Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2007

  • Dutch Star Forts

    BLDBLOG has an entry that refers to Dutch Star Forts. It reminds me of the time when we lived in Gouda. Nearby, between Bodegraven and Nieuwerbrug was Wiericker Schans – a very simple version of a star fort.
     
    Wiericker Schans 
     
    I wonder whether there are any around the area where we live now?

  • Pull The Other One

  • What We Need More Of…

    …is Science. MC Hawking lays it on the line.
     
     
     
    (hat tip to Richard Dawkins Net)

  • Sidebar Gadgets

    One of the toys introduced with Windows Vista is the Sidebar – a place where small applications (called "Gadgets") can live and run. I use it to hold a couple of weather and news gadgets, plus a photo gadget that shows photos that I have taken in the garden.
     
    Windows Sidebar 
     
    There’s a thriving community out there writing gadgets. As might be expected, their usefulness is often in the eye of the beholder. For example, here’s one for the Harry Potter fans: a countdown clock to the publication of the last book in the series.
     
     

  • Twiddling Thumbs

    I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently testing a beta version of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server product, and that I had a showstopper of an issue on my Vista machine – after installation of the Windows Home Server client software, Vista won’t start – it just locks up.
    Two weeks ago, the cause was identified – it’s a conflict between CA’s Anti-Virus 2007 product and the Windows Home Server client software. I wrote then that Microsoft were aware of the problem, and that a fix was on the way. I’m beginning to wonder if I might have been jumping the gun. I’ve been following the issue on Microsoft’s feedback forum for beta testers, and some of the responses I’m seeing from the Microsoft side make me wonder whether they’ve really understood what we’ve been telling them.
    It seems as though Microsoft thinks that we’re talking about their Live OneCare product and its anti-virus capability. Er, no, guys. Read my lips: it’s a conflict between CA’s Anti-Virus 2007 and your Windows Home Server client software.

  • Here’s One I Made Earlier…

    My belief in one of the bedrock institutions of British Society has been shaken to its very core today. I refer, of course, to the news that the institution in question, the children’s TV show Blue Peter, has been caught rigging the results of one of its competitions.
     
    I may never be the same again…

  • Crib Notes

    Once again, I am grateful to Not Saussure. This time for two reasons.
     
    a) drawing my attention to the synopsis of the second installment of The Trap. Close reading of this material will prepare this bear of very little brain to have a fighting chance of understanding and appreciating the argument being put forth by Adam Curtis when the programme is broadcast this coming Sunday.
     
    b) referencing the article in today’s Guardian which appears to indicate that idiotic quantification is the new fashion for Nu Labour.

  • The Trap

    I mentioned that I would be screwed to the sofa to watch The Trap by Adam Curtis on BBC2 last Sunday. I was there and watching – but for this bear of very little brain there was an awful lot to absorb. There’s a problem, I have found, when both the argument and my brain are dense. I’m not really complaining – the current approach in the media to reduce everything to a two-minute soundbite deserves to rot in Hell – but there was a lot to take in. Perhaps the next programmes will give me a chance to tease out the arguments.
     
    Still, I did not feel that it was a waste of time – unlike most stuff on the telly these days.
     
    Not Saussure comes closest to what I think my reaction would have been had I grokked Curtis’ argument more fully… However, I’ll be there on the sofa for the rest of the series…

  • Spring Is (Almost) Here

    …and I can’t help but think it’s about three weeks ahead of last year…
     
    20070305-1133-15 
    20070305-1135-25 
    20070312-1542-45 
    20070312-1547-23 

  • Are You A Nerd?

    Another pointless quiz. But if you’re a Nerd, you probably will want to find out how much of a nerd you are…
    I am nerdier than 64% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out! 

  • Dan Dennett’s Soundbites

    Here’s an interesting little collection of short videos featuring Daniel Dennett. Each video takes one point and Dennett answers succintly, sagely and suavely. I think my favourite is the first, where I think he puts his finger on why Darwin’s dangerous idea is so unsettling to many people.

  • Peepshows

    The word Peepshow has come to mean something associated with sexual voyeurism. But it was not always so. And even today, the Dutch word Kijkdoos retains something of its innocent antecedents. In the wider lineage of the kijkdoos, Charles Matton continues the tradition with stunning results. The images of the library draw me in…

  • Playing With Dolls

    Jeremy Stangroom, over at the Talking Philosophy blog, links to, and discusses, the short film A Girl Like Me. The recreation of the famous doll experiment of Kenneth and Mamie Clark breaks my heart. Have we really not moved on at all?

