I just put on shuffle a playlist consisting of Chulahoma and Thickfreakness. I have named it ‘Chickfreakness’, because I have a little too much time to kill today. It is now playing so loud I can’t hear myself think. This is good. But not helping.

What’s happened in ten weeks then?… Fuck me, ten weeks! Where’d that go, huh? A quick glance out the window tells me it’s still snowing in Copenhagen. Not ideal.

I think I’ll tell you a story now. A few weekends ago I was in Aarhus for a live concert of The National. Yes they were amazing, BRAG BRAG. But our host for the night, named Jan, decided to throw his phone into the city’s canal after drinking too much of a danish liquor called Fisk (yummy). This left us in a very sticky situation for the night, because he then ran off down the road chasing some poor guy who only wanted a taste of his Fisk. Funnily enough, this didn’t leave us with many sleeping options for the night. The moral of the story being to never trust a guy with a girl’s name.

I made an acrostic ode to Fisk for you.

Fisk is Danish for fish, but it doesn’t taste like fish at all.
Ice cool refreshing, like licorice mouth wash.
So very Danish.
Keeps you awake while talking to Belgians.

Now, I think we all know it’s time for a list of the things I like about the Danish winter.

1. The basement turns into a beer fridge. This is nice, because it leaves more room in the fridge for bacon. Bacon is really cheap here. Weird I know, it’s like opposite land.

2. You don’t feel bad about hibernating in your duvet with Seinfeld repeats for days at a time.

3. The awesome padded onesies that pre-schoolers have to wear. Yesterday I saw a kid do an almost complete cartwheel after crashing his bike into the curb of the road at quite some speed. He stood up and just started laughing hysterically along with his friends. Not even a scratch. They also tend to travel in packs, like penguins.

4. It is better than the Swedish winter.

5. At a tiny cinema in town, they have monthly midnight screenings of ‘The Room’, directed by Tommy Wisseau. They hand us plastic spoons and pillows to throw at the screen and they sell great film merchandise at the counter.

6. Live music at Loppen in Christiania. Because boogying warms you up. I’m seeing a band called Woods tomorrow night. They should be groovy. The lead singer sounds exactly like Neil Young. But hopefully he won’t go walking out on stage with cocaine hanging off his nose hairs like Neil used to do. Loppen has a strict “No Hard Drugs” policy.

7. Hey, there’s a little squirrel outside my window! Well I think it’s a squirrel. Googling “squirrel”. Yes, it is a squirrel.

8. Traveling around Europe in winter can be really cheap. Just have to book early.

9. Short cuts across lakes and canals on icy morning walks, or late night adventures.

10. Pub.

Pub. Yes. Time for pub. Bye.

The Royal society of New Zealand, on March 8th, hosted a workshop on geoengineering and its implications to New Zealand. Geoengineering? Yeah, I had no idea what that meant either. But the press release helpfully explained that bioengineering refers to climate change control by methods other than reduction of carbon emissions. Examples they list of this kind of technology include shooting reflective particles into the atmosphere to reduce sunlight to the earth, and pumping carbon dioxide and iron atoms into the depths of the ocean.

Call me crazy, but most of these ideas sound pretty extreme – not to mention pretty irreversible! My initial gut reaction to hearing this was of revulsion. It’s the same kind of feeling I get from people who live extremely unhealthy lives and then ‘fix’ it by taking pills and having surgery. But I thought a little more about it1, and I realised that it would be totally unfair of me to dismiss it for that reason. Climate change is a huge problem facing our generation. Unimaginably huge. To dismiss potential improvements because I, in my house with running water in my first world country, find them an unpleasant thought is absolutely unforgivable when those most affected by climate change don’t even get a say in the matter. If pumping carbon into the oceans will save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people living in poor coastal areas, then I think we who could implement these solutions have a responsibility to give them genuine consideration. Who knows, perhaps some of these extreme solutions may be of benefit after all.

The thought the remains in my mind when considering all this though is: Wow, the people who are actually trying to Do something about climate change are getting really desperate! Some of the things they are now proposing to deal with it will have huge negative consequences, without a doubt. Can you imagine what it would be like living in a world where there are twice as many clouds blocking out the sun? And yet they persist, because other less extreme methods could not be pushed through into legislation and at the end of the day, they feel that they have to do something. I actually fully support their efforts, if not any particular proposal.

I think perhaps that the biggest barrier to the human race actually doing something about climate change is the feelings of the public. A huge number of people still deny climate change, and an even greater number don’t fully realise the implications – what climate change will mean for their lifestyles. I think perhaps that the number of people who fully understand the impact climate change will have on them is similar to the number of people who fully understand quantum mechanics – a small (but growing) number indeed. And it is pretty certain that the media have had a big role in this.

The vast majority of what people know about climate change comes not from scientific papers (obviously. Scientific papers are a bitch to read, even for scientists who know the language), and not from talks or presentations given by scientists, but from the media, newspapers and television news shows. And the picture they have presented us with is extraordinarily skewed. The view held by the vast majority of all scientists who have researched the problem of climate change is that: Climate change is real. Human activities are causing climate change to accelerate. At the current rate, sea levels will rise to unacceptable levels, destructive weather phenomena will increase in frequency and in severity. And yet the story you get from listening to the media is much different. The impression one gets from the media however is that there is a huge scientific war being waged between dissenters and assenters, leagues upon leagues marching on either side. This would understandably make you think that the proclamations of either side should be viewed with a grain of salt, and greatly undermines the credibility of the vast majority of scientists in the public mind. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the media is implicit in greatly downplaying the effect climate change will have on its readers/listeners/watchers lives.

The way in which the media has given this impression is by giving vastly more airtime to deniers of climate change than to assenters, despite the numbers on each side. The public is led to believe that the deniers have a lot of sway and legitimate points, but in reality all the evidence points to the majority view2. They do this for many reasons. It first of all simply makes a better story to show the lone battlers, fighting for what they believe in against overwhelming odds. Those people also tend to have more to say, and will say it in such a way as to communicate more effectively with the public, untrained in science. If I was cynical, I would also say that the content of newspapers and news programs is under the control of people who have commercial interests in no meaningful legislation being made to combat climate change.

So yellow card to the media for misrepresenting scientific knowledge! Personally, I believe that for as long as the media is the way in which scientific knowledge is communicated to most people, they have a responsibility to represent it accurately and fairly, in the same way that journalists are tasked to tell the news. However, I have a yellow card for scientists in this affair also – they are also to blame! They have codified their knowledge, and abstracted it from everyday experience, and hidden it away behind strange language and indecipherable figures. And then they have turned around and complained that people don’t understand them any more! Big surprise scientists. Now that it has been made clear how important it is to convincingly communicate your work to the public, you need to start thinking of ways to do it better. MUCH better.

How might that be done? I don’t have all the answers but I think it ought to start with some kind of direct communication between scientists and public, not so the scientist can talk to the public but so the public to talk back to the scientist! I think it is really important scientists get feedback directly from the people they are communicating to. This will help them to learn what they’re doing wrong, and how to improve. What are your views on this, readers?

[1] This is my absolute favourite, best trick I have. I can’t overstate how useful thinking more about things is. You should always be the first person to challenge your own views – if you don’t other people will surely do it for you! Maintaining a high level of credibility is best done by having good knowledge of and respect for every side of an argument.

[2] Disclaimer – there are many more issues at play in this particular debate, among them and particularly evident in the climategate incident was people without specialist knowledge and experience interpreting data and methods and getting things wrong. However I am focusing on the particular role of the media.

But this recurring theme of letting the team down is not something that stops with children. Lately, I have noticed that even professional sportsmen are letting their teams down in unacceptable ways and circumstances. Most significantly, anyone who watched the New Zealand vs Pakistan cricket game the other night would have witnessed an atrocious display of wicket keeping by Kamran Akmal. Not only was his performance beyond poor, but it cost them the match as he gave Ross Taylor three lives by failing to dismiss him twice. Taylor went on to complete some of the most devastating death hitting that has ever been seen on a cricket pitch, belting 62 runs off the final 16 deliveries he faced. Thanks Kamran.

