All Summer in a Day

If you hadn't heard, Ray Bradbury passed away recently at the age of 92. Since his not wholly unexpected demise, I learned that he only ever acknowledged Fahrenheit 451 as being science fiction, since it was the only story that could come true. All others he considered fantasy, despite being quoted as saying, "The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance; the idea that anything is possible."

One of my favourite short stories I've ever read was written by Ray Bradbury and shared its title with this post, or rather the title of this post was posthumously plagiarised from his short story. If you haven't read it, do. You can download a PDF here. If that doesn't work, try Google, or whatever replacement exists in the dystopian future you currently live in where anarchy rules and Dropbox links no longer work. Don't come back to this post until you've read it; it won't make sense and I might ruin the ending.

So, for those who have read it, which should be anyone reading this far down the post, you will remember that it is a very sad story about a poor girl who, through an unintentional consequence of school bullying, misses a very, very rare event. That event is, of course, a break in the clouds and a brief glimpse of sunshine. Well, I wish to present to you evidence that Ray Bradbury was wrong about his stories being fantasy. For you see, we live in a city that over the past year has begun to resemble a certain Venusian settlement in more ways than a rising bully population.

In the past 12 months, Auckland has been subjected to 41.3 days of constant rain. Not 'constant' constant, but if you add up every rainy hour, that's what you get. That means it's been raining 11.3% of the past 12 months. So what, you say, that's 324.6 days of glorious sunshine. Au contraire, my arithmeticulous friend, the sun doth not shine at night. But you're right, 11.3% might not be that bad. Rain a bit at night, concentrate it over winter and voila; nice, long dry periods for all those outdoor activities. Unfortunately, the rain wasn't concentrated. It's been spread so thinly that we have actually had more rainy days than dry ones. A depressing 51.7% of the last 366 days have had at least 0.2 mm of rain (the minimum rainfall measurement at Auckland Airport). As you can see here, March and April have been the only months recently to buck this average, with January barely scraping above the bar.

In fact, as you can see from the graph to follow, the longest stretch of consecutive dry days we've had is 12 days. That's not even a fortnight without a bit of rain. And that stretch was in April, when all us working schmucks were safely tucked up in our office chairs. In the summer months preceding that the longest dry spell was a mere week.

I don't have time to go into long-term means, or rabble on about how this most likely has nothing to do with climate change. It'll probably all get better, we're due for a good run, blah, blah etc... There's nothing anyone can do about it, I just think of poor Margot every time I look up from my computer and see a break in the clouds and a glimpse of sunshine

I guess then, my point is this: the weather is miserable, you have every right to bitch and moan and if you have any school-aged children locked in your cupboard, there's no hurry to let them out just yet.

Prolonged Delivery

My Kindle arrived today. I'm very excited, but thought I'd share its painstaking journey across the World with you before I allow myself to enjoy it. The journey didn't actually take that long, 3 days less than expected in fact. What was painstaking was that for half the trip my Kindle was knocking about in the back of a CourierPost van while it ambled around Auckland.

I now present a graph to help convey my frustration to you, after which I will forget about the journey and focus on the destination.

Chpr Phn Plns Pls

We get ripped off in NZ. From All Blacks jerseys to dSLRs, we pay more than we should and it's hard to figure out why. Are we too far away, nestled down here in our island paradise? No. I recently bought a camera from a shop in USA, who made a profit out of the sale, had it shipped all the way down here and it still cost me $500 less than if I had gone to a store and bought it. I can't imagine how electronics suppliers, who buy things in bulk and get them shipped in bulk, can charge so much more than their foreign counterparts. I'm sure there are some complex economics behind it, but it doesn't make sense to me. 

However, one thing that we can't buy on eBay is a monthly mobile phone account. Sure, we can buy the phone's cheaper, but it's very hard to ship an ongoing service via USPS. So we come to the crux of this rant. The cost of mobile phone usage in NZ. Since I'm hell bent on finally getting an iPhone (in memoriam to Mr. Jobs, of course), I decided to do a comparison of the prices here in Aotearoa versus those in lands far away. Below is a table of the most comparable plans I could find for NZ, Australia, UK, USA, Canada and Germany. Why Germany? Because they always seem to be in the iPhone business, and I thought I'd branch out from the English-speaking elite. I've gone with the soon-to-be defunct iPhone 16GB on a 24-month contract, because that's what most company's websites, including Vodafone NZ's, still have up for sale. All prices are converted to $NZD (rates as @ 07/10/2011).

