Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2007

  • The Case of the Phantom Penis

    As a result of listening to the interview with Patricia Churchland that I mentioned here, I discovered another podcast. This time it was the wonderful VS Ramachandran talking about transsexuals and the phantom penis. Absolutely fascinating stuff, and proof, if any was needed, that the wrinkles of consciousness, and the interplay with genes, are endlessly interesting. 
     
    BTW, that link will get you to a download of the whole show. The rest of the show is also worthwhile. Listen to Steve Chu in particular on replacing oil.

  • Management Speak

    A particular bugbear of mine is the growing encroachment of management-speak into every part of our daily lives. Whenever I hear it I cringe inwardly and sorrow that more humans have been taken over by the pod people.
     
    Here’s a particularly fine example identified by Dr. Crippen over at his NHS Blog Doctor. Watch the video and see if you can remain unmoved. I think it was when Dr. Jonathan Tritter talked about "sharing the vision" that I lost it completely and screamed aloud. Mind you, the signs are there from the very opening sentence which is: "The aim of the new NHS Involvement Centre is to place patients at the heart of new and creative health services". Oh gawd, what the f*ck does that even mean? Forget about "new" and "creative", why not just have health services that work? And that guff about "putting patients at the heart" is right up there alongside "giving the consumer choice" as a trope that sounds good but signifies sod-all.

  • The Trap

    Via Not Saussure comes news that BBC2 starts a new three-part series next week. It’s The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream of Freedom. As it’s made by Adam Curtis, the man who made the absolutely riveting Power of Nightmares, I can see that I’ll be screwed to the sofa watching this.

  • Software Made Hard

    Michael Killian is a software engineer by profession. In his spare time, he is an inventor. He has invented the Sideways Bike. It’s clearly a death trap, if ever I saw one. I can only hope that I am not using any of his software.
     
    (hat tip to qwghlm.co.uk for the link)

  • Eliminative Materialism

    That’s a phrase that sounds intriguing. From this entry in Mind Hacks, linking to an interview with Patricia Churchland, to this entry in Wikipedia, it looks as though there’s enough material here to keep my mind boggling for years…

  • God Is A Spandrel

    Darwin’s God is the title of an interesting article* in the New York Times magazine about exploring the basics of the two major camps in the scientists studying the evolution of religious belief: the byproduct theorists and the adaptionists. The former posit theories that religion is a byproduct of some other cognitive processes. That’s the "God is a spandrel" camp. The adaptionists, on the other hand, posit theories that religion of itself is a succesful evolutionary strategy. The article opens with the author (Robin Marantz Henig) introducing the person and the work of the anthropologist Scott Atran. He’s an interesting character, and I’m in the middle of his book In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. However, I’m not convinced by his explanation of the "African Relic" anecdote related in the NYT article. It seems to me to be much more reasonable that, rather than the subjects’ reluctance being powered by superstition, as he claims, it’s powered by suspicion.
     
    I need to explore both sides of the byproduct versus adaptionist arguments some more. My natural tendency is to plump for the "God is a spandrel" explanation, but I’m quite willing to accept evidence that religion might have once solved problems of survival and reproduction of our early ancestors. I’m far less convinced that it continues to do so today.
     
    *This link goes to the opening section of the article reproduced on the Richard Dawkins web site. The full article is currently to be found here, but the NYT has a habit of placing archive material behind a subscription wall. Get it while it’s hot.

  • Purple Haze

    There’s something about seeing mountains in mist and twilight that I like. Here’s two examples. The first I was fortunate enough to be able to photograph way back in 1969 on the Isle of Man.
     
    1969_north_barrule 
     
    The second is a stunning example of the genre from Miyukiutada, and it can be found here. 

  • Old Schooldays

    Via Gelert’s Experiment in Normality, I am gladly reminded of two books from my childhood and currently snuggled together in the library: Down With Skool and How To Be Topp, both written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle. Both long out of print, but they have been reissued as a compendium. There’s even a short animation using the original Searle illustrations from Down With Skool:
     
     

  • Coulrophobia

    I’ve often suspected that I suffer from a mild form of coulrophobia – I find clowns somewhat disturbing. But I think that when I end up in a nursing home, the last thing I want to invade my space is a posse of clowns, particularly Christian Clowns…
     
     
     
     
    (hat tip, I think, to Orac)

  • How Will You Die?

    Another little quiz, and I learn that…
    You’ll die from a Heart Attack during Sex.

    Your a lover not a fighter but sadly, in the act of making love your heart will stop. But what a way to go.
    ‘How will you die?’ at QuizGalaxy.com

     

    Well, I can think of worse ways to go, but it might prove to be a bit traumatic for Martin…

     

  • Dune

    Carrying on from the previous entry… the next DVD that I think I shall watch again is Dune. I’ve just been prompted by reading an entry on Kevin’s Blog. Like him, I really enjoyed the books, and I like the feel that David Lynch brought to his visualisation of the story. Yes, there’s a lot of voiceover exposition, so those who have not read the book are in danger of feeling lost, but seeing the duel of the House Harkonnen and the House Atreides visualised in such a baroque style is, for me, a real treat. For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!
     
