2016: Seems to be that this is the first time a year has widely been accredited as being complicit in bad things that have happened, the death Bowie & Prince, Trumps election and my favourite teacup that broke to name a few.

learnings: we took some learnings from the report but we don't really intend to address them.

Russell, is there audio of your time on the radio for the flag marathon?

I think Quaxing. I'm going to jump on my velocipede and quax me some comestibles. Honorable mention to pfffft akshully and redpeak. In sci tech circles crispr is bound to be word of the year.

a yellow pohutukawa in the esplanade in Palmerston North

I'd like to see something like an approval voting system for electorates. Where you can vote yes or no to any or all of the candidates. It's supposed to elect the Condorcet winner almost all of the time and goes some way to negate tactical voting.

Even Obama is having a dig at CC's climate change and moon positions

"Now, part of what’s unique about climate change, though, is the nature of some of the opposition to action. It’s pretty rare that you’ll encounter somebody who says the problem you’re trying to solve simply doesn’t exist. When President Kennedy set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it; it was going to be too expensive, it was going to be too hard, it would take too long. But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anybody saying that the moon wasn’t there or that it was made of cheese. "

Oh imagine if policy was based on evidence. Get a study evaluating the harm and make a decision based on that even if the cut off is somewhat arbitrary. The lancet published a evaluations a while back as referenced in this article, so maybe something like that would help. http://transform-drugs.blogspot.co.nz/2007/03/lancet-and-drug-harms-missing-bigger.html . I did for a while hope that the legislation might be a step in the right direction, not any more it seems.

Traktor have recently released a dj app for ipads, looks like it might be fun, $25