As you can see, we are light years behind Australia and the UK. In some cases the costs of the iPhone and the plans themselves are, literally, infinitely better than what we have on offer. Surprisingly, USA, Canada and Germany are relatively expensive. Still mildly better than us in terms of the cost of the iPhone and what you get for your monthly fee, but their plans cost more per month (except Canada) and they're way behind Australia and the UK. Sprint in the US offer a US$99.99 per month plan which gives you infinite everything. Reasonably expensive, but Vodafone NZ doesn't give us an option even close to that sort of potential usage. You wouldn't need a home broadband connection with a contract like that, you could just tether your iPhone to your home computer. The prices aren't directly comparable either, they're just a direct currency conversion. That doesn't take into account the average income, cost of living, chief exports or rising sea levels.

There is something that I should add though. NZ is quite rare in that nearly anywhere you go in this country, you can get reception. Other countries struggle to get coverage to rural areas, so we can consider ourselves lucky there. Still, we are clearly paying for the privilege. Compared with Australia and the UK we are very clearly getting the bum wrap. Compared with the USA, Canada and Germany we are still getting a raw deal, but not as much as I would have thought.

Of course, none of this is going to stop me getting an iPhone is the coming months (I have agonised over whether to switch to Android plenty; it wasn't a matter of blind loyalty, I promise you that). Therein lies the problem. If I want an iPhone, I have to go through Vodafone. Sure, I could spend $1100 and buy an iPhone outright from Apple, then get it hooked up to Telecom or 2Degrees. Believe me, I'd love to do that. It's just that I don't want to spend that sort of money up front. So I have to take what I can get and there's nothing I can do about it, short of bitching about it on the internet. At least soon I'll be able to bitch about it right from the phone itself.

Edit: I thought I'd add some pretty graphs. Everyone loves graphs, right?

Shedding Light

Something happened over the weekend; something wonderful. Something that many have been eagerly anticipating for some time now, and many will rejoice in for months to come. New Zealand was gifted an extra hour of sunlight in which to enjoy the evening. Oh sweet Amun, God above, your brilliance shall be basked in with added euphoria and duration. In short, I love summer. Nay, I despise winter. Perhaps that's unfair though, there are things about winter that I wouldn't want completely removed from my life. Wood fires crackling away while the rain sheets down the windows. Those crisp, sunny days when your dragon's breath hangs in the air as you wrap your scarf ever tighter. Snow gently settling on your skin as you try and convince yourself that it's not just regular sleet. There are some things that only winter can provide. However, there are things that I could do without. One thing in particular: a noticeable absence of daylight.

So it was that I found myself a week or so ago discussing the upcoming blessing that the Department of Internal Affairs was about to bestow upon us. I mentioned that I am always amazed how, sitting in the darkness at 7pm on a winter's night, it's hard to imagine a time where there is still light at 10pm. At some point during the fits of derisive laughter that subsequently surrounded me, I started to think that maybe those I was with didn't necessarily agree with my contemplation. It turns out they thought 10pm was a bit of an exaggeration. Never one to doubt myself in the face of unanimous doubt, I was convinced that it was, at most, an optimistic rounding error. Mostly because I clearly remembered thinking on one night last summer, at around 10pm, that there was still light where six months prior there had been none. I was unable to broaden their minds to the possibility, so it was dropped and the conversation moved on.

Not for me though. Never one to pass up an opportunity to procrastinate at work, I set out to prove, if possible, that the summer months ahead held more daylight hours than my disbelieving companions could fathom. Where else to start a search for such proof than the US Naval Observatory. If there's one thing the US do well, it's providing government websites that generate tables of data which can be openly interpreted to prove a point. I'd used such a service before when some insisted that sea temperatures had varied significantly since we were children (they hadn't; data not blogged).

Ferreting through the tabular possibilities, I chose to focus on three measures of 'light': sunset, civil twilight and nautical twilight. Sunset you should all know about already...I hope. Civil twilight can be defined as the limit at which terrestrial objects can still be clearly distinguished and outdoor activities can be carried out without further illumination. Nautical twilight is defined as the limit at which the horizon is indistinct, however ground objects may still be distinguishable. So, without further ado, I present to you a graph:

As you can see, 10pm may have been an optimistic rounding error. However, at the height of summer (light-wise, not temperature-wise), there is still enough light to distinguish ground objects at 9:53pm. I'd say that falls pretty damn close to my original contemplation. Good enough for me anyway. I can relax, safe in the knowledge that a little over 2 hours before we welcome in 2012, I will be able to walk outside, point to the ground and say, with absolute confidence, "that, my friend, is an object".

The Power of Graphs (and vice versa)

There's a bit of talk going on at the moment about the cost of power, switching companies and whether those companies use renewable energy or not. I hear people bandy around that this company is greener than that company, they generate energy from fairy dust, they use the screams of innocent children. What I don't see or hear is actual data, so I thought I'd have a dig around and find some.

