Recent Posts
Weather Related Owies
Those who follow me on Facebook or Twitter will know that I don’t cope well in the heat. I hate the high temperatures in Summer (and New Zealand is just coming out of Summer). I like feeling warm, yes, but there is a limit as to how much my body can tolerate.
Even in my youth, I didn’t cope well with the heat, suffering from heat exhaustion and borderline heat stroke on numerous occasions. I know the signs and symptoms to look for. When people tell me that it’s all in my head and that I don’t know what I’m talking about…
I might not be a medical doctor, but I do have Outdoor First Aid training and personal experience to draw from. I also have AWESOME research skills.
For this month’s new episode on Conversations in Science, I decided to talk about heat exhaustion, heat stroke and hypothermia, and a whole rafter of other weather related owies.
Heart in Turmoil: A Poem from 1996
In digging through some old notebooks, I came across a stack of free-form poetry that I wrote when I was in college. For an engineering student, they possess emotion that is so unusual for an engineer. (What is wrong with the world? An engineer revealing emotion?) I thought I would share just one of those poems now. I hope you like it.
7 Years Ago, The City Fell
It’s hard to believe that seven years have passed since my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand changed forever. On February 22, 2011, at precisely 12:51pm, an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale leveled the city. I kid you not.
For many other earthquake-ridden cities around the world, it took an earthquake of much greater magnitude to cause anywhere near the same level of devastation, but even then, it’s not nearly every building in the CBD that needs to be demolished. Over 70% of the buildings suffered irreparable damage during that quake, continuing to stand only just long enough so people could get out. Some buildings didn’t even do that. Whole suburbs, most of East Christchurch, needed to be abandoned and bulldozed to the ground — and because if it, we have a severe housing shortage, even seven years later. But what really makes Christchurch so unique is that we were already a broken city.
ConvoScience: Dating Turkey Dinosaurs
I know, it’s an odd title to an episode of Conversation in Science, but it was an honest one. Jessie Sanders, my producer, was doing some research for one of her other shows, looking up some of the latest news about Turkey — not the gobble, gobble type, but the country. Well, in her research, she encountered an article about dinosaurs the size of turkeys discovered in Australia. Of course, she fired the article my way, but it sparked a whole new topic for Conversations in Science.
How does one actually date a turkey dinosaur?
Is driving a thing of the past?
For many of us, getting the driver’s license was a rite of passage. We were counting the days, possibly even minutes, until we were old enough to put in the application and sit that first test. The first time behind the wheel, we bunny hopped down the road, tires squealed, and we flew forward as we put the brake on a little hard. (And in my case, I gave my mother a heart attack and her first gray hair.) When we passed our practicals, it was party time and driving down to our favorite haunts to show off the piece of paper.
However, something has changed. While we were biting on the bit to get our driver’s license, the current generation of youth don’t seem to care.
Who are these children? What am I missing that is the secret to this apathy from the next generation?
Friendship: A Poem from 1997
In digging through some old notebooks, I came across a stack of free-form poetry that I wrote when I was in college. For an engineering student, they possess emotion that is so unusual for an engineer. (What is wrong with the world? An engineer revealing emotion?) I thought I would share just one of those poems now. I hope you like it.