Following on from the last entry on the need for good parenting, I just thought that you should know that this blog is…
Year: 2007
-
Children See, Children Do
An excellent advert from Australia. I’ve often thought that it is too easy for people to become parents. -
The Zeusaphone
This seems somewhat appropriate as there’s a thunderstorm going on outside. Presumably, over at Glastonbury, the rather less musical natural version will put in an appearance at some point over the weekend. -
Not Giving An Inch
I must admit I’m currently enjoying the current round of interviews that Christopher Hitchins is giving to publicise his latest book: God Is Not Great. He gives no quarter whatsoever in his verbal swordplay.The latest that I’ve heard is the interview he gave on Simon Mayo’s BBC radio show last Monday. You can still listen to it or download the podcast for another day or two from here (choose the Monday tab). My favourite bit:Mayo: Do you think that you would win more converts to atheism if you were less dismissive of religious…Hitchens: I have no idea, but I can’t be other than dismissive. I hear someone like that sheep-faced loon from Blandford Forum [the Reverend Tim something-or-other… a previous caller] I have to say it sounds like bleating to me, and I remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Yep. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I’m not a sheep and I don’t need a shepherd and what shepherds do when they’re not actually messing around with their sheep is they’re keeping them around and alive so they can be fleeced and then killed. And yes, hearing these bleatings from the church of England does remind me of that and I don’t feel any need to make converts by not saying what I think. I leave it to them to make their hypocritical, unctuous, pseudo-friendly statements in the hope of keeping people inside the church. -
Musical Mondays
I referred yesterday to two articles that summarised the current state of research into sexual orientation and its manifestations. I was a bit po-faced about a crack from one of the articles: "It is not clear if Hamer and his team found the locus of the genetic code that causes men to memorize lines from A Star Is Born". The trouble is, there is a grain of truth in it. There is something about the Hollywood musical that stirs up the camp in a gay man’s soul, and I am not totally immune to it.When done well, this response to the musical can be very, very funny. By chance, I came across two bloggers today who have got this down to an artform. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Tom and Lorenzo and their Musical Mondays… -
Microsoft Surface Redux
Someone’s redone the voiceover to the video about Microsoft Surface. I think this version is much more accurate… -
Ideas Generator
Lyndsay Williams has had a lot of bright ideas in her time. The trouble is, it now appears that she is too practical for Microsoft Research, her former employer. She would rather invent useful devices; they appear to believe that writing academic papers is what they are about. Strange. -
Under The Knife
Being a proud parent is all very well, but this is probably a cut too far. I have my doubts about Nurse Practitioners as it is; child surgeons seem even less of a good idea. -
The Last Straw
Oh gawd, now Jack Straw spouts nonsense over the Rushdie affair. Will this flood of unspeak never end? Ophelia, once again, goes into battle. -
Scary Magic
I mentioned Kelly Link’s collection of short stories: Magic for Beginners back in March. I should have made a note that I have now read it.Despite what you may have concluded about me from my review of Cloud Atlas, I do appreciate spookiness in its place. And Kelly Lynn’s book doesn’t have "cheap spookiness", it has the real, genuine, gold-plated article. These stories are scary stuff. No outright blood and gore, but the more subtle kind of "what’s that lurking just out of sight" that will have you thinking "how on earth did she come up with that?"In particular, the story Stone Animals is suffocatingly strange, because it’s almost so ordinary, about an ordinary family moving into a house. But the tension and weirdness is racheted up until on the last page, I went "What?" and my brain exploded.And I loved Catskin, which reads like The Brothers Grimm crossed with Kafka.A highly recommended collection. -
A Poor Thing…
…but mine own. That’s my blog. And today, I see the cumulative hit counter has reached 200,000. Thanks for dropping by… -
The Science Of Gaydar
That’s the title of a rather good article in the New York Magazine that summarises the current state of knowledge about sexual orientation and its manifestations. One niggle, it does perpetuate the "scientists try to turn sheep gay" myth, but other than that, it’s a pretty good summary.And here’s a companion piece from Discover Magazine. Mind you, I can do without cracks such as: "It is not clear if Hamer and his team found the locus of the genetic code that causes men to memorize lines from A Star Is Born". Just for the record, I have not memorised any of the lines, and while Martin can listen to, and even enjoy, Barbra Streisand, I run screaming from the room at the sound of her voice.(hat tip to Mind Hacks for the links) -
Good User Interface Design
Despite the billions that Windows Vista has probably cost to develop, the user interface still has places where the meaning is confusing, rather than clear. Take this example. As Jan Mikovsky points out, the important and salient facts are simply not obvious to the user. The likelihood that he or she will make a wrong decision is higher – and not even be realised after the fact. -
Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu was the first attempt to create Hypertext software. It was begun back in 1960 by Ted Nelson – nearly 50 years ago!Now, on the occasion of Nelson’s 70th birthday, version 1.0 of XanaduSpace is released.Somehow, despite the fact that the rival Hypertext system (the World Wide Web of Tim Berners Lee) has been sarcastically described as “the joy buzzer and the whoopee cushion of the Internet”, I don’t think that the more elegantly designed Xanadu has a hope of displacing its rival. Sometimes, technical elegance is not enough. Just being good enough at the right time and place is what wins the day. I fear Xanadu is doomed to being a footnote in the history of computing. -
Touchscreens
There’s been a rash of touchscreen technologies being demonstrated recently. Here’s another one, this time from the Cambridge branch of Microsoft Research. -
Language, Language
The unspeak being used in the reporting of reactions to Rushdie’s knighthood rolls on. It’s like being in a game of Whack-A-Mole. Ophelia is doing her best, but I sense that she is beginning to lose patience. Can’t say I blame her. Here are the latest three examples (I’m linking straight to Ophelia so that you can see the unspeak in the originals being exposed immediately):Inayat Bungawala in The Guardian. This latest piece by Bungawala is particularly disingenous. He expects us to fall to our knees in gratitude over the fact that he has renounced book-burning, while carefully skirting the issue of not explicitly renouncing the calls to murder Rushdie. What a piece of work he is. -
Cloud Atlas
I managed to take another book off my towering to-be-read pile today. This time it was a novel – David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I started it yesterday, and it gripped so hard that I polished it off today. A set of six interlinked novellas, strung out along the theme of what makes us human and separated in time by thousands of years. Each novella has a unique voice and style, ranging from the historical novel, the detective novel, farce or science fiction.The whole book is in the form of an arc through time, travelling first forward through the centuries to the central novella, and then retracing the steps back to complete the other five novellas until it ends where it began, with the tale of a 19th century notary travelling in the Pacific. The climax of the central novella is wonderful – like the moment where a ball hangs in the air at the peak of its trajectory before falling back to earth. It may be bittersweet or elegaic; I don’t know, but it hangs there, perfectly. There’s much to enjoy along the way as well. I must admit The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish was great fun: “Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage”. Gosh, I wish I’d thought of that line…Update: during a night of fitful sleep (my leg is still sore), I reflected some more on the conceits and motifs of Cloud Atlas. Some strike me as being a step too far, for example that all the lead characters throughout the ages share the same birthmark. Then there is the moment when the lead character in the third novella feels some mysterious pull towards the three-masted schooner on which the 19th century notary had travelled:Luisa is distracted by a strange gravity that makes her pause for a moment and look at its rigging, listen to its wooden bones creaking. … What is wrong? Luisa’s birthmark throbs. She grasps for the ends of this elastic moment, but they disappear into the past and the future.She also has another moment when she feels that she knows the Cloud Atlas Sextet, the music composed by Robert Frobisher, the lead character in the second novella in the book:The sound is pristine, riverlike, spectral, hypnotic…intimately familiar. Luisa stands, entranced as if living in a stream of time.We seem to be steering dangerously close to the territories of woo here. For me (ever the rationalist), that’s a pity, since I think that the stories are strong enough to stand on their own two feet, without what strikes me as a cheap appeal to spookiness. There are more straightforward links between the novellas anyway, and for me these are sufficient. A diary links the first and second novella, letters the second and third, an unpublished novel the third and fourth, a film links the fourth and fifth, and a recording device links the fifth and sixth.Mitchell uses other conceits as well. Events and characters mirror real life. For example, the lead characters in the second novella – an aging syphilitic composer, his wife and the composer’s amanuensis – are clearly inspired by Frederick Delius, his wife Jelka and Eric Fenby. The story of the third novella is like a remix of the Karen Silkwood affair. Mitchell also explicity connects, in order to separate, the events in his novel with the real life analogues. For example, the clerk in the music store telling Luisa that the Cloud Atlas Sextet by Robert Frobisher is “not exactly Delius, is it?”And of course, the Cloud Atlas Sextet is a musical analogue of the six novellas that make up Cloud Atlas.Oh, and SPOILER ALERT…I was disappointed by the LEXX-like revelation at the climax of the fifth novella; the scenes on board of Papa Song’s Golden Ark. I don’t think that the numbers work out. Twelve years service for a Fabricant before Xultation? I don’t think there is enough to go round, as it were, certainly not hundreds of thousands… And was that a deliberate typo: Solent Green? -
Billboards At The Towers Of Silence
Mr Eugenides has the details of a sad tale that is developing around the Towers of Silence. Go and read it and marvel at the interconnectedness of life (and advertising).
Geoff Coupe's Blog 