Category: General

Remu-wera

Morgan Avery

remu-wera

Why not correct the naming of our suburbs, where there are clear examples of more correct spellings? I think Remu-wera means something like ‘tail of the whale’ and is an older name for Mt Hobson.

New Zealand, Supine

Morgan Avery

supine-new-zealand

I can’t help thinking that it would be better for all of New Zealand if this was the ordinary way to display our fine country on national maps.

The horizontal view seems to create less of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ feeling than I get from the ordinary North/South map, this side-by-side orientation evokes something more familial, inspiring a sense of brotherhood and mateship.

Anyway, isn’t it sort of an old-fashioned world-view to always put North at the top? After all, there isn’t really any ‘top’ on a sphere, let’s just do our own thing.

Stroh Violins

Morgan Avery

amplified-violin-variants

These things are incredible. They look like something you’d order from an eccentric luthier, only available from a difficult-to-navigate website, perhaps featuring autoplaying background music that starts suddenly and makes you jump, with barely relevant animated GIFs distributed haphazardly around the page, but they were actually made around the turn of last century.

stroh-violin

They’re modified violins, with attached amplifying horns. Apparently there are even cello-sized instruments available as well, but I didn’t see any on display today.

Absolutely wonderous looking machines – there are videos on the web of people playing various examples, unfortunately the sound is much less special (to my ears, in any case) than the appearance.

Photos taken at an exhibition of the Castle Colllection of antique, rare, and unusual instruments, currently on display at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Richard Dawkins

Morgan Avery

richarddawkins

I went to tonight’s Richard Dawkins lecture with my friend Catherine.

Dawkins is very popular in a certain circle (which I broadly include myself in), and it sold out within 2 hours of tickets going on sale, thankfully I was able to acquire a couple of tickets from a friend.

Dawkins has fascinating ideas, can present them in entertaining ways, and of course has a terribly sharp mind, so of course it was good, but the evening could still be improved with just a couple of small tweaks to the format. For one thing, by embracing the audience – question time was really engaging, cutting 10 minutes from Dawkins’ monologue to add to the interactive portion would have enhanced both.

It is a problem, of course, that you never know how many questions you’re going to get, or what the quality of those questions will be, so this might be a dangerous approach.

Secondly, and this could sound a bit lowbrow, but it would have been nice to have had slides to illustrate each point he was making as he spoke – he was in front of a pair of gigantic projection screens, and Auckland University Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd used them during his introduction, so the facility was certainly available.

Incidentally, the attached photo is of his reaction to being asked about the Symphony of Science videos – in which he has involuntarily (if that’s the right word) appeared – he has watched them, and indeed seems to find them quite delightful.