For a holiday in March 2021, my draft itinerary is
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Day 1: Drive with bike from home to Paeroa: 6 hours.
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Day 2: Bike Paeroa to Waihi: 6-7 hours (inc. sightseeing), 24 km. Stay 2 nights.
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Day 3: See the sights in Waihi.
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Day 4: Bike back to Paeroa.
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Day 5: Drive home.
I’m looking into options for a small holiday early next year. It’s so frustrating when websites make it difficult to find the prices. I don’t fall into the category of people who don’t need to know how much a thing costs. How many people do?
I’ve suggested to our local Library that they buy Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley 📚:
A new, feminist translation of Beowulf … a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child,
It’s time to sell my (not very) old bike — I just don’t ride it now I have an electric bike. The Avanti Cadent ER 2 is so light though! And fast. Sad to see it go, but the space and the $$ will be very welcome. Took it for a last very short ride today.
Siouxsie Wiles & Toby Morris: Covid-19 and the Swiss cheese system:
Twenty years ago, James Reason, a professor of psychology at the University of Manchester in the UK, published a paper in the British Medical Journal in which he described what he called the “Swiss cheese model of system accidents”. Reason was trying to move people’s thinking from treating mistakes as individual errors by “bad” people to a systems approach that accepts that humans are fallible and mistakes are to be expected. Rather than blaming individuals for failure, we should try to understand how and why the failure happened to prevent it from happening again.
But what has Swiss cheese got to do with all this?
The idea behind the systems approach is to build in layers of barriers and safeguards. In an ideal world, each of these defensive layers would be impenetrable. But in the real world, they aren’t. So Reason likened each layer to a slice of Swiss cheese – it has holes in it. To be fair to the Swiss, they have lots of different cheeses, many of which don’t have holes, so it’s probably more accurate to call Reason’s model the “Emmental Model”.
Multitasking. Watching NASA Live | NASA (starts now):
Live coverage of OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touch-and-go (TAG) maneuver to collect sample on asteroid Bennu
while working on my email InBox and updating subs payments and database for the Waikawa Beach Ratepayers Association.
Election 2020: ‘Historical high’ - New Zealand Parliament readies for more diversity
NZ’s first African, Latin American and Sri Lankan MPs are among 40 new faces in Parliament.
…7 of the Green Party’s 10 seats, more than half of Labour’s 64 seats …will be occupied by women.
Excellent video: Why Doesn’t All Thunder Sound The Same?:
We’ve all experienced thunder, but what ARE all those claps, booms, and rumbles?
Today’s dog walk was in the forest across the river. We stopped by the shag colony and listened to the shags while the river flowed placidly by. 🐶
Looking for something else I saw one of NZ’s most famous and best-loved TV ads: Bugger.
A series of farming mishaps each provoke the laconic comment — “bugger”.
The shock value… the role of Hercules the dog, and the… hapless farmer … made for Kiwi pop culture magic.
Bug report from Micro.Blog 2.0 on Mac: the New Post window ends up behind the main window after switching apps.
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New Post
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Switch to [app] to copy text
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Return to continue writing New Post. Post window is annoyingly behind the main window.
(Repost as I think it got lost.)
Scientists have measured … the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule.
… 247 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a 1.
Our election has significantly increased diversity in our 120 seat Parliament:
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All eyes on Māori MPs after an impressive battle (15 people)
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New Zealand now has the queerest Parliament in the world (11 people)
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NZ election brings in largest Pacific caucus (10 people, I think)
Sharon Murdoch draws 👍 political cartoons. Our Prime Minister as author:
The Second Book: OK, so the first one had a birth, a terrorist attack, a volcanic eruption and a pandemic
This second one, my public wants a house, a job, a recovery, equity and no surprises… Oh, boy.
All ♀ should know — World Menopause Day is 18 October. Breaking the taboo: Women mixing menopause with martinis as a call for change:
30+ potential symptoms - some … minor, others … life-changing. …
“I don’t feel like myself,” … oestrogen has over 400 biological actions.
This Paradise shelduck pair were calling in the cow paddock next door.
Pleased by strong themes of hope, trust, a leap of faith, and working together in Star Trek Discovery S03E01. (On Netflix in Aotearoa New Zealand.) Screenshot
Is this a new trend in shows? They were also key themes in the sci-fi series Away.
With most votes counted, that’s a decisive and historic win for Jacinda Ardern, Labour and the Greens. It takes 2 weeks for Special Votes to be counted but they can’t change too much now. Now the Government will have a huge job ahead of them.
The Wairarapa candidate, Kieran McAnulty, who seems likely to win the seat for Labour actually used the word “streuth” in his interview. I didn’t know anyone actually said that any more. (“Streuth" pronounced ‘strooth’ is an exclamation.)