October 2006 Archives

Following on from the release of the Stern report, the BBC are running a "Speak Your Brains" discussion on climate change. It makes very depressing reading. The majority of correspondents either deny that climate change is a problem or object to the government's green tax proposals.

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the Earth is doomed. There is no way that a large enough percentage of the population will be convinced of the dangers of climate change in time for anything to be done about it. The best that we can hope for is that we're not the generation who has to deal with the worst of the problems. And that's looking less and likely too. I saw a scientist interviewed recently and when he was asked what would happen if we don't make the necessary changes, he replied "my best advice would be to not be under forty".

Update: I can't find it on their web site, but on page two of today's Guardian there's a "Today on the Web" feature about the Stern report that quotes from this post.

If we ever met, I'm sure that Boris Johnson and I would have plenty of ideological differences. But I have to admit that he's never less than entertaining and his blog is well worth reading.

Today's entry is a good example. He's interviewing for a new researcher and can't resist the urge to compare today's graduates with his generation (which is also mine).

Their A-level results cascaded down the page like a suicidal scream. They were magazine editors, union presidents, champion mooters, and they had blues for everything from rugby to lacrosse. They had prestigious New York awards for their film-making; they had been semi-finalists in University Challenge 2004-05. They had already published important articles in the Guardian and served internships throughout the FTSE-100. They had fluent French and confident German and unblemished driving licences and they had managed to secure the top firsts in disciplines from English to Engineering to History while playing squash to county standard.

I'm not sure I fit in with one description of his generation:

When I talk about my generation I mean the bunch who graduated about 20 years ago, and what a sharp-elbowed, thrusting and basically repellent lot we were. We were always bragging or shafting each other, and in a way we still are, with our pompous memoirs and calculated indiscretions. When Toby Young began an article in Cherwell with the words, 'I work harder and achieve more than anyone else I know', we all chortled in approval of this ghastly ethic. But would any 20-year-old be quite so brazen today? On one side of the political divide we had Thatcherites, voluble or silent. When Gordon Gekko said 'Greed is good', we did not exactly cheer, but we smirked. When Tebbo said 'On your bike', we thought, yah, he had a bloody good point. When Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was an 'Evil Empire' we thought the language a bit strong but the analysis broadly sound; and though we were a bit sad for the miners, we thought they were cruelly abused and deluded by their leadership.

But then he goes on to say:

On the other side of the argument there was a symmetrical sense of engagement. Some of our girlfriends even went to Greenham Common or held hands outside South Africa House, and two decades later I know a prosperous barrister who still goes 'oink, oink, oink' and hisses 'piggies' whenever she sees the police. When poor Keith Joseph made his doomed attempt to reform university finance in 1984, he was so pelted with eggs that he backed off.

Which sounds far more like me.

I'm not sure that he's really got a reasonable cross-section of all of today's twentysomethings, but it's an interesting (and amusing) read anyway.

You'll often hear people complaining about how cold the UK is. What the complainers don't seem to realise is that considering how far north we are, the climate in the UK is actually far warmer than it really should be.

The reason for this warmer climate is the Gulf Stream (or, more accurately, its northern tributary the North Atlantic Drift). If it wasn't for this huge aquatic conveyor belt bringing warm water to these parts the average temperature in the UK could be far lower.

It's often been mooted that climate change could have a disastrous effect on the Gulf Stream and, of course, any change in the Gulf Stream will have a knock-on effect on the UK climate. I was therefore very worried to read this article in today's Guardian which points out that part of the current stopped completely for ten days in November 2004.

Scary stuff.

A nice subversive use of technology. Amazon.com has started allowing customers to tag products (don't think that's available on the UK site). A group of DRM campaigners have started adding the tag defectivebydesign to products that implement some kind of DRM.

I wrote a review of The God Delusion on Amazon. Here's what I said:

For the last few years, Richard Dawkins has been becoming more and more open and confrontational with his views on religion. A few of the essays in "A Devil's Chaplain" and this year's Channel Four documentary "The Root Of All Evil?" left no doubt as how he feels about the growing influence that the religious are having on society. And now he has produced a book on the subject.

