Cabinet shuffles are more fun in Denmark

Michelle's sour face as she bumped her husband from sitting next to the beautiful PM of Denmark set me looking for more Thorning photos. What I discovered is that cabinet shuffles in Denmark are more fun than Canadian, but Canadian shuffles look like a party compared to the American sense of ceremony which is more suited to guest choral groups in a seniors home. A little happiness, informality and a lighter touch on security look well on a leader.

Yes, that is Ms Thorning-Schmidt, PM, in the white.
A lean team. More than just token males.
It's possible to look like Sarah Palin and be respected.

Smiles, a crowded bench. July 2013
A stouter team. An awkward bit of tie.

EPA and Budget appointments. HO HUM.

As a footnote, the entertaining three-photo sequence from the Mandela memorial which ends with Mrs. B.H. Obama looking askance at the blonde PM after getting her husband to trade places.  Soap opera at its best.

Canadian Politics are irrelevant Thank God.

Canadian politics are mostly irrelevant, coming in seventh after family and neighbourhood, internet, work, shopping, and entertainment activities.   (Internet is a transnational oddball, not even Canadian).  A #8 Robertson screwdriver, the Nanaimo bar and a drive across the prairie are more of my Canadian identity than antics in Ottawa.

We still love our politics, especially in an election year, but since government spending is only one sixth of the GDP  (15.9% cited in Cato report and down from 22% some years back), it's only reasonable and desirable that politics should be more of a hobby than a calling for most.

Chuang Tzu (369 BC - 286 BC) may have been the first to point out that less government is better government:  "They made no history"

"In the age when life on earth was full, no one paid any special attention to worthy men, nor did they single out the man of ability. Rulers were simply the highest branches on the tree, and the people were like deer in the woods. They were honest and righteous without realizing that they were “doing their duty.” They loved each other and did not know that this was “love of neighbor.” They deceived no one yet they did not know that they were “men to be trusted.” They were reliable and did not know that this was “good faith.” They lived freely together giving and taking, and did not know that they were generous. For this reason their deeds have not been narrated. They made no history."  -Chuang Tzu

Martin & Chretien share credit with Harper for having reduced the burden of government in Canada.  At the same time, the United States has been climbing from 18% to well over 20%.

Privacy? That ship has sailed. Ginormous internet theft.

Belarus servers played man-in-tbe-middle and re-routed millions of communications from businesses and governments through its copier.  This is the same trick NSA uses
but now it's done by a private criminal enterprise.  h/t smalldeadanimals

The idea is simple.  BGP routers decide what path messages will follow and depend on trust, telling each other what IP destinations they can easily deliver to.  The winner is the one with the smallest block of IP addresses that includes the destination address.   Sometimes people lie.

“What makes a man-in-the-middle routing attack different from a simple route hijack? Simply put, the traffic keeps flowing and everything looks fine to the recipient,…” Renesys wrote in a blog post about the hijacks. “It’s possible to drag specific internet traffic halfway around the world, inspect it, modify it if desired, and send it on its way. Who needs fiberoptic taps?”

Lots of detail at the source.  The good news is that Renesys sends tagged data out into the internet all day long and retrieves it so see if it followed a logical path or was detoured.  On the other hand, if the thieves only tell a few targeted servers to re-route data, Renesys may not hear about it.

Chuang Tzu predicted this thousands of years ago:

In taking precautions against thieves who cut open satchels, search bags, and break open boxes, people are sure to cord and fasten them well, and to employ strong bonds and clasps; and in this they are ordinarily said to show their wisdom. When a great thief comes, however, he shoulders the box, lifts up the satchel, carries off the bag, and runs away with them, afraid only that the cords, bonds, and clasps may not be secure; and in this case what was called the wisdom (of the owners) proves to be nothing but a collecting of the things for the great thief.

This applies to passwords and credit card information too. You are obliged to use increasingly complex alphanumeric passwords for everything while your overlords are robbed blind by hackers who steal those secrets by the million.

Privacy? That ship has sailed.  The choice is between a dynamic identity in an open network or a private identity in the backwoods.  Both are attractive but the open one needs power to counter-attack thieves.

One easy trick to eliminate last minute shopping.

Don't apologize for last minute Christmas shopping.
Re-Brand it.