Perhaps this performance could be overlooked as a mere lapse, but unfortunately this is not the first time Akmal has performed in such a way. The Sydney Test last year was appalling and he has dropped 32 catches in his last 25 Tests. He cannot catch a ball, which is his primary responsibility. But his batting is not much better, constantly disappointing at the top of the order.

Another who disappointed this week, though it was out of the ordinary, was Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas. In a vital match against Barcelona in the Champions League return leg, he was basically invisible despite being their talismanic star player. The one time he did make himself seen, he would soon like to forget. An unnecessary back heel pass at the top of his own box led to the opening goal of the match by Lionel Messi. This was a game that if Arsenal had any chance of winning, they needed their captain to be at his best, but he lacked impetus after recovering from injury to be fit for selection.

At least he was fit for the game though. Real Madrid will not be so lucky next week when they host Lyon. They will be without their highly skilled Brazilian mid-fielder Kaka because he has injured himself once again. It seems as if since joining Madrid in 2009-for a then record £56M-he has spent more time on the physio’s table than he has on the field. In fact he has only managed to make 44 appearances for the club. He has not turned into a great investment so far as he faces more time off with his re-injured left knee.
Someone however, who definitely did not let his team down this week, is American teenager Wes Leonard. Wes (16) powered Fenville High School to a 20-0 unbeaten season with the winning lay-up in overtime. Sadly, shortly after he was hoisted high by his teammates, he collapsed and was taken to hospital in cardiac arrest where he died a couple of hours later. Wes was not only the school’s star on the court but also led the football team to the Southwestern Athletic Conference North Division championship, throwing seven touchdowns in the final game to clinch it. So here’s to the memory of Wes who was an amazing athlete and who I am sure will be sorely missed by his teammates, friends and family.

http://www.realtalk.co.nz

The first thing you learn when you come to France is that the French, for everything that they are, certainly are not an efficient people. Unfortunately for me, this lesson was learnt on my very first day in France, when, having just dragged my wheelie suitcase halfway across town from the train station to the university, I was struck by the Curse of the European Lunch-Break.

Contrary to the idea we have in New Zealand of running errands during your lunch-break, in many European countries the lunch break really is just a time for eating lunch. In Spain they sleep, in Italy they head home for lunch with the family, and in France they simply close up shop. And by ‘close up shop’ I mean, quite literally, that between the hours of 12pm and 2pm all shops, banks, pharmacies, offices, universities and post offices close. You are forced, by these sheer limited opening hours alone, to take a break and just… well… have lunch. And god forbid if you try to do anything else.

One time, for example, a friend and I (forced to do so because everything else was closed) were having a coffee at a cafe sometime between 12-2pm. When we went to pay the bill, there was an awkward moment when we realised that every single staff-member had stopped for lunch, and were now all giving us the evils and willing us to go away, wondering how we could be so inconsiderate as to want to pay while they were eating. In fact, there is a post office near my house that is open each day from 8am-10am, and then again from 3-5.30pm. This means, that with a 5-hour lunch break in its 9.5-hours between open and close, the post office is CLOSED for more hours each day than it is OPEN. The other day I managed to post three parcels there; I threw them onto the counter and ran out the doors, scared that they’d be forced to close before I’d even managed to utter ‘Bonjour’.

And so it was that I found myself, on my first day in France, standing outside a locked and very abandoned-looking international students’ office at some time between 12-2pm. Shit. I was at a total loss. I had no idea where I was living, was suffering from severe sleep-deprivation and couldn’t communicate very effectively with anyone. Not yet familiar with the Opening-Hour Curse, I assumed that the office simply mustn’t have opened yet for the year. So, after sitting down and having a wee cry, followed by a self-motivational pep-talk, I dragged my suitcase all the way back to the train station, bought a phone card and called the international students’ office.

“Hi, I’m an exchange student, I’ve just arrived in France and I was just at the office but it was closed.”

“Closed? What? No. We’re open. Of course we’re open. We’re all here. See you soon.”

The second lesson you’ll learn in France is that the French either proudly defend, or are incredibly indifferent to the – at times crippling – inefficiency of their way of life. Some French will sing to you the many praises of doing nothing at lunchtimes, all-day Sunday and half of Monday (when shops are also shut), such as reducing stress of workers and creating more days for enforced family-time. Others will simply offer you one of two all-purpose, fail-safe, “I don’t care about your problems, foreigner” responses. These are “C’est pas grave” (Don’t worry about it) and “C’est la France” (That’s France).

“Why do I have to wait ten days before the bank will open my account, and then another five before they send me a letter with a code which I then have to take to the bank – but not between 12-2pm – to retrieve my bank card? I can’t wait that long, I have no money left!”

“C’est pas grave.”

“Why has our class inexplicably moved not only to a different room, but also is now going to be taught on a different day AND at a different time, but only for two weeks, after which it changes again?!”

“C’est la France”

But with each day of living here, this French way of life seems a little more natural. Sitting down to have lunch or a coffee (takeaway coffee doesn’t exist here) seems much nicer than their on-run-equivalents; learning to come back after 2pm is a little less grating, and even my stomach has begun to align its hunger with the daily lock-down.

I’ve even begun to regularly utter “C’est pas grave” instead of getting worried when something goes wrong. If anything, “C’est la France” is always a faster and easier option than attempting to explain the inexplicable. Maybe the French aren’t so inefficient, after all.

Until next time, c’est la France!

For more regular updates of my adventures in La Rochelle and beyond, follow www.frenchletter.tumblr.com

First of all, I would like just to say… I was scooped! That scoundrel of a science advisor clearly managed to find himself an advance copy of the Salient’s blog section, and, knowing how significant an impact the venerable publication has, decided to base his keynote speech at the Science Communicator’s Association New Zealand conference, on the very topic of this blog! A mere day before this column appeared on Salient’s website! Coincidence? I think Not, Sir Peter Gluckman!

In all seriousness though, I’m really pleased to see the issue of science reporting in the media being addressed on such an important level. It shows how important this topic has become. Sir Peter Gluckman is the Prime Minister’s science advisor. I have followed his press releases, which I have always found to be balanced and informative writing about issues where science may affect government or policy, or which captures the public eye. He gave a very good speech shortly after the whole ‘climategate’ situation flared up for example, though thankfully the public in New Zealand seems not to have nearly as much inherent distrust for scientists as the public in the UK and USA.

That small rant aside, onto the actual topic of this week’s column, wherein I celebrate the opening of the New Zealand Ruminant Methane Measurement Centre. And just what is that, you ask? Simply put, it is a large sealed box (just how large I was not able to ascertain) in which one may put a cow, a sheep, or a similar grazing animal. The levels of methane gas in this box are carefully monitored, and the inputs to the animal (ie diet, atmosphere, humidity) can be controlled. By doing this, one can better understand what influences the amount of methane released by these animals, the ultimate goal of course being to reduce the methane emissions from New Zealand’s livestock, and thus reduce our impact on global warming. Oops! I mean climate change.

Nota Bene, the press release also states that animal welfare is a priority and that efforts are made to ensure the comfort of the animal being studied. This in any case is a good idea because animals under stresses of alien laboratory conditions tend to behave very differently from in the wild, or in domestic conditions. For example, you know how everybody knows that the female preying mantis bites off the male’s head during sex? Turns out that occurs only very rarely outside laboratories. It was probably mostly the fault of giant eyes peering through magnifying glasses and watching their every movement, which might understandably give a girl performance anxiety…

Over half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions1 are from livestock, so pursuing this kind of research is going to be necessary in order to lower greenhouse emissions as a country, and equipment like this is going to be of huge benefit to the scientists working on this problem. Take it from another experimental scientist, having the right equipment can cut the amount of time you have to spend on something in half or better. Imagine for example if instead of using a mechanical eggbeater, all you had to use was a fork. Far more time and effort, right? So all in all, I am really excited about hearing about the results that come out of the NZRMMC! But a question remains…

It’s unlikely that any of you reading this right now will have heard of the NZRMMC before now (which is partly why I wanted to highlight it). In fact, the only newspaper to run an article on this development is the Manawatu Standard. Yup, seems you have to go pretty far a-field to find science news these days! And yet, this story has it all. It’s a success story for a smallish New Zealand company (the centre is run through AgResearch), it has huge significance for possibly the most interesting science topic to the public, climate change, and to top it all off you could give it a cheesy headline about cows farting! How is it that this didn’t make the bigger papers?

