A lovely article in the New Yorker that explores the piece of magic that is known as Philip Pullman. Wonderful.
(hat tip to Ophelia over at ButterfliesAndWheels)
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Pot, Meet Kettle
I see Sir Iqbal Sacranie is in the same mental cesspit as Cardinal Keith O’Brien. Depressing, but not unexpected. I’m sure they will enjoy each other’s company as they swirl around. It is of their own making, after all*.*With acknowledgements to another example of their ilk, Sir James Anderton.Update: Ophelia, over at ButterfliesAndWheels is even more exasperated at the tosh spouted by these people than I am. She says it so much more satisfyingly though…Leave a comment
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The Importance of Language
I hadn’t come across this one before, but thanks to Scott over at Adventures – the Next Chapter, I give you a Dutch advert for learning English. Though to be honest, I don’t think there are too many grandparents who are as innocent as this left in the Netherlands these days…Leave a comment
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What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
That’s the question posed by the Edge for 2006. And there’s plenty of food for thought provided by 117 thinkers who give their responses in a series of short essays. Lovely stuff.
I find it somewhat depressing, though, at how often the "dangerous" idea is of the form: there is no god/soul/afterlife. That to me is merely the logical conclusion of what scientific evidence points to and I don’t find it dangerous in the slightest. Though to be fair, the sense of danger that is explored by the writers is the sense of how people at large could react at having the crutch of faith kicked away from under them.
I found Sherry Turkle’s piece poignant, and Kai Krause’s piece particularly scary – Stand on Zanzibar, here we are. And Geoffrey Miller posits a terrifying dystopia akin to Atwood’s Handmaid’s tale or the underground society in Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog.
But there’s lots of plums in this feast of ideas – go and pick out a few for yourself!
(hat tip to Norm Geras for the link)
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Two Data Points
Data point one: the story in yesterday’s Observer that followed the story of how "pink Wednesday" validated the love of three gay couples.Data point two: the story in today’s Telegraph of Cardinal Keith O’Brien attacking "gay weddings" (sic) as "undermining values which for generations have been treasured".Erm, which values would those be, Cardinal? Mean-spiritedness, or homophobic bigotry, perhaps? Well, good riddance, I say.Leave a comment
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Happy New Year!
A happy new year and all the best for 2006! Here’s hoping there’ll be some laughter amongst the tears on the way…The Dutch celebrate the New Year by letting off millions of euros worth of fireworks – supposedly (according to the Citizenship test) to scare away the ghosts – but most Dutch believe it’s just an excuse for a party.
More from last night’s festivities here.
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Teaspoon Research
Here’s a prime candidate for a mention in the Annals of Improbable Research: a longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute, published in the British Medical Journal this week.(hat tip to Nicey over at NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown)Leave a comment
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Warning – Pedant Ahead
I’m afraid this news story brought out the pedant in me. It began with the headline – "New Aluminum Windows Stop .50-Caliber Bullet". And no, it’s not the fact that Americans use "aluminum" and "caliber" instead of the proper English words of "aluminium" and "calibre" – I’ve long given up on those sort of battles.No, what irritated me was the suggestion that scientists have been able to make aluminium as transparent as glass. That would be astounding, if true, and, of course, it isn’t. It turns out that they have made a material – aluminium oxynitride – and this happens to be transparent. This is rather like saying that scientists have been able to make a food flavouring out of the highly reactive metal sodium and the extremely poisonous gas chlorine – when all that is being described is sodium chloride – common salt.The story also contains another possible push to my pedantry. The head of the research team is quoted as saying: "The substance itself is light-years ahead of glass". Now, it may be that he genuinely meant this in terms of metaphorical distance (miles ahead), but I suspect that he meant it as an even more impressive-sounding version of the common phrase: "it’s years ahead of its time". In which case, he really should be rapped on the knuckles with a ruler. A light-year is a measure of distance, not of time.Leave a comment
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100 Things
Courtesy of the BBC – here’s a roundup of 100 things that we didn’t know this time last year.Leave a comment
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Is The Lid Coming Off?