  • Happy Birthday, PZ!

    From Richard Dawkins, no less, I learn that today is PZ Myers’ 50th Birthday. Have a good one.
     
    I’ve learned something else today from Professor Dawkins – how to pronouce Pharyngula correctly… All this time I’ve been saying faryngoola instead of faringula – to rhyme with singular…

  • Hand Me The Quellada Lotion…

    Carl Zimmer has another terrific post up on The Loom. This time he considers the three million year-old history we and gorillas have shared with pubic lice. Nice!

  • The Digital Universe

    Via Preoccupations, I learn that there’s a new study been published on the ever-increasing amount of digital information published worldwide and its impact thereof. It estimates that by 2010 we’ll be drowning in 988 exabytes (988 billion gigabytes) of the stuff. It’s sobering to realise that in just 2006 alone, the study estimates that the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated was 1,288 x 1018 bits. In computer parlance, that’s 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes … This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written.
     
    Equally sobering is the observation that the lifetime of digital information is very short, so long-term preservation of real information is a definite challenge.

  • The Power of Language

    I’ve remarked before how language can be used to shape and direct our attitudes and feelings. Jim Burroway in Box Turtle Bulletin has a particularly interesting entry on how language is used by anti-gay groups in the US. Well worth reading and thinking about. As Burroway says:
    For me, attending the Love Won Out ex-gay conference in Phoenix was very much like being an anthropologist from Mars, as Oliver Saks [sic] once put it. I observed a culture with its own vaguely familiar language and customs. And learning its language was key to understanding the framework and worldview from which Love Won Out operated. But as is true with many cultures, it almost requires a total immersion inside the culture of Love Won Out to pick up on the nuances of those terms and customs. 
    I tend to feel like that Sacksian anthropologist (actually ‘on’ Mars, rather than ‘from’ Mars, as Burroway writes) when I look at much of what emanates from the US, and doubtless the feeling is mutual. The contrast with things that are taken for granted here in The Netherlands is sometimes startling. Yesterday, for example, the Dutch "queen of the afternoon chat-shows", Catherine Keyl, had as her main guests Albert Verlinde and Onno Hoes, a same-sex couple who have been married for five years. Verlinde works in television and produces musicals, while Hoes is a politician; a member of the Executive for the province of Noord-Brabant. While the focus of the interview was on how do this couple juggle their busy professional careers to have enough time together, the underlying language and feeling of the interview was how "gewoon" (commonplace, ordinary) their situation was.
     
    The interview served to point up that their experience was part of family life, whereas in Burroway’s example of the Love Won Out conference, the language used serves to drive a wedge between a person and their sexuality:
    Their language is specially designed to treat people and their sexuality as if they were two completely separate entities, as if sexuality were a separate thing outside of the person. As Melissa Fryrear put it in a breakout session, they constantly work to “separate the ‘who’ from the ‘do’,” or, as others have put it more crudely in Mike Haley’s example, “the sinner” from “the sin”. 

  • The Shipping Forecast

    When I was a young boy, I remember lying in bed in the mornings listening to the Shipping Forecast on the radio, and hearing the melliflous tones of the BBC announcer intoning those evocative names: Dogger Bank, Cromarty, Forties, Fisher, Rockall, German Bight and the rest.
     
    And now, in these modern times, my brother has drawn my attention to something equally good: a web site that displays the real-time movements of shipping in the Irish Sea. My uncle (still alive at 101!) would love this. He used to spend many happy days aboard the boats of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company crossing from Douglas to Liverpool and Fleetwood. Now he can watch the Ben-My-Chree as it crosses the Irish Sea.

  • International Women’s Day

    Tomorrow is the annual marking of International Women’s Day. It continues to be necessary, although as Zoe Williams points out in today’s Guardian, it appears to be in danger of drowning in trivia. Just one minor quibble with Ms. Williams’ article, I think she was having a Freudian slip when she reffered to "Agassi kitchen utensils" in place of "Alessi kitchen utensils"…

  • Is Your Baby Gay?

    Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, dreams of the day when he can carry out a final solution for gays…
    If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin. 
    (hat tip to Unscrewing the Inscrutable for the link)