Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2006

  • A Mother’s Story

    When I watch something like this, I find it difficult not to despair. How can such a cycle of violence ever be broken?

  • The Science Book List

    The editors of Discover magazine have published their list of the 25 greatest Science books of all time. It’s a pretty stunning list, and I’m ashamed to say that I’ve only read a few of them. Glad to see that Darwin takes the top two places on the list. Quite right too…

  • Torchwood Guttering

    Well, I keep watching Torchwood every week in the hope that it might improve. Last week’s effort (Small Worlds) wasn’t too bad, but last night’s episode (Countrycide) was simply laughable. The plot holes could have had a truck driven through them, and the climatic standoff between Gwen, Owen, the psycho and the bent copper was – well, utterly ridiculous. And this was episode 6 in the series. I’m beginning to lose my patience.

  • 21 Years Old Today…

    That’s Microsoft Windows. Version 1.0 was released on 20th November 1985. Somewhat depressing to realise just how long it’s been around. More Windows trivia to celebrate the anniversary here.

  • Public Service Announcement

    Maceij Ceglowski (the intelligence behind Idle Words) has started the Bedbug Registry, where travellers can report sighting of bedbugs in the hotels they visit. The University of Kentucky has a particularly illuminating web page on the species.
     
    It all brings back memories of the first time I stayed in San Francisco. When I got to my room and switched on the light, I saw, with some horror, the pattern on the carpet fleeing to the walls…

  • A Party Political Broadcast

    We’re in the middle of political campaigning here in The Netherlands, leading up to elections later this month. Since I don’t (yet) have Dutch nationality, I’m not allowed to vote. So I thought I’d bring you a sample of political campaigning from Poland.
     
    Here, for your delight, and doubtless extreme puzzlement, is the party political broadcast of one Krzysztof Kononowicz, would-be mayor of Bialystok. I am indebted to Obscene Desserts for this gem. 

  • A Short, Sharp, Burst

    That’s possibly what will happen tonight with the Leonid meteor shower. More details here. I saw a spectacular Leonid last night – there will probably be some around, but the peak could be really spectacular, if short-lived.
     
    Update: Well, there might have been some spectacular meteors – but unfortunately, if there were, they were all happening on the other side of thick cloud cover. Foiled again! Oh well, perhaps next month on the 14/15 December I’ll get a crack at seeing the Geminids.

  • Happy Birthday

    In an attempt to prove that I can be just as soppy as anyone, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish Parker a very happy Fourth Birthday. Seriously, we could do worse than to consider the example of his parents. Unfortunately, still far too many people in this world think that this is wrong, and that Parker and his parents should not be a family.

  • Graphic Falsehoods

    In which Neddie takes a trip to Hell, and returns with Edward Tufte’s autograph on a particularly nasty piece of graphic falsehood. By virtue of his insight into how to tell a story by the use of graphical language, Tufte is a hero of mine; but I share Neddie’s relief that I was never actually one of his students.

  • Geek Toy

    The eStarling is clearly a device for someone with more money than sense. $250 for a tiny photoframe? I think not. Wake me up when it’s a tenth of the price, and then I’ll think about it.

  • Top SF and Fantasy Books

    OK, here’s the list arrived at by the Science Fiction Book Club of the most significant 50 books of SF and Fantasy for the last 50 years. The list is annotated by me as follows:
    Highlighted – I’ve read it
    Asterisked – a favourite.
     
    The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien *
    The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
    Dune, Frank Herbert
    Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
    A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin *
    Neuromancer, William Gibson
    Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
    The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
    Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury 
    The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
    A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. *
    The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
    Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
    Cities in Flight, James Blish
    The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
    Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison *
    Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
    The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester *
    Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
    Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
    Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
    The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
    The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
    Gateway, Frederik Pohl
    Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (TV) *
    I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
    Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
    The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin *
    Little, Big, John Crowley
    Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
    The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
    Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
    More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon *
    The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
    On the Beach, Nevil Shute
    Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke *
    Ringworld, Larry Niven
    Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
    The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
    Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
    Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
    Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner * 
    The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester *
    Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
    Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
    The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
    Timescape, Gregory Benford
    To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer  

  • Wormbook

    Should you have a need to know about the biology of Caenorhabditis elegans, then you’ll probably find more than you need in Wormbook. You can even download all 380 megabytes (zipped) for your offline reading pleasure… 

  • The Faster You Go

    A striking Road Safety advertisment from New Zealand. Although, to be strictly accurate, it ain’t the speed that causes the mess – it’s the sudden stopping that does it.

  • Ultra-Secure Passports?

    A rather alarming article in today’s Guardian. The UK government has started issuing what it calls "ultra-secure" passports containing biometric information on an RFID chip. The government is confident that the information is sufficiently protected. Unfortunately, it has taken a journalist and a computer security expert just minutes to break it. Well, what a surprise. The naivety of governments when it comes to computer systems and technology knows no bounds.

