Today, we joined a neighbour when she moved her boat from a mooring in Gouda to one in Reeuwijk. That meant boating through Gouda’s rivers and canals until eventually we arrived in the lakes at Reeuwijk. A very pleasant way to spend a few hours. Some photos are attached.
Year: 2005
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A really Hot Cup Of Tea
That was one of the essential ingredients in building an infinite improbability drive in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Alas, as Neil Gaiman discovers, it’s rarer than it should be in the real world.
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Romania Holds Its First Gay Pride March
Saw this on Towelroad. It takes me back almost 30 years to the atmosphere of the early marches I went on in the UK. Read the comments following the post, in particular the one from Eddie Martin. This sort of thing makes me realise how lucky I am to be living where, and when, I do.
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Improve Your Dog’s Self Esteem
Another of the "it’s like shooting fish in a barrel" posts… This week’s New Scientist has a story on the monetary worth of the pet industry (Billions, apparently). The full article is only available to subscribers, but the abstract sounds rather juicy:
BARRY seems pleased with his new super-enhanced testicles that Jane got him as a treat from the silicon implant catalogue. She is already planning the wedding, and Barry looks so smart with his new haircut and Gucci jacket. But he does seem to be getting a little chubby. Ooh, and she must remember to get that life vest for him – she doesn’t want him falling overboard on their sailing holiday. She is always worrying about him dying. He’s not as young as he was. In fact he’s 12, which is quite old…for a dog, that is.
Dog’s bollocks as silicone implants? Must be a joke, I thought. Nope, it turns out they really exist, and over 100,000 pet owners have bought them (presumably for their darling pets).
The web site for Neuticles (what a wonderfully toe-curling name, BTW) contains some real gems:
Neuticles – allowing your pet to retain his natural look, self esteem and aids in the trauma associated with neutering. (aids in the trauma associated with neutering?)
With Neuticles– It’s like nothing ever changed! (apart from the fact that your dog’s lost his real testicles and now has a couple of lumps of silicone). The FAQ expands on this:
We feel the removal of a God given body part – leaving a male pet looking unwhole after the traditional form of neutering is not only unethical but unnatural. With Neuticles it’s like nothing ever changed.
I swear, I couldn’t make this up if I tried. The rest of the FAQ reaches dizzying heights of bizarreness – it’s worth reading. But I did learn one interesting fact – it’s not just dog’s bollocks they’ve got covered:
Neuticles are now available for any-sized canine, feline, equine, bull or any neutered pet. Refer to sizing chart for additional information and 3D sizing chart. Custom sizing is available.
I love that "custom sizing" bit.
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Balkenende: The New Dr. Pangloss?
If you’re not familiar with the reference, Dr. Pangloss is a character in Voltaire’s novel Candide, who is a hopeless optimist. "All is for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds".
I was reminded of this when I read the Dutch press reports on the debate in the Dutch Parliament over the outcome of the referendum on the EU Constitution. The Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, was quoted as saying that he even saw a "ray of light" in the outcome: he told MPs that people are finally "thinking and talking about Europe." Well I suppose that’s one way of looking at the situation – immediately after the Dutch electorate have delivered a metaphorical punch to your face leaving you with a very bloody and broken nose…
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Guestbook
One of the features missing from MSN Spaces at the moment is a way to comment on the space itself. There is a workaround and this is it: I am creating this entry as an "off-topic" area, or a Guestbook.
Post about anything in the comments here!
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Beethoven Downloads
The BBC is about to broadcast every single note of all of Ludwig van Beethoven’s works this week on Radio 3.
What’s more, it’s going to offer all of Beethoven’s symphonies in a downloadable format for a period of one week after they have been broadcast.
To quote Alex de Large:
"And it was like for a moment, O my brothers, some great bird had flown into the milkbar and I felt all the malenky little hairs on my plott standing endwise and the shivers crawling up like slow malenky lizards and then down again. Because I knew what she sang. It was a bit from the glorious Ninth, by Ludwig van."
And again:
"Oh bliss, bliss and heaven. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a space ship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied I knew such lovely pictures."
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Tomorrow is Mad Sunday
I grew up on the Isle of Man. As well as Manx cats, the island is also famous for being the home of the TT (Tourist Trophy) races. This coming week, the annual TT races will be held on the island.