What you really are is a Just In Time Shopper.


Like the pioneering Toyota and other industry leaders you have applied JIT to the holiday season.

Little bird in a tree is a master of math

An edible bird perched in the branches of a tree is exploiting a space-filling algorithm to maximize its safety at the same time as the tree exploits that algorithm to distribute its branches, twigs and leaves to grab light.  Though single twigs seem chaotic and random, they are optimized for the bird's defence and the tree's offense.

Hawk defeated by math.

You are 100% vulnerable to hacks. Privacy ain't what it used to be.

This should be a movie.   When journalist lecturer Penenberg's laptop froze, telling him to dial a 312 area number to unlock, and simultaneously his cell phone began vibrating in the middle of a class, he knew he had been hacked.  All his passwords, savings, investments, even the phone numbers of some of his anonymous sources were tracked down.  Oddly, this was the plan.  He had contacted SpiderLabs and challenged them to get into his stuff.  Below is the plan of attack they set out.  You and I are so vulnerable.   Read the original entertaining story here.

This isn't a bad news story, it's a news story, like the discovery of antibiotics or gunpowder.   Privacy is like tribal identity, something that is being redefined.   It's nice living in a small village but cities often offer more.  I love being private but a resilient identity in a large open network can offer more.

Mandela: Soft-pedal the hagiography. UPDATE

Let Mandela be remembered as a kindly old guy, who was not vengeful, didn't steal his country blind, and helped South Africa move away from Apartheid.  Soft pedal the hagiography as leaders great and small climb aboard the hallelujah train.  He was a Marxist dupe and slept with his Winnie who organized the murder of black opponents.  (He later divorced her).   I'm glad he played a role in recovering from Apartheid but his speeches are embarrassing to a conservative.  You can test this by seeing that the usual lefty suspects are loudest in his praise. I salute honourary Canadian, Nelson Mandela for a peaceable character but will follow neither his politics nor philosophy.

UPDATE: Read this PBS interview with South Africa's Justice Minister, Coetsee, who set in motion the talks with Mandela while in prison, met personally with him, and came to respect his character, more than just "a kindly old guy" as I wrote above.

UPDATE: A book draft Mandela wrote while in prison can be read on line.  This story points out he was an active member of the South African Communist Party and certain views he held were erased from the later book, The Long Walk.

Below, a nice picture upon Mandela's 1990 release from prison, found at the National Post. The smiling Winnie okayed the killing of political opponents with a burning tire necklace,  liked vengeance and went in for communism.  (Coetsee reports that Mandela's release was behind schedule because Winnie was at the hairdressers.)

Moderate and more appropriate encomiums upon his career (reproduced below) can be found  here at Instapundit and again  here, also at Instapundit.    (My education points to "encomia" but my heart to "encomiums".

Jihad Sux

RIP Nelson Mandela. No he was not a saint. He was not in the mold of Gandhi. If he was a communist that is a sin he will have to answer for.

1) Soon after his release from prison he divorced Winnie Mandela. She who apparently never turned from her support for vengeance, communism, retribution and hate. +1

2) When many anti-Apartheid people urged violence to topple the regime he no longer did so after prison. +1

3) Once the Apartheid government relented he was the most powerful and popular person in all of Africa. He ruled more moderately than his enemies predicted. +1

4) He protected and promoted the reconciliation process which granted more amnesty and forgiveness to his enemies than his enemies had any right to expect. +1

5) He stepped away from political power when even more would have been his had he only asked. +1

6) He did not however use his world acclaim and statesmanship to condemn Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. As an apparently great man he could have done more and should have. But we could say that of all great men.