One aspect about the science/media relationship that Peter Gluckman raised in his aforementioned speech is that the media likes to publish stories only about significant breakthroughs, eureka moments and giant steps for mankind. This portrays a view of science that is really quite different from reality. Almost all science is in incremental advances, such as this centre will surely be. I don’t know if that is the whole story, but what I do know for certain is that it is still tough to keep abreast of science news in today’s world, particularly if you want science news in New Zealand. I found the link to this story on www.scoop.co.nz under their science & technology section.

Until next time, may you search far and wide in your journey to learn about science.

[1] Aha! Look at me, using a statistic just like I told you to be wary of last week! My own analysis of this figure is: the main point is simple enough – that NZ has a large carbon emission problem relating to its livestock. In more detail, I wonder how that 50% is measured. In terms of impact on climate change, methane causes much more damage than carbon dioxide, so I wonder whether the 50% thing is measured in terms of total mass of carbon or volume of gas, or whether it is on some other scale where methane ranks more highly.

In a week where sport is probably the last thing on people’s minds, there has come a bit of bad news out of the Wellington Phoenix camp.

Marco Rojas, strongly considered a serious alternative to sliced bread, has signed a contract with Melbourne Victory, and will leave the capital to – most likely – give himself a greater chance of success, in Australia and in Asia.

To my mind, the decision can’t have been a tough one for Rojas. There’s a better chance for him in Melbourne, and the only thing keeping him in Wellington would have been loyalty. It’s unlikely that money was an issue.

Invariably, there’s sadness out of Wellington. We’re all devastated that the boy we raised has left us. It doesn’t really help that this boy was a very talented young footballer. And it really doesn’t help that the A-League doesn’t have transfer fees. The Yellow Fever are already comparing Rojas’ new contract to a romantic break-up. But as break-ups go, this one isn’t too messy. He was honest and open to Wellington, and he will forever be thankful for the chance Phoenix gave him. Well, he had better be thankful.

But, like all break-ups, Phoenix fans are left with no small degree of confusion. It’s going to be awkward, it’s going to be hard, and we’re (seriously) going to need a rebound boy. But who?

Who can take on a defender the way Rojas did? Who can cross a ball like Rojas? The truth is, probably no one. Unless Ricki Herbert can pull off a brilliant offshore signing, the Phoenix is going to have to play with a much weaker, less incisive attack. There’s probably only room in the Kiwi game at the moment for one ‘Marco Rojas player’.

So what are we supposed to think of him now?

When Shane Smeltz left the capital, he returned to excessive (perhaps uncalled for) booing. I imagine Rojas will receive the same treatment. Most Phoenix fans will be hoping for some sort of sophomore slump, a type of second season syndrome. But I for one will be silently pleased to see him succeed.

It might sting a little, if he scores against the Phoenix, or if his Melbourne can do a little better than us. But every cloud has a silver lining. We’ve now seen young Kiwis make it to bigger contracts through the Phoenix. Kosta Barbarouses is flourishing in Brisbane, and now Rojas. Wellington has the moral high ground to smile and say ‘we made you’. We’ve been shown that people from Hamilton really can succeed. And it opens up a door for a new player at the Phoenix (as well as increasing the urgency to re-sign existing players). And it makes a win against Melbourne so much sweeter. For Rojas, this really might be the break to get him a big overseas contract. Then at last, Wellington fans can cheer him again.

And there’s always the All Whites. Hopefully.

Has sport lost its importance? Has relevance abandoned it? I constantly hear people say to me “it’s just a game” while I curse profanely and repeatedly at my television or computer screen because McCullum has just thrown his wicket away again to a half-pitched long hop. Well to all you over-sized-singlet-wearing-indie-misfits, I’m telling you it is much more than just a game. Just because you only got participation medals at school for cross-country, does not mean that sport (and winning) is something to scoff at.

In this country, we constantly cram the ideal of ‘participation’ down our children’s throats. That it is less important to win than to simply play the game. Then we wonder why we haven’t won a rugby world cup in twenty-four years and currently languish at the bottom of the world’s cricket rankings, despite these being our two most popular sports. Slowly, this kind of attitude infiltrates the social consciousness and as a result we breed a nation of people who do not value winning and the nature of sport.

But try to tell this to Barcelona FC fans whose football team is not only the best club in the world (perhaps one of the greatest ever) but a mighty symbol for Catalan culture and nationalism. To them, as it is to many nations around the world, football is not “just a game”: it is religion, it is politics, it is a way of life. People live and die by their team’s success.

This is passion that is seldom seen in New Zealanders when it comes to the sports field. Not only do we seem to lack support for our own teams, but we also lack a genuine love of sport in general these days. This seems like a strange thing to say, as many consider us a sports mad country, but everywhere you look, latte drinking theatre goers are popping up where rugged rugby gents and dames once stood. Gone are the days when every man and his dog watched footy all weekend with a cold brew and abused his wife if his team didn’t win. Perhaps the term ‘good old days’ comes to mind.

But can we blame sport itself for this lack of interest? Sport is continually dumbing itself down to make itself more accessible to people with ‘games’ such as 7s rugby and T20 cricket, but the problem is that the objective of fandom in this case is to dance and socialise rather than watch. So people are not more interested in sport because of these innovations, despite the increased gate takings.

The beauty of sport does not lie in these abridged versions however. It lies in: a 5-day test match, of which the finest example was displayed in summer’s Ashes series when England drubbed the Aussies; the El Classico, that pits two of the greatest sporting and national rivals against each other where Barcelona showcased their entrancing football in a 5-0 win; or a gritty test match between the All Blacks and the French that we will only be too lucky to witness in this year’s world cup.
So shrug off your ridiculous singlet, throw away your pointed shoes (maybe lose some weight) and watch some sport. Become a fan (and not on Facebook). Because if people can still support the Chicago Cubs and Arsenal fans really believe they can win meaningful silverware this year without choking, then you can appreciate some sport this weekend too.

After two days (or one really long day) of travel, I arrived in this foreign land where everything appeared to be similar but slightly different. Slightly Spanish, even. I wandered around looking for my first real Spanish meal until I was so hungry that I settled for a very traditional chicken burger from McDonald’s—it was actually written in English on the menu but when I tried to pronounce it, my attempts were met with a blank expression from a woman who clearly hated her job. I knew then that, despite feeling more or less confident with Spanish grammar, verb tenses and vocabulary, I needed to find a Spanish person, or at least a Spanish speaker, to teach me all of the important things if I was to have a chance at doing anything without feeling like a complete foreigner.

Enter: Mateo, an enthusiastic South-American studying abroad in Spain who was kind enough to offer to teach me about la lengua española and life in Madrid. Through him I received my first invite to a Spanish house party (actually, it was an apartment party) with real Spaniards and so much Spanish going around that it would have been impossible to deal with without a bottle of 95 cent wine in hand – there I was truly beginning to feel like I was starting to be comfortable here. That all changed suddenly later that evening when I had a first-hand lost-in-translation experience. In a rage comparable to the drama of telenovelas it became apparent that Mateo had thought we were dating and I found myself having my first Spanish argument about the significance of eating Chorizo and drinking Sangria with somebody while talking about the correct Spanish mispronunciation of English words. Confused and slightly drunk, I had lost what I had come to think of as my Spanish (okay, South-American) friend.

It’s not all cheap wine and drama in Madrid, though. When I first got here I had the ever-exciting task of finding a place to stay. Living in an understated, only-slightly-dirty hostel nestled between the city’s gay and red lights districts, I was relieved when, a few days into the flat hunt I found a room in the centre of town with nine other exchange students that was within the budget I’d set myself. Perhaps it was the fact that at the time I was sharing a bunk with a middle-aged Argentine who only matched his ability to snore with his ability to sleep that made everything by comparison seem like the Ritz, but I ended up taking a room with no windows. Don’t ever think that it’ll be okay living in a room with no windows. It’s not. I learnt this the day we had a power-cut and I realised that I had to either go to sleep or leave the house. I chose the latter and got four blocks before realising: a) that I’d put my cardigan on inside-out and b) the true value of natural light.

