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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.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.Leave a comment
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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…Leave a comment
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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.Leave a comment
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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…One response to “The Trap”
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Your space has been put forward for MSN’s Special "Let it Out". The good news is that you’ve been chosen to be featured on the Spaces Home Page. The creator of the Space that wins the most votes will win a laptop, webcam and headset package worth £1500. Good Luck and congrats on the excellent work!
MSN Specials
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Are You A Nerd?
3 responses to “Are You A Nerd?”
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51% scored higher (more nerdy),2% scored the same, and 47% scored lower (less nerdy).
What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:Somewhat nerdy. I mean face it, you are nerdier than about half the test takers. -
As long as we’re sharing, I scored a *94* on this quiz.6% scored higher (more nerdy),
0% scored the same, and
94% scored lower (less nerdy). What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:
Supreme Nerd. Apply for a professorship at MIT now!!!I’m somewhat surprised. -
No, Mike – I’m not surprised in the least. I would have expected nothing less from you. Gelert and I are clearly *not worthy*…
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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.Leave a comment
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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…Leave a comment
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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?One response to “Playing With Dolls”
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Darn. This was strangely topical. Today we took some kids to visit the nursery children here, and while I was there a little white girl asked me to get her a doll from the cupboard. I said, ‘there is a doll there, look, by the chair’ (it was a black doll, one of the natural featured and haired ones) but she screwed her face up and said, ‘I don’t like THAT one’. I asked her why not, but she just shook her head. Then I come across this post of yours.
I suggested on the site that, maybe the preference merely reflected the commonality of what the kids see around them (not knowing the ethnic percentage make up where the film was made), and had nothing to do with black and white being ‘better’ or whatever. I wanted to make this assessment first. Then I watched the film, and that was hard, then when it came to the doll experiment part, it made me tear up – its so damn sad. The children’s responses made specific reference to ‘the nicest’ because ‘it’s white’ and so on. I’m not sure how to respond now, but I don’t think now that my initial perhaps over hopeful idea is right. Something insidious is going on.
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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…Leave a comment
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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!2 responses to “Hand Me The Quellada Lotion…”
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Gorillas – pubic lice – yes Geoff, your blog never disappoints. Heh. Is there a Darwinian argument here?
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Gelert – yes, absolutely there’s a Darwinian argument! The gorillas’ pubic lice made the jump three million years ago to us because early humans were already losing hair, and had lost other species of lice (apart from the head lice) as a result. Thus, the pubic lice moved into an empty ecological niche, and didn’t have to compete with other lice on us… As the song goes on an ancient 78 record I have: "there are no flies on auntie"…
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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.Leave a comment
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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”.Leave a comment
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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.Leave a comment
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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"…Leave a comment
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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)6 responses to “Is Your Baby Gay?”
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‘…any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.’
Shit! He’s going to castrate the whole population?? What an absurd mindset to suggest its only going to apply to the pink babies. What a …… wanker basically. -
And why only baby boys? Don’t lesbians sin too? Why am I bothering to even consider this?
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that peed me off so much I sent him an e-mail. Now I have to go out. I do love your blog geoff, always gets some part of me or other vibrating with something.
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Our Gelert, when he is sound up thus, is indeed a force of nature.
It’s interesting that these people are willing to interfere with life in the womb to correct what they think is nature’s mistake, but are wholesale against interfering with life in the womb in the form of abortion. Clearly they are not bright enough to appreciate their own paradox. I may write to them too, simply because stupid people annoy me and they’ve annoyed my Wednesday morning. -
On the other hand, read this: http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=893
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Coboró, Mohler indeed hits the right note in his comments about Coulter. But it seems to me to be simply an extension of his "hate the sin, but not the sinner" view of gays. And that’s a sentiment that I’ve always found rather insidious. It allows, as we’ve seen, him to move to the blithe pronouncement that only heterosexuality is right, and homosexuals should be "cured". It’s basically the "homosexuality is icky and it makes the baby Jesus cry" view of the world. It’s a view that would deny my being if it could.
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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.2 responses to “The Case of the Phantom Penis”
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This is really interesting Geoff. I know a couple of people who feel they are in the wrong bodies – not going so far as to want surgery, but just to the extent that they always felt vaguely uncomfortable, and that they had more ‘male’ or ‘female’ brains than their bodies intended. I’ve heard every explanation from the fact that the brain is indeed out of step, to a hang over from a previous incarnation.
You’re totaly science based I know – what do you make of it?
btw. I always knew you were my kind of guy – anyone who appreciates Molesworth has got to be worth a bacon sandwich. -
Gelert – well, you know me; I certainly don’t give any credence to the explanation being a result of reincarnation. But I find it interesting that you say that one possibility is that "the brain is out of step". Why should it be the brain that is out of step? Why not the body? Or alternatively, neither are "out of step", they just don’t match. Then the interesting point is which do you "correct" to match the other? Today, our only option is to do physical surgery – i.e. correct the body. But what if we could administer some chemical/hormonal corrective to change the brain? Which would be better? I don’t know if you listened to the Patricia Churchfield interview, but she touches on some of these issues. What I find absolutely fascinating is that so many (and possibly all) of our deepest feelings and reactions can be reduced to chemical reactions in the brain. Listen to Churchfield talking about the Voles, for example. The implications of what she says are truly astounding. I honestly think that if our species lives through the next few centuries, we are going to see such changes in ourselves that what it means to be human will be very different to what it is today.
Oh – re Molesworth – did you catch the end of the Phantom Penis podcast? Then you would have heard Peter Sellars in one of his finest speeches!
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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.6 responses to “Management Speak”
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I recall sitting in a meeting recently where projects were being assigned and one of my colleagues was announced as "honchoing the foreign repair stations." I asked what that was and was met with an incredulous look from the chair. "It means he’s in charge." well, Why didn’t you just say so, you pretentious git, I thought.
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don’t be shy about the asterisk. This type of bullsh*t is also prevalent in education, with much the same results.
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don’t be shy about the asterisk. This type of bullsh*t is also prevalent in education, with much the same results.
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don’t be shy about the asterisk. This type of bullsh*t is also prevalent in education, with much the same results.
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Hell’s teeth, I only posted it once I promise!
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Gelert – see, there’s an echo in here as well!
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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.Leave a comment






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