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The New Zealand Medical Council issued a “Guidance Statement” (see below) to doctors, in April 2021, stating “there is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice”, then enforced it vigorously, at a time when the Government was urging people to get unbiased advice from their doctors. For instance here is an excerpt from one of those ads: “For trusted information about the COVID-19 vaccine, visit your family doctor or…

The alleged voyage of King James I in a submarine under the River Thames remains one of the most intriguing mysteries of 17th-century England… Was King James I and VI of Scotland the first monarch to voyage underwater in a submarine? It seems unlikely, if not ridiculous, but according to an account in John Wilkins’ 1648 work, ‘Mathematicall Magick’, this may indeed have been the case! **The Origins of the Account:** John Wilkins was a…

Saturn’s rings are iconic, but new evidence suggests Earth might once have sported one of its own. This ring would have caused chaos on the surface. We know Earth has gone through a lot of different phases in its lifetime. Early on it was covered in magma oceans, and much later it was a giant snowball for a while. Landmasses have broken up, drifted apart and come back together over hundreds of millions of years. But a period where it sported a…

Fifty years of six o’clock closing of pubs had ended two days earlier, after a referendum convinced the government to change the antiquated licensing law. Introduced as a ‘temporary’ wartime efficiency measure in December 1917, 6 p.m. closing was made permanent the following year. The ‘six o’clock swill’ became part of the New Zealand way of life. In the short period between the end of the working day and closing time, men crowded together to…

With millions if not billions of dollars at stake, it’s easy to understand why AI employees hesitate to speak up—at least according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. Their concerns relate to fears about AI’s threats to humanity and fear of retaliation. Or to introduce a metaphor, what might occur in the Twenty-Fifth Hour. These are people with the most knowledge as to how AI systems work and believe that the technology could grow out…

Adding 10 per cent to the cost of most goods and services, GST was a key part of the economic reforms of the fourth Labour government – dubbed ‘Rogernomics’ after Minister of Finance Roger Douglas. Douglas implemented his ‘new right’ reforms after Labour won a landslide victory in the snap election of July 1984. The new government inherited an alarmingly high budget deficit and overseas debt, an over-valued dollar, and rocketing inflation.…

Dairy farmer Stanley Graham killed seven people in Kōwhitirangi on the South Island’s West Coast. One of New Zealand’s largest manhunts ended when Graham was shot on the evening of 20 October. He died of his wounds the following day. The tragedy began when Graham refused to hand over his rifle to police to assist the war effort. He felt aggrieved that police were ‘persecuting’ him rather than investigating his neighbours, who he believed…

Felix Graf von Luckner earned the epithet Der Seeteufel (the Sea Devil) for his exploits as captain of the German raider SMS Seeadler in 1916–17. The Seeadler, a converted merchant ship, sank 14 Allied ships in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans between January and July 1917. Von Luckner prided himself on the effectiveness and bloodless nature of his operations; only one person died during his raids. In August 1917 the Seeadler ran aground on…

The RW-5 Voxan recently took to the salt flats at Bonneville for flying mile tests, shattering four separate speed records for an electric bike. It was developed via a collaboration between Ohio State University and the Venturi Group. Venturi is the name behind MVS Venturi, the Atlantique sports car, LM race cars, and even the FLEX rover designed for SpaceX's mission to the Moon. The company owns French bikemaker Voxan, and it is that firm's…

It's a major problem. Declining trust in our society's key institutions undermines their credibility. Kiwis are clearly calling for a return to first principles, and the reality is, protecting free speech is essential if we are to keep public confidence in our key institutions. When approximately only one in three Kiwis trusts politicians or journalists, you would think this ought to be a wake-up call for our key institutions. Three damning…

The sensational case of the Maungatapu murders came to a grisly end when three members of the ‘Burgess gang’ were hanged shortly before 8.30 a.m. at Nelson gaol. Joseph Sullivan, the fourth member of the gang, avoided the death penalty by turning Queen’s evidence and testifying against his co-accused. Career criminal Richard Burgess approached his death with bravado. He bounded up the steps of the scaffold and kissed the noose as ‘the prelude…

**Reality of Racism in New Zealand** It is safe to say that most people want to live peaceful, happy and productive regardless of race and to do that race/ethnicity should be irrelevant. And yet we are being increasingly divided, forced to take sides, as either black or white when in fact life is mainly grey. Without some measure of compromise between races, society as we know it couldn’t exist. We seem to have developed a section of the…

In what might be described as a real-life Black Mirror episode, a Harvard student uses facial recognition with $379 Meta Ray-Ban 2 smart sunglasses - to dig up personal data on every face he sees in real time. If you've ever cared about your privacy, now might be the time to grab the tin foil hat. I've already got mine on. AnhPhu Nguyen, a junior at Harvard University, uses the livestreaming feature of his Meta Ray-Ban 2 smart glasses while…

Low-flying ground effect aircraft can deliver zero-emissions coastal transport that goes a lot further and a lot faster than electric boats – without needing FAA certification. So what happens when you add energy-dense hydrogen fuel to the equation? That's the question Miami startup Sea Cheetah plans to address, with a plan to develop hydrogen-fueled ocean-skimmers as well as a hydrogen generation, storage and fueling network in partnership…

Inspired by footwear he had seen in Japan, businessman Morris Yock and his son Anthony began manufacturing this simple rubber footwear in their garage in 1957. The name ‘jandal’ combined the words ‘Japanese’ and ‘sandal’. There is disagreement about whether Yock invented the jandal. The family of John Cowie claim that he introduced the footwear from Japan in the late 1940s, coining the name ‘jandal’ in the process. They believe Yock only…

AIs have a big problem with truth and correctness – and human thinking appears to be a big part of that problem. A new generation of AI is now starting to take a much more experimental approach that could catapult machine learning way past humans. Remember Deepmind's AlphaGo? It represented a fundamental breakthrough in AI development, because it was one of the first game-playing AIs that took no human instruction and read no rules. …

The privately organised rugby team was the first to wear the silver fern and an all-black uniform. Originally called New Zealand Maori, their name was changed after organiser and captain Joe Warbrick (Ngāti Rangitihi) and promoter Thomas Eyton added five Pākehā to strengthen the team. The 26-man squad included six former students of Te Aute College, five Warbrick brothers, and future New Zealand captain Thomas Ellison. During a marathon…

Why not get the kids making their own delicious afternoon tea treat these school holidays. Get them involved with making these sweet buns with vanilla custard in the middle. **Ingredients** 4 cups (640g) bread flour 1/2 cup caster sugar 1 tsp salt 2 1/2 tsp (10g) instant yeast 1 1/4 cups milk 100g unsalted butter, melted 2 tsp vanilla essence 2 eggs, lightly beaten 300ml thickened cream 50g instant pudding mix 1 egg,…

It has been a year since Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,139 people and reshaping the Middle East once again. As the war drags on, the potential for peace appears simply out of reach. While the media and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appear more focused on events in Lebanon, the bombing of the Gaza Strip continues. The struggle for peace appears increasingly futile as a campaign of supposed escalating to de-escalate unravels any…

In May 2007 the residents of the Scottish village of Cowie gathered to unveil a memorial to Pilot Officer Carlyle Everiss – a New Zealand fighter pilot whose heroic actions saved the lives of many villagers during the Second World War. Carlyle Gray Everiss was born in Gisborne on 3 December 1914. Following the outbreak of the Second World War he enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and began pilot training in January 1941. After gaining…