Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2005

  • Beams and Motes

    I usually have a lot of time for Giles Fraser, team rector of Putney and lecturer in philosophy. His occasional columns in the Guardian often contain a lot of common sense (which, as everyone knows, is not very common these days). However, his latest column seemed to me to fall below his usual standard. He seems to be claiming that us atheists are not self-critical enough, and even worse, we are somehow not trendy and fashionable enough.
     
    Being the dilettante that I am, I was wondering whether I should comment on the column, but Ophelia, over at ButterfliesAndWheels, has come thundering into the fray with a vitriolic response. Over to you, Ophelia…

  • Theo Van Gogh

    It is exactly one year ago that Theo van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri. At the moment, there is a remembrance event going on in the Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam. In a typically satiric touch, in place of a bunch of flowers there is a pot with a cactus plant on the spot where van Gogh was shot and had his throat cut by  Bouyeri. There will be further events throughout the day.
     
    Van Gogh was no saint, but no-one deserves to die in the manner that he did. Bouyeri has no remorse.
     
     

  • Gastronomic Art

    Unlike the Darth Vader carved out of butter, I think there is a genuine case for these witty images to claim the title of Art. Not great Art, but Art nonetheless.

  • But Is It Art? – #5

    Life is too short to be spending years doing this, surely?

  • OTT Workstation

    The Total Immersion PCE takes the term "couch potato" to new heights. I confess that I wouldn’t mind having a ride on it though.

  • But Is It Art? – #4

    I think we can safely say that if it is, it’s not art as we know it, Jim.

  • Why Bother Going to the Cinema? – Part 2

    Manish, over at Septia Mutiny, discusses the same topic as I visited last week. Apparently, M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t want his films to be released in the cinema and on DVD simultaneously, and appeals to the "magic" of the shared experience in the cinema. Manish holds much the same jaundiced view as I do: The movies are great, it’s the moviegoers I could do without.

  • Murine Melodies

    Lovely little story in The Guardian today about the fact that scientists have discovered that male mice sing songs. The songs are at an ultrasonic pitch, so aren’t normally heard by humans. The scientists slowed down the songs electronically to bring them into our range of hearing. I learned a new word too: murine.

  • XBOX 360

    Apparently Microsoft’s XBOX 360 has just been released. I doubt very much that I’ll be lining up to purchase one – all the gee-whizzery seems to be devoted to games of the first-person shooter variety. This is a genre that appeals to me not one jot or tittle. Perhaps it’s just me, but I get a real feeling of dissonance when I read this in Greg Hughes’ blog entry of first impressions of the XBOX:
    The crowd was excited. A sign is taped to the end cap where the 360 resides that says "5 minutes, please." The crew of giddy people (mostly adults by the way) quietly contained themselves and politely took turns splattering people with their virtual firearms. It pretty much rocked. Ooohs and Aahhhhs abound.
    "Politely took turns splattering people"? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand it.
     
    And if you want to see something really depressing, then watch and listen to this video of a 9 year-old (a 9! year-old) child playing a first person shooter game. It’s linked to by PZ Myers in his blog entry here. The child is a brat, his mother is completely ineffectual. I don’t know which is worse. All I know is that I think there’s going to be trouble around him when he gets older.
     
     

  • Autumn Woods

    Yesterday we went for a ride through the Bergherbos – the woods that lie between Beek, Stokkum, ‘s-Heerenberg, Zeddam and Braamt in the province of Gelderland in The Netherlands. We were lucky enough to be invited to ride in an open carriage drawn by two black horses. Wonderful weather, wonderful day. Some photos that attempt to capture the sense of it are below.
     

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  • Jack The Lad

    The owner of the riding school that we visited yesterday breeds both Labradors and Jack Russell terriers. Here’s a shot of one of the Jack Russells.
     
    (Ed and Chris – this one’s for you!)
     

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  • Online Memorials

    Danah Boyd, over at Apophenia, comments on an emerging phenomenon: the use of social networking services to act as sites for mourning and remembrance. What struck me about the example she uses (the online social profiles of Christine Dao, who has just died in a car crash), was the tone and the manner of Christine’s friends when leaving their messages of remembrance on her profiles. Not that they addressed her directly, as though she still lived – that’s a fairly common thing – but the casual, almost flippant, tone of most of the messages. These are young adults, for the most part (Christine was 20), but the comments seem to me like the equivalent of children’s finger-paintings. Are young adults really this immature these days?