And what a fabulous book it is. Dawkins pulls no punches in his criticism of organised religion and the book will (hopefully) be seen as a call to arms for atheists everywhere. The churches have had things their way for far too long and it's time we stood up to their medieval beliefs.

The core of the book is chapter four. Dawkins admits freely that it's impossible to prove the non-existance of a supernatural being, but he goes on to show that the existance of something like a god is very improbable. In the process he demolishes most of the common arguments in favour of god's existance.

The rest of the book isn't as important as chapter four, but it's still a very enjoyable read. It will arm you with useful facts to use in discussions with religious people. One of the most interesting sections for me was the one showing that the founding fathers of the USA never intended it to be a christian nation. Another section takes a very funny look at the ludicrous suggestion that the Old Testament of the christian bible can be used as a basis for any sensible moral system.

I know that Dawkins will largely be "preaching to the converted". It's unlikely that many religious people will read this book. But if you have any interest at all in the arguments against the existance of god or the huge damage that religion is doing to society, then you should really read this book.

"MySun", the first concrete result from News Corporation's purchase of MySpace earlier this year seems to have been launched with very little fanfare. So if you want start a blog with thesun.co.uk in the URL, now you know where to go.

Personally, I'm very afraid.

This is all very late notice, but I've only just seen it.

This afternoon, four MPs will try to raise an amendment to the Charities Bill which will give humanist and secular charities (and organisations seeking charitable status) exactly the same rights as religious organisations. It's obviously ludicrous that our charity system gives more help to charities based on religious beliefs so we need to do all we can to ensure that this amendment is passed.

So here's what to do:

• Go here to read all about it
• Then go here and send a fax to your MP asking them to support the amendment
• Relax that you've done your bit to fight the forces of medievalism

Update: Medievalism won. The debate is here and the (very disappointing) vote is here.

I've got a beta membership of Tape It Off The Internet - a new site that aims to make it easier to find episodes of your favourite programmes on the internet.

I have a few invitations, so if you're interested in trrying it out then let me know and I'll send you one.

I don't really go in for christmas. I particularly don't go in for christmas parties. But news reaches me of a party that I'd love to go to. The BBC Backstage Project are organising a christmas party in conjunction with all of the London geek groups that they can track down. It's going to be on Saturday December 9th. Sounds like it's going to be a pretty big night.

But I won't be there. Unfortunately I'm already busy on that date. Which is a shame.

Last night the BBC showed the first two episodes of Torchwood, its new Doctor Who spin-off. What did we think?

Well, the word that mostly springs to mind is "derivative". The whole idea of group of strange people investigating even stranger goings on looks a lot like Angel, the secret hideaway secreted behind a normal-looking building was all very Man From UNCLE. The Torchwood HQ looks a bit like an untidier version of the Batcave (with a holding cell that was taken directly from Silence of the Lambs). The lift that takes you up to the Millennium Centre is like something out of Thunderbirds. Oh, and since Captain Jack was brought back to life by Rose Tyler in Doctor Who last year he seems to have mutated into Captain Scarlet (he's IN! DE! STRUCT! IBLE!).

There was one nice plot point in the first episode when a member of Torchwood, who we assumed would be a regular cast member, turned out to the baddie and was killed off. But even that's looking a bit tired since Jesse was killed in the first episode of Buffy and Helen was killed in episode two of Spooks.

As expected, the first episode spent far too long introducing everything and as a result, the plot was tiny. But the BBC decided that it would give us two episodes. Which makes it very annoying that they didn't remove the "coming next episode" section from the end of episode one.

Episode two played on the fact that Torchwood is an "adult" drama. And what's the best way to demonstrate that? To fill the plot with sex of course. Apparently humans give off the best "orgasmic energy" in the galaxy and aliens travel for light-years to soak it up. And they do that by taking over a young woman's body and turning her into a nymphomaniac. And sometimes she gets carried away and snogs women! They say it's adult - but really it just looked like a group of sex-crazed teenagers had been let loose on the script.

So, not a great start. But hopefully it's still finding its feet and I'll be giving it a few more weeks before giving up on it completely.

Update: Blimey! Quoted on The Stage web site.

If you believe Bishop Ussher (and, of course, in these enlightened days only a handful of idiots do) then the Earth was created on 23rd October 4004BC, six thousand and ten years ago today. I'm just sorry that I missed marking the 6000th anniversary ten years ago, but I think I was busy on my honeymoon.

