Latest column on www.theset.co.nz - How much should free speech cost?

Hey folks, my latest column has just been published on www.theset.co.nz

It touches on the Electoral Finance Bill and aspects of the 'spending money is free speech' debate.

Enjoy

Halo 3 is the future

Not just of gaming, but of the world. A very well done clip!

100% Pure New Zealand

You know a blogger got allllll lazy when it just start posting videos...but this one is quite cool. Cheesy, yes, and the song is quite repetitive, but the presentation of NZ is nicely simple and unpretentious, kind of like kiwis at their best I suppose.

A must-see show - Flight of the Conchords

FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS begins Monday 17th September at 10.00pm on PRIME. It is a truly unmissable take on how kiwis approach the big wide world, and what the world thinks back.

Here's a clip from the show:


Other FOTC stuff on YouTube

Obesity is Contagious, and so is Junk Science

TCS Daily has a good piece on the recent study 'proving' that obesity is contagious. The experimenters examined the Body Mass Index data of a particular group of people over time, saw some nice correlations, so instantly jumped to the conclusion that fatness spreads through people who know each other.

By what causal mechanism you say? Apparently 'social contagion' means if your friends are fat, so will be you, because you emulate their lifestyle. Unfortunately what the study 'proved' are really just some interesting hypotheses that need some real testing. Unfortunately all that the media (rightly so) seizes on is the bottom-line.

And here's a joke for all the physicists out there. The study 'proved' that having fat friends makes you more fat. It also found that the distance of friends from each other didn't matter.

'The jump from association to cause may be most evident in the conclusion drawn by the researchers with regard to the association of weight gain in friends living far from each other. "We were stunned to find that people who were hundreds of miles away had just as much impact on a person's weight status as friends who are next door."'

Now that, my friends, is spooky action at a distance.