  • Autumn Trees

    Yesterday, we rode through woods in a horse-driven carriage. More on that later. One of the reasons for doing it was because the trees are showing their Autumn colours.
     
    Carl Zimmer, over at the Loom, points out that there are two main theories as to why the leaves turn red and yellow in Autumn. I had always thought that it was simply a side-effect of the trees preparing for Winter, but it turns out there is another theory that has been proposed to account for it. And now there’s some new theorising that seems to tie together both of the competing theories. Go and read Zimmer’s piece for more info.

  • Cameras and GPS

    One day soon, the majority of cameras will come with built-in GPS like this Ricoh Pro G3. Then it will become so much easier to add geo-spatial metatags to photos. And once the online photo services such as Flickr start to handle this stuff under the covers, then I’ll be able to use Google Earth to show and navigate photo odysseys without any effort at all…

  • Library Downsizing

    Wendy Lesser, in today’s Guardian, explores something that I try not to think about: downsizing one’s library. I know that at some point in the future, it will be inevitable that I will have to let some of my books go, but hopefully that will not be for many years yet.

  • Turing’s Cathedral

    Interesting piece penned by George Dyson that has been posted over at the Edge. Dyson is reflecting on his visit to Google in the context of the history of computing, from von Neumann and Turing onwards.
    My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
    And he raises a nice little frisson in the mind of this reader with:

    Google is Turing’s cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope. In the words of an unusually perceptive friend: "When I was there, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?"

    Is there a John Connor in the house?

  • Only 80%?

    So I’m not Mr. Spock then, but at least I’m down in the bottom left corner, where I expected to be…
     
    You fit in with:
    Atheism

    Your ideals mostly resemble those of an Atheist. You have very little faith and you are very focused on intellectual endeavors. You value objective proof over intuition or subjective thoughts. You enjoy talking about ideas and tend to have a lot of in depth conversations with people.

    60% scientific.
    80% reason-oriented.
    Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com
     

  • George Takei Comes Out

    If you have to ask who’s George Takei?  then you are clearly not a Trekkie – a fan of Star Trek. Takei is the actor who played the role of Lieutenant Sulu, the helmsman of the Starship Enterprise in its first incarnation. Apparently, at the age of 68, he’s finally decided to come out of the closet. Oh well, better late than never, I suppose.
     
    Update: Here’s the interview that Takei gave where he acknowledges who he is. It’s a good interview and he comes across as an honest human being. Go read it.

  • Why Bother Going to the Cinema?

    That’s the question that Diamond Geezer raised on his blog recently. He rightly notes that the time between a film being released in the cinema and it being released on DVD is becoming alarmingly short. It used to be a year, now it seems to be a few months.
     
    He argues that we should still continue to go to the cinema (a) because it’s cheaper and (b) because it’s on the big screen. In an ideal world (b) would be true. There can be something magical about the shared experience of the audience sitting in the dark. But too often these days the experience is tainted for me by people talking, eating or slurping huge cartons of coke before tossing them aside. Increasingly, I find myself content to wait a few months (or even a year) for the DVD. Yes, it may cost more initially, but I see some good films being reissued at little more than the price of a cinema ticket. And every time I watch a DVD again, the value increases. I estimate that I’ve seen 30% of my collection at least three times and 40% at least twice. Basically, I’m willing to pay good money for a good DVD secure in the knowledge that I can devote my full attention to it, and not be distracted by my neighbours discussing the charms of the actress on the screen.

  • Going, Going…

    … Almost gone. The Routemaster bus from London, that is. The red double-decker Routemaster bus, with its open platform at the back is an icon, but it is being removed from service in London. Today, it vanishes from route 38, leaving just one route left on which these buses are used. That too will lose its Routemasters by the end of the year.
     
    I’ll admit to a feeling of nostalgia about this, when I was 17, I had a summer job working on the buses as a conductor, and liked the Routemaster buses most of all. Another link with the past vanishes…