I’ve been fortunate enough never to have had to take anti-depressants in my life. The real kicker appears to be when people stop taking them, as Holly Finch has found out.
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Cold Turkey
2 responses to “Cold Turkey”
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I was put on a drug one time, and it was only an hour or so after I took it that I started to feel bad. I woke in the night convinced I was, literally, on fire, and my heart was going like a hamster’s on speed. I binned it. Later on, it was implicated in increased suicide bids in young people. Coming off a drug can be worse than what it was meant to save you from.
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I see that tonight’s Panorama is devoted to the topic. Worrying stuff.
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Maths Equation
And now, courtesy of xkcd.com, the Romantic Drama Equation. Seems pretty logical to me.Leave a comment
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A Date for your Diary?
Somehow, Las Vegas feels like the perfect choice of location for this: an International Alchemy Conference. A place (built by profits transmuted from the hopeless dreams of people who fail to acknowledge that the house always wins) hosting a conference for the hopeless dreams of people who fail to acknowledge that alchemy is nonsense. I foresee more profits for the house.(hat tip to Les over at Stupid Evil Bastard)Leave a comment
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Mission Impossible
On the day before Microsoft has a collective orgasm over the introduction of Windows Vista, how could I resist this old promotional video for Windows 386…?Leave a comment
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Lost In Translation
At least, I hope it was. Surely the Japanese Health Minister didn’t really refer to women as "birth-giving machines"?Leave a comment
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No-Body
I know that self-awareness makes us to be a very strange species, but sometimes I come across something that I find extremely difficult to understand. Here’s an example: a healthy woman who sees herself as incomplete – because she has too many legs.Update: Vaughan, over at Mind Hacks, has some more information about this.One response to “No-Body”
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Well hey, maybe she was a snake in a former life? or a mermaid? Personally I think reincarnation has a lot to answer for! I can distinctly remember once being an intelligent human being for instance….. long ago it must have been……
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Black Sheep
New Zealand, the country where men are men, but now the sheep are apparently no longer nervous… The trailer looks good, I hope the film stands up. Shear terror, perhaps?3 responses to “Black Sheep”
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Please tell me this is a joke??? Sheep? Insane murderous sheep? Heck, I’ve spent too long on the Welsh Hills wooing these wooly cuties to be able to take this seriously. What next? Night of the killer chicks? (Hmm, I’m sure that one’s already been done, just without feathers).
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I can’t wait!! Violence of the Lambs! There’s Something About Mary’s Little Lamb! Night of the Living Chop!! Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the paddock…Hooves!! Shorn of the Dead!!! Oh my, I’ll be chucking popcorn at the screen and screaming like a girl!!
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Tee-Hee. Puns galore! Gelert, wake up man, the Welsh sheep have been biding their time…
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The Fire on Apollo 1
Phil, over at The Bad Astronomer, reminds us that 40 years ago yesterday, a fire on the Apollo 1 spacecraft took the lives of astronauts White, Chaffee and Grissom in just 17 seconds. Go and read it and remember them, and others like them.Leave a comment
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Which SF Writer Are You?
Another little quiz. My result:
I am: Olaf Stapledon
Standing outside the science fiction "field", he wrote fictional explorations of the futures of whole species and galaxies.
Which science fiction writer are you?
Interesting that it’s Stapledon. I don’t actually have any of his books in my collection, although I’m sure that I have read some of his work when I was growing up. Perhaps that’s a gap that I should seek to fill.2 responses to “Which SF Writer Are You?”
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Arthur C. ClarkeWell known for nonfiction science writing and for early promotion of the effort toward space travel, his fiction was often grand and visionary.
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Oh, well done. Arthur is a good result. You know that he’s also a friend of Dorothy, don’t you?
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OTT Bike
For those who think that the bicycle is passé, may I point you towards the Hyperbike. Somehow, I can’t see myself wanting to cycle through town in this. I’ll take my chances on the old-fashioned bike, thank you very much.(hat tip to Improbable Research)Leave a comment
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The Sound of Woo
Following on from Donnie’s musical offering, Orac treats us to the wilder shores of woo…Leave a comment
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Blasphemy!
