Wellingtonista has the word on a series of free Shakespeare shows around Wellington over the first two weeks of December. I’m thinking of catching one of them, but I’m not sure which yet. I’ll have to wait to see how my schedule pans out.
For anyone interested in sending Christmas presents, I’m going to start a wish list. I’m not planning on crazy-expensive stuff that I’ll never have a chance of getting. I’m thinking of somewhat realistic things.
- A subscription to Scientific American Mind. Even though I don’t understand it all, it’s an amazing read and always interesting. The price gets up there for international readers, but it’s still cheaper than a lot of my IEEE subscriptions
First, Don Brash is resigning as leader of the National Party of New Zealand. This stems from an incident involving leaked email and a yet-unpublished book. The book is on hold thanks to a court injunction barring anyone from communicating the contents of the email.
A strong lesson needs to be learned here. Email is not private. If it hasn’t been encrypted, it is public. Even if it has been encrypted, there are no guarantees that it is secure. The best analogy is that of a postcard traveling through the postal system. Anyone with a pair of eyes pointed in the right direction can see what is written on the postcard, and exactly the same is true for email. I believe that it was wrong for the judge to grant the injunction, and I think that the general population should take care with what they think is personal, private and secret.
Second, a conversation with a friend who’s since moved to Australia brought to light a strong point:
Sure, the corruption might be low, and we don’t stand for fascist stuff, but kiwis are SO short sighted.
The driver behind this was more a generalisation on my part – that politicians are responsible only for getting themselves re-elected. With a focus of two to five years, they’re being asked to make decisions that will continue to impact the region for decades. What’s missing is a proper sense of planning. Why isn’t there a set of well-defined goals to work towards? There is the Wellington Regional Strategy, but it seems surprisingly short on details when it comes to things like traffic volume growth in the next decade. When you read of the changes possible within the largest of cities, it makes you wonder why we’re letting the government shovel money into motorways and bypasses in hopes that increasing the amount of road-space that drivers have a available, they’ll somehow stop congestion problems. They don’t seem to understand that natural systems have a way of filling resources to capacity.
So the next time that I’m watching 2 buses go by before there is enough room for me to get on, I’ll be sure to silently thank our city councillors for planning for drivers instead of passengers.
Edit 24–11-2006 Noticed broken link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess’_paradox
