Saturday Morning for Saturday 27 November 2021

8.10 Chris Smith: a new Covid variant has been detected

A new heavily mutated Covid variant is causing global alarm. Since its detection in several tests in South Africa, Belgium has confirmed a case in a traveller who returned from Egypt on 11 November which is seeing the EU and United Kingdom among other countries restrict travel from Southern Africa.

The World Health Organisation has assigned the Greek letter Omicron to the variant, previously known as B.1.1.529. It has been described as the most significant variant to date. The WHO have been meeting under urgency amidst global alarm. The variant has been identified and sequenced in record time.

Our regular commentator, Cambridge University consultant clinical virologist Dr Chris Smith joins us to discuss.

8.25 Nowroz Ali: escaping the Taliban to make a new home in NZ

When the Taliban took over Kabul, Afghanistan in August, Nowroz Ali feared for his life. A wanted man for many years for his work with the New Zealand Defence Force, he was supposed to be on a Hercules sent to evacuate people, but such was the pandemonium he couldn’t get to the plane. 

Ali and his family have spent much time fleeing the Taliban. They killed many in his community in Bamyan province when he was just a child. He went on to become a volunteer interpreter and then official interpreter with the NZDF between 2003 and 2013. He has been trying to get to New Zealand ever since. 

After a long, often frightening journey, Ali is finally here, staying in an Auckland hotel awaiting resettlement. Two of his sisters and a brother have also made it, while his parents and other siblings have been left behind. Ali hopes to get the rest of his family here as he turns his mind to finding work and completing a Masters in international relations.

9.05 Steven Pinker: why being rational is human and matters now 

Is the world losing its mind? While our understanding of the world through science grows, fake news and conspiracy theories have never seemed stronger. That might lead you to believe that humans are ultimately irrational. It’s not so, says Steven Pinker. In Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters Pinker argues that we act in ways that are sensible in the context of most of the ways we live, but then we don’t always take advantage of the tools of reasoning our greatest thinkers have developed over millennia. “The rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology by individuals can,” he acknowledges, “add up to crippling irrationality.”

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language, cognition and social relations, writes for the New York Times, Time and The Atlantic and is the author of twelve books. 

10.05 Ann Patchett: a much loved writer asks what matters most

She’s a bestselling, prizewinning author with her own bookshop in native Nashville Tennessee, but in her new collection of essays This Precious Life Ann Patchett reveals that below the surface of any charmed life there are darker undercurrents. "Again and again," she writes, "I was asking what mattered most in this precarious and precious life." 

Ann Patchett is the author of seven novels, four books of nonfiction and in 2019 published her first children’s book. Patchett’s numerous awards include the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and 2020 novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2012 Patchett was named by Time as one of the ‘100 Most Influential People in the World’.

10.35 Christopher Boyle: the rise of green hydrogen   
 

In March New Zealand’s first hydrogen powered bus was launched in Auckland, and this month saw the arrival of the first of Hyundai New Zealand’s new hydrogen-powered electric trucks. But just exactly how viable is hydrogen as a major power alternative? Is it the key to a lower carbon economy and this country being more energy self-sufficient?   

Christopher Boyle believes so. He’s the co-founder and CEO of AFCryo, a Christchurch-based company working in cryogenics - extreme cooling technology, which they’re exporting internationally. They’re providing superconducting technology for electric aircraft in the UK (set to take to the air late 2022), and developed a prototype hydrogen-fuelled chase boat for Emirates Team NZ. 

In May AFCryo unveiled what they bill as a revolutionary green hydrogen production system, in partnership with UK company Clean Power Hydrogen. Its first production unit is now operational as part of Northern Ireland’s first one-megawatt electrolyser-based system, at a wastewater treatment works.

11.05 Jo Guy: searching for your lighthouse person

When Scott Guy was shot dead at the gate of his family farm in Feilding 11 years ago, and his brother-in-law was charged with his murder (later acquitted), six of Jo Guy’s grandchildren were made fatherless. In the care of those grandchildren Jo Guy came to see how many more children are in the same boat.  

Now grandmother to 14 tamariki, Guy’s insight and own experience of surviving and thriving has now been told through a children’s book she has written, illustrated by Paul Cornwell, The Search for the Lighthouse People.

Jo Guy has written several children’s books as well as a book about her late son Scott Guy. She lives near Feilding with her husband Bryan, and describes one of her life goals as passing on the love of reading and learning to children. The Search for the Lighthouse People is available by order here.

11.30 Hamish McDouall - Whanganui recognised as an international city of design

It’s only small, but as a city Whanganui is rich in design. From the eccentric Durie Hill elevator and wooden colonial Opera House to its renown for glass and ceramic object making, the river city has both a diverse smorgasboard of historical buildings and a growing interest in contemporary urban ideas. This month the city was announced as New Zealand’s only UNESCO City of Design, one of 40 such cities worldwide.  

Hamish McDouall has been Whanganui mayor since 2016 and vice president of Local Government New Zealand since July 2020, representing the provincial sector. A Whanganui Collegiate old boy, he was born here and is distinctive among mayors for having won both the TV gameshow Sale of the Century in 1989 and quiz show Mastermind in 1990. 

 

Books featured in this episode:

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
By Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525561994

These Precious Days 
By Ann Patchett 
Publisher: Bloomsbury 
ISBN: 9781526640970

The Search for the Lighthouse People
Words: Jo Guy 
Illustration: Paul Cornwell
Self-published
ISBN:9780473604530

 

Music featured on this show:

Wanganui
By The Bambi Molesters
Played at 11.30am