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Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Tuesday, June 6, 2017
America First? No way, say New Zealanders
Tillerson and Matthis may not have the welcome they expect today....
From the Dominion Post
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is on a flying visit to further relations with New Zealand - but a survey of nearly 40,000 Kiwis suggests they have no confidence in American President Donald Trump and are increasingly looking to China for leadership.
The online survey, conducted by Stuff and Massey University, released on the eve of Tillerson's visit, shows only 15.2 per cent who answered that question would have voted for Trump.
That confirms a Reid Research/Newshub poll last August which showed New Zealand voters rejected Trump's recipe during the run up to the US presidential elections, with an overwhelming majority favouring Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton and only 9 per cent saying they would vote for Trump.
Associate professor Grant Duncan of Massey University
said the survey of 39,644 respondents was a self-selecting online poll and so
it should be treated with caution because it was not scientifically sampled.
However, the make up of the sample - which was heavily
skewed towards men, and greatly under-represented Labour voters - suggested a
weighted sample would likely have been even more unfavourable to Trump and the
US.
"This particular
survey is quite low on women and low on Labour supporters so I would think this
possibly slightly overstates the support for Trump. He is unelectable in this
country."
Also interestingly, China is now seen as the leader of the free world, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years to go. Granted, the free trade agreement we have with China must make a difference. But, as the report goes on:
"Trumpism must have had something to do with the outcome of the survey. When you put the two things together, Trump's repugnant behaviour and his 'America First' attitude, presumably it had some influence on the result."
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Booklife review of THE MONEY SHIP
Just in time for the four-day free promotion of the first book in The Money Ship saga, a review from Booklife has arrived.
It has a rather odd format, but is satisfying, nonetheless.
Plot: This skillfully plotted novel delivers as much historical information as it does story.
Prose: The prose is true to the time period, contains great details, and delivers the flavor and style of the era. The writing keeps the reader in the story, but never in an overly showy fashion.
Originality: This historical maritime adventure is original and engaging. The author's knowledge of sailing, the time period, the South China Sea, and the economics of the day is evident -- and this information is deftly incorporated into the story. Much of the spirit of the time is captured in this intriguing tale.
Character Development: The characters here are very well developed for the most part. The author provides backstory for each main character and follows the characters' evolution over the course of years.
Free short story from a popular Old Salt Press author
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Free book promotion
Having belatedly noticed that the hits for this blog are well over one million, and also to celebrate the rave review of The Money Ship in Quarterdeck, the first book in the series, The Launching of the Huntress will be free -- cost nothing, absolutely zilch -- for four days, June 3-6.
So do take advantage of this offer! HINT THE LINK AND WIN!!!
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Friday, June 2, 2017
Prehistoric tsunami
From New Zealand Science
A story by John Edens describes a project by NIWA (New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research), that pinpoints evidence of ancient paleaotsunami in our country.
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| Ancient tsunami in New Zealand |
The devastation can only be imagined. As I wrote in Tupaia, this geological evidence reveals that sometime in the fifteenth century, New Zealand was hit by one of these mega-tsunami, with catastrophic effects on the Maori who had settled there about the year 1200.
It is impossible to tell exactly what caused this unbelievably violent event. According to Chinese lore, a comet plunged into seas just south of New Zealand in June 1430. Alternatively, there may have been a massive underwater volcanic eruption; perhaps part of the ocean floor collapsed.
Whatever the source of the disaster, from archaeological evidence the horrifying results are clear. An immense wall of water struck the east coast of the North Island, broke with a tremendous roar, and surged inland, carrying a whirling flotsam of houses, animals, people, plants, and double canoes.
The immediate catastrophe was bad
enough, but it had consequences beyond imagination. Because the gardens, forests, and fishing
beds were destroyed, thousands who had survived the deluge starved to
death. Ancient artifacts were lost, and
tools and weapons had to be reinvented.
The old people, with their restrictive prohibitions and traditional
knowledge of how things were supposed to be, were all gone, not having the
strength to survive privation. Many of
the women and children, at home when the tsunami struck, had drowned or died of
injuries, so mostly young men were left—men who had been on hunting or fishing
expeditions, who returned to their homes to find them destroyed. Fighting over the scant food resources and
surviving young women may have been the path that led to tribal warfare.