On his current book tour, Richard Dawkins has an analogy that nicely sums up the size of the error in Ussher's cronology. He says that believing that the Earth is 6000 years old is like believing that the distance between New York and San Francisco is 700 centimetres.

Update: Changed metres to centimetres - see discussion in the comments.

Last night I downloaded and installed two new browsers.

Firstly I booted my laptop into Windows for the first time for months (it's the only computer in the house that has Windows installed) and installed IE7. First reactions? A big "so what?" It's (obviously) a vast improvement on IE6, but I can't see anything that will obviously draw Windows-based Firefox users back to IE. My big hope for it is that it will be adopted by IE6 users really quickly so that web designers (and I, laughably, like to include myself in that group) can stop using the horrible hacks that are needed to get round IE6's nasty broken implementation of CSS.

Then, back on home ground in Linux, I installed the release candidate for Firefox 2.0 (the full release is expected within the next couple of weeks). I didn't have long to play with it, but it seems pretty good. I'll keep using it as my default browser for a few days and see how it goes.

Channel 4 have... er... lost the rights to broadcast the next series of Lost. They have been outbid by Sky One.

It's been a while since I've watched a US import drama on Sky One. The last one was probably when I got bored of Nip/Tuck halfway though the third series. Oh, no. Actually we watched Threshold on Sky One earlier this year. But the vast majority of US imports that we've been watching in recent years (The West Wing, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, ER, Lost itself) have all been shown on Channel 4 (or one of its digital channels).

And, to be honest, I won't be watching series three of Lost on Sky One either. We were getting so caught up in the mysteries at the end of series two, that I've been getting the series three episodes from Bittorrent. I know I'm behind the curve here, but I'm slowly becoming what 2lmc call a Martini content consumer.

This probably isn't big news for many of you (particularly as it came on the same day that IE7 was officially released) but Adobe have released a new beta version of Flash 9 and it includes support for Linux.

Previously, the latest version of Flash available for Linux was version 7. This was fine for a lot of sites (the video player on YouTube, for example, worked without any problems) but there were a number of sites where the designer insisted on the latest and greatest version of Flash before showing you the fruits of their labours (tho', I suspect that in many cases they didn't actually use any of the new Flash 8 features and my Flash 7 would have worked just fine if not for their Flash version detection scripts!).

I installed it on a Fedora Core 5 system last night and it seemed to work on the few sites that I tested it on. I can finally see the Sandi Thom site that I complained about back in May. Of course, in the meantime, everyone has forgotten who Sandi Thom is :-)

Of course, most Flash-based sites are horrible and any sane person wouldn't want to visit them. But it's nice to be able to make that choice on aethestic rather than technical grounds.

So overnight I was planning another entry that would explain further why I don't think that "tequila slammer girls" are appropriate entertainment for a professional software conference.

But this morning I read this and this. Pointing out the offence in what Russ Michaels is doing is one thing, but submitting his web server to denial of service attacks and subscribing his wife and him to porn mailing lists is something else completely. That's not something that I could ever condone. Russ might be a bit of an idiot, but no-one deserves that.

If it's any of my readers who are perpetrating these attacks then please grow up and stop it.

I've removed the original piece (and replaced it with this) to prevent anyone else coming across it in the coming weeks and thinking it would be clever to wreak fuckwitted vengence on Russ or his family.

Why is the world so full of idiots?

(The creationists are going to love this!)

From the BBC (tho' note that the research was carried out for the dodgy satellite channel Bravo - make of that what you will):

Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

Evolutionary theory says that species become differentiated when two populations are separated by environmental factors. This could lead to the first instance of it happening because two populations just choose not to interbreed.

Are you Eloi or Morlock?

This'll annoy the people who don't live in London.

Giles Coren articulates something that has been nagging at me for years.

My old mate and former Times colleague, Guy Walters [...] has a theory: "For every ten miles you drive away from London", says Guy, "you travel back one year in time." He's talking about fashion, mostly. About shops and clothes and cars and food and conversation topics. And if you look around, you will find that it's absolutely true. In Oxford, for example, 60 miles from London, they're all showing designer knicker elastic above the waistband of low-crotched jeans, gelling their hair into fins, eating overrated Japanese fusion and thinking that the biggest threat to world security is the Millennium bug.

