An urban N.Z. baby-boomer and a Jack Russell terrier
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A ROYALLY DOGGED DAY IN NELSON

30/11/2015

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​​There’s nary a corgi or a Union Jack to be seen in central Nelson at ten o’clock on the morning of the royal visit. There are hardly any people either. Although Trafalgar Street isn’t exactly Dead Man’s Gulch, it’s certainly quieter than usual. “Don’t quote me” says a shopkeeper, “but town is dead”. 
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There is a brass band though. They are playing something vaguely Pomp and Circumstance from within the barricades which stretch from the church steps, along Hardy street and then dogleg through Montgomery Arcade into the Saturday Market. 

The green-painted Spud Cart, a potential hotbed of IRA sympathisers, is not under any kind of surveillance. Beside the ANZ, there’s a small cluster of people including a child in a glittery wig and another dressed as a tiger. A woman in a peasant skirt sits smoking on a bench outside the museum. On the other side of the street, there’s another woman waiting for something to happen. She’s sitting in a striped folding chair, knees pressed against the barricade with a Fox Terrier on her lap. She’ll have a prime view of the royal entourage as it strolls by, but at the moment it’s a lonely vigil she’s keeping. A couple of women stand chatting outside Cruella’s Natural Fibre Boutique. One of them is clacking away at some knitting like an antipodean Madame Defarge. 


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THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: DO TRY THIS AT HOME

3/11/2015

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​Thought experiments are the best kind of experiment. They take place in the mind where anything is possible. They involve no dangerously combustible chemicals, no finicky data-collection or the wearing of unflattering lab-coats. No animals are harmed in thought experiments – except perhaps in the case of Schrödinger's Cat - and then only very theoretically. 
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Even with human subjects informed consent is not mandatory. Thought experiments cost absolutely nothing to conduct and so the results are unlikely to be corrupted by pharmaceutical lobby groups or other questionable sources of funding. 

All that is required for a thought experiment is what - if you were telling a joke - would be the set-up, plus some imagination and wild surmising. The set-up can be very simple or mind-bendingly elaborate and aimed at illuminating the farthest shores of philosophical and  scientific thought. Apparently Galileo didn’t actually lob tennis balls and refrigerators off the leaning tower of Pisa in order to conclude that that objects fall at the same speed regardless of their weight. He saved himself all the hard yakker by coming to the same conclusion via a thought experiment.

And of course Herr Schrödinger, in his famous thought experiment, only had to lock an imaginary cat in a box with an imaginary Geiger counter, some completely non-existent hydrocyanic acid and a dab of fictitious radioactive material, in order to elucidate his argument about quantum mechanics. Whatever that was.


I’ve devised a few thought experiments of my own – necessarily constrained by the fact that this column is intended for a general readership. So please, come along with me to the Thought Lab and apply your imagination, intuition and reason to the following three thought experiments. The first couple of experiments are pretty straightforward. The last one though … well, let’s just say it allows plenty of room for thought. ... 


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    THE GREY URBANIST
    Ro Cambridge, is a freelance writer, 
    arts worker & columnist Here she reports on the oddities & serendipities of  urban life.  She roams Nelson city , NZ 
    with a tan & white Jack Russell. (Her original canine side-kick, Pete, who features in many of these posts died in 2015.

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