But despite its minor flaws, I love my Spanish apartment and the fact that between English, French, German, Croatian and Spanish, we all slightly misunderstand one another yet we can still communicate enough to get on well. That, and I’ve learnt so many foreign swear words it should be illegal. ¡Hasta la próxima!

My father and I have a theory, that the most important growing and changing to set the scene for your adult life occurs between the ages of 18 and 23. A lot changes over this time, not least (usually) being turned out of the nest in the hope you will fly away… or at least land on your feet… more often just hitting a branch slightly lower. It is very, very common for people to cycle through different clothing styles, groups of friends, political ideas, gender and sexualities over this time. For you it might be a bit awkward but feel completely natural. Watching your friends do the same, however, is another story. But when do you speak up? When has someone gone too far? When have you gone too far?

Measure everything not by its acceptance within your immediate community, but by its normalcy in the world. I want you to look at your friends and remind yourself of the same- they may be a different ‘type’ of person to you, but if there’s a (legal!) community that they can become a part of, and they are happy with themselves, then power to them.

Don’t make overarching comments and assume that changes are forever. For example, if you become a born again Christian, good for you; if you become a born again Christian and as a result must marry and procreate by December, take a step back. Honesty to yourself is important, and you should be able to honestly tell yourself, with no shame, that you used to be someone else, and you have changed, but you may well change again. This does not mean that you should doubt your sincerity, values, or beliefs, but it does mean that you shouldn’t paint yourself into a corner where you limit your personal growth over this time.

Keep your friends, unless they are damaging you emotionally. I always get very uncomfortable when meeting people who can’t retain friendships, for obvious reasons. You may have outgrown your friends, you may no longer have anything in common, but drift apart—don’t sever and don’t take an opportunity to rub friend’s faces in the mud. Wellington is a small place, and even if you do marry and procreate within the year, it would be great to assume that your friends can see beyond your massive lifestyle/outlook change to support and love you for who you are. It would be even better to avoid ceaselessly judging or criticizing friends who now have different values and beliefs. Tell people off for littering, sure, but going through their garbage while yelling at them about recycling…? Ask them to come to church one day, sure, but telling them they’ll burn in hell…? See things from your friend’s points of view and try to put yourself in their shoes. Work out where the line should be drawn, and if possible, you could even sit down and talk to them about your feelings to clear the air.

Remember, this is a short period in your lives where you can play adulthood without being tied down. Opportunities should be taken with both hands, and if drinking to excess for 6 months is someone’s choice, then keep an eye on them, avoid letting them go too far, and remind yourself that an alcoholic 40 year old who just came out, left their wife, and is now trying to relive an uneventful youth is one of the ugliest, heartbreaking things to see. Identify the difference between an experiment, a lifestyle change, and a personally damaging change. Keep your mind open and your friends and families close. Be safe, be open minded, and be glad to live in a society where we can change with the seasons and not be stoned to death.

In order to convey the maximum of information in the minimum of time and effort on the reader’s part, one tool journalists love to use is statistics. What better way to interest a reader than to tell them that 50% of men will suffer from erectile dysfunction at some time in their lives, or that 1 in 10 humans are gay or bisexual? Bam! One easy sentence, such high impact.

Naturally, the reality of any given situation is rather more complex than newspaper statistics portray. It must be – you only got given one number to explain the all of the results! And of course, when politicians or salespeople get involved the situation gets even more twisty. If a statistic sounds like it supports their view, they won’t look too closely at its validity. I’m sure that all of you, having made it to university, have already figured this out, and found a way to deal with it. One can deal with the reporting of statistics in many ways, ranging from a flat refusal to lend credence to any statistic (which by the way is not too unjustified) all the way up to proper research, finding citations and methodology used. Most of us lack the tools or connections to carry out the latter, and besides which one would seldom have enough motivation to personally spend the required time doing so. Today I’d like to share with you a couple of shortcuts to help you interpret the meaning of a statistic.

When people quote you a statistic, it’s important to think about exactly what its meaning is. Almost always when people use statistics, they are trying to use them to prove some point or other. You should always double check whether or not the fact they use actually supports their point or not, because often enough it actually doesn’t. Occasionally the misrepresentation is malicious, but I think that most of the time it is simply because the quoter has not fully understood the meaning of the statistic themselves. The key word here is exactly.

I’ll give a simple example of this. Say there was a 50% year-over-year increase in cases of breast cancer reported in the year after breast cancer screenings were made available for free in some sector of the population1. One might quote this statistic as evidence that the rate of breast cancer cases was increasing, or that the system was failing. What exactly does this statistic tell us? The figure does not say directly that there is an increasing rate of breast cancer in the population. Nor does it say anything about the rate of success of treatments for breast cancer, or the survival rate of those suffering from it. The only thing this figure measures is the number of diagnoses of breast cancer. It is unjustified to use this figure by itself to claim an increase in the rate of breast cancer (though if more facts were compiled one might be able to argue a case). If one looks at the broader situation, it should be no surprise that an increase in breast cancer diagnoses follows a year of freely available screening

Secondly, it important to carefully consider the context of any given statistic. “Thanks to my intervention, sales have risen 13%!” This figure sounds good by itself. But you’ve got to then ask other relevant questions, such as “by how much have our competitors’ sales risen in the same period?” or “how have our expenditures changed?” Once the bigger picture is taken into account the figure might not be so great after all. At the end of the day, statistics are a tool to help us make decisions, and you are almost never in a situation where you are making a choice between doing one thing and doing nothing. Any new medical treatment these days must not only be better than no action, it must not only be better than a placebo – it must have a better result than the best available treatments in order to be a successful treatment (albeit that a cheaper treatment with similar results is also worthwhile).

Any improvement seems great when you compare it to nothing, and it’s hard to see how a statistic given in isolation in this manner could be misleading. The sample size can be huge and comprehensive, the methodology perfect and the results correctly interpreted, and yet it could still be meaningless without a comparison. For that reason, I think the single most important question to ask in the face of any figure is: how would this have been different had another choice been made?

Until next time, I hope you are now better equipped to apply some healthy skepticism to any figure quoted to you!

Acknowledgement – A lot of this week’s column is inspired by the work of Ben Goldacre. Try his book, “Bad Science,” or his blog at www.badscience.net.

[1] This is not an actual statistic. I made this up for the purpose of this example.

The ASB Premiership is in its last few weeks, and I expect most people have no idea who is going to be contesting the finals.

For the record, Auckland, Waitakere and Wellington are in, and the final spot is up for grabs between everyone else (except Manawatu, who have this year redefined ‘dreadful’).
But in an 18-month period where football has exploded into life in this country, it’s hard to say whether the domestic trophy has taken strides forward or backward.

Not too long ago, about 2,000 fans turned out to support Canterbury in soccer’s return to Nelson. The same weekend, an Auckland derby attracted about 1,000 supporters. The teams are regularly playing football against a ‘professional’ outfit in the Phoenix reserves. Aaron Clapham and Sean Lovemore got the nod from Ricki Herbert to turn out for the Phoenix, and ex-Waikato player Marco Rojas will have attracted the attention of some very flashy names across Europe. And with a hefty cheque from ASB (and FIFA) in the bank, there seems to be plenty of reasons for the Premiership to smile.

But on the flipside, the top and bottom of the league seem to be light years apart. Our top clubs aren’t stepping up on the regional stage and for the first time in a fair while, New Zealand had no representative at the Club World Cup. Struggling clubs are playing in front of empty grounds, and – perhaps of most concern – there is a notable lack of public interest in the league.

So where does the Premiership go?

Everywhere you look, somebody will throw around a restructuring suggestion, but they don’t seem to be the solution. Promotion and relegation works well in Europe, but in New Zealand, there is simply nobody else feasible to step in. Expansion, too, would only be embarrassing.

