Category: Hot Topic

You can’t always get what you want

The Awa Book of New Zealand ScienceHot Topic didn’t win the Royal Society of New Zealand’s first Science Book Prize: the cheque went to Rebecca Priestley, who compiled and edited The Awa Book of New Zealand Science — a very worthy winner. I had a glass of wine with Rebecca before the event, and we were both picking other books to win. We were both wrong… The judges said some very nice things about HT, which I’ll stick up in the sidebar when I can remember what they were, but the real honour was in being shortlisted.

Apart from the excitement of the presentation, the evening’s highlight was an amiable Sean Plunket pressing Richard Dawkins on which religion he’d choose if his life absolutely depended on it. After no more than moment’s thought Dawkins revealed himself to be a Pastafarian: a devotee of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The author of The God Delusion prefers a delusional god…

[Update 18/5: Kathyrn Ryan interviewed Rebecca Priestley on Nine To Noon this morning: audio here.]

[Stones (not obscure at all, StephenR)]

Blog bits #438(b)

Observant readers might have noticed a few changes at Hot Topic over the weekend. Two new navigation options have popped up over the header: Book Reviews and Debate Map. The first one’s fairly straightforward, it’s a link to the book reviews category — a short cut to all the book reviews we’ve published at Hot Topic since Bryan started diligently working his way through new and notable climate-related books. Thanks to his efforts we now host the most comprehensive review coverage of climate books on the web (that’s my claim, and I’m sticking to it).

The Debate Map link goes to a new page created to provide a permanent home for the Debategraph interactive map of the climate debate I first posted about back in March. It’s a wiki-style site given a nice graphical structure. I find the whole thing fascinating, so I urge all Hot Topic‘s readers (even sceptics) to go and have a play and don’t be afraid to contribute items and arguments. Debategraph head honcho David Price provides the accompanying text, and is very happy to discuss any aspects of the map with interested readers.

One other tweak regular readers may like: I’ve updated the site’s theme to allow for “threaded comments”. This means you can now reply to individual comments by clicking on the “reply” link at the bottom of each comment. Your response will then appear immediately underneath, slightly indented. You should be able to reply to replies up to five indents deep, but I haven’t tested that…

McKibben in Wanaka

mckibben.jpg American environmentalist, writer, educator and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben is in New Zealand this month, and will be speaking at Wanaka’s Festival of Colour on Wednesday 29th April. Bill will be on stage for two sessions at the Infinity Crystal Palace, the first of which — at 10-30am on the impacts of global warming — will also feature me: Bill’s covering the big picture, and I’m providing the local colour. It’s an honour to share the stage with Bill, and I’ll be in the audience for his afternoon gig (2-30pm), where he’s going to address how we can deal with the problem. I hope I’ve finished Deep Economy by then…

Hot Topic shortlisted for Royal Society of NZ science book prize

I am very pleased(*) to report that Hot Topic has been shortlisted as one of five finalists for the first Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize. The competition’s stiff. HT is up against four extremely good books: The Awa Book of New Zealand Science, edited by Rebecca Priestley (Awa Press), Falling for Science, by Bernard Beckett (Longacre Press), In Search of Ancient New Zealand, by Hamish Campbell and Gerard Hutching (Penguin), and Wetlands of New Zealand: A Bitter-sweet Story by Janet Hunt (Random House). More details here. It’s a great honour to be shortlisted, and not just because the prize is worth $10,000… The winner will be announced by Richard Dawkins (via a video link) on May 15th in a special event at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. I wonder if I’ll have the chance to draw his attention to the error about truffles in The Ancestors Tale… 😉

[* – Something of an understatement.]

Goin’ back

FrenchPassVortex.jpg You may have thought I was on holiday, but in reality I was gathering blog-relevant material while eating and drinking too much on a catamaran tootling round D’Urville Island. I took a look at DOC’s new bush regeneration for carbon offsets project in Greville Harbour (from the beach), assessed fish stocks (with a rod and line) marvelling at barracouta chewing blue cod before they could be hauled into the boat, saw a seal tossing an octopus snack, enjoyed the company of Dusky dolphins, and ate rather too much crayfish. I’m a bit late for Seaweek, but given I’ve been on the sea most of the week, it deserves a plug.

Readers may recall I posted about von Karman vortices in clouds last week, and as Jamarh navigated French Pass, I saw another fine example as the tide flowed past the channel marker in the middle of the strait. You can clearly see the vortices forming as whirlpools downstream of the pillar.

And now, after a week without radio, TV or cellphone contact, I have some catching up to do…