It still surprises me that “the defaults” in life have the hold that they do. I tried a lot of computer programs when I was younger and found WordPerfect the best word processor, and to this day I use it. In the early 1990s, it was the default. However, it got there through fair competition […]
Read More… from Variety is the spice of life, so get away from the defaults
Which club is the better one to belong to? The ones who have bent the curve down and trying to eliminate COVID-19, or the ones whose curves are heading up? Apparently Air New Zealand’s boss thinks the latter might be better for us. From Stuff today, certain ‘business leaders’ talk about the New Zealand […]
Read More… from If you’re in the ‘New Zealand can’t’ camp, then you’re not a business leader
I can cite these COVID-19 calculations (infections as a proportion of tests done) with a bit more confidence than the last lot, where many countries’ testing figures had not updated. I see the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has released its total test numbers now, and they show a pretty good result, too. Compared to […]
Read More… from COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done: April 13 update
Peter Lambrechtsen rightly pointed out that COVID-19 per capita infection statistics aren’t as good as knowing the infection rate based on tests done, so at 2 a.m. I decided to crunch some numbers based on the stats I had on hand. These are many hours old now but hopefully still indicative of where things stand. […]
Read More… from Another COVID-19 table: total infections as a proportion of tests done
Russell Brown linked this COVID-19 trend page by Aatish Bhatia on his Twitter recently, and it’s another way to visualize the data. There are two axes: new confirmed cases (over the past week) on the y and total confirmed cases on the x. It’s very useful to see how countries are performing over time as […]
Read More… from One more COVID-19 post: graphing and animating the data
I had to see how we were tracking on total COVID-19 infections alongside other countries on a per capita basis, and here’s the latest update (source also linked above). I knew Switzerland was doing badly, but not this badly. I know I haven’t been consistent with my previous post’s country selection, but I don’t want […]
At the end of the last century, the National Government announced its Bright Future programme. Their research had identified that one thing holding back our national competitiveness was our devotion to the team rather than the individual, when in fact there have been many times New Zealand individuals have made immeasurable contributions and had not […]
Studio Incendo/Creative Commons 2·0 As an expat, I’ve been asked a few times about what I think of the Hong Kong protests. There’s no straight answer to this. Here are a few thoughts, in no particular order. The British never gave us universal suffrage, so the notion that it was all roses before 1997 is […]
The Cooler Master Storm Quick Fire TK, with white case. On Tuesday, my Manhattan keyboard, for which I gave a glowing review on Amazon, gave up the ghost. I’m not entirely sure why but through its lifetime, there were two things wrong with it: the first was that regular typing wore off the keys’ […]
Equal access: an audio recording of this blog post can be found here. I know I’m not alone among expats watching the Occupy Central movements in Hong Kong. More than the handover in 1997, it’s been making very compelling live television, because this isn’t about politicians and royalty, but about everyday Hong Kong people. […]
Read More… from An expatriate’s view of Occupy Central and what Hong Kong wants