Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2007

  • The Poison of Prejudice

    Over at a Fistful of Euros, Douglas Muir writes a commentary on a rather depressing piece by Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic. It’s worth reading.

  • Microsoft & Flickr

    It’s very nice to see that with the latest version of the Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta, I can now publish photos directly into Flickr. Excellent.
     
    WLPG test 1 
     
    Update 25 October 2007: Ah well, I spoke too soon. The Upload to Flickr facility in Windows Live Photo Gallery has a bug. The IPTC/XMP Description metadata field in image files is not preserved during the upload process. Instead, the contents get overwritten by the content of the Title metadata field.
     
    Update 26 October 2007: I sent an email to the Microsoft Photography Blog, and I’ve had a reply back. It turns out that they do preserve the image metadata, but for some reason they map the XMP Title field to the Flickr Description.
     
    Why on earth do they do that? It seems to me to be much more logical to map the XMP Dublin Core Description field into the Flickr Description field… That’s what Flickr’s own uploading tool, Flickr Uploadr does, after all. With WLPG, I end up with files on Flickr where the Flickr Description doesn’t actually correspond with the image metadata shown under Flickr’s "more properties". It makes no sense to me.
     
    So now I have the situation where Microsoft’s own Photo Info plug-in correctly displays the Description field; all my other image tools correctly display XMP/IPTC information, but WLPG corrupts the Description field on Flickr because it marches to a different tune. I’ll continue to stick with Flickr Uploadr, thanks very much.
     
    Update 27 October 2007: I’ve had a further email reply from a member of Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery team. He agrees with me that the mapping of the Title field into the Flickr Description field is a bug, and he has logged it as such. Hopefully, it will be corrected in a future version of WLPG.
     
    Update 17 September 2008: The latest version of Windows Live Photo Gallery was released as a beta today, and wouldn’t you know it – that bug is still there… Here’s a photo uploaded to Flickr with the Flickr Uploadr tool. See how the description field says what it is supposed to say? And here’s the same photo uploaded with Windows Live Photo Gallery. See how the description field has been overwritten by the file title field? Gah…
     
    Update 21 September 2008: I’ve described a further bug in Windows Live Photo Gallery that is a showstopper as far as I am concerned.
     
    Update 17 December 2008: The version of WLPG released yesterday (build 14.0.8051.1204) has fixed the mapping bug. Hooray.

  • Fodor’s Flying Pig

    I read an article, by the philosopher Jerry Fodor, in the London Review of Books last week: Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings. And I thought at the time that something wasn’t quite right about it. Whether it was the science or the philosophy, I wasn’t quite sure, but it just didn’t feel right.
     
    Today, I come across Jason Rosenhouse’s critique of Fodor’s piece, and he explains, to my satisfaction, that my gut feeling was correct. Fodor was away with the fairies. Thanks, Jason.
     
     

  • Another Debate

    David Thompson draws our attention to a terrific debate on the motion: We Should Not Be Reluctant to Assert the Superiority of Western Values. Do go and listen. Ibn Warraq and Douglas Murray are spectacular, while Tariq Ramadan strikes me as disingenuous, shifty and rather scary.
     
    The free-for-all of the Q&A session is wonderful.

  • Carlitopolis

    A short film. I laughed – loudly – I am an evil person.

  • Chat With God

    I see that someone has set up a chatbot that gives you the opportunity to chat with God. I was about three sentences in before God replied: "you know, not many people express themselves that way". About par for the course, I suppose, but it doesn’t say much about his omniscience.
     
    Oh, and the Google Ads across the top of the page helpfully had a link to 2008: God’s Final Witness (Unprecendented destruction will come in 2008, leading to America’s fall). Clear evidence that while God may not exist, the world is certainly stuffed full of crazy people…

  • Stay The Course

    Mr. Deity is back.

  • Vernon’s Tosh

    Dear lord, I’ve often thought that Mark Vernon writes some utter tosh at times, but I have seldom come across a bigger pile of codswallop than this. Ophelia gets stuck in to show it up for the rotting pile of fish ordure that it is.

  • Countdown

    And now, especially for film buffs, the countdown from 100. How many clips do you recognise?
     
     
    (hat tip to Peter Bradshaw)

  • Hitchens vs McGrath

    Here’s a video of the recent debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath on the topic of religious belief in the modern world. I’m sorry, but it seems to me that Hitch simply wipes the floor with McGrath, who waffles as much as ever. Surely there must be better proponents of the religious position than this…
     
    McGrath seems to be a perfect illustration of what Dennett calls a Murky (see the previous entry).

  • Daniel Dennett

    Here’s the second part of the speech that Daniel Dennett gave at the recent Atheist Alliance International conference. Thought-provoking stuff.
     
     

  • Ayaan Hirshi Ali

    If you haven’t read Hirshi Ali’s autobiography Infidel, then here’s a chance to see her telling part of her life’s story. Well worth watching. I never thought that something so mundane as the Nancy Drew stories could have such a far-reaching effect…
     
     
     

  • Saturn

    Phil, over at Bad Astronomer, has a post on the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Saturn probe: Cassini. Amazing images, new knowledge, and the killer sentiment:
    "That’s how we learn. That’s how we grow. And that’s what science does for us". 
    Amen. It’s a pity that so many of us will seemingly retreat into the false fuzziness of woo…

  • Men And Their Members

    Mark Hoofnagle, over at denialism blog, has a wickedly good post on the eternal search by the male of the species for tumescence. I particularly liked the lengths (as it were) that British physiologist Giles Brindley went to in order to demonstrate the efficaciousness of his research. Egad, sir, we British are afraid of nothing in the pursuit of scientific truth…

  • Autumn II

    I’ve hardly blogged at all during the last week. We’ve had family visiting us from Scotland, so we’ve been showing them the sights. Here’s some of the things we saw…
     
    20071007-1238-13 
     
    20071014-1254-13 
     
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    20071014-1231-17 
     
    20071014-1224-52 
     
    20071014-1214-33 
     
    20071014-1215-22 
     
    20071014-1217-23 
     
    20071013-1129-53 
     

  • No Duality

    Dr. Lisa Saksida explains that there is no such thing as mind/brain duality in this short video.
     
    (hat tip to Mind Hacks for the link)

  • Well-Deserved

    I see that Doris Lessing has won the Nobel prize for literature. It is well-deserved. To understand why, go and read this.

  • Down The Toilet

    What in heaven’s name has happened to The Observer? This was once a quality Sunday newspaper. But today it carries what at first glance seems to be a serious news story about forensic analysis. However, Ben Goldacre points out the facts. The journalists in question, Mark Townsend and Ned Temko should hang their heads in shame. Disgraceful, truly disgraceful.

  • A Journey

    Carolyn Porco takes us on a journey. Come along with me and wonder.

  • Cronenberg’s Worlds

    There’s a good interview with David Cronenberg in today’s Guardian. Worth reading.