No Impinging on the Bingeing

I was quite surprised that parliament voted against raising the drinking age in any shape or form. Not because I think it should be raised, but because I thought the general consensus among adults not affected in any way by the change in drinking age was that it should be raised. As I said, I don't think it should be raised. The first, and possibly most important and final, point is that if you're old enough to be trusted to vote and determine the future of the country, why shouldn't you be able to buy yourself a pint? As it stands the gambling age is still 20, which makes even less sense. That's a different story though. Secondly, I'm not convinced binge drinking, let alone binge drinking among 18 and 19 year olds, is as big a problem for society as the media makes it out to be. Anyone can go out with a camera and find a representative from any age group behaving poorly as a result of alcohol. If you go into town no less, you're bound to find the binge-drinking youth because people over 25 find town on a Friday and Saturday night hellish, expensive and above all, too filled with young people who make us feel old and out of place. Us older kids largely choose to stay at home and binge drink. And remember, just because that wine you're knocking back cost $40 a bottle, doesn't mean you're not binge drinking. I've been binge drinking for 15 years. For the first 3 I was under age and for the last 9 I've been above the proposed drinking age of 20.

Excessive drinking has been part of culture since a damp bag of grain first got left in an overheated storehouse too long. What piece of writing or film set in ye olden days doesn't depict people getting their booze on. Perhaps it's largely a British influence on our own culture, but they're not the only culprits (although they may be one of the worst). Other European cultures have managed it better, such as Spain and France. This is possibly a result of a lower drinking age, making alcohol more accessible and less desirable. Regardless of where binge drinking is occurring though, it is not the exclusive domain of the irresponsible youth. I think one of the problems is that young people still know how to enjoy themselves. There's a scene in 'We Bought a Zoo' where the daughter can't sleep because there's a party next door. When the father comes in and asked what's wrong she says, 'their happy is too loud'. I think that pretty much sums up a lot of people's arguments against this sort of thing.

Well, not entirely. Obviously there are other factors, like destruction of property and clogging up the A&E. Destruction of property? I know first hand that that's not the exclusive domain of youth either; they're just fitter and able to outrun the consequences. Clogging up the A&E? Sure, it takes beds away from people who otherwise need them, but so does falling off your ladder because you didn't secure it well enough, or running over your toes with a lawnmower. Most accidents are the result of stupidity or carelessness, and it can be argued that they are largely self-inflicted one way or another. The fact that the careless self-infliction relates to an overdose of alcohol isn't all that different from a severed toe. If they don't want accidents in the A&E, they should just call it the E.

Then we come to the next big one. Drink driving. I hear people say all the time that the careless youth are responsible for a large percentage of drink driving accidents. I had no reason to doubt that, after all, they haven't been driving or drinking as long. Why would we expect them to be good at either? Anyway, I looked up the stats on the Ministry of Transport website and present to you the flashy graph you're been hanging out for (this is mean data from 2008-2010):

This clearly shows that 15-19 year olds cause a high number of alcohol and drug related fatalities (the stats I gathered didn't differentiate). They also cause a high number of non-alcohol related accidents. Like I said earlier, I would expect nothing less from people who have only been driving for a couple of years. It would be better if there were no fatalities, but sadly it's something we have to accept for the time being. Raising the drinking age might reduce alcohol-related fatalities, but 15-19 year old inflicted road toll would still be higher than many other age groups. 20-24 year olds are the biggest offenders in terms of both alcohol related and total fatalities. There's no reason to think that would change if the drinking age was raised. Interestingly, 30-34 year olds have the highest percentage of alcohol-related fatalities. So, there's an age group that has clearly learned to be more careful on the road, but after a few drinks that all goes out the window. Maybe they (or should I say 'we'?) should be more heavily targeted by the anti-drink driving campaigns.

Most interesting of all is that of all the fatalities on the road, only 34% had alcohol or drugs as a contributing factor. That means that in 66% of fatal road accidents, the person responsible was stone sober. I find that a much more terrifying prospect. It also makes me wonder, how can drink driving be considered a major contributing factor when twice as many accidents occur without it being involved? If I was to plot a graph of jeans being a contributing factor, would the statistics look the same? I dare say jeans are involved in more accidents than alcohol. OK, I'm getting into dangerous territory here; I'm on the edge of defending drink driving. That is absolutely not my stance. I loathe it and am glad that it is not as prevalent today as it was a generation ago. Actually, I don't have the stats to back that up, but I'm sure I've read that somewhere.

Right then, what's the answer. People under 20 cause a lot of accidents. Alcohol is a factor in 33% of these. Would raising the age help? I believe there is a developmental age that restricts when kids start drinking. Lowering the age to 16 wouldn't mean 12 year olds would be getting wasted every weekend. They don't need alcohol to have fun, they still have an imagination. Raising ethanol taxes might help. That would encourage low-alcohol products like good old beer over that have built-in regulators to prevent too much alcohol being consumed at once. Granted, you can still drink a lot of beer, but even if you drink 2 litres, that 2 litres is still only 5% alcohol. Drink spirits and you can polish off half a bottle before your body starts protesting, and by then it is way, way too late. People say ban RTDs. I don't agree with that either (although if you banned Woodstock & Cola, I'd wager domestic violence would plummet). 'But the marketing is targeting young girls'. Maybe that's because teenage girls are the number one consumers of all things and so any company will jump at the chance to target them. But young people aren't necessarily going to change their drinking habits based on advertising, they'll just change their brand choice, or worse, drink $10 bottles of fortified water labelled as vodka. At least alco-pop has the same built-in alcohol intake regulator as beer. Lowering the cost of alcohol in town might be another solution. If one wishes to spend hours in town but doesn't wish to spend hundreds of dollars, they preload. This is because town is a living hell and the only way to survive it is to be mildly unconscious. To preload for the next few hours requires a lot of alcohol, otherwise you might sober up in the middle and realise who you're dancing with. The problem here is that all that alcohol one consumed before heading to town hits one all at once. Suddenly the bars don't want you and the cold concrete of the concrete behind a dumpster is your only friend. If drinks were more reasonably priced in town, maybe people wouldn't preload so much and their drinking would be more evenly spaced. More time patronising the bars and less time patronising the stormwater drains.

This is a difficult problem to tackle. Largely because when it comes to alcohol, you can't do many things to youth that don't affect the more responsible, grown-up binge drinkers. One of the only things you can do is raise the drinking age. So, like I said at the beginning, I'm surprised parliament voted against the changes. I dare say tonight the happiness of 18 and 19 year olds will be doubly loud.

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.