  • Snail Telegraphy

    The ever-dependable Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society has a corker of an entry today: The Snail Telegraph. It was based on the well-known scientific principle that any two snails, once mated, will remain forever in telepathic contact with each other, no matter what the distance between them. Er, right. But just supposing this bizarre hypothesis was true. How different the world would have been following the introduction of the snail telegraph back in 1850…

  • The Rules of the Game

    The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has published a report: The Rules of the Game: Terrorism, Community and Human Rights. It looks to be worth reading, and is already attracting attention from mainstream media and bloggers. Not Saussure quotes the following passage from the report:
    Tony Blair talks of ‘rebalancing between the rights of the suspect and the rights of the law-abiding majority’. John Reid declared to the Labour party conference , ‘It cannot be right that the rights of an individual suspected terrorist be placed above the rights, the life and limb of the rest of the British people. It cannot be right – it is wrong, no ifs, no buts, it’s just plain wrong.’ But these are false dichotomies: ‘suspects’ are members of the ‘majority’. They are innocent until proved guilty, their rights and those of the majority hang together. (It is a miserable fact, however, that thanks to its constant use, the word ‘suspect’ is now charged with the presumption of guilt – so much that the Guardian recently wrote of ‘alleged terrorist suspects’.) (p 42) 
    I find it really worrying that British politicians are using rhetoric such as that quoted above. They seem to be intent on making things worse.

  • No Utilitarian Value…

    …So says the maker of his self-assembling chair. The video’s rather fascinating, though…

  • Running Repairs

    I leave my computer running 24 hours a day. My excuse for this non-green waste of resources is that it’s running the BBC’s Climate Change Experiment. One night last week, the computer shut itself down. Checking the event log, I found that the graphics card had overheated. The inside of the PC seemed to be dustfree, but I cleaned everything anyway. I also kept an eye on the temperature of the graphics card. Sure enough, it did seem to be wildly fluctuating – mostly about 80º C, but occasionally shooting up to the mid-nineties. After several more forced shutdowns, I identified the cause of the problem – the fan on the graphics card wasn’t running efficiently – its bearing was shot.
     
    So off to the local computer shop to see what could be done. The best shop locally is Hecosys, in Silvolde. A veritable Aladdin’s cave for computers. They recommended simply replacing the fan with a third-party cooling product, rather than replacing the entire card. So that’s what I did, at a tenth of the price of a new graphics card. I bought a Zalman fan (a VF700-Cu) from them, and now the card is running at 50º C – and I can’t hear the fan at all. I’m a happy bunny again.

  • Monckton’s Mockery

    Apparently, the Sunday Telegraph has published a two-part article by Christopher Monckton on climate change, in which he accuses scientists and the UN of distorting the facts about global warming. I didn’t read it myself (I don’t often dip into the Telegraph’s pages). However, I see that today’s Guardian carries an article by George Monbiot that thoroughly shreds the "facts" presented by Monckton. It’s a pretty good demolition job – and, following the article, the first comment by "rashers101" is rather good and somewhat sobering.

  • An Inspissated Gloaming

    And following on from my mention of the Archbishop, his pals, the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster, were doing something similar at the launch of a new religious think-tank, Theos. Supressing my instant thought that the phrase "religious think-tank" sounds too much like an oxymoron, I turned instead to the piece by A. C. Grayling commenting on the development. As expected, Grayling brings in a few home truths:
    We understand that the faithful live in an inspissated gloaming of incense and obfuscation, through the swirls of which it is hard to see anything clearly, so a simple lesson in semantics might help to clear the air for them on the meanings of "secular", "humanist" and "atheist". Once they have succeeded in understanding these terms they will grasp that none of them imply "faith" in anything, and that it is not possible to be a "fundamentalist" with respect to any of them. 
    "An inspissated gloaming of incense and obfuscation" Doncha just love the English language? Mind you, I did have to look up the meaning of inspissate – it’s not a word that I often use. Well, alright then – I’ve never used it. But now I’ll certainly have to try to find the right occasion to produce it in a verbal flourish.
    People who do not believe in supernatural entities do not have a "faith" in "the non-existence of X" (where X is "fairies" or "goblins" or "gods"); what they have is a reliance on reason and observation, and a concomitant preparedness to accept the judgment of both on the principles and theories that premise their actions. The views they take about things are proportional to the evidence supporting them, and are always subject to change in the light of new or better evidence.
    Well, exactly. Why don’t the archbishops grasp this simple fact?
    "Faith" – specifically and precisely: the commitment to a belief in the absence of evidence supporting that belief, or even (to the greater merit of the believer) in the very teeth of evidence contrary to that belief – is a far different thing, which is why the phrase "religious thinktank" has a certain comic quality to it: for faith at its quickly-reached limit is the negation of thought.  
    Well, quite, it’s that oxymoron again. Anyway, go and read the rest of Grayling’s article. It’s good.