But the success of Canterbury’s Nelson trip gives me plenty of hope for the next five years of the competition. Take the Premiership to centres previously deprived of top flight football, and the public shows up. Give Gisborne and New Plymouth a go next year. Manawatu hosting a match in Taranaki couldn’t possibly result in a smaller crowd than that they have achieved in Palmerston North, could it?

When (not if) Rojas moves abroad, he will become the first player to clearly follow the road from grassroots football to a big pay check. Part of the promise of the Phoenix was to provide a pathway from the Premiership to the professional world. With luck, many will follow him. So the quality of the league is in no way disappointing, but for some reason, the fans don’t seem interested.

So while the attention of the everyday football fan in New Zealand is likely to be firmly set on the All Whites, and the Phoenix, I encourage every supporter in the country to get out and support the Premiership. Get to know your local team _ for anyone outside of Palmerston North this can be very satisfying. Who knows how many of the next crop of All Whites will have come straight from our backyard, and who might be lining up for the Phoenix in the next few years?

And Team Wellington is doing okay, too.

During the week of 7-11 February, AMN-5 was held in Wellington. This is a large academic conference held every other year, and is one of the few conferences in New Zealand on the topics of physics and chemistry. I went along to this conference, and I thought I’d give you my impression of some of the more interesting things I saw there.

Although the topics presented at AMN-5 were extremely broad overall, the standout theme this time around seemed to be magnets. Whether it was an examination of the fundamental science of superconductivity, or spintronics1, or a more practical experiment on how to grow interesting magnetic materials, there was definitely a trend there. This was perhaps to be expected, as between the companies Magritek and HTS-110 there is actually a lot of expertise in magnetism in New Zealand.

In terms of the effect of these areas of science to the public, superconducting cable has already begun to be rolled out in the USA electrical grid. Progress in the research seems to be progressing smoothly, and I’d guess that after the early adopters have had their go, superconducting cable as a standard could reasonably be expected within this decade. What that’ll mean for you is more efficient electricity transmission and a good deal less energy lost as heat through the grid, which ought to help out in the carbon emission area. Hopefully it will also lead on to reduced power prices, but in the New Zealand power market I wouldn’t hold your breath…

Spintronics on the other hand has its applications mostly in computing. It is hoped that one could carry out simultaneous calculations with the same ‘bit’ of electricity by measuring both the current and the spin in parallel, instead of just the current. This technology is still a long way off consumer applications though. There is a lack of a good design of a ‘spin transistor,’ and of a material with the right properties to make such a device. I saw a lot of new materials showcased this week however, as well as a device design that looked promising, so I remain hopeful!

Another hot topic at the conference was organic solar cells, with a large number of presenters showing their various experiments and insights. Compared to the silicon solar cells that most of us are probably used to, organic solar cells are less efficient, but MUCH less expensive. This makes them a lot more viable to cover large areas with, or just to access markets and still be relatively competitive with other energy sources. I personally was quite excited by some of this research I saw presented at the conference, and I’ll try to explain part of it for you here. This research was in part done right here at Victoria University!

For various reasons, it is good to have two different types of polymer2 mixed together in the body of an organic solar cell, and one can control how well they are mixed. You could have something like salt and sand mixed together, or something more like apples and oranges in a fruit bowl. By shining lasers at the mixture, scientists have discovered that to create a bit of electrical energy from the sun, a very finely mixed solar cell is preferred, but that in order to take that bit of energy and put it into a battery, it is better to have coarse mixing. One might initially be disheartened to hear this, because it sounds a lot like these two things which you want to maximise both of are competing with each other. But this is exactly the kind of problem that nanoscience has typically been very good at solving. Now that the problem has been made clear, I feel confident that scientists can find a clever way to work around it. My guess is that this is another technology that we’ll see being used in the real world in the next decade or so.

One final thing bit of science which I found interesting at the conference was a man who gave a talk about the capture of waste heat as useful energy. He convinced us that this was a big deal by giving us figures that showed that in the States, about half of all energy generated is wasted as heat. Think about it – that’s a huge amount of energy! The idea of generating electricity from heat is nothing new – New Zealand already generates close to 15% of its electricity from geothermal power stations. But what this scientist was suggesting that was new is generating power from heat as and where it is wasted – for example, in car engines. Obviously it is impossible to have a whole power station inside a car engine, so new methods are needed to do this, and he looks toward advanced materials to provide them. This is the first I had heard of such an idea, and it sounds like a winner to me.

I realise that I have still not got into the stated aim of this column, that being the examination of science as presented in the media. However it’s not every week that a conference like this comes along, and I thought I should take advantage of it. I also thing that one thing that scientists have to do if they want to improve communication between themselves and the public is to present new research to them, rather than to each other. Today’s article has been an attempt on my part to do that.

And I shall leave you with an image of one further thing that I was surprised to learn at the conference – scientists apparently love a good hoedown.

[1] Spintronics is the topic of how electric current flows differently depending on which way the electrons in it spin

[2] A polymer is a long noodly organic molecule. If this doesn’t help you, feel free to substitute for polymer the word: thing. It works just as well for the purpose of this column.

This week, a friend of ours completed purchase of one of the best bars in Wellington (this isn’t a plug, I’m not going to name it). That makes two friends owning two bars, plus a host of acquaintances who also own bars. I feel like we’re growing up. It does, however, decrease the likelihood that I’ll get to see him much at all, as he works nights and sleeps days.

My partner is still getting the invites for all kinds of hospo outings. In hospitality (bars and restaurants), you usually get Sunday through Tuesday off work. And what does hospo do on the ‘weekend?’ Drink, mostly. Hence the well known alcoholic/constant partying/crazy lifestyle that hospo is known for (living it is quite another thing, where only a few nights a week are actually partying, a few are pretending to party for punters, and a few are pub quiz/quiet drink/smoke and 6 pack on the beach etc). As neither my partner nor I actually work hospo hours, we’re kept in the loop by dropping by on the weekends. I’m in the loop even less, as I only get out on the rare occasion that I can bully someone into babysitting for me. The outcome is that my partner is invited, or expected, out at least 5 days a week, and there’s no telling which ones. He already works three nights a week so I’m getting quite lonely, typing away on my computer and keeping up all of the psuedo-upbeat emails and facebooks that mean I remain networked into, well, my networks. During the day, when I can get out with bubba strapped to my side or pushed in the pram, I am always out and about, as there are only so many hours in the day, and anything outside of the house has to be done before 5pm when you have a child (dinner, wash, bed… then you are given the unwelcome choice of leaving them alone in the house, commonly known as neglect, or sitting at home alone).

My partner has the choice of leaving me home alone to see his friends outside of work/uni; going out at 10pm, after work, to see friends; or seeing even less of his daughter and going out to see friends on his few days off. The current choice of going out after work has led to his mostly seeing friends who work at, or drink in, bars: this has led to the invites all days of the week. I’m not sure if we thus have the best or the worst of both worlds, as most of our friends are available at times that we can see them, but my partner and I never have any time together where we aren’t choosing between one thing or the other. No one can ever just go out of the house for a few hours without the time police jumping in, and someone getting a wee bit jealous.

How do I deal with this? I feel relief when I look toward the future. In a few years our friends (who are mostly still out partying, not holding down jobs, and unable to understand this crazy ’stay at home, eat breakfast, be responsible’ nonsense) will ’settle down’ themselves, my partner will ’settle down’ more and get a more sociably-houred job, and these invites will stop. That’s right. The only positive outcome short of getting a nanny, is currently the creepy security one feels when encouraging the type of 9 to 5 lifestyle we despise. I want to be able to schedule in brunch before 3pm on the weekends, and squeeze in lunch dates on lunch breaks. I’m done with alcohol being the baseline for human interaction, and night time being standard social hours. I hate myself for this train of thought, but it creeps in every Saturday night when I get the “I’m just going out for a few hours after work” phone call.

Once you have kids, you genuinely want a good night’s sleep because days spent with them are precious, joyful, and exhausting. Do we regret a second of our life? No. Do we want to stay out for one more drink? No. Do we want to go out at night more? No. Do we want to want to go out more? Well…

This blog was brought to you by any company that sells birth control.

