We have English, French, Spanish, Portuguese all trending Christmas greetings.  And then the American’s are shopping at their holy temple of commercialism: Wal-Mart.

Merry Christmas Everyone.

PUBS are likely to be banned from selling energy drinks on tap with both the Government and Opposition committing to tackling the issue.

… highly-caffeinated drink Mother is on tap at 95 pubs and clubs across the state, despite NSW Health officials warning energy drinks, mixed with alcohol, can provoke sexual assaults and an increased rate of violence.

Health minister Carmel Tebbutt will look at banning energy drinks on tap and will put the issue on the agenda at a cabinet committee.

The next thing I expect is the BAC (blood alcohol concentration) limit for driving to be replaced by a BCC (blood caffeine concentration) limit.

The reality is alcohol causes much more problems than caffeine and I don’t see any moves to ban that.

A Paris court has convicted US search engine giant Google and its chief executive Eric Schmidt of defamation over results from its “suggest” function, a French legal affairs website has revealed.

The new function, which suggests options as you type in a word, brought up the words “rapist” and “satanist” when the plaintiff’s name was typed into the search engine, legalis.net reported.

The court concluded that the search engine’s linking his name to such words was defamatory.

A Google spokesman told AFP by email that they would be appealing the ruling.

The statement said that the Google Suggest function simply reflected the most common terms used in the past with words entered, so it was not Google itself that was making the suggestions.

Now this is interesting, Google are correct that they are not manually making the suggestions. But a machine they programmed is. Where does the accountability for the suggestions it makes lie? You can’t sue a machine, or in the future maybe you can?

But does this mean that a machine that is artificially intelligent and makes money for you really makes money for itself? And if it gets sued then the money that it has made can be used to pay court costs? Can a machine be represented in court by a lawyer?

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. – Benjamin Franklin.

This morning I have been cleaning the house and among other rubbish that is being thrown out is a few old bus passes. For some reason I decided to look on the back of my bus pass where each of the trips taken are recorded and it is a little scary how routine my day is:

Trip 1 – On Bus at 8.20
Trip 2 – On Bus at 17.29

Trip 3 – On Bus at 8.28
Trip 4 – On Bus at 17.29

Trip 5 – On Bus at 8.29
Trip 6 – On Bus at 17.20

Trip 7 – On Bus at 8.31
Trip 8 – On Bus at 17.40

The scatter of morning trips is within 11 minutes and three of the four trips are within a 3 minute period on different days. Coming home from uni the spread is over a 20 minute period but two of the four trips are identical times on consecutive days.

The going to uni closeness in times makes a lot of sense I have my morning routine drilled down so well that I can be up at 7.30, showered, breakfast, and walk down to the bus stop within a 10 minute window of variance.

What surprises me more is the pattern in heading home. I try to maintain 9 – 5 hours at uni but the end time is often determined by who I am talking to or what I am working on, it is not the sort of thing you can just stop, I stop when I get to a point in my code I can halt on, or I finish whatever task I was doing, so to manage 4 consecutive days of finishing within a 20 minute window is well scary.

West Coast cannabis haul slumps 42pc

The West Coast’s reputation as the second most popular cannabis growing area in New Zealand after Northland may be under threat.

The headline and opening line of the story makes it appear that cannabis is a major export earner for New Zealand.

a “standard fault” caused delays of about half an hour

Auckland commuters on the Western line faced 30-minute delays this morning when a train broke down and had to be pushed down the tracks.

I don’t see how a train breaking down and having to be pushed to another station can be considered a “standard fault” and be treated as such a minor and simple operational issue. It is little wonder Auckland has such poor public transport given the “meh” type response to this sort of issue. The Auckland rail network has only 3 routes on it and yet it seems to have more failures than any other major city that I know.

Hotplate mistaken for a landmine

A tense situation involving an apparent land mine under a Mount Maunganui house was defused after Defence Force bomb disposal unit members identified the mystery object as an old and corroded hotplate.

I know that you can’t take bomb threats/concerns as jokes but really a hotplate as a landmine? And how the hell do you defuse a hotplate!

Scrubone at Halfdone Blog has written a good post on the issue: http://halfdone.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/cults/

His key comments are:

Someone commented over there (sarcastically) asking what the difference between a cult and a church is. Well, if you’re not “permitted” to listen to Radio Rhema or “attend any other Christian ministry”, you’re in a cult.

Cults try to shut down all independent thinking. The activly control what members do and say. Only the thoughts and idea of the leader are allowed.

On the other hand, a good church will encourage (Biblical) independent thought and study and cooperating with other churches in the Lord’s work. Naturally, there are plenty of bad churches out there, on both extremes.

Update: Immediately after I wrote this Scrubone just did another great post: http://halfdone.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/brians-cult/

All I can suggest is Tamaki should get a new theme song, how about this one:

If you desire more entertaining information on Tamaki’s background here is the Uncyclopedia article on him:

“the development of his theology, a radical and innovative doctrinal system that dispensed with annoyances like humility and love for fellow man and replaced them with the more progressive and modern virtues of materialist greed and unbridled judgmental bigotry. They kept their doctrines nice and flexible so they could make them up as they went along. The only thing set in stone was that the congregation had to give them plenty of money.

such a skilled orator was Pastor Brian – it was positively ingenious the way he could turn any sermon on any subject around to the subject of money, and how God needed more of it. No matter what the theme of his sermon, whether it was “Socialism is the Tool of Evil”, “Homosexuals and Women with IQ’s higher than 50 will burn in hell”, “Thinking is the enemy of righteousness” or “Fundamentalist Indoctrination is the true path to Holiness” – all would eventually find their utmost expression in the familiar mantra – “It’s time to take up the tithe and offering now” – at which point the Armourguard security van would back up to the door of the church and the security guards would cock their weapons.”