The men of great mana (prestige), who had lived in favored positions
near the coast, were among the first victims.
The craftsmen, the priests, the star navigators, and the shipwrights
were annihilated, along with their specialist knowledge. Many family histories—whakapapa—were stalled, as the elders were not there to recite them
anymore. Without the old shipbuilders,
canoes had to be redesigned, and so the double canoe was replaced by the
single-hulled canoe. Voyages back to Raiatea
became impossible. Ka kotia te taitapu ki Hawaiki, the people mourned. The sacred seaway to Raiatea was cut, and the
homeland was lost, remembered only in surviving ancient myths.
Three hundred years after the disaster, the Endeavour arrived — with the Tahitian high priest Tupaia on board. It is little wonder that the people gathered in their hundreds to hear him talk, or that local priests listened raptly to the histories and myths that had been forgotten, and that he now restored.
Three hundred years after the disaster, the Endeavour arrived — with the Tahitian high priest Tupaia on board. It is little wonder that the people gathered in their hundreds to hear him talk, or that local priests listened raptly to the histories and myths that had been forgotten, and that he now restored.
So, there is anecdotal evidence of giant tsunami, too. Interestingly, flood myths are found all around the world. The Flood that was survived by Noah's Ark is one of them. Another is a myth from one of the indigenous tribes of Taiwan, the Paiwan Gaoshihful.
In ancient times, the world was a broad plain without mountains. A sever earthquake happened one day and a flood followed. Almost all living creatures died in this disaster. A brother and a sister grasped Ljaqulaqulas (long and thin grass with firm roots) so tightly that they were not taken away by the flood. After the flood receded, many huge earthworms proliferated. The excrement of these earthworms hardened and formed mountains everywhere.
(from Literary History of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples, by Pauya Poiconu).
And there is another from Tahiti:
Tahiti was destroyed by the sea. Even the trees and stones were carried away by the wind. But two people were saved. The wife took up her young chicken, her young dog, and her kitten, and the husband took up his young pig. The husband said they should escape to Mount Orofena, but the wife said (correctly) that the flood would reach even there, and they should go to Mount Pita-hiti instead, which they did. They watched ten nights till the sea ebbed. The land, though, remained without produce, and the fish in the rock crevices were putrid. When the wind died away, stones and trees began to fall from the heavens, where the winds had carried them. To escape this new danger, the couple dug a hole, lined it with grass, and covered it over with stones and earth. They crept inside and listened to the terrible crash of the falling stones. By and by, the falling stones stopped, but to be safe they waited another night before coming out. The land they found was desolated. The woman brought forth two children, a son and a daughter, but grieved about the lack of food. Again the mother brought forth, but still there was no food. Then in three days all the trees bore fruit. All people are descended from that couple.
(originally recorded in, Frazer, Sir James G. The Golden Bough, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., Hertfordshire, 1993.)
And so forth and so, all around the world, more evidence of huge flood waves.
You can read them in this collection by Mark Isaak
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Is wood the new steel?
It is beginning to look as if it will be possible to build skyscrapers out of wood -- and New Zealand is a leader in the field.
From Bob Brockie in the Dominion Post
Some concrete buildings munted in the Christchurch quakes are being replaced with wooden buildings. Among them is a university building, which, at four storeys high, will be the country's tallest wooden building.
This wooden building is the brainchild of Canterbury University professor Andy Buchanan who specialises in innovative timber construction, fire and earthquake risk, and who has spent time at the Wood Innovation and Design Centre in Canada.
Canadians got off to an early start in 2014, when they constructed an eight-storey building out of douglas fir. It was among the tallest wooden buildings in world at the time, and it has served as a model for builders everywhere.
In 2015, Norwegians built a 14-storey wooden tower comprising 62 flats, with offices and shops. In 2016, a 53-metre wooden dormitory was built at the University of British Columbia by four workers in only 70 days.
Another 30-storey building is planned for Vancouver and Austrians are currently building an 84-metre wooden building. Cambridge University architects and engineers have a 300m high wooden building on the drawing board, and which they hope to put up in London.