This post is not about whether or not I think the renewable nature of the energy generated should take precedence over the cost of the energy or whether I think coal is the fuel of the Devil and hydro is liquid Jesus. I'm a supporter of renewable energy, but that's mostly because often it's new technology, and I love that. Burning coal to produce energy? What is this, the industrial revolution?! OK, it's now a little bit about what I think. From now on it's just the facts. What this post is really about is presenting some simple graphs that show how the top 5 companies generate their power. This post also isn't about cost, so I'd suggest visiting Powerswitch.org.nz to find that information.

I collected this data from the most recent annual reports available from each of the companies. The GWh produced might be a little bit out of date, but the percentages should be pretty accurate, and the general philosophy of each company definitely won't have changed much.

The first graph shows total energy generation by source. The second graph shows the percentage of the total energy generation that each source provides. 'Other' refers to biomass for Mercury Energy (which is actually Mighty River Power) and Swaption for Contact. What is Swaption you ask? I'm not really sure. Look it up. To make it all a bit easier to digest, I then present a graph that has been simplified down to two categories: non-renewable and renewable.

The next set of graphs are the pie charts. These show individual power companies and just the energy sources they each use. You can interpret this as either total energy generation, percentage of total energy generation or Big Mac equivalents. It's a pie chart, units are irrelevant. The whole pie is everything, segments represent parts of that everything.

Finally, I present one last pie-chart showing NZ's total energy generation. Again, units are irrelevant.

Keep in mind when perusing this data that no matter how a company generates it's electricity, it all gets fed into the national grid. That means that even if you choose the greenest power company imaginable, you still might be boiling your kettle with dolphin tears. That doesn't mean you aren't encouraging companies to use renewable energy sources by supporting them, it just means that you have no guarantees over the power you use. Since 81.6% of NZ's energy is classed as renewable, you probably don't have to feel all that guilty about it anyway. An 18.4% chance of dolphin tears makes for pretty good odds.

So, without further ado, I present to you the graphs.

GMO you didn't!

Articles like this one from Stuff.co.nz irritate me. Not just because they blatantly get basic scientific principles wrong, TV and movies do that all the time. What annoys me is that in the case of genetic modification, all they do is perpetuate ridiculous myths about mad scientists toiling away in their underground lairs creating frog-potatoes that will devour us all. A basic understanding of genetics and the role of DNA would be quite refreshing in a lot of science reporting.

In the article mentioned above, there is one line that urks me, that is "...fundamental flaws in the monitoring of horizontal gene transfer from genetically modified animals disposed of in offal pits." This sentence conjures up images of DNA oozing through the soils and some cow licking it up and growing an extra udder or something. Horizontal gene transfer only occurs in bacteria and some fungi and yeasts. I'm guessing the genetically modified organism (GMO) in question here is actually some sort of bacteria in the cow's gut, not the cow itself. Genes can not spontaneously transfer themselves from one animal to another and instantly incorporate themselves into the DNA of every cell in their body. Viruses can achieve something close to this, but they're not the products of science. If animals could transfer genes by ingesting the tissues of another animal the vegetarians might actually have a valid argument. I'm not sure if the reporter's parents have had this conversation yet, but in order for animals to exchange genetic material, they need to have sex. For that to happen with GMO, first GE animals need to be produced, then they need to escape, then they need to fornicate with similar species, then the offspring need to do the same in order for the gene in question to be perpetuated through a population. To prevent that, it would be wise not to carry out this research in the animals natural habitat. However, cows tend to be reasonably well contained, so a GMO outbreak would require a lot of faulty number 8 wire.

Science reporters should really attend a primary school science class or two, or at the very least do a quick search on Wikipedia before submitting their article.

Non-News is S#@t News

I get my news during the day from Stuff.co.nz. Often they're more tolerable than NZ Herald, often they're bang on par. I just saw a news story titled World Cup advert 'unlikely to offend'. Granted, it made me look. On closer inspection I realised that this was another non-story, paraphrased from a press release.

The story talks about a complaint about the ANZ ad where a couple fire a giant party popper from the top of Ruapehu. It goes on to say that the complaint was rejected.

I visited the Advertising Standards Authority website and found that it wasn't rejected, it had 'no grounds to proceed'. That's the equivalent of someone bursting into the ASA screaming 'this ad offends me' and the ASA waving their hand and saying 'get this man out of my office'. It was barely even considered. THAT'S NOT NEWS!

There were 15 other decisions released yesterday, 10 of which had 'no grounds to proceed'. Why did they choose this one? Probably because it had all those great elements that get the punters clicking: "World Cup", "Pakeha", "Iwi", "Party Popper". They probably wanted us to get all full of national pride and say 'have they no sense of humour?!'. Well I did one better, I wasted part of a Friday afternoon blogging about it and directing traffic to the article.

By the way, if you really want to get all riled up about the lack of humour some individuals possess then visit the ASA website and read some of the full decisions. There's not having a sense of humour and then there's this.

Sincerely,

J. Milledge