The other ideas I have are going to take some work, so this is it for now. Both are based on Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, but I know a few people who experience the odd gravitas shortfall.

… I’ve started selling T-shirts. Just the one so far, but I’m working on a few more. Later designs will be less cryptic; this one will help you confuse your friends.

For those people coming to my blog via Google in search of Dr Greg Holwell, of the University of Auckland: here’s his website.

Make sure you ask him about his  Whitesnake collection.

Just parking this link here so I can find it after I’ve ruminated a bit more:

Humans Are Still Evolving, Study

This looks like the business, Stearns is a heavyweight in evolutionary biology. The trends in female reproductive potential that they’re suggesting would have us creeping closer to the life history patterns of the other great apes. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that something really weird must have happened in the evolution of modern humans. I’ll try and write something more involved about this over the next couple of days.

I recently had the opportunity (OK, OK, I was on honeymoon, kind of) to spend more time in Ohakune. It’s a place that still feels novel to me, so I think I can write about this trip without the complacency that makes it hard to say anything fresh about more familiar parts of New Zealand.

Ohakune is one of the highest inhabited parts of the North Island, and serves as an entry point for Turoa skifield on Mt Ruapehu. As a consequence it spends much of winter over-run by Aucklanders and Wellingtonians wearing beanies, fleeces and interesting sunburns. Even with them, it’s beautiful. It’s a very New Zealand thing, I think, to be constantly over-shadowed by a mountain; Ohakune takes the experience to extremes. You can’t go anywhere without seeing Ruapehu looming in the sky, in whatever mood he happens to be displaying today. The North Island has recently had a spectacular and unseasonal dumping of snow, so the mood was pretty icy for much of our trip (for the rest, it was the old coyly hiding behind clouds routine).

Ohakune is famous for growing carrots (and for erecting a big fibreglass carrot), but it’s also within spitting distance of some remarkable old-growth forests. New Zealand’s native forests are fairly sharply split between Southern Beech forest (Nothofagus species, unrelated to northern hemisphere beeches) and what’s often called called podocarp forest; actually a mix of podocarps, various conifers, proper angiosperms, plus whatever climbing, scrambling, divaricating and creeping plants can find a toehold in a riotous temperate ecosystem that has more in common with the rainforests of the tropics than with most temperate forests.  Ironically, the beech forests are ultimately the dominant form: their litter is highly acidic, and they both create and do well in low-nutrient conditions where the podocarp forest can’t compete. Fortunately for the podocarps, New Zealand has rather a good line on disturbance regimes. If the floods and landslides don’t keep the beech forest scattered and battling, the volcanic eruptions certainly will. We walked in bush to the south of Mt Ruapehu, and found it dominated by huge silver beech, some of them probably 1000 years old. Closer to town were forests pierced by towering rimu with shaggy bark and drooping foliage. Mosses and fungi were everywhere, and as the token Kiwis we were doing our best to identify everything for visitors. Bush-walking with botanists and zoologists is drawn out and enjoyable experience, but not one that burns many calories.

This trip has crystallised a feeling I’ve had since returning to New Zealand, that I now appreciate aspects of the landscape that I previously took for granted. One of those things I’ve come to appreciate about New Zealand after seeing them anew is the humble flax bush. Flax (or Phormium tenax, to it its formal scientific name and avoid confusion with the unrelated European flax) is a monocot, vaguely related to grasses, but flax is to temperate grasses as The Incredible Hulk is to David Banner. A mature flax bush is over two metres tall, more when it bears flower spikes. It is resistant to salt spray, snow, howling winds, and waterlogged soils. Both chainsaws and lawnmowers choke and die when confronted with flax. Its distinctive and unmanageable shape is as evocative a symbol of the New Zealand landscape as any forest giant, and more ubiquitous.

Flax flowers provide food for birds and lizards, and the plant itself shelters insects, snails, lizards, and the seedlings of less robust species. Some varieties are highly prized for weaving and handcrafts, and with a little more scraping and processing those same green blades yield a natural cord of high quality and strength (well, for a natural fibre, anyway). Flax grows on the side of roads, in swamps, on the coastal cliffs and the high alpine plateaus, and until i re-made my acquaintance I didn’t realise how much I liked it.