STALLION

There are folks who may object to what I am about to write, but I think I speak the truth in this:
I do not celebrate the death of Nelson Mandela. He seemed like a kindly old guy in his later years, and he's had his share of difficulties. Nevertheless, I do not celebrate his life either. He was most certainly NOT a Lincoln or Jefferson.
Mandela objected to apartheid. I don't blame him - it was a stupid system that wasted generations of talent and productivity. Nevertheless, he chose the wrong path for his people by choosing Marxism as the political ideology that would lead to his people's 'freedom.' It was very fashionable for the elite of third world societies to earn their higher education in London or Paris and attach themselves spiritually and ideologically to Marxism. The naturalness of the attachment stems from their observation that their respective homelands were, at the time they were getting their educations, likely still under the colonial rule of some western European nation, and the only political movement that seemed to have the strength to oppose the West was Soviet or Chinese Marxism. Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Pol Pot and a whole bunch of others came to that conclusion, and unfortunately so did Mandela.
It would have been vastly better for his people if he had instead simplified his thoughts and concepts on the just future for his people - a future where his people did not spend their energies trying to 'divide the spoils' of an overthrown apartheid regime, but instead used that overthrow to claim what was theirs truly by birthright - the individual fruits of their labor, the opportunity to pursue personal betterment in a financial or social sense, to exercise their INALIENABLE RIGHTS OF LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
Then, Mandela would have been a true icon for the ages.
Instead, he's just another failed Marxist ideologue whose nation gets more and more screwed up with every passing day, with the difference between pre and post apartheid being just that instead of having the creative and productive potential of their lives wasted by the imposition of a personally enslaving and degrading system imposed on them, they instead impose such a system on themselves.

If you're still with me, here's the kindly gentleman singing with some marxists about killing white people.  Maybe he was just going along for the ride that day.

Serve them right if Harper resigns.

If the rumour-mongerers prove prescient, it serves them right.  If our PM deliberately renews the leadership of the Conservative Party (and then resigns), the man they call names and despise could send them tumbling. Picture the tug of war with a leader on one end of the rope and a press gang tugging away on the other end to bring him low.  If he lets go, its their own rabble that falls. Those catcalls about "despot, tyrant, criminal, corrupt and power-hungry" would come to nothing.  I suspect name-callers of harbouring the sins they charge others with.

I'm happy to picture the honeymoon glow for a new Conservative leader just as the next federal election arrives.  More voters are swayed by the personal than policy.

Best PM in my lifetime.

Robot makes better burgers. More adult kids move home.

360 gourmet burgers an hour come from a robot that pays for itself in a year and frees adult kids from dead end jobs as burger flippers.  They can move home and have time to demonstrate for the $15/hour minimum wage.   Here  and  here.  Pictures and story from singularityhub.com

Gourmet?  Yes.  The patty can be fresh ground, formed and grilled.  The tomato and pickle are sliced the moment the patty comes off the grill.  Big savings on labour mean better quality buns and beef can be bought.  You'll probably have one-click ordering just like at Amazon. The bill is paid and the patty shaped for the grill with one touch.

.

A dose of economic freedom may save Detroit.

A dose of economic freedom may yet save Detroit. (Why stop at Detroit?)  Paul Rand has a plan and opened a GOP office in Detroit to advance Black American prosperity.    Ballsy of him.  The plan is to create Freedom Zones with five points:

1.   5% flat income tax for people and businesses inside a designated freedom zone.
2.   Reduced payroll tax in the zone.
3.   Education vouchers for parents in the zone to choose their kids' school.
4.   A stop to EPA air quality penalties inside the zone.
5.   Exemption from union-wage-only laws for government work done inside the zone.

Breaking free

Why do people have to be desperate before they give up folly and why do they try last what will solve a problem?  We had an example this week where the White House screwed up management of Obamacare's Coming Out party and after a month of agony hired six skilled business people. Now they're advertising  the site is being fixed "with private sector velocity and effectiveness".  That should have been first not last.

Paul Rand is advocating shortcuts, using what I call the "Two Question Principle".
First question: If you had only half the time or half the money to get a job done, what shortcuts would you take.  Second question:  Why not take those shortcuts anyway?

What's notable about his five points is they are federal options but most of the screw up is caused by local politicians.  If the city council would pitch in with some shortcuts of their own, Detroit could come roaring back.

Less friction to keep it moving
than to start it moving.

Remember, if you don't like the results, you can tune the direction the freedom zones are going.  Doing more of the same old is the wrong option.  Once you get something moving along, it takes less effort to steer it.

Chong's bill could roll back the triple whammy that concentrates power in party leaders. UPDATE

I've high hopes and low expectations for Michael Chong's private member bill to shift power to MP's and riding associations.   Three elements in the bill to be introduced this Thursday are according to Coyne:  Riding Associations have the final say on who gets nominated, not the party leader.  Caucus can decide who belongs and can trigger leadership reviews with a 15% petition to be followed by a 50% +1 vote.  MP's will have more liberty to disagree with the PMO's direction and to represent their riding.

