Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2006

  • Philosophical Musings

    David Byrne places his entry for the 20th November in his Journal into the "Philosophical Musings" category. It’s an interesting read, ranging from climate change, the economy of China, to the wellsprings of religion. I do quibble with one thing he writes, however. He claims that Dawkins, Dennett and Harris "deny that the propensity for people to believe (i.e. have religious faith) is innate". He quotes the latest books by the trio as evidence of this denial.
     
    That’s odd, because Dawkins’ "The God Delusion" has a whole chapter called The Roots of Religion, with over 40 pages exploring various hypotheses as to why religion may be innate. And while I haven’t read either of the latest books by Harris and Dennett, the latter has certainly explored hypotheses for the causes of religion – see the section: The Diversity of Darwinian Explanations in his book Freedom Evolves, for example.  Methinks David Byrne is the one in denial here.

  • Retired Husband Syndrome

    Interesting piece by a BBC reporter about Retired Husband Syndrome – a condition seen in some Japanese wives. I can well believe that having a retired husband suddenly cluttering up your personal space can be unnerving, and given certain aspects of Japanese society, it can amplify into a syndrome. Thus far, Martin and I have managed to avoid it. Not living in a two-room flat probably helps.

  • Leonids Video

    As I mentioned, my attempt to watch the Leonid meteor shower was foiled by the weather. However, some people got lucky, and there’s even a video to prove it.

  • Little Recipes for Little Cooks

    And here’s another book – this time from the 1930s. Funny how the assumption is that only girls want to cook…

  • Things Girls Like To Do

    That’s the title of a book published in 1917. As you can imagine, the things are limited to housekeeping and needlecraft. The book is published as part of the Uplift Vocational Series. And as expected, the boys get the better part of the deal; their book is called Things Boys Like To Make, and is in two parts: Carpentry and Woodwork, and Electricity and its Everyday Uses.

  • The Revelations of a Rat Catcher

    Ike Matthews was a professional rat catcher who worked in Manchester, and who published a book distilling his 25 years in the trade in 1898. It’s become available online and is an interesting read. I probably need to pick up a few tips in order to keep a proper eye on the outhouses, although I’m relieved to say that so far we just seem to have the occasional mouse appear in the traps.
     
    I note that Ike recommends keeping ferrets. I do hope it won’t come to that. I don’t want to end my days being the crazy old man in the pub who puts ferrets down his trousers as his party piece.

  • World AIDS Day

    Just six days to go to this year’s World AIDS Day on the 1st December. The theme for this year is accountability. The EU Commission has also launched its AIDS – Remember me? web site – a somewhat odd little web site aimed at yoof.

  • Death In The Woods

    I’ve mentioned before that at this time of the year I regularly see crops of mushrooms in the woods. Today’s Guardian has an article by Giorgio Locatelli extolling the delights of gathering, cooking and eating wild mushrooms. Trouble is, I don’t feel confident enough to be able to identify them, even though I have illustrated guides on my bookshelves. Knowing my luck, I’d probably pick poisonous varieties. I mean, when it’s something like the Fly Agaric mushroom (see below), then it’s easy to identify and obvious what it is. But how about Amanita virosa – also known as the Destroying Angel? It looks so innocent. Richard Eshelman thought he knew his mushrooms. Read about what happened to him here.  
     
    061109-1517-21 
    The Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) mushroom – poisonous and obvious
     

  • How To Avoid Nightmares

    Here’s the FurReal Friends Butterscotch Pony for every little girl who’s ever dreamed of having her very own animatronic pony. But doting parents would be well advised to heed the warning:
    Adults take note: Pony comes unassembled in box with head detatched. You may wish to not open the box around your children if they may be frightened by a box with a decapitated horse inside.
    Yes, I can see how that might not go down well with most little girls.
     
    (hat tip to Improbable Research)

  • Our Daily Bread

    Pruned draws attention to a film by the German director Nikolaus Geyrhalter: Our Daily Bread. It looks interesting, but will probably put you off your food.

  • Cute Lies

    There’s a buzz in the blogsphere at the moment about a forthcoming documentary that purports to show animal foetuses developing in the womb. There are some cute pictures floating around, which seem to have been untimely ripped from Cute Overload. Er, but hang on, what’s this "representations using ‘computer graphics’" all about? You mean that real life is not quite as cute and in such sharp focus? Real life is in fact messy and slimy and murky in the womb? And the womb isn’t the big space that all the cute foetuses have such a grand time swimming about in? Yes, Virginia, real life isn’t quite like that. Get used to it. It has its own attractions, but lying about it doesn’t improve it.

  • Electoral Deadlock

    So, the Dutch Electorate have spoken. Trouble is, they have not spoken with a clear voice. No one party has control, so we’re going to have yet another coalition government. And the ingredients are even more like chalk and cheese, or sodium and water.
     
    I’m pleased that the Socialist Party has made substantial gains (added a further 17 seats); dismayed that the far right party of Geert Wilders has won 9 seats, and rolled my eyes that, only in the Netherlands, the party for animal rights has won two seats.
     
    I watched the "results debate" on Dutch TV – the leaders of the parties talked about the results together at midnight last night. Wilders was audacious enough to propose that it would be a good idea for Balkende to include his members in the government. You could feel the waves of distaste rolling from everyone else seated around the table. Mark Rutte, leader of the VVD (liberal) party, couldn’t contain himself, and expressed what I’m sure everyone else was thinking. It was, I thought, interesting that Balkende himself kept his counsel, but was happy for Rutte to leap in and say what needed to be said.
     
