Category Archives: Uncategorized

Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act

By | September 15, 2010

Like many, I’m pretty incensed at the passing of the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act (CERRA) in the last 24 hours or so. For those who need context, please read these two posts, one from Idiot/Savant, the other from KiwiPolitico. Basically, the act allows the governor-general (at the request of Gerry Brownlee, a Minister… Read More »

“The TV Show”

By | December 18, 2009

A most excellent animation borrowed from Mark Chen’s blog Fourth walls crashing down left, right and center, with a kick-arse soundtrack. It gets particularly excellent when the worlds start to merge.

Mad Science

By | December 15, 2009

So, I really need this book: Mad Science – Experiments you can do at home, but probably shouldn’t. I feel that it would be of great relevance to my ongoing research into unnecessarily hazardous fun.

Suspended humiliation

By | October 8, 2009

I just want to quickly articulate the concept of suspended humiliation. Like suspended terror, where one is not presently terrified but well aware of the likelihood of a terrifying experience occurring at any moment, suspended humiliation is the sense that one might be called out and humiliated at any second. It’s the feeling you might… Read More »

On Procrastination, the iPhone, and Grinding.be

By | September 1, 2009

Clearly I’ve got work to do, because I’m procrastinating with blog posts. #include<speculative comments about motivation> Interesting piece about the futurist implications of the promising new technologies on the horizon becoming corporate controlled walled-gardens, much as everything is now. It’s clear that some level of profit driven development is good, as it spurs innovation, but… Read More »

SD Conf. – VIII – Sterman et al – Climate Change modelling with C-ROADS

By | August 4, 2009

Notes from one of the closing plenaries at the 27th System Dynamics Conference:: Using C-ROADS to Support Analysis of International Climate Change Proposals by Andrew Jones, John Sterman, Thomas Fiddaman, Travis Franck, Elizabeth Sawin Following on nicely from the presentation by Moxnes, in this presentation John Sterman talked about climate change, modelling, and decision making.… Read More »

Pending upgrades

By | August 3, 2009

I’m going to be making design changes to my blog (the one at Meme Hazard) over the next few weeks. Apologies in advance for the mess and inevitable breakdowns. For those of you reading this syndicated on Facebook, LJ or elsewhere, this is probably irrelevant. Please go about your normal business :)

SD Conf. – VII – Moxnes – Do people follow advice w.r.t complex systems?

By | August 3, 2009

Notes from one of the closing plenaries at the 27th System Dynamics Conference: Are advice adhered to? “Populist” versus “activist” or “systems analyst” advice by Erling Moxnes Hypothetically, imagine you’re a reindeer herder. Weird, I know, but this research is from Norway. You’ve got, say, 1850 reindeer on your island. Reindeer eat lichen, which grows… Read More »

System Dynamics Conf. – VI – The Rest

By | August 2, 2009

This will be my last journal style post on the conference; I’ve got two detailed write-ups of the “Closing Challenges” presentations to post separately, and at some point, I’ve got some reflections on the conference as a whole, and in general on what one can get out of a conference, but they’ll wait till later.… Read More »