Plenty of two- and three-storey wooden buildings are currently being used for social housing in London.
These builders use no ordinary wood, as it is too soft and weak. Instead they cut wood into thin slices and cross-laminate them. That is to say, the sawn slices are laid on top of each other at right angles and cemented together under high pressure with resins and glues. Huge 3m by 6m blocks can be manufactured.
Enthusiasts claim that the laminated product is as strong as steel. The wood is lighter in weight so can be erected on sites too difficult for heavier concrete and steel structures. Wood is relatively inexpensive, so its buildings are 9 per cent to 14 per cent cheaper than similar conventional concrete and steel buildings.
Paradoxically, laminated wood is more fire-resistant than steel. This is because the big blocks char on the outside and this protects the structural integrity of the wood inside and, unlike steel, wood does not bend when it gets hot.
Wood is environmentally friendly because it is a lower-carbon product than concrete and steel. Used on a large scale, it is potentially useful in staving off global warming.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Giant waves
Last week, New Zealand media reported the biggest wave ever recorded - by a newly deployed buoy in the Southern Ocean, near Auckland and Campbell islands, sites of many shipwrecks in the days of storm-battered tall ships.
The wave, measured at 19.4 metres -- just under 64 feet -- was higher than a five-storey building, yet scientists say that those that get away without being measured are even bigger. And waves are due to get even bigger as climate change takes hold.
Huge waves are nothing new, though. For centuries sailors have been relating yarns of gigantic waves, while countless ships have silently foundered, lost without apparent reason, leaving no trace.
The BBC has created a wonderful picture album, under the heading "Terrifying 20-metre rogue-waves are actually real."
As Nic Fleming writes, "TEN-storey high, near-vertical walls of frothing water. Smashed portholes and flooded cabins on the upper decks. Thirty-metre behemoths that rise up from nowhere to throw ships about like corks, only to slip back beneath the depths moments later.
"Evocative descriptions of abnormally large "rogue waves" that appear out of the blue have been shared among sailors for centuries. With little or no hard evidence, and the size of the waves often growing with each telling, there is little surprise that scientists long dismissed them as tall tales.
"Until around half a century ago, this scepticism chimed with the scientific evidence. According to scientists' best understanding of how waves are generated, a 30m wave might be expected once every 30,000 years. Rogue waves could safely be classified alongside mermaids and sea monsters.
"However, we now know that they are no maritime myths."
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Monday, May 29, 2017
Australian mutineer convicts in Japan
From The Guardian
By Joshua Robertson
With the help of a local volunteer manuscript reading group, Russell has since worked at translating written accounts of the ship’s arrival by Hamaguchi and another samurai, Hirota, now held by the Tokushima prefectural archive. Hamaguchi’s is called Illustrated Account of the Arrival of a Foreign Ship, while Hirota’s is A Foreign Ship Arrives Off Mugi Cove.It was Hamaguchi’s watercolour sketch of an unnamed ship with a British flag that first intrigued Russell when he saw it on the website of the Tokushima prefectural archive in 2014.
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An amateur historian has unearthed compelling evidence that the first Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago.
Fresh translations of samurai accounts of a “barbarian” ship in 1830 give startling corroboration to a story modern scholars had long dismissed as convict fantasy: that a ragtag crew of criminals encountered a forbidden Japan at the height of its feudal isolation.
The brig Cyprus was hijacked by convicts bound from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour in 1829, in a mutiny that took them all the way to China.
Its maverick skipper was William Swallow, a onetime British cargo ship apprentice and naval conscript in the Napoleonic wars, who in a piracy trial in London the following year told of a samurai cannonball in Japan knocking a telescope from his hand.
Swallow’s fellow mutineers, two of whom were the last men hanged for piracy in Britain, backed his account of having been to Japan.
Western researchers, citing the lack of any Japanese record of the Cyprus, had since ruled the convicts’ story a fabrication.
But that conclusion has been shattered by Nick Russell, a Japan-based English teacher and history buff, in a remarkable piece of sleuthing that has won the endorsement of Australian diplomatic officials and Japanese and Australian archival experts.
Russell, after almost three years of puzzling over an obscure but meticulous record of an early samurai encounter with western interlopers, finally joined the dots with the Cyprus through a speculative Google search last month.
