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Day 17 September, 2009

Entries 2 Total

Whanganui or Wanganui but why not Whanganui/Wanganui

Sep 17, ’09 8:22 PM

I’m in Aotearoa New Zea­l­and for a couple of weeks and driv­ing about provided me with the great priv­ilege of catch­ing up with the sea of enlight­en­ment that is NZ talk­back radio, in this case the lovely Leighton Smith. Flip­ping through the chan­nels I just had to stop and listen to one of Smith’s callers com­plain­ing that if they had wanted to call Wan­ganui “Whan­ganui” all that time ago they would have used a bloody ‘F’. Suf­fice to say Smith didn’t offer up any wis­dom to his schol­arly caller.

I’m nat­ur­ally inclined to side with cor­rect­ing the spelling mis­take but I’m also sym­path­etic to the view that the “Wan­ganui” spelling is indeed an import­ant part of the his­tory and cul­ture of the area, even if ori­gin­ally a res­ult of ignorance.

Which is why I have to agree with Read­ing the Maps on the mat­ter. Use both.

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Five essential things to know about evolution

Sep 17, ’09 12:19 AM

John Tim­mer writ­ing for Ars Tech­nica:

If sci­ent­ists had to pick one area of sci­ence that’s most fre­quently mis­un­der­stood, evol­u­tion would prob­ably win the vote. It’s not simply the sea of mis­in­form­a­tion avail­able on the Inter­net (although that clearly doesn’t help); it also seems that a lot of people who accept the sci­entific evid­ence don’t fully appre­ci­ate some aspects of evol­u­tion­ary the­ory. It’s one thing to remem­ber a few examples of the com­pel­ling evid­ence we have for evol­u­tion; it’s another thing entirely to appre­ci­ate the fea­tures of the pro­cess that make it so incred­ibly power­ful but, at the same time, hide many of its actions from our com­mon experience.

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