Oh hi, I’m living in København, Denmark for the first half of this year. I’ve just begun studying Political Science at Københavns Universitet on an exchange program run by VIC OE.

This is such a fucking wicked city. There is no such a thing as a culture shock or language barrier here in København. They speak perfect English, and don’t quite act like the xenophobic racists they once were. They are polite and courteous. However I wouldn’t say that they’re an overly friendly bunch.

I mean they do tend to smile politely, but only if you’re doing the same thing as them, such as bike riding – they do like that a lot here. They are also incredibly frank people. If you find yourself in a bar (there are some ridiculously cool places to go) head for a table of Danes. They’re not too difficult to spot, or in particular to hear. They sound as though some poor animal with lung cancer died in their throat when they reached puberty. God it’s a horribly sounding language. Anyway, they’re very frank with each other. They will happily discuss anything with you. At the first table I sat down (mostly girls I might add), they were chatting about how they prefer to keep the “fisse” (look it up yourself). Day-to-day conversation here, apparently.

Now the first thing I learnt here is that the Danes LOVE beer! You can buy it at absolutely anytime and everywhere. It’s usually pretty cheap as well. They pride themselves on holding their drink, and constantly make fun about the Swedes, who struggle to hold theirs. I think part of the reason why the Danes are such happy people is because they have such short working days, accompanied by such cheap and accessible beer.

You may encounter some weird shit over here in Denmark. However it comes so in the form of a Chinese production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Words cannot describe how terrible, strange and unnerving that was. But, as they say, nothing shows human thought and emotion better than imperfection diction and a seemingly endless flock of life-like emus walking around the stage at the strangest of times during the show.

More weird shit. The other night as I stood huddled round a bonfire in Christiania, a stranger from Nigeria entered our tiny hub of warmth. Quite suddenly he began to chat away in very broken English. We all listened intently, his story was something like no other.

But what followed after was in fact just as intriguing. Because within less than a moment he had left our huddle, sprinted across the narrow street and planted himself against a dark wooden gate. There he stood in perfect silence staring into the back of our heads. I turned around only for a glimpse, but his eyes met mine quickly. His stare was incredibly intense. After a few long minutes, I could hardly bring myself to turn away from this unusual character. I could see him becoming agitated. He was flicking his Zippo back and forth, creating a brief flicker of fire with almost every second he stood there. Then he shot off in some other direction, leaving his plastic bag full of cans by the bon fire with us. What an unusual character he was! Christiania is really such a lovely place to visit and meet new people.

Unfortunately, it turns out the government has decided to crack down once and for all on the settlement of Christiania. Christiania, also known as ‘Freetown’, is a self proclaimed autonomous neighborhood of about 850 residents. It began in 1971, when inhabitants of the surrounding area broke down the fence of an abandoned military area, and by September that year it was considered a settlement of its own, run by cannabis and yoga enthusiasts. Just the other day I noticed the police passively standing outside the gates of Christiania. The entire settlement seemed a little paranoid and anxious at the time.

They better not tear down a bar called Loppen. I practically live there. Shit could get crazy if they go through with it. We’re talking street riots, ten times larger than those seen in 2006 when ‘Ungdomshuset’ (Youth House) was torn down. So much of the local and international community have a strong attachment to Christiania, whether they be pot-heads or not. It would be ridiculously unwise of the government to go through with their plans.

Har det godt! Vi ses!

Fuck Yeah I’m in… is a blog shared by three Victoria University students on exchange overseas. Molly is in France; Rupert, in Denmark; and Alan, who will make his debut next week, in Spain.

The most ludicrous use of addiction language in marketing must be otherwise square dairies and supermarkets claiming that when you pop down to the corner store for some milk, you’re chasing some sort of elusive grocery high. You’re a desperate junkie – for bottled water! They’ll really get on some meta-shit when they all but accuse you of being a dope fiend for buying some ibuprofen for a stubbed toe.

Where addiction language can really zing is when one talks about something legitimately addictive. I’ll give you a pass if you’re a edgy, Macbook’ed-up coffee house, because caffeine is the wage-slave equivalent of trucker speed and thus addictive as shit. Testing of junk food has tentatively shown that it interacts with the brain in the same way as many habit-forming illicit drugs, and most everyone has had a smack-esque craving for some truly grody eats. Fast food joints are allowed to take this angle in their advertising, because everybody gotta eat, but booze companies cannot. Rotgut RTDs would be making a definite misstep if they told people to ease their delirium tremens with a calming swig of their rum and coke. Instead, you get crazy obvious ‘wink wink’ phrases about hard-earned thirsts, or ’starting the night off right’. But never ‘ending the night in a well of self-loathing/The Bristol’.

On the flip side, noted rap-metal poet laureates Limp Bizkit used the language of addiction to devastatin’ effect in their single “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)”, with the line ‘jonesin’ for your fix of the Limp Bizkit mix’. I’m going to let Fred Durst away with this one, because he’s Fred Durst.

I realise that this may read as a pedantic rant against the changing English language, and the shifting context and meaning of words that pass into common usage. It’s not my intention to be a curmudgeonly dickface and say our language should stay immobile and dead, but I think it’s pretty amusing that advertising and language is using terms that carry deep associations of broken homes, death and societal decay to describe bungeeing or wanting to buy a chocolate bar.

If any of you marketing majors reading this are getting a solid Idea Boner, then allow me to present you with some vivid imagery. Beat-era junkies passed out under a boardwalk, clutching Monster energy drinks in their palsied hands. 70s Death Wish New York speed freaks shivving a housewife and using her supermarket receipt for a Country Road shopping spree. A high-flying Auckland businessman smokes meth out of a light bulb in a Port-a-loo then joins his kids on their first para-glide. And finally, looping footage of Jared Leto shooting up into an abscess dissolves into a couple buying stir fry vegetables at a greengrocer’s.

REAL TALK is a weekly show on the VBC 88.3 FM (Saturday 8-10pm) and a podcast which can be found on iTunes or at Realtalk.co.nz.

If my life to date was sold and reproduced as a television show, the opening conversation between TV Mom and I would go something along these lines:

Sophie: Mum, I’ve decided, I’m going save orang-utans in the Borneo Rainforest.
Mum: You want to go to Borneo?
Sophie: That I do! It’s called “thinking globally,” Mum; it’s rad.
Mum: I think you’ll find the end of that quote is “acting locally,” Sophie. There’s plenty you can do for the environment without swanning off to Southeast Asia. Your room is a pigsty– I wouldn’t be surprised if I found a few orang-utans climbing in between your coat hangers…

And so on and so forth, until probably the dialogue becomes too unrealistic and too full of animal-related puns for the average television watcher to endure, and compels you to switch over to Dating in the Dark.

Nonetheless, TV Mom has a point. Folks may prattle about doing big things and making significant changes in the world; but living the “good life” (as in, a life which brings individual happiness at either no expense to or to the benefit of the future lives of generations to come) can also be found close to home. For Goodness’ Sake will thus be dedicated to adjustments that anyone (that’s you and I!) can take to care for ourselves, our communities, and our Mama Earth.

With this in mind, I will next week pay homage to the trusty sewing machine. What’s that, you ask? Stay tuned…

Sometime in May last year I decided that I would quite like to live in France for a while.

And that was how, just eight months; several thousand dollars; two interviews; ten application forms; fifty ‘I’ll miss you too’s; one thirty-one-hour plane and five-hour train trip later, I found myself in a little French town called La Rochelle.

I left New Zealand on 3 January, having spent the two weeks prior to that in a tent, hoping to maximise what little summer I could get before plunging myself head first into the depths of a European winter. Having never travelled further from home than Australia, my attitude towards the lengthy flight between New Zealand and France was at first one of extreme excitement – I have somewhat of a penchant for aeroplane meals; my heart-rate quickened at the thought of how many UHT milk capsules I’d get to consume during the 18,533 kilometre stretch.

I believe this excitement peaked upon my touchdown at Sydney International Airport, where I managed to have probably the most fun anyone has ever had during a four-hour stop-over. There I stumbled upon a bonanza of garish Kath and Kim-esque jumpers, a store devoted entirely to The Wiggles, and ‘I <3 Oprah’ tees available at 30% off following the talk-show queen’s departure.