    Update: Out of curiosity, I’ve just leafed through my paperback copy of Dune. It was published in 1965. I was somewhat amused to see that it bears the proud declamation on its cover: "Soon to be a major film!". Well, in fact it was almost twenty years later when Lynch’s Dune reached the silver screen in 1984…

  • When The Cat’s Away…

    …the mice will play. Well, the mouse in this case. Martin’s away visiting friends, so it’s a chance to watch DVDs by myself, with a kleenex box to hand as required.
     
    First up was Tim Burton’s Big Fish. I have a very soft spot for all of Tim Burton’s films. More than one of them have sent me stumbling from the cinema in floods of tears, and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order. I like Big Fish for both the tall tales, beautifully told and visualised, and for the story of a father and son who are reconciled at the moment of the father’s death. I hasten to add that this is nothing like my own story, but I recognise and respond to such basic human motifs. I laugh and cry at the same time during this wonderful film.
     
    Second up was The Iron Giant. OK, it’s a children’s film, but it captured the feeling of growing up in the late 1950s very well. While I would not say that I had the bravado of the film’s boy hero Hogarth Hughes, I knew the world of wonder and paranoia that he inhabits. It’s a terrific film, forget the children’s film label, just see it. 

  • Solar Eclipse

    By one of those cosmic coincidences, when we view a solar eclipse from the Earth, the moon’s disc appears to be the same size as the sun. But here’s a transit of the moon across the sun that has never been seen by human eyes before. It was captured by the STEREO-B satellite. Watch the animation of the images for the full, staggering, effect. Absolutely spectacular.
     
    (hat tip to the Bad Astronomer for the link)

  • Denounce

    Denounce – not a verb, in this case, but a combined Blog reader and Podcast player application. Well, to be strictly accurate – it’s more of a conceptual application, built to show off some of the new capabilities of the user interface of Microsoft’s Vista. It’s not functionally complete, and it’s buggy; but it does succeed in showing some of the new ways of interacting with your PC.
     
    Denounce screenshot 1 

  • Turning The Pages

    I’ve mentioned the British Library’s Turning The Pages application before. If you haven’t seen it for yourself, or are unable to run it on your computer, then here’s a short video that shows it off, and gives the background to the initiative. For the best quality, download the video and then play it, rather than watch the online streamed version.

  • Magic For Beginners

    That’s the title of a book of short stories by Kelly Link. It has a glowing review in today’s Guardian, which is sufficiently enthusiastic and makes the book sound inviting enough that I’ve just ordered it. I look forward to reading it – although my pile of unread books is starting to grow again as I wrestle to find enough time to do all the things that need doing…

  • Life Was Simpler Then…

    …and Health and Safety issues were a thing of the future. Still, I’m sure a barrel with a pipe stuck through it worked out a good deal cheaper than the Playstations, Nintendos and Xboxes that today’s children have come to demand.

  • One For The Scrapbook

    A newspaper cutting to savour, perhaps?

  • Usability – Take Three

    I’ve mentioned Adobe’s Lightroom application before – and not in a good light, as far as I was concerned. Admittedly, it was then in beta. It has now been released in all its glory as a fully-fledged version 1.0 application. And my verdict? I’ve given it the hook.

    Its performance is still terrible, its metadata handling is poor, it costs too much and I really don’t need it.

    Performance – really, scrolling through thumbnails is jerky and incredibly frustrating. There is no feel that there is a real connection between a movement of the mouse on the scrollbar and the scrolling of the images. As I’ve noted before, Google’s Picasa (a free application) has this down pat, and is an example to aspire to. Adobe doesn’t come anywhere close.

    Metadata – in its favour, it does have a complete implementation of IPTC Core. However, it only reveals a few fields of EXIF metadata. Where is Orientation, for example? Lightroom seems to expose a grand total of 12 EXIF metadata fields. IDimager shows over 110 EXIF metadata fields.

    I did like the Metadata browser of Lightroom – particularly the “location” hierarchy, which allowed me to identify a few metadata errors immediately. However, performance again is pretty poor, and turning on the option to enable Lightroom to update metadata directly in the image files makes it unusable – at least on my system.

    All in all, Adobe’s Lightroom is not for me: overpriced and underperforming for what I am looking for. My ideal digital asset manager will be something like the offspring of Picasa and IDimager – a child having the Picasa’s lightning fast image library and search capability coupled with IDimager’s comprehensive metadata capabilities.

  • Kicking The Tyres

    I mentioned that I’m currently testing the beta software of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. In that last posting I mentioned that I had a showstopper of an issue – Windows Vista would not start when the Windows Home Server Connector software was installed.

    Someone reported the same issue today on the feedback forum, and said that it was caused by a conflict between the Connector software and the CA Antivirus program for Windows Vista. A bit of testing on my part confirms this: either I can run the Connector software or I can run the CA Antivirus – but I can’t run both together. What’s also frustrating is that the Windows XP version of CA Antivirus does not have a conflict. Martin’s PC, which is running Windows XP, is happily sending backups through to the Windows Home Server box.

    I’ve reported this to Microsoft, and I’ve just received an email to say that they’ve confirmed this, and there is a fix in the works, so I’m looking forward to getting this and carrying on with testing.