Just finished Chweβs βJane Austen, Game Theorist) (h/t @scientificdiscovery.dev) which I very much enjoyed. The book explains how Austen essentially teaches game theory in her novels.>
"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead"
Happy birthday to TOM STOPPARD, born TomΓ‘Ε‘ Straussler this day (July 3) in 1937
"None of the key concepts contained in the proposed principles are truly present in te Tiriti. Instead, the proposed principles are built on additions, omissions and distortions of the original text".
Great new paper from Luke Harrington and co-authors: how NZ rainfall extremes (wet & dry) change as the climate warms. Even where no change in average rainfall is expected, we still see wetter wets and drier drys. We need to #adapt to this, and #mitigate to cap it. www.stuff.co.nz/climate-chan...
The Great Barrier Reef has experienced five mass bleaching events in the last decade β the most recent in March this year. It was the most severe and widespread mass bleaching event ever recorded there.
Reminder that you can sign off emails today with:
Kia pai te tau hou (Have a good new year)
Kia pai to mutunga wiki roa (Have a good long weekend)
NgΔ mihi o te tau hou (Greetings for the new year)
Good to see that the NZ governmentβs shameful abandonment of bringing agriculture into the Emissions Trading Scheme is mentioned in this article on Denmark doing the opposite.
Correlates with Denmark being first in the Corruption Perception Index.
iβve always found brooke fraserβs career kinda weird, because her pitch-perfect, blemish-free empire was built hand-in-hand with an abusive megachurch. please RT this story, i think it's important... and it gets kinda weird: www.webworm.co/p/brookefraser
The PCE's latest report brought a lot together for me about what seems broken in Aotearoa and what we can do to fix it. open.substack.com/pub/troybais...
NZ an executive paradise, not democratic paradise
In a speech on how to improve our governance and democracy, former Prime Minister and constitutional law expert Sir Geoffrey Palmer argues NZ democracy is not producing governments that follow majority public opinion on important issues
A study in Nature Ecology & Evolution reports that the frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires appear to have doubled over the past 20 years, and the six most extreme years for these events have occurred since 2017. go.nature.com/3RFYBPW π§ͺ
Climate change is βloading the weather dice against us,β as I say here. βAs the ocean and the atmosphere are heating up, itβs supercharging our climate system, essentially adding more sixes and even some sevens and an eight to our weather dice.β
Listen here:
A demonstration of what we all know - "Cunningham said climate change has made fire weather hotter and drier, lending the right conditions for wildfires to erupt β even in environments where fires are infrequent." www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...
The relationship between fuck around and find out is linear and is described by π¦ = ππ₯ where π is always equal to 1. The time to 'find out' was short because the magnitude of 'fuck around' was high.
Don't forget to get out there today and figure out a strategy for saving our ecosystem from the largest crisis it's ever faced without offending anyone! π
Something that's perhaps worth considering in the "does throwing soup at paintings/ paint on Stonehenge help change minds about climate change action" discourse is that this question has been studied and we have data.
An important thread for whenever the conversation turns to *which* species we might save from extinction. (By @sophiefern.bsky.social who really knows her stuff.)
Solar panels & wind turbines yes, but energy *demand* has to start falling if we're to have any chance of slowing climate change. Can we do it? www.theguardian.com/environment/...