Tomorrow is Mad Sunday, when a large proportion of the 40,000 visitors (the island’s population is only 70,000) to the event will take to their motorcycles and ride around the racecourse. But this is not a specially-built racetrack – the course is run over ordinary roads. The course runs for almost 38 miles, and is extremely dangerous – if you come off the road, you are likely to have your speed stopped dead (literally) by a stone wall or a telephone pole. These days, everyone taking part in Mad Sunday has to go round the course in the same direction. A sensible development – at one time, people could ride around in either direction, with the inevitable result of accident carnage.
Every year, riders taking part in the races are killed – but presumably they know the risks, and no-one is forcing them to take part. And with the advance of motorcycle technology, the race is getting faster all the time. I grew up in the 1950s, when riders such as Geoff Duke were doing laps with an average speed of under 100 mph. Geoff Duke almost broke the 100 mph average speed barrier when in 1956 he did a lap at 99.97 mph. In 1967, Mike Hailwood set a speed record that would last until 1975 when he did a lap at an average speed of 108.77 mph. The current lap record stands at 125.69 mph.
Remember, these are average speeds – that means that on parts of the course (such as the Sulby Straight), speeds of the bikes will reach up to 180 mph.
I recall growing up when "doing the ton" – that is, riding your bike at a speed of 100 mph – was seen as a rite of passage, and an achievement. And certainly, the first (and last!) time I did it on my own 650cc Kawasaki, it was both scary and exhilarating. But the superbikes of today are capable of almost twice that speed… I’m glad I don’t have to prove my manhood today.
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The Shining
I’ve put this under the category of "Entertainment", but it deserves connections with other categories. Now read on…
I mentioned "The Shining" in my post on the "Wollemi Pine" last month. BTW, I have to get back to you about the outcome posed in that post. I promise I will do so…
Anyways-up, to quote Julian and Sandy, my husband is out this evening, so I thought that I would put the DVD of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining on the DVD player.
Gawd, it is so brilliant! Kubrick was a master. I was listening to the audio feed of an interview with Phillip Pullman at the Hay festival yesterday, and he made a point about the modern novel being aligned with Cinema. It is very true – he describes how his masterpiece: His Dark Materials reads like cinematography – close-ups, long-shots, and the like. Whereas the "voice" of the traditional fairytale is very different. And he used other examples of his writing to illustrate this. And it was true, they had none of the close-ups or voiceovers of what the hero/heroine is thinking. The difference is staggering when you hear it or see it – and I hadn’t really appreciated it before.
And what struck me, which I hadn’t thought of before, is what is exactly so powerful, and so right about Kubrick’s vision of Stephen King’s novel is that it is exactly filmed as a fairytale, and not really as a modern piece of cinema or the modern novel. There is no deep introspection as to why these people behave the way they do, they just play out their parts in front of our eyes, the way a Grimms’ fairytale conjures up the action in our imagination.
Brilliant.
And, I must comment over the styles of the actors. Jack Nicholson gives (to my senses) a really over-the top interpretation of the role of Jack Torrance. It’s OK, and perhaps it’s what Kubrick wanted. But when I see Philip Stone in the role of Delbert Grady, and I cannot think otherwise than this, this is how it should be played. Supremely understated, yet with the underllining of faint, yet absolutely bottomless, evil. Stone is just perfect in the role.
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Margot Wallström Is Blogging
Chances are, you’re asking: "who is Margot Wallström?" Well, if you’re from outside Europe, then you’re forgiven – but if you’re European, then you should know that she is one of the EU Commissioners. (Confession time, I didn’t know that either until today)
Whatever, I think it is significant that she has her own blog, and one that is integrated into her official web pages within the EU Commission web site. She also appears to read the comments pages on her blog as well.
I found the link via the Europhobia blog which has a random roundup of reactions to the EU referenda so far.
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Trust Me, It’s Only Oxytocin
From this week’s New Scientist comes a news story about the effects of Oxytocin:
Giving people a whiff of a key chemical can make them more inclined to trust strangers with their cash, a new study reveals. Just three puffs of a nasal spray containing a hormone called oxytocin increased the chance that people would part with their money.