The flight between Sydney and Singapore was a little more sombre. I was watching a pretty heavy TV series about a rapist and the aeroplane meals were starting to clump together in my stomach instead of being digested – probably due to not having really moved at all for about 15 hours. Still, having written numerous essays about Singapore for my politics major, I was pretty excited about my first trip to the city-state – perhaps I’d even catch a few glimpses of their lack of political liberties in the airport terminal!

Unfortunately my visit to Singapore was much more hap-hazard than I’d hoped for. In short, when you’re running from one end of that terminal to the other, motivation levels are not helped by signs that say your gate is “Up to ten minutes” away, when you’ve already been running for five minutes. In fact, before leaving New Zealand I didn’t even know it was possible to have buildings that large.

Shit started to get real on the final Singapore-Paris stretch. The reality that I’d signed myself up for six months in a country full of people I probably wouldn’t be able to understand began to sink in. All of the free newspapers were in French. The air-steward said something about Australia that I didn’t really understand, so was forced to reply with ‘hhrrrruuughghh’. I was too scared to ask for a water because I couldn’t remember if the French word for glass was masculine or feminine. I had no idea how I was going to survive for six months. And I was really thirsty.

Not exactly how I would have hoped to enjoy my first trip to Paris, I managed to spend just twenty minutes in the capital, talking to only two people and never leaving an enclosed space. This was when I was still under the impression that the university actually had its shit together, so when they said that university started on 5 January, I would have to be there, on that date, to start my courses. I certainly had no time to faff around in Paris! (My courses actually started two weeks later – I wasn’t even able to enrol until the 14th. Another exchange student doesn’t start until March. This, as you will see, is a recurring theme at the university.)

My train took five hours in total to reach La Rochelle, and it remained dark until 10am. I had well and truly left summer behind. When I finally got to La Rochelle, whether it was because of my severe sleep deprivation or simply the small-town charm of the place, I immediately fell in love with my new home. I got snap-happy at the train station, maxing out my memory card with hundreds of pictures that all looked the same. And with just twenty kilograms of luggage, twelve lost time-zones and a filled baguette sandwich to my name, I was here.
See you in six months New Zealand.

Follow Fuck Yeah I’m in France as I live it up in La Rochelle, complete with getting hopelessly lost in translation, being mocked by university lecturers, a small rainforest-worth of bureaucratic forms and more bread and cheese than you can shake a baguette at.

Although the years tick over and new seasons come and go, there are always a few things you can count on in the sporting world. These seemingly endless truths are something you can always rely on, no matter how much the world has been kicking you in the balls.

The number one thing you can rely on in sport is that the Black Caps will still be shit and will disappoint you with nearly every action they make on a cricket field. Recently we: lost 11 ODIs in a row and lost a test and ODI series against perennial underachievers Pakistan (who were missing their best players due to a pending corruption verdict). And if by chance they do perform well with a finely crafted batting performance or a disciplined bowling spell, it seems as if this was merely to raise the hopes of their supporters in order to serve them with an even more crushing defeat and embarrassment.

Much drunken philosophising has ventured into the subject of why our national cricket team is so appallingly dreadful. Most recently, it was proposed to me that just like any employee, the players should be paid based on their performance. If they had to “win to pay for their dinner” then they might be more inclined to do so. This is a logical argument which relies on the natural human instincts inside all of us. But it fails once scrutinised by evidence.

If we think about Australia, who is the most successful cricket team of the recent past, their top players earn up to $1.5M annually. Compare this to New Zealand Cricket’s contracts, which have a top retainer of approximately $170,000 and whose best player, Daniel Vettori, will earn no more than $400,000. By comparing the top earners, Australian cricketers earn 350% more than their New Zealand rivals. And this clearly correlates to success, as Australia has been both Test and ODI number one and has won the past three World Cups. So perhaps we should be paying our players more to obtain satisfactory results. After all, our players seem to perform reasonably well for their Indian Premier League (IPL) teams who just gave Ross Taylor a USD $1M contract for three weeks of cricket.

But is this kind of money enhancing or ruining the essence of sport? The IPL and T20 have elevated a mercenary ethos into the game of cricket, which in the past we aligned more with European football and American Baseball. Another thing you can always rely on is football clubs over paying for players in the January transfer window. Last week, Liverpool footballer Fernando Torres was sold to rivals Chelsea for a staggering £50M where he will get paid upwards of £150,000 per week. But does this kind of money make a better player? In fact, players on these outrageous amounts of money often feel so much pressure that they don’t fulfil their potential, or in the case of baseball, turn to performance-enhancing drugs. So we probably cannot blame money for our cricketing woes.

So I s’pose a New Year’s challenge to all those reading this: become a cricket player. Be our next Black Cap. A new generation of cricketers may be our only hope. Because God (and his wide range of titles) knows that you couldn’t do worse than the ones we’ve got. And although our players get paid comparatively less than others, it’s still a shit load more than we will ever earn working in a government department on the back of our BAs.

How to make yourself more attractive quickly and easily without having to stop eating doughnuts.

Remind yourself as often as possible. Every time you think of it, or feel down about how you look, try to do one of these things instantly-

-Sit up straight and roll your shoulders back. Anyone who has seen a graduation ceremony, or any event where a lot of people walk in front of you, will have had an uncomfortable chuckle at a few hunchbacks. Most of us are, unfortunately, varying levels of hunchback (…until we regularly remind ourselves, that is).

-Don’t scratch yourself. No, really. Have you ever seen an attractive scratchmark? How about the scab from those itchy bites? Shaving rash will get worse. Leave. It. Alone.

-In the same vein, don’t touch your face unless you actually need to. This will keep your skin happy, and you will look less nervous/insincere.

-In a more complicated vein, think about how you want to appear to people, and how you can stand/sit to reflect that better. Confident people don’t avoid eye contact and hold handbags against their chests. Here’s a good one, to instantly feel more confident keep your thumb as far from your index finger as possible. I’m not kidding. Try to make it look natural.

-Practise smiling as often as possible, wherever you can. People do love a smiler, and everyone—everyone—looks better when smiling.

-Smile, then say “thank you” whenever possible, and use a tone which implies that the recipient really moved heaven and earth for you.

-Every time it is available, drink a glass of water. I hope I don’t have to explain the benefits of water.

-Check your underwear isn’t showing, and is unlikely to anytime soon. Noone finds accidentally flashed gruts impressive, except creeps.

-When washing your hands in the bathroom, look at yourself in the mirror even if you hate doing so. It’s the basic “there’s no food on my face” check that’s important. If you hate looking at yourself, it’s even more important! Look into your eyes and with a mental “This is who I am, and I look fricken great.”

-Apply lip balm, male or female. Wellington wind takes moisture straight outta them.

-Think about what you look like, and don’t gloss over the bits you hate, reminding yourself that “This is who I am, it looks fricken great.”

-Get your makeup chosen by the in-store experts, or at least ask their advice. You will continue to make the same mistakes otherwise, promise.

-In fact, how about buying any body-related product in a store where you can ask for help about that kind of thing, and ask for help for the best product.

-Apply moisturiser to your hands and feet. If you don’t look better, you’ll feel like you do.

-Be frank about your body when discussing it in a non-deprecating way. Confidence is attractiveness. Always try to act about 10% more confident than you feel. I will always remember the advice, “He isn’t thinking ‘that bra doesn’t match her panties’ or ’she shaved her armpits badly.’ He’s thinking, ‘holy shit, I get to see this girl naked,’ and trying not to smile so much it looks like a smirk.”

-When you get dressed, prepare for your clothes to be shifted about a whole lot more than you want them to be, and plan accordingly. Prepare for the weather to vary more than you want it to. There’s nothing less attractive than a sweaty butt, or shivering girl. Unless you’re a creep.

-Most importantly, don’t focus on looking attractive just for the people you find attractive, or want to attract. Focus on feeling attractive, happy and confident about your body and within yourself, and it is important to have this attitude with everyone you come across in your day. It’s not a game to get someone to find you attractive, because it’s not about anyone except your lovely self.

