Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2006

  • Living In The Country

    We’re into the second week of having the work done on the kitchen and other parts of the house. That includes renewing the electricity distribution panel in the meter cupboard. Tonight, I was seated in my usual place (at the computer) and heard scratching sounds coming from the meter cupboard in the room next door. On investigation, I discovered the culprit…
     
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    Not sure how he/she got there, but it was safely transported back outside to the garden.

  • Two Fathers

    Typical, I live in the Netherlands, but I discover this video of a boy singing about his home life via a blogger in America. Thanks, Terrance, and the song’s not bad either.

  • Like Fish In A Barrel

    The wonderful duo of Penn & Teller on religious icons. Never underestimate the gullibility of humans. And, we have a worthy successor to Dr. Pierre Barbet. Step forward, Fred Zugibe! Your sterling work to prove the authenticity of the Turin Shroud will not go unremarked.

  • Dilbert On Success

    Ever since Scott Adams (the man behind Dilbert) showed himself to be a wanker over Intelligent Design I’ve not bothered to follow his cartoons any more. Still, Dilbert pops up from time to time. This cartoon was commented on today in Language Log. Adams is mining the usual stereotypes, but I was interested to see that his efforts are pretty weak when compared to the great James Thurber.

  • Matmos Meets Turing

    I came across an article in Seed Magazine today about the music duo Matmos. I hadn’t heard of them before, but was immediately intrigued. First, because of their name – the Matmos was the living liquid underneath the city of Sogo in the film Barbarella. The film is a cult favourite of mine. Second, because they have created a musical tribute to Alan Turing, and used, as the basis, recordings of an actual Enigma machine in action. The result can be heard here. Fascinating.
     
    In addition, there’s also a video lecture given by the duo at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute on this piece. 

  • Work for Google

    Google is trying out a way of assigning keywords ("tags") to online images. It asks people to participate in a game of labelling images. I note that you don’t get paid for taking part, even though presumably you are driving up the quality of Google’s search, and hence presumably making the shareholders very happy. At least with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk you can get paid for your work…

  • Maupin Interviewed

    There’s a nice interview of Armistead Maupin in today’s Guardian. As well of the man himself, you also get a sense of how he was shaped by the city that he lives in: San Francisco. It reminded me of the time (in 1995) when we were there and went on the walking tour of the Castro that was organised by Trevor Hailey. She used the tour to give our little group a fascinating history lesson on the society and characters of the city through the span of a century.
     

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  • Technical Refresh

    If you’ve been trying out the Beta 2 release of Microsoft Office 2007, you might be interested to know that a technical refresh of the software will be released tomorrow. If you are also playing around with Vista RC1, then you definitely need this technical refresh.

  • Murder In Amsterdam

    Here’s a book review that makes me want to go out and buy the book immediately (or, this being the Internet age, go to Amazon and click). The book in question is Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.
     
    The book gets a glowing review. Interesting that Buruma is another observer who sees characters such as Bouyeri (van Gogh’s murderer) as self-loathing losers. As the reviewer (Claire Berlinski) writes:
    Buruma finds him virtually the embodiment of the archetype described by the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger as "the radical loser": young, talentless, self-pitying; a man whose loathing of himself could be converted with only scant coaxing into a violent loathing of others. (This character was also foreshadowed, of course, over and over again, in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.) Bouyeri was pudgy. He was no good at sports. Dutch women snubbed him. His parents, bewildered immigrants from a remote village in the Moroccan Rif mountains, appeared to him whipped, subservient, humiliated.
    The review itself is worth reading – it looks as if Buruma has captured aspects of multicultural Dutch society and pinned them like butterflies onto his specimen board for us to gaze at and ponder on. They are not always a pleasant sight. And Buruma apparently offers no solutions. But understanding what we are dealing with is the first step in the right direction.

  • The Moral Sense Test

    Want to volunteer for some research being done into the nature of human moral judgement? Then take the Moral Sense Test. I’m intrigued, by the way, by that description on the web site that the testing is being done on human moral judgement. It makes me fantasise that someone in the next department is testing the moral judgment of non-humans…

  • A Good Place To Be

    I’ve often remarked on this blog that I’m happy that I have ended up in The Netherlands, given that the attitudes towards gay people here are more relaxed than in practically any other country.
     