The British expatriate all but solved what was for the Japanese a 187-year mystery, while likely uncovering vivid new detail of an epic chapter of colonial Australian history.
“If you’d said I was going to go hunt and find a new pirate ship, I’d have gone, ‘you’re crazy’,” Russell told Guardian Australia. “I just stumbled on it. Boom. There it was on the screen in front of me.
“I immediately knew and as soon as I started checking, everything just fitted so perfectly.”
The ship anchored on 16 January 1830 off the town of Mugi, on Shikoku island, where Makita Hamaguchi, a samurai sent disguised as a fisherman to check the ship for weapons, noted an “unbearable stench in the vicinity of the ship”.
With the help of a local volunteer manuscript reading group, Russell has since worked at translating written accounts of the ship’s arrival by Hamaguchi and another samurai, Hirota, now held by the Tokushima prefectural archive. Hamaguchi’s is called Illustrated Account of the Arrival of a Foreign Ship, while Hirota’s is A Foreign Ship Arrives Off Mugi Cove.It was Hamaguchi’s watercolour sketch of an unnamed ship with a British flag that first intrigued Russell when he saw it on the website of the Tokushima prefectural archive in 2014.
Russell first thought it may be a whaling ship, but the manuscript readers were skeptical. Having learned mutinies were common among whalers, Russell last month Googled the words “mutiny 1829”.
This stumbling upon a link between a samurai record and the story of the Cyprus was the research equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack, according to Warwick Hirst, the former curator of manuscripts at the State Library of New South Wales.
“It was a fantastic find,” Hirst, author of The Man Who Stole the Cyprus, told Guardian Australia. “I have no doubt that the Japanese account describes the visit of the Cyprus.”
What emerges is a picture of a desperate band of travellers, low on water and firewood, who provoked curiosity and suspicion among local warlords vexed by their appearance.
Bound to violently repel them by order of Japan’s ruling shogun, the samurai commanders showed some restraint, giving the foreigners advice on wind direction after raining down cannon balls and musket shot on their ship.
Hamaguchi wrote of sailors with “long pointed noses” who were not hostile, but asked in sign language for water and firewood. One had burst into tears and begun praying when an official rejected an earlier plea.
A skipper who looked 25 or 26 placed tobacco in “a suspicious looking object, sucked and then breathed out smoke”.
He had a “scarlet woollen coat” with “cuffs embroidered with gold thread and the buttons were silver-plated”, which was “a thing of great beauty, but as clothing it was gaudy”.
Hamaguchi’s watercolour sketch of the coat has what Russell said may be a telling detail on the sleeve: a bird that could be a swallow, the skipper’s own stamp on a British military officer’s jacket taken as a souvenir in the mutiny.
Read the rest of this fascinating story
Read the rest of this fascinating story
Friday, May 26, 2017
Our oceans in crisis
From the Economist
EARTH is poorly named. The ocean covers almost three-quarters of the planet. It is divided into five basins: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Arctic and the Southern oceans. Were all the planet’s water placed over the United States, it would form a column of liquid 132km tall. The ocean provides 3bn people with almost a fifth of their protein (making fish a bigger source of the stuff than beef). Fishing and aquaculture assure the livelihoods of one in ten of the world’s people. Climate and weather systems depend on the temperature patterns of the ocean and its interactions with the atmosphere. If anything ought to be too big to fail, it is the ocean.
Humans have long assumed that the ocean’s size allowed them to put anything they wanted into it and to take anything they wanted out. Changing temperatures and chemistry, overfishing and pollution have stressed its ecosystems for decades. The ocean stores more than nine-tenths of the heat trapped on Earth by greenhouse-gas emissions. Coral reefs are suffering as a result; scientists expect almost all corals to be gone by 2050.
By the middle of the century the ocean could contain more plastic than fish by weight. Ground down into tiny pieces, it is eaten by fish and then by people, with uncertain effects on human health. Appetite for fish grows nevertheless: almost 90% of stocks are fished either at or beyond their sustainable limits. The ocean nurtures humanity. Humanity treats it with contempt.
So what went wrong? And can we do anything about it before it's too late?
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