    Some more, and better analysis, here and here and here.

  • Beyond Belief

    There’s been an interesting conference that took place earlier this month: Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival. There’s a number of reports appearing on the web. This one from the New York Times and this one from the New Scientist. Best of all, the videos from the sessions are becoming available. I look forward to watching them through the miracles of the Internet and computers.
     
    While there could have been more believers than atheists at the conference, it appears as though the discussions were, shall we say, spirited, with Richard Dawkins coming in for the usual criticism over his "take no prisoners" approach. Me? I’m with Professor Dawkins. Call a spade a spade, I say.

  • The Ten Worst Science Books

    And following on from the editors of Discover magazine listing their 25 greatest Science books, John Horgan, a blogger with Discover, has an entry in his Horganism blog for the top ten worst Science books. It’s actually quite tricky to come up with a list that includes only genuine science books. There are thousands of books that claim to be about genuine science, but are simply pseudoscience. Anything by Deepak Chopra, for a start. So Horgan’s list is quite interesting.
     
    I can readily believe that some of his nominated books are pretty dire. Anything that I’ve read by Ray Kurzweil, for example, usually has my eyes rolling by the end of the second paragraph. And I suspect I would agree with Horgan about the Tao of Physics – I have another of Capra’s books that had my eyebrows raising, and not in a good way. But I’ll reserve judgement on the nomination of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. Clearly, Horgan thinks it’s a load of tosh, and it is quite true that string theory pushes one’s sense of credibility to the limits. I quite liked the book. Greene explains things well. What we need, of course, is some experimental evidence to show that the theories of Greene and his fellow string theorists have some validity. We may get some of that once the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva becomes operational next year. 

  • CAPTCHAs

    CAPTCHAs are those little checks that you see on web pages where you are asked to recognise the word shown in a graphic image and type it in.
     
    Mindhacks has a fascinating blog entry about them – including how spammers are using human weakness for sex into breaking the protection of CAPTCHAs.
     
    Equally fascinating is the update to the entry pointing to a Google video of Luis von Ahn talking about them. But I note the irony that the human responsible for captioning the talk made a transcription error over von Ahn’s name…

  • Sledgehammers and Nuts – Take Two

    I wrote earlier this month about the intention of the Dutch Government to ban the burqa. It seems as though the lovely Rita Verdonk got her way last week, and the Dutch government are indeed going to press ahead with this ill-conceived idea. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of discussion about it.
     
    Jill, over at Feministe, summarises much better than I could, why the proposed ban is a bad idea. It is not going to help the process of integration one jot, in fact it’s going to make things worse on all sides.
     
    Verdonk is a menace. I hope that in tomorrow’s elections, the Dutch electorate will throw a spanner in the works.

  • Foxes In Henhouses

     
    Data point two: the Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the US Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as "demeaning to women."
     
    Great.

  • Usability – Take Two

    While we’re on the subject of poor software design, I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Herbie’s rant about Adobe’s developers. They just don’t seem to understand what makes good design. And it’s not just confined to the install process of the Acrobat Reader. The malaise of piss-poor design seemingly crops up all over the place in Adobe’s products. I’ve ranted on about this before, writing about Adobe’s Organizer in Photoshop Elements version 3.0. It didn’t improve much with version 4.0 – in fact, in one significant area it got a lot worse. At least with version 3.0 I could apply batch edits to my photo metadata. Adobe pulled that in version 4.0. Gee, thanks, Adobe, I found that out once I had paid for the upgrade – you certainly didn’t bother to tell us in your feature list. Needless to say I have not bothered to upgrade to version 5.0 as a result.

    Now Adobe are playing around with another product that does many of the same things as Photoshop Elements: Lightroom. It’s still in beta form. Because it’s still a beta, I can understand that a) it’s not feature complete and b) performance is not optimised. But on my system, performance is non-existent. It is totally unusable, and I’m not the only person who is experiencing this. The laughable thing is that Lightroom is currently at beta version 4.1. The difference between this beta 4.1 and, for example, Microsoft’s beta 2 for Office 2007 is chalk and cheese. Office 2007 beta 2 feels solid and absolutely usable. Lightroom beta 4.1 is a dog. I’ve kicked it off my system.

  • Usability

    Good design is important for making things usable. Donald Norman has long been an advocate for good ergonomics. Now I see that Houtlust has examples of advertisements for something called World Usability Day 2006.
     
    I’d not heard of this event, or the organisation behind it, before now. Mind you, I can’t help but notice, with the raising of an ironical eyebrow, that one of the companies sponsoring World Usability Day is the German software company SAP. As someone who still bears the scars of battling with SAP software, which has quite possibly the most appallingly designed user interfaces in the known universe, I have to wonder why they are sponsoring World Usability Day. I’d like to think it was out of some sort of penance, but I fear that they actually believe that they are doing a good job in usability design.

  • Behind The Curtain

    Earlier this month, I mentioned the fact that an early preview of Microsoft’s Photosynth had been released. Bill Crow, over at his Windows Media Photo Blog gives us a peek behind the curtain at the technology that powers Photosynth. Interesting stuff to a nerd like me.

    Addendum: And of course Microsoft has now scrapped the Photosynth product and technology, so none of these links work anymore. It’s dead, Jim.