    Now, Ingrid Robeyns, over at Crooked Timber, draws my attention to some just published research on societal attitudes towards gay people in The Netherlands. Broadly speaking, the research confirms my gut feelings. There are just two small clouds on the horizon. One being that the growing Muslim community in the Netherlands do not accept gay people (including those in their midst who are gay and Muslim themselves). Secondly, the Justice Minister, Piet Hien Donner, has just aired the view that he can conceive of Sharia law being introduced into The Netherlands. Erm, if that happens, then presumably Martin and I will be stoned to death or hanged… This is not something that either of us would look forward to…

  • Science Or Art?

    Following in the footsteps of the quite simply wonderful Museum of Glass Flowers comes shuffling along the somehat more prosaic Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art. Models of the brain constructed out of, for example, knitting. Just one question: why?
     
    (hat tip to the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher society for the link) 

  • Armageddon Will Be Late This Year…

    Yisrayl Hawkins predicted that nuclear war would break out yesterday, and that a third of the human race would perish. Um, it’s a nice day outside, the birds are singing, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of nuclear armageddon happening anywhere in the news media today.
     
    I’m also wryly amused by Yisrayl’s web site, which (at the moment, at least) proudly carries a date banner that reads Wednesday, 13th September 2006, -1 days before the start of nuclear war. That’s the trouble with computers – they’re just so damn literal-minded. Doubtless Yisrayl will make a minor alteration once he wakes up.

  • A Day Out

    I had a day out in Utrecht today to meet with a couple of old colleagues for lunch. Like me, they are both now retired, and also like me, they don’t regret it in the slightest. After lunch, one of them suggested that we pay a visit to the National Museum Van Speelklok Tot Pierement (from Musical Clock to Street Organ). A fascinating place. Housed in an old church, it has a nice collection of musical automata and organs. Well worth a visit if you find yourself in Utrecht.
     

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    Some more photos here.

     

  • Bloemencorso

    Bloemencorso is Dutch for Flower Parade or Flower Pageant. A number of places in the Netherlands hold these annual parades. Understandable really, given that flowers are big business in the Netherlands. According to this, the flower auctions in the Netherlands handle 60-70 percent of the total world trade in flowers. 
     
    Anyway, a small town, Lichtenvoorde, is famous for its annual Bloemencorso, and as it lies within a 30 minute cycle ride from where we live, I cycled along last Sunday to take a look at the 77th Bloemencorso. The floats were spectacular, and are covered with hundreds of thousands of dahlia blossoms – all stuck on by hand. Here’s a few examples:
     

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    The King Kong moved and roared – the human Fay Wray screamed…

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    Many of the floats were powered solely by human power

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    What it must have been like in there, pushing the float on a hot day, with the sound system on the float blaring out next to your ears, I dread to think.

    The full set of photos I took are to be seen up on Flickr, here. 

  • Time Lapse Art

    Noah Kalina has been taking a photograph of himself every day for the past six years. The result is a strangely fascinating video. This is a work in progress. He wants to take it to the ultimate conclusion, releasing a video every ten years of his life.

  • Earth To America

    Nice advert by the Blue Man Group for StopGlobalWarming.org. The BMG were in Amsterdam a couple of weeks back. I saw them (on TV) perform in a concert in the Dam Square and liked what I saw.

  • The Age Of Horrorism

    It has a terrible title, but the essay by Martin Amis in today’s Observer is well worth reading. It’s a long essay, too; but in an age where the short attention span is king, this essay, in all sorts of ways, shows that the emperor has no clothes. A brilliant piece of writing that has truth running through it like the words in a piece of seaside rock. 

  • Memories, Truth, and Propaganda

    The media is full of items on a certain anniversary at the moment. And, like the theme of my last entry, the question that comes to my mind is "what’s true and what isn’t?". Or, to put it another way, "what’s true and what’s just propaganda?".
     
    Liz Marcs writes an extraordinarily powerful piece on people’s memories of events that shape them. Go and read it. Now.
     
    (hat tip to Nicholas Whyte for the link)

  • Reality Goes Out The Window

    What’s real and what isn’t? So far as the internet is concerned, it’s a good question. The latest example of fantasy masquerading as reality is lonelygirl15. Ostensibly a teenager keeping a video diary unbeknownst to her parents, she turns out to be the creation of a group of filmmakers. Zephoria, over at Apophenia, has the story. And while she is excited about this and "loves the way people are using all of these new social technologies to create cultural experiments", I am less sanguine and confess to feelings of unease.