Welcome back to Vic, everyone :)

Read from the bottom up.

“Her body is a temple, I don’t give a fuck, I’m atheist” – Earl Sweatshirt

The human body is a bizarre and complex thing. But if you take away the skin, all you are left with is a gross pile of mushy organs, stringy veins, and this red goo which is really hard to wash out of carpet.

The more we dwell upon foolish notions of ‘beauty’, the more we move away from the truth of the matter, which is that we’re essentially all the same on the inside. We all have blood, which pumps through our veins, leading to the heart—A.K.A. the organ that makes you love the sultry tones of Michael McDonald. From the heart we get the beat of life, which comes in two forms: Latin Jazz, or Chicago Blues. These saucy beats help us to forget just how gross the rest of us truly is.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m mad? Are you thinking “goddamn, I wish I could stab this person with a spoon”? Well, the joke’s on you, because it’s really hard to stab someone with a spoon, and also because I have proof of just how gross we all are: the belly button.

The belly button (or navel) is something we take for granted, and why shouldn’t we? We all have one (with the exception of those who have had an umbilical hernia or gastroschisis) and the only real difference between them is whether they are ‘outies’ or ‘innies’.

However, there is much more to the belly button than merely poking it and making a “pop” noise. Tiny microbes grow inside the navel, and on the whole they appear to be benign, but they live in there, chillin’. Because our navels are relatively isolated, and it’s tricky to wash the entire thing, they are a place where microbes are safe to grow and prosper. In conclusion, your belly button is Smurf Village: deal with it.

In direct contradiction to everything I just said, no one actually knows entirely how the human body works (NO ONE!), but what we do know is quite a lot. Including the fact that certain things can be bad for your body.

In terms of alcohol and your stomach, alcohol can irritate the stomach to the point of inducing gastritis (inflammation of the stomach lining), ulcers and acid reflux. Prolonged exposure to alcohol can erode the stomach lining and cause chronic blood seepage into the stomach. If the individual is particularly unlucky, a vessel can rupture and cause major bleeding. This shouldn’t be a problem if you’re having a cheeky drink every once in a while, but your squishy belly won’t last forever if you treat it with contempt.

Walking barefoot? Don’t. There are several types of fungus that attack the foot, these can result in itching and sometimes pain and scaling. Also it makes you look like a filthy hippy.

This may sound scary, but remember—the illnesses stated above are self-inflicted (and in the case of alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs: really fun). So don’t think of your body as weird, gross, or ugly—it’s not. All it is (and all it ever will be, Botox or not) is a pile of pumping, heaving, wet organs in a skin sack. Just like everyone else’s.

Adorable.

Being horrified of your body is nothing new. David Cronenberg based a film career on it, and women’s and men’s magazines as well as advertising in general fund entire industries on it. As stated before, bodies are gross as hell. But even with all this ground so well-tread, I still find ways to find being in my body a shit-scary A&P show haunted house that never ends, because I’m stuck in it until I die. And to add insult to injury, there are very rarely snow cones involved.

We have been genetically programmed to find ideas of infection and invasion by foreign bodies generally icky and alarming. Fair enough, too—back in the Flintstones days, coming down with the flu meant you wouldn’t be able to violently dismember a gazelle with a chiselled hunk of obsidian and bring it home to the fam. I blame this reptile-brain reaction for the primal dread I feel when a tickle in my throat comes on, or I get a shaving nick accompanied by minor swelling. Every time I wince at an irritated follicle, the caveman in my head wants to tear off my lower jaw to stop a tide of disease from flooding my brain with diseased pus. I wish I could flay the inside of my gullet with a wire brush – really gouge that niggling cough out of there. Then I could clear my throat politely and get a bagel for lunch.

The same goes for super-common skin conditions that science can clear up in a week or so. Trying to stop myself from peering at my hands for new bumps or blemishes like a goddamn monkey is as easy as stopping the Mississippi river with a kitchen stool. But when you break it down, there are so many tiny interlopers that can live in and on your body that dwelling on them can turn you more than a little Howard Hughes. I say become the absolute opposite of a germophobe! Touch all kinds of surfaces, then cram your grubby little kid hands in your mouth! Prepare food on surfaces already dried with tomato juice, meat drippings and God knows what else! Eat a lot of dirt, all the time! What’s wrong with you? Where’s your pioneer spirit? Where is your Kiwi ingenuity?

Person-to-person contact is a whole other story. I would say avoid it entirely for hygiene reasons, but let’s be realistic—you’re a sexually-liberated, Skins-watching, try-anything-once student of life. The best we can do is throw a bunch of dental dams and assorted prophylactics at you and hope some of ‘em stick. Honestly, whatever germs are in your make-out partner’s mouth should be the least of your worries. Keep your concern level at whether they have their (gender respective) piece wrapped up, and you’re away laughing, kids.

Real talk.

REAL TALK is a weekly show on the VBC 88.3 FM (Saturday 8-10pm) and a podcast which can be found on iTunes or at www.Realtalk.co.nz.

Welcome to Victoria, new and returning students! I’m a physics student in the second year of a PhD, and the purpose of this column is to help people outside of the world of science understand it a little better, and learn what your relation to science is. I’ll focus on the particular relation of science to the media in future columns, but today I’ll be giving you an overview of how you can interact with science and scientists in your role as a student at Vic. In all likelihood, you’ve never had as many opportunities than you do now to communicate with scientists, or learn about real, up-to-date research!

Of course, those of you enrolled in a science degree will already have a pretty good idea how you’re gonna learn about science. But there are a number of things you may not know, and these things are applicable to a person in any degree:

Library

The VUW library is a great source of current and historic scientific research. Make use of it! If you’re a new student, then this is probably the first time in your life that you have the ability to go and pick up off the shelf a new issue of Nature, Science or Lancet and read today’s research without having to pay a subscription fee. You may also not be aware that you can access these journals on the internet for free as well, as long as you’re logged on to a VUW computer.

This is the real stuff too. It ain’t no high school titration experiment, or a report on a Newton’s laws of motion! One of the big problems with science in high school is that it is typically very stale stuff. Nothing anyone learned in the past ten years is allowed into your NCEA exams, but what you can find in journals in the library is what professional scientists are interested in right now.

The library website is library.vuw.ac.nz, and it is situated in the Rankine Brown building in Kelburn campus.

Science Society

The VUW Science Society is the newest VUWSA-affiliated representative group. Like the other rep groups, they are designed to provide support for their students, and to reach out to other groups of people. Got a burning question about what happens if you shine a torch in front of you while travelling near the speed of light, or what would happen if you built a ladder between the Earth and the Moon? I just know these guys would love to find the answer for you! They’ll also be holding some more social events during the year, such as quiz nights and lab coat parties. And towards the end of the year, you’ll have the chance to go to the very first Science Ball! How cool would that be? The science society also maintains a mailing list of science speeches and seminars being given around the university.

The science society will have a stall during Clubs Week, so look out for them there. You can also find them on Facebook—search for “the science society” in Victoria University of Wellington.

Viclink

For those of you more interested in the end-user aspects of science and technology, Viclink might be of interest to you. Viclink is Victoria University’s commercialisation company. Its job is to take the results of Vic research and find a way to turn it into a product or service that can be sold in the market. You can visit their website www.viclink.co.nz to learn about some of the most exciting high-tech businesses that have developed from VUW research, and you could find out about the process of tech commercialisation from them too. Viclink will also be worth keeping in mind once you start to do research of your own!

The Viclink office can be found in Alan MacDiarmid building, room 404.

Public Lectures

One last thing I encourage you to do is to take advantage of public lectures! No matter what your field is, your mind will always be broadened by listening to people from beyond your usual spheres. Look out for posters on notice boards around the university. I know it might seem like a drag to haul yourself down to the railway station at 5pm after your classes are over, but trust me: it’s almost always worth the effort.

That’s all from me for now. You’ve got your first week of classes, and a lot of O-Week fun to look forward to! Get out there and enjoy yourself, and next week I’ll get down to the real business of scientific investigation.