There’s a buzz in the blogsphere at the moment about a forthcoming documentary that purports to show animal foetuses developing in the womb. There are some cute pictures floating around, which seem to have been untimely ripped from Cute Overload. Er, but hang on, what’s this "representations using ‘computer graphics’" all about? You mean that real life is not quite as cute and in such sharp focus? Real life is in fact messy and slimy and murky in the womb? And the womb isn’t the big space that all the cute foetuses have such a grand time swimming about in? Yes, Virginia, real life isn’t quite like that. Get used to it. It has its own attractions, but lying about it doesn’t improve it.
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Electoral Deadlock
So, the Dutch Electorate have spoken. Trouble is, they have not spoken with a clear voice. No one party has control, so we’re going to have yet another coalition government. And the ingredients are even more like chalk and cheese, or sodium and water.I’m pleased that the Socialist Party has made substantial gains (added a further 17 seats); dismayed that the far right party of Geert Wilders has won 9 seats, and rolled my eyes that, only in the Netherlands, the party for animal rights has won two seats.I watched the "results debate" on Dutch TV – the leaders of the parties talked about the results together at midnight last night. Wilders was audacious enough to propose that it would be a good idea for Balkende to include his members in the government. You could feel the waves of distaste rolling from everyone else seated around the table. Mark Rutte, leader of the VVD (liberal) party, couldn’t contain himself, and expressed what I’m sure everyone else was thinking. It was, I thought, interesting that Balkende himself kept his counsel, but was happy for Rutte to leap in and say what needed to be said.Leave a comment
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Beyond Belief
There’s been an interesting conference that took place earlier this month: Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival. There’s a number of reports appearing on the web. This one from the New York Times and this one from the New Scientist. Best of all, the videos from the sessions are becoming available. I look forward to watching them through the miracles of the Internet and computers.While there could have been more believers than atheists at the conference, it appears as though the discussions were, shall we say, spirited, with Richard Dawkins coming in for the usual criticism over his "take no prisoners" approach. Me? I’m with Professor Dawkins. Call a spade a spade, I say.Leave a comment
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The Ten Worst Science Books
And following on from the editors of Discover magazine listing their 25 greatest Science books, John Horgan, a blogger with Discover, has an entry in his Horganism blog for the top ten worst Science books. It’s actually quite tricky to come up with a list that includes only genuine science books. There are thousands of books that claim to be about genuine science, but are simply pseudoscience. Anything by Deepak Chopra, for a start. So Horgan’s list is quite interesting.I can readily believe that some of his nominated books are pretty dire. Anything that I’ve read by Ray Kurzweil, for example, usually has my eyes rolling by the end of the second paragraph. And I suspect I would agree with Horgan about the Tao of Physics – I have another of Capra’s books that had my eyebrows raising, and not in a good way. But I’ll reserve judgement on the nomination of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. Clearly, Horgan thinks it’s a load of tosh, and it is quite true that string theory pushes one’s sense of credibility to the limits. I quite liked the book. Greene explains things well. What we need, of course, is some experimental evidence to show that the theories of Greene and his fellow string theorists have some validity. We may get some of that once the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva becomes operational next year.Leave a comment
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CAPTCHAs
CAPTCHAs are those little checks that you see on web pages where you are asked to recognise the word shown in a graphic image and type it in.Mindhacks has a fascinating blog entry about them – including how spammers are using human weakness for sex into breaking the protection of CAPTCHAs.Equally fascinating is the update to the entry pointing to a Google video of Luis von Ahn talking about them. But I note the irony that the human responsible for captioning the talk made a transcription error over von Ahn’s name…Leave a comment
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Sledgehammers and Nuts – Take Two
I wrote earlier this month about the intention of the Dutch Government to ban the burqa. It seems as though the lovely Rita Verdonk got her way last week, and the Dutch government are indeed going to press ahead with this ill-conceived idea. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of discussion about it.Jill, over at Feministe, summarises much better than I could, why the proposed ban is a bad idea. It is not going to help the process of integration one jot, in fact it’s going to make things worse on all sides.Verdonk is a menace. I hope that in tomorrow’s elections, the Dutch electorate will throw a spanner in the works.Leave a comment
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Foxes In Henhouses
Data point one: Janis Smits has been appointed head of the Latvian parliament’s Human Rights Committee.Data point two: the Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the US Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as "demeaning to women."Great.Leave a comment
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Usability – Take Two
While we’re on the subject of poor software design, I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Herbie’s rant about Adobe’s developers. They just don’t seem to understand what makes good design. And it’s not just confined to the install process of the Acrobat Reader. The malaise of piss-poor design seemingly crops up all over the place in Adobe’s products. I’ve ranted on about this before, writing about Adobe’s Organizer in Photoshop Elements version 3.0. It didn’t improve much with version 4.0 – in fact, in one significant area it got a lot worse. At least with version 3.0 I could apply batch edits to my photo metadata. Adobe pulled that in version 4.0. Gee, thanks, Adobe, I found that out once I had paid for the upgrade – you certainly didn’t bother to tell us in your feature list. Needless to say I have not bothered to upgrade to version 5.0 as a result.
Now Adobe are playing around with another product that does many of the same things as Photoshop Elements: Lightroom. It’s still in beta form. Because it’s still a beta, I can understand that a) it’s not feature complete and b) performance is not optimised. But on my system, performance is non-existent. It is totally unusable, and I’m not the only person who is experiencing this. The laughable thing is that Lightroom is currently at beta version 4.1. The difference between this beta 4.1 and, for example, Microsoft’s beta 2 for Office 2007 is chalk and cheese. Office 2007 beta 2 feels solid and absolutely usable. Lightroom beta 4.1 is a dog. I’ve kicked it off my system.