It would appear that the story that the UK government uses intelligence that has been acquired via torture in Uzbekistan has just been turned up a notch or two higher. Documents in the possession of the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan have been re-published on multiple sites in the blogosphere in an attempt to beat what is allegedly the UK government’s attempts to suppress the information.Justin McKeating over at The Chicken Yoghurt has a good summary of this story, including the alleged documents, and I recommend reading it.One thing that caught my eye was a supposed quote from Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary. He apparently said:"One of the things that is done with intelligence that comes from liaison partners, obviously an assessment is made about its provenance.Because it does not follow that if it is extracted under torture, it is automatically untrue. But there is a much higher probability of it being embellished."Embellished!? I am appalled that he could choose this word. It means "to add incidents or imaginary accompaniments so as to heighten a narrative". In other words Straw is assuming that the information obtained under torture is basically true. He apparently refuses ever to consider the possibility that the information could be false in every respect. I find that sickening, and morally repugnant.Leave a comment
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MyLifeBits
I see that the Guardian carried an article earlier this week on the Microsoft Research project: MyLifeBits. Gordon Bell, a computer pioneer, is the guinea pig who is having his every waking moment recorded for Posterity – although whether Posterity will be pleased is probably a moot point.The article carries a sentence that seems to me to put its finger on the weak point of the project:If he wants to recall something, he switches on and picks his way through days and months of information until he finds what he is after."Picking one’s way" through reams of information hardly seems to me to be the most efficient manner of information retrieval. What I think the MyLifeBits project is so far is a "write-only" data vault. Until ways can be found to retrieve information quickly from all that data, then I would classify this as an interesting, but so far a sterile, piece of research.2 responses to “MyLifeBits”
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Although the project does allow you to browse via a timeline etc. it definitely indexes all the content etc. and allows other types of searches through the data. Take a look at the following video which is an interview with some of the people involved and includes demos of the project as well.http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=46702
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OK, thanks for the pointer, Sean. The ultimate goal would surely be to have recall as instantaneous as possible… but I suspect that’s some way off…
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Britons’ Ignorance of Classical Music
The Guardian reports today on a survey that apparently shows that more than half of Britons polled did not know that Elgar was English, or that Beethoven was born in Germany. But before I get too worked up about this appalling ignorance and start tut-tutting about the state of knowledge today, I should perhaps reflect that my knowledge of today’s pop music is practically non-existent. Pot, kettle, black.Leave a comment
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Odd Books
Courtesy of the Improbable Research blog, I have been pointed to OddBooks – a web site devoted to odd books. I look forward to many happy hours of browsing.Leave a comment
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Windows Vulnerability
There’s apparently a vulnerability in the graphics rendering engine of Windows that’s being exploited in a new series of attacks. No fix as yet, but a security warning has been published by Microsoft. Be careful what websites you visit.Leave a comment
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Japanese Beauty Aids
It must be tough, trying to be beautiful in Japan.(hat tip to Zapato Productions intradimensional for the link)Leave a comment
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Charles Socarides
I see that Dr. Socarides died last Sunday. I can’t say I’m sorry – as the obituary says, he inflicted enough pain and suffering on gay and lesbian people in his time, and the organisation he founded (NARTH) continues to do so.Leave a comment
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The Citizenship Test
Both the UK and the Netherlands are toying with the idea of introducing a citizenship test for immigrants. Last night, one of the Dutch TV channels had a programme: De Nationale Inburgering Test (the national citizenship test). It was the same format as the BBC’s "Test The Nation" – two presenters introduce a series of multiple choice questions for those watching at home and in the studio, and there are six different groups in the studio audience plus a group of celebrities. So the Dutch version had groups such as Chinese (from Chinese takeaways in the Netherlands), Antilleans (from the Netherlands Antilles in the Caribbean), royalists, students, Zeeland (a province of the Netherlands) and workers with asylumseekers.The 36 questions were in three main categories: Dutch life, norms and rules, and Dutch history. If you answered at least 80% of the questions correctly (i.e. 29 correct answers), then you could consider yourself as having passed the citizenship test.Well, despite having lived here for 23 years, I only managed 24 correct answers – so I’ve failed the test (does this mean I get deported, or am I going to be put on a list of potential terrorists, because I clearly don’t fit in with the Dutch way of life?). At least I know that Martin didn’t do much better – he only got 26 correct answers, and he’s Dutch!However, the real kicker was that none of the studio groups, on their group average, managed to pass the test – even those consisting of native Dutch people. That also went for the viewing audience who followed the test on the Internet, or who texted in their answers via SMS. And the group that did the best (while still not passing)? The Chinese, of course. Only one slice of the studio audience managed to actually pass the test – the older women – everyone else failed. Let’s face it, it’s clearly just too difficult to live here…Leave a comment
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