Hunting the undebunkable

Before I come to the boffin on the radio, here’s a question: how many plesiosaurs do you know by name (ie by Christian name, surname, or both)? Right, time’s up, and the answer is . . . pause for tension-stretching fanfare . . . one. And that one is, altogether now, at the tops of your voices, Nessie.

I apologise to those of you who didn’t realise the Loch Ness monster is a plesiosaur, but she is. It’s obvious from the few faked photographs, obvious at least to anyone who, at the age of seven, had a brief but burning crush on dinosaurs in general to the extent that he read every book on the subject in the Hassocks District Library and who to this day can tell his triceratops from his diplodocus and who has never forgotten the lesson of the allosaurus.

The allosaurus was every bit as terrifying as tyrannosaurus rex, but it was so forgettably named that everyone forgot it. Branding, even Nessie: Disprove her all among the extinct, is you like, but she’ll endure. everything.

Anyway, a plesiosaur was an aquatic brontosaurus, long-necked, longtailed and big-bodied. But whereas the brontosaurus supported its weight on legs the size of kauri stumps, the plesiosaur handed that duty over to salt water and evolved a set of flippers for propulsion. It needed propulsion because, unlike the plodding vegetarian bront, it was a predator.

Now, it is generally agreed that the last plesiosaur turned up its flippers 66 million years ago. Yet there’s said to be one in Loch Ness. It is into this apparent contradiction that our boffin on the radio steps.

The boffin’s field of expertise is environmental DNA, which, as far as I could gather from the snatch of interview I heard with the excellent Kathryn Ryan, works on the same principle as the Theory of Napoleon’s Urine.

I learned the Theory of Napoleon’s Urine (Tonpis to the French) at the same time as I was learning about dinosaurs. Its one tenet is that every glass of water you drink contains at least one molecule that passed through Napoleon’s bladder.

Now, while being aware that there are trillions of molecules in a glass of water, and while being further aware that Napoleon was fond of a drink, I am not sure that I have ever quite believed Tonpis. Environmental DNA, however, I am more inclined to trust.

Essentially it argues that you and I and all living things are forever shedding stuff containing DNA, and that stuff gets broken up and distributed randomly through the environment like Napoleon’s urine.

It follows, therefore, that if you take a few cups of water from Loch Ness and you sieve out the fish DNA and the pondweed DNA and the dead sheep DNA and the bathing human beings’ DNA and of course the tonpis, then whatever DNA you’re left with is Nessie’s. And that is precisely what the boffin on the radio is doing.

Who’s paying him to do it, I can’t tell you. But I can tell you what he’ll find, which is nothing at all. As he surely already knows. There is no Nessie.

Why then is he doing it? Why is he scouring a lake on the other side of the world for what obviously isn’t there? Is it for the publicity? If so, then he’s a cunning bugger. The world’s media are clamouring.

But if he’s hoping to debunk the myth of Nessie, then he’s a fool. Nessie’s undebunkable. You can disprove her all you like but she’ll endure. We much prefer our pretty stories to the dreary truth. Look at ghosts. Look at god.

It’s been pretty tough going for a lot of those people at the lower end of the income scale.

You may be pleased to learn that, whatever you might think, the cost of living is hardly going up at all. Just like the past five years, inflation has – with a brief exception – remained stubbornly below 2 per cent. According to Statistics New Zealand, the cost of the goods and services which normal households regularly consume rose a measly 1.5 per cent over the last year, exactly as the Reserve Bank expected.

It probably always feels like the cost of living is going up by more than the statisticians estimate. But now more than before, it appears to be a clearer pattern that for many that feeling has merit.

In the last 12 months, the prices of telecommunications hardware and audiovisual equipment (phones and TVs) have fallen substantially. So has the price of subscription television, as Sky TV fights for survival against new, more nimble competitors, by slashing prices.

For people who can afford the latest technology, that’s terrific news, and there is more good news for anyone who can afford to treat themselves.

While the rising price of oil may have slowed the recent trend, international airfares have been falling for years. Since the global financial crisis, it’s been a tremendous time to be a Kiwi with discretionary spending power. If you have owned a home since the last recession and held down a wellpaid job, you have arguably never had it so good.

But inflation to one household is not the same as inflation to another, and the latest figures spell out the problems faced by people living week to week.

Petrol prices rose sharply in the quarter as the NZ dollar weakened at the same time as oil prices firmed. Rents are up, as are insurance costs, as are electricity prices. Overall, petrol and housing (including utility bills) made up well over half of the overall increase in inflation of the last year.

Unavoidable items are creating unavoidable pressures on households, which has a disproportionate impact on those who typically have nothing left over just before pay day.

While officials at Statistics NZ try not to step into political scraps over what official measurements