First Past The Post in elections gives clarity to the vote (a feature) and concentrates power in the hands of the winning party (a bug).  This goes double because the winning party, not the voters, decide who our prime minister is.  This goes triple because the PM then controls most of what happens in the party and the house.         The Chong bill would weaken the top down effect for the second and third whammy.

This sounds democratic but more accurately is a distribution of power to a larger number of inside players.  An unrigged gateway in through riding associations is opened wider.   I like it. 

Other media pretty much reprint the  Canadian Press story although the Globe did their own.  Michael himself hasn't promoted this on his website and has declined comment until the bill is introduced.    The opposition parties that would like to put the chop on our Prime Minister are showing gentlemanly restraint because the bill would cramp their leadership style too.  Thus the "low expectations" in my lede.

h/t Blue Like You

UPDATE:  I agree with posters Diogenes Borealis and Crux of the Matter that the bar is set too low for a leadership challenge.  The 15% sounds like a bait number to get MP's to buy into the bill by amending it.

Conservative and Liberal voices are still mostly irrelevant.

You can pretend the conservative voice is louder by getting easy access to inconsequential sites that mirror your views.  You know that more will be available each year because a swelling population of grey-haired people have families, grandchildren, homes and neighbourhoods they want to hang onto and hence are more conservative.   For now, politics has been voted mostly irrelevant by Canada's webizens.

This fall MSNBC and CNN viewer stats have plunged 45%.  See Alexa's graphic ranking American conservative sites against total US traffic.  That could be a plus.   On the other hand, Fox was down 21% too.                                                                                                                                        

Canada has a story too.   rabble.ca has an alexa traffic rank about ten times that of bloggingtories alexa rank but in the bigger picture of all sites in Canada,  Rabble and Blogging Tories are hobby nooks for the dedicated. Go to the link and browse the first couple hundred popular sites in Canada.  Google is at the top, the BBC is more popular than almost any Canadian paper, Fulltiltpoker (#225)beats the Financial Post (#226).  Politics is not the top interest, not anywhere near the top interest for Canadians and anything either left or right is hard to find.  This tells me that a successful party must appeal to people with more important things to do. You don't wean them from the other team,  you draw them from the otherwise engaged.

Otherwise engaged.

(If you want to keep going, here are the US rankings.  Google, facebook, YouTube are the top interests.)
Footnote:  The Liberal party web site  (2800 in Canada) and the Conservative web site (14,000 in Canada).  The NDP party  (15000 in Canada).  The Green Party  (11000 in Canada).  Obviously site traffic is different from votes.  Why do the sites have different levels of engagement?

Who chose your last name?

Traditionally men are stuck with the name they are born with while, as adults, women by marriage choose their surname.  If wealth or a high status job is involved, both men and women keep theirs.  In recent years, thanks to feminism, more women and men act like the wealthy and retain their birth names.  It's even illegal for a woman to change her name when marrying in Quebec.  Where does this lead?  (Typo fixed. Used to say "keep her name")

His Royal Highness Prince George Alexander
Louis of Cambridge with fans.

It makes it hard to tell who is married.  Almost half the house plans I see at work are for couples with different last names.  Marriage is such a powerful argument against single parent homes and against the state standing "in loco parentis" that subversive information about marital status is suppressed.

Where else does it lead?  To hyphenated children.  This may work until the second generation when hyphenated young women and hyphenated young men marry up and have to decide their kids surname.  You'll be getting cute little Judy Bradstone-Moore-Wang-Jenkinses.  After three generations of this nonsense, chaos.

Names have to be practical.  Why have a war over patronymics (borne by males who had no say in their name) or matronymics (borne by females who also stick with a name they had no say in choosing)?  If the last name is connected to status and wealth, a simple accounting test can decide the little nipper's surname.

A modest proposal:  Everyone gets a unique alphanumeric name, like a Postal Code.  "C" for Canadian, "BC" for British Columbia" and "1490078" for my birth registration number.   I'd be CBC1490078 in the phone book and '78 to my intimate friends. There'd be no more struggles between wealthy families and the fractious sexes.