If you didn’t catch the discussion (I wouldn’t call it a debate) between Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry at last year’s Hay Festival, then here’s your chance to hear it or capture it for posterity. Posterity will be moderately proud of you.Leave a comment
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Science Imitates Art
Well, that’s if you can stretch the concept of Star Wars into "Art". Tara C. Smith asks: what bacterium was named after a George Lucas invention?Leave a comment
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Smoke and Mirrors
This week’s Improbable Research column in the Guardian has a piece on Barbara Tedlock, distinguished professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Apparently she’s just published a study on a "theory of practice for divination".I got two sentences into the piece before I went: "hang on a minute…".Sentence 1: How do diviners divine? A reasonable question, I think. What is the process that they follow? How do they interpret their data, whether it be twitching of a rod, the pattern of cracks or the state of a dog’s intestines? From aeromancy (divination by wind) to zygomancy (divination by weights), the trappings of diviners are many and various.Sentence 2: How do they achieve such dependable results? Er, excuse me? Did you say dependable? I puzzled over this for a moment, and then realised that what must be meant is that one can depend on the results being governed by the laws of probability, i.e. we know from scientific testing that the results are the same as for random chance. Phew, what a relief, I thought for a moment there that professor Tedlock was implying that divination actually worked. Silly me…Er, but what’s this: These practices are so prevalent we must assume they work, Tedlock says. Er no, that’s about as valid as the old joke: eat shit, nine billion flies can’t be wrong.And this: Given that scientists are now imagining gravity-bent light "and other strange concepts that defy common-sense reality", Tedlock says, "why should we not approach divination with the same conceptual openness?" Careful, professor Tedlock, too much of an open mind can make your brain fall out.Leave a comment
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Submission 2
Interesting interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali here. Some good points, but I couldn’t help but raise the ironical eyebrow at this:Ms Hirsi Ali made a relaxed impression during her visit to Barcelona. She seems more at ease having exchanged the snakepit that is Dutch party politics for the very proper American Enterprise Institute.Methinks that either Hirsi Ali, or rather more likely, the interviewer, has not realised that she has exchanged one snakepit for another. Mark my words: out of the frying pan and into the fire.Still, I do, and sincerely, wish her good luck in the next phase of her life.Leave a comment
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Is It, Or Isn’t It?
…Real, that is. I’m talking about the video: God Hates Fags. I blogged about it here, in an entry called WTF? The video was taken down from YouTube, but now I’m told that it’s still (at least at the time of blogging) available on MySpace. So, if you go now to my WTF? entry, hopefully you’ll be able to see Donnie Davis in all his glory.And, is it real? My money, and my sanity, rides on the proposition that it’s a brilliant parody. Sacha Baron Cohen, you have competition in the room…2 responses to “Is It, Or Isn’t It?”
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You’ve seen this lot I suppose? http://www.godhatesfags.com/main/index.html. This lot are for real. That other video was a screech wasn’t it. That so stiff, concrete, jacket removing move was just so…… well, yeah. It would have me running up the knave in two seconds flat. More research is needed I feel.
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"The knave"? I’m assuming that that was a Freudian slip… 🙂 And yes, I have seen the Phelps clan, though thankfully not in real life.
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Touchscreen Take Two
Some time ago, I blogged about a touchscreen interface that had been developed by Jeff Han. Now there’s an article about him and the interface, together with a very impressive video.A direct link to the video is here (sorry, I can’t directly embed it into this post, and you’ll have to watch an advertisement first).However, as I said in my original post, the mode shifts in the interaction are minimised, and the gestures are emphasised so as to be the whole story. It’s not. We are clearly watching a master manipulate his instrument. How intuitive that will be, without some meta interface rules that span multiple applications, remains, for me, an open question. It looks good though, but then, so does a concert pianist playing a Beethoven piano concerto. Doesn’t mean to say that anyone can do it.Leave a comment
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Twee Vaders – Redux
Oh, I have just learned that Windows Live Spaces has been updated to allow direct embedding of videos within posts. Standby for more YouTube traffic over the internet…Let’s see if this works… Here’s a direct embed of Twee Vaders…Yay!4 responses to “Twee Vaders – Redux”
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Wow. I just linked this video on my blog post – didn’t know I could have done this – how’s it done Geoff?
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Gelert, Microsoft has just upgraded the Windows Live Spaces service, and this was one of the visible features that has been introduced. You’ll now see, in your blog entry editor, an "embed video" button down at the bottom, alongside the "add Photo" button. Click it, and you get a pop-up dialogue, into which you paste the "embed" string that a YouTube video gives you. Close the dialogue, and the video is embedded… Should work with other video services that allow you to embed, but I haven’t tried them out yet.
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It is perhaps the product of a mind like a bat’s arse that this evening, for the first time, and even though I first saw this video ages ago, I came to wonder if Twee Vader is Darth’s gay younger brother.
"Yes, Luke, I am your uncle, isn’t that fabulous?"
Yeah, cheers, now give us a hand, would you?" -
Coboró, you do know that you are twisted, don’t you? Long may it continue…
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Wot War On Terror?
Not Saussure draws our attention to a speech made by Sir Ken MacDonald, the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions, in which he said:“London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, ’soldiers’. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a ‘war on terror’, just as there can be no such thing as a ‘war on drugs’.Absolutely. Read the rest.Leave a comment
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Blogging the Future
Diamond Geezer has started an interesting series of posts over at his blog. It started a few days ago with this one, which had today’s date on it. The subsequent posts follow the progress of Diamond Geezer as he’s trapped in the Tube. It’s shaping up to be a riveting read…Leave a comment
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