Antipodal – relating to or situated on the opposite side of the earth; pertaining to the antipodes; diametrically opposed to; relating to or denoting cells formed at the chalazal end of the embryo sac;any of three haploid cells in most angiosperms that are grouped at the end of the embryo sac farthest from the micropyle.
Earth sandwich
22/01/2020A New Zealander and a Spaniard have created an earth sandwich with 20,000 kilometres of filling:
. . . Etienne Naude and a counterpart in Spain have placed slices of bread on precise points, either side of the planet, 20,000 kilometres apart.
The men used longitude and latitude to make sure they were precisely opposite.
Naude told Morning Report he did it because he had the ability to do it – that, and university holidays aren’t very exciting.
One piece of bread that makes up the sandwich lies on Auckland’s Bucklands Beach, the other piece in Spain, placed by a counterpart Naude found in a subreddit.
“It’s amazing that we’ve actually been able to collaborate and do something like this at exact opposite points of the globe,” Naude said.
“We made sure to get the exact location with Google Maps, to get us within a few metres range, and then we used the actual image data on Google Maps to pinpoint ourselves even closer than that.” . .
Travellers often get asked where they come from.
When Kiwis answer, we often find the questioner has at best a very vague notion of where New Zealand is and often have no idea at all.
That’s rarely a problem in Spain for two reasons . The first is kiwifruit, Spain is our biggest export market for this fruit.
The other is that New Zealand is the antipodes of Spain and when I tell people in Spain I’m from Nueva Zelanda, they almost always reply, el pais mas lejos de España (the country furthest from Spain).
If the Greens weren’t so red
22/01/2020Another delivery failure from the government:
No progress has been made on advancing the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary over the past two years despite specific Government promises in their coalition agreements to do so, Nelson MP Nick Smith says.
“Written Parliamentary Question to Ministers reveal the Government has all but given up on advancing the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary. There has been no Cabinet papers and little work by Ministers or officials on the sanctuary. There has been no meetings, no correspondence, and no official papers in more than six months.
“There is now no realistic prospect of the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary being put in place during this term of Parliament, despite specific promises in the Confidence and Supply agreement with the Green Party to do so.
“Far from helping to create the new Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, the Government has blocked attempts to progress it. They have put my original Government Bill to create the sanctuary at the bottom of the work schedule and repeatedly blocked my Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Members Bill from being introduced.
“This important sanctuary would protect an area of ocean twice the land area of New Zealand and hundreds of threatened marine species. The Kermadec Sanctuary now joins a long list of policies this Government has failed to deliver on.”
The government hasn’t delivered on this coalition agreement promise which is Greens’ core policy because that party hasn’t the bargaining power of NZ First which is beholden to the fishing industry.
If the Greens weren’t so red they might have contemplated a coalition with National and had no argument about creating the sanctuary.
But the party is deeply red and the environment is the loser because of that.