Footnote:  Longest on record:  Captain Leone (d. 1917).  Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache 

Why did Sandy Hook mass murderer Lanza kill those kids? Violent videos don't explain it.

Killer dance move

The prosecutor's official report came out this week.  Adam Lanza played Dance Dance Revolution three afternoons a week and had been a devotee of Super Mario Brothers, and he played Call of Duty.   Sandy Hook was a dance move gone wrong?  Reason.com quotes the NY Post: that Lanza lived in an "eerie lair of violent video games" where he obliterated virtual victims ...until`the virtual became a reality".  That sold papers but didn`t give the reader enough information to understand the crime.

5 star read

This is always the case with horrific breaking news.  You read that at least ten people have died in an earthquake, then next morning it is a hundred, and two weeks later it is three thousand but few bother to report it. First reports are almost always wrong.  An excellent book, ``The First Casualty`` details how "The first casualty when war comes is truth".  Accurate information isn't available in the fog of war and the information that is available is massaged or falsified to manipulate people.  That sells policies and papers.  The Benghazi circus of lies and misdirection is a good example.

 Related news in the same report (see reason.com for the source): Adam had mental issues but not enough to deny him the right to buy a gun.   The new legislation wouldn't have kept his mother from legally buying a gun. He fired a bullet on average every couple of seconds, not a spray of fire.  He still had 300 rounds on hand when he killed himself, something that limiting magazines to ten rounds wouldn't address.  To top this off, "there is no evidence that people with Asperger's are more likely than others to commit violent crimes".

Adam didn't tell people why he was going to kill.  Why do we even think we should understand why?  I believe prosecution should be based on the act, not the state of mind and competency of the killer.  The verdict should be simple.  Let the punishment or consequences be complex with room for clemency.  The outrage we feel when a killer is declared "not guilty" when he or she clearly did the crime, diminishes respect for justice.

Che Guevera T Shirt Quotes. UPDATE

Don't expect real Che Guevera quotes on T-shirts.

My blood pressure soars when I see Poseurs sporting those poster and shirts. Are they in love with killers and tyrants?   (See update in comments to source some of these quotes.)

1) “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates. Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”
2) “Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think as individuals!”
3) “The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”
4) “We must do away with all newspapers. A revolution cannot be accomplished with freedom of the press.”

Obama campaign office

5) “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”
6) “Hatred is the central element of our struggle! Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him a violent and cold-blooded killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus.”

..... more at the Libertarian  link.
h/t Instapundit.

Your house equity is a nest egg that won't be hatching. Prove it on NYT's interactive chart.

Canada leads the world for overpriced housing. The IMF reports we are paying 85% more to buy a home than to rent the same place. This is so far out of whack, it is going to crash. See for yourself with the NYT's tool below.

Rents will rise but it's more likely the price of a house will come down. Not long ago US pricing was in a bubble but that popped.  The chart shows it's a toss-up whether to rent or buy there. In Canada there is only one answer in almost every market for financial optimum:  Sell your place, tuck the equity somewhere where it earns interest, and rent a lovely home.  Use the savings between rent-and-buy for something better like a trip to Rome, an RSP, or a business start-up. Or better yet, put it into your Be-An-Owner-Again account for when the price is right.

If you haven't used this New York Times interactive chart,use it now. Plug in your numbers on the sidebar. (Note that taxes is a percentage, not a dollar amount). Then move the two sliders to guess how much you think prices and rents will change next year.   "Brown" is the colour of cash savings  and brown is what you want to see before you buy. Don't let if be too far in the future or you wont to be alive to enjoy it.  The house I tested last night as a "buy" made me worse off than a tenant for every one of the next 30 years unless I assume fast rising home values and startling rent hikes.  If you move the vertical bar, it will give you a report on where you stand at any year in the mortgage. The footnotes cover things like paying the Realtor commission when you sell and annual maintenance.

Even if you long ago bought your house cheaply and don't owe a penny, your equity would increase if you rented a comparable house and put  the sales proceeds of the dear old homestead into an interest bearing account, until such time that owning your own home is a good investment at a small premium over renting. A house is an asset and it's value should be based on what it can earn from a stream of rent money.