Our time in Ohakune was followed by a brief jaunt in Kawhia. Kawhia is a traditional New Zealand West Coast fishing village, at the end of a narrow road with about eleven million corners and almost as many hills. It’s also an awfully nice place, home of what I think are some of the best fish and chips in New Zealand (it helps that the fishing boats tie up to a wharf right across the road from the shops). I have to recommend the Blue Chook, a pub and restaurant run by two sisters from Wellington (and points north, south east and west, by the sounds of it). Kawhia harbour is huge, heavily tidal and largely empty, probably because the harbour mouth is the typical West Coast bar with strong currents and permanent breakers. Outside the harbour is the wild blue Tasman sea, and black-sand beaches stretching north past Aotea, Raglan and Port Waikato to the Kaipara, and south to Taranaki. Did mention that I like Kawhia?

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Werewolf brings us a very informative piece on Iran’s internal politics and how that relates to their world position:  Iran: Paranoid, But With Real Enemies. Well worth mulling over (or just bookmarking as a reference to dramatis personae, since the medias insist on calling Ahmadinejad the ruler of Iran).

II

I recently discovered a documentary about Project Orion on Youtube (link is to part one of five, click through to the rest).  It’s interesting from a technical point of view; I take the view that Orion is the only nuclear-powered spacecraft we actually know how to build, and I don’t have a problem with a nuclear-powered spacecraft if you keep it away from our biosphere. But the reason I’ve posted it as sociopolitical is the attitudes of the guys (all guys, this was military-industrial complex in the sixties). Freeman Dyson seems to think that ecology is an ideology, even though he was prepared to trust his life to a closed-cycle ecological experiment.  And he was working with people who designed nuclear weapons, and didn’t see an ideology inherent in that.

Like I said, weird stuff.  Friendly Atom KoolAid all ’round. Yes, we’re planning to launch directly from the ground, but we never did solve the fallout problem… no kidding. They were all extraordinary gung-ho, too. Controlled experiment, what’s that?  Was that really the culture of people doing cutting-edge work in the middle of the 20th Century? Perhaps they didn’t mention details because some of it is still classified, but they don’t come across like any of the engineers or scientists I know. More like big kids playing with really cool toys, and hardly idea of consequences.

III

This all ties into something I’ve been thinking a bit about, which is the lasting psychological effect of the Cold War. I didn’t really grow up with it; too young and too far away. The Iron Curtain came down when I was ten years old. But people who were adult, or coming of age in that period seem to have internalised it in an odd way. I think that somewhere still in the back of their minds, off course the world is full of nuclear weapons. So of course it’s logical to use that technology for low-carbon power generation (just as a for example, and because it’s currently topical: I think it’s a more general mindset than that). Normalising things that are actually quite nasty and best avoided is of course a pretty common human behaviour. I’m just curious as to what extent people did this with the threat of nuclear war, and how it shapes their current attitudes.

I just made these today, and they’re enough of a success that I feel like sharing the recipe. This is a proper scone recipe, not like most you’ll find if you search for gluten free scones on Teh Internets (proper scones do not have sugar in them!).

Ingredients

• 3 cups rice flour
• 6 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 tablespoon besan*
• 1 teaspoon guar gum/xanthan gum
• Sprinkle of cinnamon
• 75g butter
• Chopped dates or sultanas to taste
• Milk to mix
• Potato starch for rolling out

Method

Soften the butter in the microwave (I know your grandmother rubbed the butter in cold… your grandmother probably didn’t keep her butter in a fridge). Add the dry ingredients and rub together with your fingers until there are no lumps left. Add milk, stirring until you have a big sticky mass. Then add the fruit and mix well.

Turn out onto a breadboard dusted with potato starch (the slipperiest flour substitute), and press into a slab about 2cm thick. Cut scone-sized rectangles and place on a greased oven tray. Cook at 220°C for 10-15 minutes.

Eat with jam and cream. Or whatever decadence your gluten-free little heart desires.

*The besan is mostly to make the colour more attractive. I used brown rice flour: for white rice flour you might want a bit more besan.

Even the Anglican Church thinks you’re being reactionary. That’s like being more disingenuous than a tobacco company executive. I mean, well done, fair play, but… srsly, folks: this isn’t actually something to be proud of.

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People seem to be ignorant of Indonesia’s real motivations for not  wanting an independent West Papua. Jakarta doesn’t give a shit about West Papua, but it cares an awful lot about the precedent that any moves to regional independence would set, particularly for the militant Muslim separatist movements that it’s been battling in some provinces since the 1940s.

II

Holocaust survivor Jacob Bronowski stands knee-deep in the ashes of Auschwitz and talks about why what the Nazis did had nothing to do with science or the scientific mindset. Starts out silent:

I just  found a photostream on Flickr chock-full of filmy descriptions like “cross process”. All attached to photos quite clearly taken with a DSLR and complete with exposure, focus and date info in the metadata. And I found it via the “film forever” pool.

You know you must be doing something right when the hipsters start trying to pretend they’re doing it too.