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Usability
Good design is important for making things usable. Donald Norman has long been an advocate for good ergonomics. Now I see that Houtlust has examples of advertisements for something called World Usability Day 2006.I’d not heard of this event, or the organisation behind it, before now. Mind you, I can’t help but notice, with the raising of an ironical eyebrow, that one of the companies sponsoring World Usability Day is the German software company SAP. As someone who still bears the scars of battling with SAP software, which has quite possibly the most appallingly designed user interfaces in the known universe, I have to wonder why they are sponsoring World Usability Day. I’d like to think it was out of some sort of penance, but I fear that they actually believe that they are doing a good job in usability design.Leave a comment
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Behind The Curtain
Earlier this month, I mentioned the fact that an early preview of Microsoft’s Photosynth had been released. Bill Crow, over at his Windows Media Photo Blog gives us a peek behind the curtain at the technology that powers Photosynth. Interesting stuff to a nerd like me.Addendum: And of course Microsoft has now scrapped the Photosynth product and technology, so none of these links work anymore. It’s dead, Jim.
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A Mother’s Story
When I watch something like this, I find it difficult not to despair. How can such a cycle of violence ever be broken?Leave a comment
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The Science Book List
The editors of Discover magazine have published their list of the 25 greatest Science books of all time. It’s a pretty stunning list, and I’m ashamed to say that I’ve only read a few of them. Glad to see that Darwin takes the top two places on the list. Quite right too…Leave a comment
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Torchwood Guttering
Well, I keep watching Torchwood every week in the hope that it might improve. Last week’s effort (Small Worlds) wasn’t too bad, but last night’s episode (Countrycide) was simply laughable. The plot holes could have had a truck driven through them, and the climatic standoff between Gwen, Owen, the psycho and the bent copper was – well, utterly ridiculous. And this was episode 6 in the series. I’m beginning to lose my patience.3 responses to “Torchwood Guttering”
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Some days it seems that everything that Russell T Davies has written after the first series of <em>Queer as Folk</em> has been truly awful. With Torchwood and the new Dr Who, the attention span of the writers seems to be considerably shorter than the duration of a single episode, there’s an ill-conceived projection of current cultural concerns into the past, and the way to indicate any heightening of the dramatic tension seems to be to have people shouting and running up and down corridors to bangy music. If that wasn’t bad enough, the BBC adds insult to injury by having any mention of Torchwood and Dr Who, in any of its media properties, be absurdly triumphalist. This whole system of dumbing town and talking up makes me want to vomit. There, I feel better now.
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Gerard, you have my sympathy. I so wanted Torchwood to succeed, hence my disappointment is all the greater. I do think that the reinvention of Doctor Who by Davies has, on the whole, worked very well. Episodes such as Father’s Day, School Reunion and the Doctor Dances have given me much pleasure. And there were motifs and plot elements that spanned the series and beyond. So in that sense I would have to consider myself pleased with the reinvention. I suppose that’s also part of what makes Torchwood such a let-down.
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[…] Torchwood is returning to our haunted fishtanks next month. While I’ve been pretty disparaging about the series in the past, I have to say that I thought that it redeemed itself with the Children of Earth […]
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21 Years Old Today…
That’s Microsoft Windows. Version 1.0 was released on 20th November 1985. Somewhat depressing to realise just how long it’s been around. More Windows trivia to celebrate the anniversary here.Leave a comment
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Public Service Announcement
Maceij Ceglowski (the intelligence behind Idle Words) has started the Bedbug Registry, where travellers can report sighting of bedbugs in the hotels they visit. The University of Kentucky has a particularly illuminating web page on the species.It all brings back memories of the first time I stayed in San Francisco. When I got to my room and switched on the light, I saw, with some horror, the pattern on the carpet fleeing to the walls…Leave a comment
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A Party Political Broadcast
We’re in the middle of political campaigning here in The Netherlands, leading up to elections later this month. Since I don’t (yet) have Dutch nationality, I’m not allowed to vote. So I thought I’d bring you a sample of political campaigning from Poland.Here, for your delight, and doubtless extreme puzzlement, is the party political broadcast of one Krzysztof Kononowicz, would-be mayor of Bialystok. I am indebted to Obscene Desserts for this gem.Leave a comment
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A Short, Sharp, Burst
That’s possibly what will happen tonight with the Leonid meteor shower. More details here. I saw a spectacular Leonid last night – there will probably be some around, but the peak could be really spectacular, if short-lived.Update: Well, there might have been some spectacular meteors – but unfortunately, if there were, they were all happening on the other side of thick cloud cover. Foiled again! Oh well, perhaps next month on the 14/15 December I’ll get a crack at seeing the Geminids.Leave a comment
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Happy Birthday
In an attempt to prove that I can be just as soppy as anyone, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish Parker a very happy Fourth Birthday. Seriously, we could do worse than to consider the example of his parents. Unfortunately, still far too many people in this world think that this is wrong, and that Parker and his parents should not be a family.Leave a comment
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Graphic Falsehoods
In which Neddie takes a trip to Hell, and returns with Edward Tufte’s autograph on a particularly nasty piece of graphic falsehood. By virtue of his insight into how to tell a story by the use of graphical language, Tufte is a hero of mine; but I share Neddie’s relief that I was never actually one of his students.Leave a comment
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