I wrote about this in 2012:  Housing bubble hasn't popped but compare prices in Vancouver and Ireland. I wrote about this in 2011:  Canadian housing over-valued? The Economist puts numbers to it. and again Worldwide house prices charted. Canada is riding a bubble.  Since then Australia, the UK and the US have reduced theirs.   We were out of line then.  Now we may be the riskiest housing play in the developed world.

"Romancing the Wind": Triple kite ballet on Kitsilano's beach

Deaf kite genius, Ray Bethell, performs an aerial ballet to beautiful music by Delibes on the Kitsilano shoreline of Vancouver.

Tipping point in the Ukraine. UPDATED

World power is shifting from America but will some go to Russia?   Russia is in a weak position economically despite recent status gains in the mid east.  Especially so because the price of oil and gas affects a third of the country's income and the new supplies from fracking in North America are hurting prices for Russia.  Right now, the Ukraine is the pivot, bigger than the Syria poison gas brokering and bigger than arms contracts in Egypt that displace American ties.  The Ukraine is on the brink of joining the EU. Or not.

"Ukraine's leaders announced suddenly last week that they were pulling out of the EU agreement, saying the country could not afford to break trade ties with Russia".

Ukraine's citizens by the tens of thousands announced today that they disagree.

UPDATE November 30th.  See comments by Gerry below.  May be "the greatest uncovered media event of the last decade." 

Last week I was optimistic the citizen's choice would prevail.

Today it's tear gas.  We may also speculate that some Ukrainian leaders are on track to become unexpectedly wealthy.

It's like a curtain coming down.

Press turns fart into atomic bomb

The press makes a stink about two senators who took the kings coin and deserted their ranks.  As a bonus, they diminish the stature of one of Canada’s best ever prime ministers heading a party they have everywhere and at all times  posted and voted against.

This comic selection from McManus fits:     “During a campus uprising, the students demanded that the college administration do away with Poverty, War and Mashed Turnips in the Commissary, although not necessarily in that order”.   Duffy and Wallin are the Turnips in this story, offending the press gallery’s taste by accepting honours from a conservative PM.   It's personal.

The biggest stink was that Duffy, while living mostly in Ottawa, claimed tax savings as if he were mostly living in his home on PEI, and had spent the savings.  Bad of him, but the press has turned that fart into an atomic bomb.  To an outsider, the RCMP seems to be in a CYA operation to avoid bad press about being a do-nothing establishment outfit.

Gentle reader, let us not forget that we’ve been in a stream of traffic at 108 km/hr in a 100 zone, and collected  a couple hundred in cash at a garage sale but didn’t list it on the T1, and so on, like most good Canadians.

Some executive housekeeping, not a national outrage, is in order: "The rules are meant to be followed and claimed expenses in both houses will be publicly posted at regular timely intervals".  

New neutrino observatory a mile below Antarctic ice is on line.

You never heard of the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory?  The Super-K and Sudbury SNO neutrino observatories were pioneers but this one far below Antarctic ice has already found a couple dozen events coming from around the cosmos and is building a directional data base.

ICNO design.

Despite trillions of neutrinos streaming through you this moment, they rarely bump into anything in thousands of years.  Their behaviour can thus conserve information about events from the earliest days of the universe.


The ICNO is "among the most ambitious scientific projects ever attempted". The picture illustrates the structure well:    86 cores were drilled 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 km into the ice with 60 sensors per string and 6 of those strings dedicated to extra depth.  The ice is clear as glass at those depths and when once in a while a neutrino (one of three types) happens to interact with a bit of ice matter, the by product includes a speck of light called Cerenkov radiation.  Beautiful.

"Bert" - at 1.04 petaelectronvolts is the highest
energy neutrino ever detected.
Science Daily News reporting on ICNO.

I admire the modular design.  After the first few strings were in place, data collection had already begun.  Redundancy is built into the experiment.

View down one shaft, insulated at the top.

The Sudbury experiment used a sphere of heavy water about a mile down an isolated mineshaft and was looking for solar neutrinos.  The Japanese experiment used a larger sphere with more detectors but with pure regular water, collecting from more sources.

Notes: Information and view down the bore hole are from spaceref site