Posts by Lucy Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Muse: Guilt By Association Copy, in reply to kiwifarang,
And purchasing a rare signed copy of Mein Kampf is a shrewd investment. It will appreciate in value long after the current stock market bubble wipes out the next wave of speculators.
Well, sure, but probably so are investments in companies that make land mines. That doesn’t mean I don’t reserve the right to be judgey as fuck about you if that’s the kind of investment you choose to make, you know?
Really, I think the lesson for everyone here is that any situation where you are forced to make a statement affirming your total disagreement with the Nazi party is a situation you probably want to avoid being in, *especially* if you’re trying to get into politics.
-
Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Peter Darlington,
He mentions most of the Indian restaurants in London are actually run by Bangladeshi’s with a Bengali emphasis.
As it was explained to me by a Bengali, Bangladesh and Bengal are essentially the same place divided by an arbitrary border.
-
Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Russell Brown,
I was vaguely aware that curry houses were a rarity in most parts of the US the last time I visited. It’s just that my friend Rael knew them all.
Most big cities are OK - I've had decent Indian in Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and the bit of Connecticut where all the hedge fund people live, to name just a few - it's just that anywhere outside them Chinese and Thai are much more popular than Indian. There's even a fairly reasonable Korean place not ten minutes from me. But Indian food has never caught on in the same way it has in NZ, as far as I can tell. (Mind you, I am living in the part of the country where ginger is considered dangerously spicy in the traditional local cuisine, so.)
Now I feel bad for posting pics of my chilis in this glorious neverending summer that Auckland has enjoyed :-)
I'm holding out for a work visit to Seattle next week, where temps of 12C and rain are looking comparatively attractive. But, hey, the blizzard hitting Cape Cod tonight is only giving us an inch of snow, so...gradual improvement?
-
Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
Wellington's Malaysian curry houses must be mentioned! That's easily one of my favourite things about Wellington.
My first eat-out curry was Roti Chenai opposite Manners Mall, when I was 11. I spent so much time in that place as a teenager with my two best friends that all I had to do was show up and I'd get a table for three. ($5 for curry and two roti - one of the best lunch deals going!) I don't know if it's the best curry place in Wellington, but sometimes, in this pale curry-free* land of eternal winter** I'm currently inhabiting, I dream about their garlic dosai.
*Not really, but there's only one really good curry place within fifty miles and reservations are a must. At least there's a passable international foods store, although their supply of Asian Home Cooking spice pastes is sadly limited to laksa.
**It's been the coldest winter since before I was born and when I left the house this morning it was ten degrees below zero. It's NEARLY APRIL.
-
Hard News: What Hekia Parata actually said, in reply to Yamis,
Last year I had a lower ability class of 17 and we destroyed the internal assessments (in a good way), but I’ve had the same class in other years with 28 or more in there and it’s been nightmarish to teach effectively and get good achievement rates, often times when you go through why a student has underachieved it has very little to do with anything that you did, but none of those things could possibly be measured by some sort of national math tool.
This is precisely the problem they've had with value-add assessments in the US - there's absolutely no consistency of results for teachers year-on-year or between classes in the same year, presumably because all the other factors (class size, prior student preparation, etc) create so much noise in the data any signal you might hope to see is invisible. And if past performance by this metric has no predictive power, then it's not actually a metric - it's wishful thinking disguised as a metric.
-
Hard News: What Hekia Parata actually said, in reply to Dave Guerin,
It looked to me (from what you quoted) like she was focusing on value add more than, say, exam results.
Yeah, but value added has pretty well proven to be a total crock in the US, due to the inherent noise in the data from different students, classes, and years. It's nigh-on impossible to find teachers who consistently "add value" year-on-year to the classes they teach, even in subjects like maths with fairly straightforward assessment (and how would you begin to assess it in, say, PE? Music? Art? In the US, they base "value add" for teachers of those subjects on kids' assessments in maths and English. How can that possibly tell you anything about how effective your PE teacher is?) All these "ideas" she's "kicking around" have been disastrous in the systems they have been applied in. That's why it's so terrifying. See, well, everything Jolisa said in her post.
