NZ Electoral Commission Probably Wants to Ruin Your Christmas

The favicon from http://www.electionresults.org.nz/ looks like Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Green Party Support Base in NZ

It's old news, but I just had a look through the 2008 election results to see where the NZ Greens were getting their list votes from.

Here are the electorates with more than 3000 "Party Votes" for the New Zealand Green Party:

Electorate	List Votes	City
Wellington Central	8494	Wellington
Rongotai	6484	Wellington
Auckland Central	5446	Auckland
Dunedin North	5221	Dunedin
Port Hills	5051	Christchurch
Mt Albert	3846	Auckland
West Coast - Tasman	3740	-
Christchurch Central	3688	Christchurch
Öhariu	3488	Wellington
Nelson	3417	Nelson
Ilam	3034	Christchurch

Seems to be a very urban support base.

One out of the box

This one goes out to the "Nah mate, couldn't live in England: never stops bloody raining" mob:

Sydney weather forecast, Feb 2nd, 2010. "Summer"

Also for the poms who reckon they'll emigrate to Aussie to get some sunshine. Good call.

Human Provenance Project

Noticed recent articles (Guardian) and blog activity about something called the Human Provenance Project, in which the UK Border Agency attempts to "scientifically" determine peoples country of origin so that they can be deported. There's a decent short summary over on the Science Insider blog.

This concept is dodgy as anything - the above articles go into it in more depth.

It rings a bell with me: I remember more than two years ago, when I first came across early rumblings of this on tech commentary website The Register and wrote to my MP about it (I've dug out a copy of my letter). A shame it wasn't nipped in the bud way back then, despite hitting Godwin's law in line 2 of The Register's article. Judging by comments coming out of the scientific community, surely this should have been ruled out long ago by some Government science adviser somewhere?

It sounds like they may be backing off a bit now due to the current media outcry. "The present instruction has been withdrawn whilst amendments are made" and they will keep gathering the data but not actually use it in decision making.

Right. Like the various strategic withdrawals on ID cards: they're not scrapping it, so it'll be pretty much business as usual when the fuss has died down a bit.

Garden - Early Spring

Working in the garden this afternoon - just taken a few photos to show the state of things now, right at the very start of spring.

Will be interesting to see how everything fares as temperatures start to rise.

Pelican

This is one weird looking bird. Beautiful. And a lot bigger than you expect, too.
The photo is from a couple of weeks ago, taken on one of Sydney's northern beaches..