For the past 30 years, business leaders, former government officials and scientists have been secretly working on a plan to save humanity from destruction when the Earth collides with another planet on 21 December 2012.

They have set up a covert Institute for Human Continuity which has now agreed to go public and warn the world that there is a 94 per cent probability of “cataclysmic forces” destroying our planet in three years’ time.

Its website offers survival kits and encourages people to sign up for a lottery to decide who will be among the lucky few chosen to be saved.

You are probably thinking that this is an elaborate hoax – you would be right. But hundreds of people have apparently been taken in by the nonsense put out by Sony Pictures as part of a “viral marketing” campaign for its film 2012, set for release next month.

Nasa is taking the issue so seriously that an astronomer at the agency has spoken out to condemn the use of the hoax website, which claims the world is going to end in 2012.

David Morrison said he had received more than 1,000 enquiries from members of the public who were concerned that Nasa scientists were involved in a conspiracy to deny that they were tracking the movements of Nibiru, a hitherto undiscovered planet on a collision course with Earth.

Dr Morrison, a distinguished scientist at Nasa’s Astrobiology Institute, said that the marketing behind the film, distributed by Columbia Pictures, was making some people so scared that he feared they could harm themselves.

“They’ve created a completely fake scientific website. It looks very slick. It talks about this organisation having existed for 30 years and it consists of international scientists and business people and government officials having concluded that there is a 94 per cent chance of the Earth being destroyed in 2012 – and it’s all made up, it’s pure fiction. But obviously some people are treating it seriously,” Dr Morrison told The Independent.

“I’ve even had cases of teenagers writing to me saying they are contemplating suicide because they don’t want to see the world end. I think when you lie on the internet and scare children in order to make a buck, that is ethically wrong,” he said.

There is nothing on the website instituteforhumancontinuity.org to indicate it is a hoax. It states that scientists are tracking a “planet X” on the fringes of the Solar System and mixes real scientific phenomena with complete fiction, such as a simulation of planet X’s near-Earth trajectory.

The website urges people to sign up to a lottery guaranteeing every person of the planet an equal chance of survival in 2012 with the offer of a place in one of the Institute for Human Continuity’s “safe havens”. Only a small Sony Pictures copyright notice at the bottom of the screen and a link to the film’s own website give any hint that this is a purely fictional website.

Dr Morrison said the idea of a mystery planet called Nibiru dates back 30 years to fictional books about supposed predictions of ancient Summerian astrologers. It was taken up by others linking a 2012 planetary collision with the end of the Mayan calender. Interest in the idea has resurfaced in the lead-up to the film’s release, Dr Morrison said. “It is too bad, but there is no law against lying on the internet or anywhere else except in a court of law.”

Vikki Luya, Sony’s publicity director, said: “It is very clear that this site is connected to a fictional movie. This can readily be seen in the logos on the site, including the Sony Pictures Digital copyright line and the reference to the ’2012 Movie Experience’. It is also evident in the user-generated videos, as well as the numerous online references to this marketing campaign.”

Dumbarses.

A selection of comments from the blog (http://www.signon.org.nz/blog/keisha-rhys-push-cut-price-bangers-500-raised#comment)

This is repulsive. The UN panel on climate change has reported that meat production contributes more to global climate change than the entire transportation industry combined, and here in NZ agriculture is responsible for almost one half of our total emmissions. And here these people are selling beef in an effort to raise money to combat climate change? Ridiculous

Note that we used organic sausages for Darby’s Barbie, meaning there’s zero chance they were feed on palm kernel supplements, because there is no such thing as organic palm kernel. Any supplementary feed given to those cows would have been organic maize, hay or sileage.
Greenpeace is not, and never will be, anti-farming. As you point out, it’s not the farming, it’s how we’re farming.

I think you guys are being a little melodramatic here are you not? We need to change our ways to fight climate change but we don’t all need to be cave dwelling vegans

In normal circumstances yes, we’d use vegetarian food for a Greenpeace activity or event, but this was, quite strategically, a traditional Kiwi sausage sizzle. With the Sign On campaign the important thing is for us to reach out to all Kiwis, not just our usual soy-sausage munching friends, so we decided we needed to keep Saturday’s event as traditional as possible.

Save the whales, but kill the cows! This is complete hypocrisy 100%.
Where’s your integrity Greenpeace? Killing cows, whether organic or not, is far from peace.

Greenies at war, very funny. Read the full thing, check out the passion in the comments. ROFLOL

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=3

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

Why God destroy the so called God Particle? It is something that could potentially hypothetically prove the existance of God, without blind reglious faith.

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.

Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.

Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”

Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

I have edited out about half the article, so go and read the full thing at the NY Times, but interesting stuff. So can we conclude that Time Travel is real? Or at least now a realistic theory?

Last week it was predicting the weather for the same day twice – with two different forecasts for each day.

Today it is predicting the forecast for tuesday, wed, thurs, then back to wed, thurs, thurs a second time, then finally friday.

What are we meant to believe?