Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2006

  • Oh, Gawd, Not Premature Ejaculation Again…

    So, we have the busting of the terror plot. And while I happily indulge in entertaining conspiracy theories now and then like any average person, I would like to think that this time (unlike, apparently, Forest Gate for example), we have the real deal. A fantastic coup by our hardworking intelligence services, who have fingered potential suicide bombers before they have been able to earn their stripes.
     
    But, we do seem to have the equivalent of a minority report in the offing.
     
    [a British official] suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.
    Second, Craig Murray weighs in with some rather telling points.
     
    When this whole affair does come before the attention of the courts, it would not unduly surprise me if we end up with another example of the Ricin Plot that never was…
     
     

  • Terrorism and Irrational Fear

    Jonah Lehrer, over at The Frontal Cortex, makes some interesting points about people’s reaction to terrorism. We do seem to be irrationally afraid of it (and this irrational fear is of course well exploited by terrorists themselves). Statistically, as he points out, the numbers of people killed in terrorist acts in a year is not much more than the number of Amercians who accidentally drown in their bathtubs each year, and yet there is no Department of Bathtub Security.
     
    One person who comments on the piece writes that the difference is that in one case there is a human agency (the terrorists) actively working to kill people, while in the other, the causes of death (car crashes, bathtub drownings) are pure chance and random events. But as Jonah retorts, while the basis of the fear may be valid – terrorists do blow up trains and planes – the fear itself remains irrational, simply because it is so very unlikely to happen to you (I am talking about a "you" who lives in a capital city in the West, of course – statistically speaking, a "you" living in Baghdad is much more likely to suffer a terrorist act).
     
    I think he’s right, we do behave irrationally over the risks – and this is a fact exploited not only by the terrorists, but by the authorities who seem to be more intent on amplifying the fear than damping it down. I really do feel that we are beginning to live in the world of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

  • Surely, This Must Be A Joke?

    "This" is a recently-published scientific paper entitled: Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism. Ben Goldacre, over at the Bad Science blog draws our attention to it.
     
    And no, apparently it is not a joke. The authors are deadly serious. They were also all born on the planet Zogg.
     
    Sometimes, I despair. Ophelia has some relevant commentary over at ButterfliesAndWheels on the paper as well. If you then read the comments on her entry, it appears that there are some valid criticisms to be made about evidence-based medicine, but the bottom line is that this paper just doesn’t make them in any meaningful or readable way.

  • Fietstocht

    Today, Martin and I went on a "fietstocht" – a bicycle tour – organised by our nearest neighbours (200 metres away across a field). It’s apparently an annual event, when someone in the neighbourhood volunteers to plan a seven-hour bicycle ride through the local countryside with stops for coffee, lunch and tea.
     
    This was our first time of joining the fietstocht, and this morning, 42 of us – of all ages – set out at 10:00 am to cover a route of about 40 kilometres. We both thoroughly enjoyed it. Gently cycling through the Dutch countryside, chatting with neighbours that we know, and getting to know new neighbours.
     
    Sometimes the simple things in life are the best.

  • I Missed Them…

    The Perseids, I mean. Last night it was heavily overcast so I went to bed. This morning I woke up at 7am to brilliant sunshine and clear skies. So that means at some point during the night I probably would have had good conditions to watch the meteors. Typical, these days I often wake up at 3am for a few minutes, but not last night when it would have had some point to it…

  • Happy Birthday!

  • Book Review: Murder in Samarkand

    The Sharpener has a review of Craig Murray’s book Murder in Samarkand. While I have a copy of this in my library, I haven’t yet got around to reading it. This review would seem to suggest that I should increase the priority, tout de suite.

  • The Return of Teju Cole

    I discovered today (via Sepia Mutiny) that Teju Cole is back blogging. Cole is a Nigerian who writes like a dream. His last blog was a series of wonderful entries, but alas, he took it down from the internet, and so the sentiments have vanished into the ether. This new blog will have a lifetime of only one year, so go and enjoy it while you can.

  • Cream Rises to the Top

    The results of a multi-year, multi-country survey on people’s attitudes on the topic of evolution have been published in Science Magazine. while the actual article is behind a pay-per-view wall, the results are analysed over at The Panda’s Thumb. Top of the list of the 34 countries surveyed is Iceland, where over 80% of the (extrapolated) population accept the theory of evolution. Bottom of the list is Turkey, where 50% of the population declare the theory to be false.
     
    The good old US is next to the bottom; nearly 40% of its population believe evolution to be false. Depressing, but I’m not surprised. I am somewhat surprised, however, that my adopted country of The Netherlands only manages to come in at 12th place. I would have thought that it would be higher than that.

  • Deckchair and Rug Time

    The start of this year’s meteor season has begun with the Perseid meteor shower. Last night it was too cloudy to see anything, but hopefully I’ll be able to watch the skies in the next night or so. The peak of this year’s shower will occur on Saturday night. The other fly in the ointment, besides the cloud, is the fact that the moon is also in the night sky, and its light drowns out the fainter meteors.
     