Raises the spectre of it being introduced at political rallies, religious meetings and pyramid selling scams…
Hopefully, at the moment:
Kosfeld doubts it, because it takes nearly an hour for the hormone to reach the brain. Nor would it be easy to make people “sniff” something unfamiliar, and it is not known whether it would work through a spiked drink.
Whaddya mean: "it’s not known whether it would work through a spiked drink"? Surely that’s part 2 of the research? Get your KoolAid here…
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How’s Your Memory?
In this month’s issue, Wired asks the question: "Are our memories suffering from our reliance on gadgets?". I think it’s certainly true that, like a muscle that doesn’t get exercised, certain aspects of memory will atrophy. So, if you have a mobile phone with all your numbers in it, you are likely to rely on the mobile, and not your memory.
By way of illustration, my mother, right up until her death a few days short of her 97th birthday, had a prodigious memory for telephone numbers. She could recall telephone numbers with no problem. This was almost certainly the result of being a telephone operator in the 1920s. Her job exercised that particular "muscle" in her memory – number memorising and recall – and she never lost the knack.
On a related ability, Isaac Asimov wrote a nice short story about this called "The Feeling of Power". Go and read it. I learned my "Times Table" in school – we didn’t have calculators in my day. I wonder if the facility for mental arithmetic is quite so well-developed in the average schoolchild today?
(hat tip to Mind Hacks)
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Microsoft Office To Use Open File Formats
It’s been a long time coming, but finally Microsoft has announced that the default file formats for Microsoft Office will be non-proprietary and open. They will be based on XML, and as well as being supported in the forthcoming Office 12, Microsoft will also release add-ons to make them usable by Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003.
I remember asking Microsoft for non-proprietary file formats back in the early 1990s – in the days when I was a customer representative in the X/Open consortium (now The Open Group). At the time, we thought such formats would probably be based on HTML, but it wasn’t until the advent of XML that the dream really became a practical possibility.
Microsoft sort of toyed with the idea of XML-based formats in Office 2003, but as Owen Allan points out in his blog, a) they aren’t the default file formats and b) they create huge files "Some word documents that were saved in the XML file format were so large that they had their own weather systems".
Channel 9 has a video interview with Brian Jones, a Program Manager for Microsoft Word, talking about the new format. He also has an entry on his own blog talking about the new format, with pointers to more technical information.
With all the hoopla going on about this, I do find it interesting that no-one from the Microsoft camp seems to have referred to the Open Document Format initiative of the EU Commission. Even Microsoft’s press release claims that the reason they are doing this is to make it "easier for companies to adopt Office 12". Not a mention by Steve Sinofsky about the ODF initiative, despite that fact that he has been in correspondence with the EU Commission about it. I suppose that he didn’t want to admit that European governments, in particular, are likely to require open document formats as a basis for doing business with them.
The ODF initiative led to the setting up of a technical committee in OASIS to develop an XML-based Open Document Format. They delivered version 1.0 of the specification last month. I’m sure the timing of the me-too Microsoft announcement is pure coincidence. So now we will have two XML-based open document formats going forward. Hopefully it won’t be too difficult to build a bridge between them.
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The Dutch Referendum
Over at A Fistful of Euros is a good summary of the background to the Dutch Referendum on the EU Constitution.
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Commenting on The Science Survey
Following up on my post pointing out The Science Survey, I think it’s only right to tell you that now four of the survey respondents offer their thoughts on What is Science For?
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Fashion for the Feebleminded
In the long gone days of my youth, I was romantically involved with a young man who moved in the circles of the Fashion Industry, Fashion Designers and their clotheshorses, sorry, models. I always found it a very bizarre world, and still do.
To be sure, every now and then I see a garment and think that it has beauty of its own, but most of the time I see things like this and wonder WTF they are thinking of. Even more bizarre to think that there will be people willing to pay good money for this.
Of course, moving further along the spectrum of bizarrity, we reach items such as living works of art, such as Leigh Bowery (although he’s now dead, alas). And then, strangely, I find I have respect for people such as him. I need to analyse this a bit more.
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The Brig
Echidne, over on her blog, posts a powerful essay, and asks some thought-provoking questions about the long term impact of the abuse of power.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 