-
Up Front: Floodland, in reply to Hebe,
John McCrone’s story in August 2012 in the Press is a good place to start understanding the issues. Then read Tonkin & Taylor land report. I cannot understand why Gerry Brownlee said yesterday he could not say whether land had dropped as a result of the earthquakes: shitloads of dosh involved? T&T was clear: it has.
Given Christchurch’s original flood risk, not knowing whether it had changed would involve either some pretty fundamental incompetence on the part of a lot of people or a massive cover-up. I am strangely relieved to know it’s just a massive cover-up and people have actually been checking. (ETA: Googling some of McCrone's reporting over the last year or so, I am gobsmacked that Brownlee thought he could get away with claiming this. The increased flood risk and general land subsidence appears to be extensively documented.) Not that it helps in the immediate term.
Back to the swamp: just found that most of the book treasures are dry. Yay.
Hurrah!
-
Up Front: Floodland, in reply to Emma Hart,
The drop in the land levels is quite hard to get your head around, because it’s pretty much invisible.
See, as someone who...did a bunch of geology courses...wait, that's not as authoritative as I meant it to be...anyway, I would be *totally fucking stunned* if the earthquakes hadn't radically altered the floodplain profile in Christchurch. It's basically a drained swamp, and everything got shaken and stirred - sometimes sort of literally, where there was lots of liquefaction. But measuring all of that, charting it, re-working the risk tables...that's years of work, and it's not surprising it's pretty far down the list when they're not finished arguing about the earthquake risk in some areas.
(By the way, the expectation back when I was looking at the maps was that the big flood risk was the Waimakariri breaking its banks and doing for all the northern suburbs - like the expected "big one" for earthquakes was a magnitude 9 somewhere along the Alpine Fault. The local Heathcote valley flooding wasn't talked up much. But then, everything was 50cm higher...puts sea level rise into perspective, no?)
Electricorp Chairman the late John Fernyhough blatantly ignored being held to account in a TV interview by chanting “one in 100 years”.
Argh. A 1-in-100-year risk means *a 1% chance of happening in any given year*, not that it only happens once every hundred years. That's actually still worth planning for.
-
Up Front: Floodland, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
Thank you for taking the time to write this, Isabel. There's an immense feeling of helplessness all over again just seeing this on the news. I can't imagine what it's like on the ground. It's so relentless and unfair.
I do get a little grumpy at the event being called a 100 year event as if that can’t be planned for when in reality it a one in 5 event
The impression I get from the news coverage is that the *impact* is what was previously considered a 1-in-100-year level, now altered by the quakes' effect on the local geography, but the storm itself is a 1-in-5-year level of rain. I remember we had torrential downpours in May 2010 - driving rain every day, all day for a week - and I biked to work along the Avon every day without seeing any flooding. It seems like the land movement has fundamentally altered the risk profile for a lot of the city in ways that haven't yet been worked through, because everyone's still cleaning up from the quakes themselves.
-
Up Front: Neither Deep nor Wide, in reply to Emma Hart,
It's comfort, but it's not safety. The Middle East is more relaxed about demonstration of affection between members of the same sex than the West is. It's, can I stand having my relationship constantly misread? Can I handle being assigned twin beds all the time? And it's okay if the answer is 'no'. But it's not that travelling as a pair of women is dangerous.
Fair enough; right now, I'm probably oversensitive to that sort of possibility because the whole Being Queer In Public thing is so new, and I know that I'm living in an artificially safe space. I genuinely don't have a sense of what it's going to be like when we move somewhere that's not hyper-LGBT-friendly, let alone going somewhere that is outright *un*friendly.
And yes, as Bart implied, one of the reasons we're very glad we went to Egypt now, is that it may actually get worse in future. This might be your best chance. Pure democracy would absolutely make Egypt less safe for women.
Also a consideration. The situation's so volatile there it's hard to tell what's going to happen.