    There’s a good article on meteor-watching in today’s Guardian (which is where the title of this post comes from).

  • Fairytales for the Faithful

    If there really were to be a hell, then the makers of this pile of tosh deserve to be consigned to it for all eternity. Kids4truth, indeed! What an oxymoron! What really gets up my left nostril is that the fairytales of Grimm, for all their fantastic cast of princesses, ogres, elves and witches, teach young children basic lessons in morality. This crap, by contrast, simply lies to them. 

  • Enlightening The Future

    Spiked has been running a survey these past couple of months, asking a selection of scientists, philosphers and commentators what they think the key challenges will be for the next generation. I’m coming late to this, so there’s a whole pile of reading to catch up on – some of it looks thought-provoking, and no doubt some of it will be dross.

  • The Persecution of Iraqi Gays

    I mentioned an article on the persecution of gay people in Iraq that appeared in last Sunday’s Observer newspaper. Last night, a documentary on which the report was based was shown on a British TV channel. That documentary is available for viewing over the web on this page. Doug Ireland also has more background on the situation in Iraq available via his web site here.

  • The Snapper Snapped

    While I was taking photos of the parade, someone was taking a photo of me… Thanks, Antoon!
     

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  • Amsterdam Canal Parade – Photos

    Finally finished uploading the photos that I took of the Canal Parade. Here’s a selection of my favourites…

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    Lots more photos can be found in my Amsterdam Canal Parade 2006 photo set up on Flickr… See you there next year… 
     

  • Lucky Dip

    One of the wonders of the web is the fact that many old books, whose copyright has lapsed, are being put online. I often find myself looking through the contents of The Online Books Page in the hope of striking lucky. Today for example, I see that a PDF version of an astronomy book published in 1900 is now available: Essays in Astronomy by Ball, Harkness, Herschel, Huggins, Laplace, Mitchel, Proctor, Schiparelli, and Others (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1900). This is terrific stuff. For example, there’s an essay by Lord Kelvin setting out what he can surmise, using the best available scientific knowledge of the time, about the age of the sun. He concludes:
    It seems, therefore, on the whole most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years, and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years. As for the future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation.
    Now, Lord Kelvin was a great scientist, who did important research in physics, and in particular, thermodynamics. Yet, science at that stage was only just begininng to uncover the workings of nuclear physics, and hence the mechanisms at work in the sun were unknown to him. His conclusions, made on the best evidence available to him at the time, were ultimately wrong.
     
    There’s also an essay by Giovanni Schiaparelli on the planet Mars. The translation, from the original Italian, uses the word "canals" instead of Schiaparelli’s intended word "channels". Thus was a whole myth seeded about there being canals on Mars. 
     
    20-20 hindsight is, of course, easy in retrospect. But then again these essays also show the scientific method in action. Working with the data available to them at the time, they formulated theories that made sense for their time. Subsequent new findings allowed new theories to arise that fitted the known facts better, and science moved on.

  • User Interface Redux

    Let’s turn once again to the theme of new forms of user interface. I mentioned one last month from Microsoft Research, now here’s another one being demonstrated by Jeff Han of the New York University Media Research Lab. 
     
    While some aspects of it are undeniably impressive, I have the nagging feeling that Han, like any proud parent, is overselling the device. He says, at several points in the demo, that the "interface just disappears" (meaning that it is intuitive to use). And, true, for some tasks – such as moving "photos" around on a "desk", and "resizing" them, it is. But, er, hang on – where did that keyboard appear from? There was a mode change here (e.g. I am no longer shuffling photos, I want to write captions on them) that he as the user would have had to signal to the computer interface. And how did he get rid of it to switch back to shuffling his photos?
     
    Don’t get me wrong, I think the interface that he demonstrates is very compelling – as far as it goes. But I have the feeling that it doesn’t go very far. You’re stuck with the fact that mode changes in an interface are a necessary evil, and that without some form of standard interface conventions, every application will end up doing their own thing. That way lies, not a disappearing interface, but the tower of Babel.
     

  • Changes

    Last week, a new series started on BBC TV: Time Trumpet. The premise is interviewing people 25 years in the future about events happening now. It is superlatively bizarre (e.g. an old David Beckham talking about the vagina transplant on his arm). But for me, one of the most surreal moments came with a bravura piece of video editing. It cross-cut between Tony Blair and David Cameron talking exactly the same platitudes and then it segued into a rendering of Changes – the song by Bowie from 35 years before today. Go and watch it now.

  • Gorgeous George

    Like Leon, I’m not a fan of George Galloway, but I have to say that he has some skill as an orator. Watch the exchange on Sky News pointed to in Pickled Politics.

  • Mothering Skills

    I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable, but I must say I find this extremely tacky. I’d hate to be that child. We’ve obviously moved on from the days when Noel penned Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs. Worthington…