In Portsmouth, 80 miles from London, the kids are just getting into vintage trainers, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" is a book for children, grown-ups still can't believe Diana is gone, and foodies dream of a trip to Aubergine, where Gordon something or other is said to be a frightfully good cook who, if you're very, very lucky, might come out of the kitchen and swear at you.

Last night we went to see Richard Dawkins speaking at the Institute of Education. It wasn't the most organised lecture I've ever attended and due to my wife's knowledge of the building we accidently found ourselves in the foyer of the hall, past any ticket checks before I had picked up our tickets. I actually had to go back out past the people checking tickets in order to collect our tickets. And then for some reason the queue that we were quite near the end of suddenly turned around so that we were very near the front, so when the doors opened we managed to get far better seats than we really should have.

The lecture itself took the form of readings from The God Delusion. Dawkins alternated with his wife, Lalla Ward (an extra treat for any Doctor Who fans in the audience), in reading extracts from the book. Obviously an hour's reading can only touch on a few topics from the book, but I was slightly disappointed that Dawkins chose not to include extracts from chapter four as this is the real core of the book. It's the chapter that attempts to prove the nonexistance (or, at least, the improbability) of god. But that's also the most technical and complex chapter of the book so perhaps it's understandable that it was omitted.

The sections that were included certainly gave an interesting taste of the contents of the book. In particular the section that ridiculed the idea that the god of the old testament could be used as a moral guide had the audience laughing out loud.

The readings were followed by a question and answer session. Sadly as the evening had started late and the readings had overrun, this was necessarily quite short. Given the numbers of hands that were in the air, I suspect that many of us would have been happy to sit there talking all night.

I don't think many people were "converted". A straw poll at the start of the evening showed that the vast majority of the audience already classified themselves as atheists. This is, of course, the problem with books like this. To a very large extent Dawkins will be reaching people who already share his beliefs. But that doesn't make it a waste of time. I haven't finished the book yet, but I've already got a lot of useful information out of it. It has galvanised me into wanting to do something useful in the fight against Bronze Age superstition and it has crystalised a lot of good arguments for me to use in discussions with religious people.

If Dawkins' God Delusion tour comes to your town then I strongly recommend that you go to see him. If not, then I recommend you read the book anyway.

This doesn't seem to have been advertised particularly well, but Richard Dawkins is speaking at the Institute of Education this evening. I've just got tickets - which is pretty amazing given how impossible it was to get tickets the last time I tried. The talk at the LSE celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Selfish Gene sold out in minutes.

Whilst reading the publicity that surrounds The God Delusion and now reading the book itself, one point that kept coming into my mind was that we really need some kind of organisation that can serve as a focal point for atheists and can campaign for more rational thought in public life. And it seems that Richard Dawkins has been thinking along the same lines. Recently he has launched the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason which aims to do just that. I'd recommend that everyone visits the site and looks at some of the interesting articles over there. I particularly recommend watching the video on the mission page.

Let's look at what Jack Straw actually said. Yesterday he said that facial expression is an important part of communication and that therefore wearing a veil over your face makes it harder to communicate. He then said that for that reason he asks veiled women if they would mind removing their veil when they visit his constituency surgeries. He also said that so far no-one has refused.

Is there anything contentious there? He explains why he thinks that the veil hinders communication (and, in my opinion has a valid point) and says that he asks women to remove them. He doesn't demand it. This all sounds perfectly sensible to me. Women are completely free to keep wearing their veil if they want, but so far none of them have.

Then today when interviewed by the BBC, Straw goes further and says that in his in his opinion veils potentially harm community relations and that he doesn't think that anyone should wear them. Again, nothing contentious there I would hope. He's just expressing his opinion. He's not demanding that all women immediately stop wearing a veil.

In my opinion he doesn't go far enough. Despite what I've heard a few veil-wearing muslim women say, I can't help but see the veil as an expression of the oppression of women and I'd like to see them all banned for that reason. But I'm a lily-livered socialist and it's against all I stand for to force people to change the way they dress against their will. I just wish that there was some way to communicate with these women and tell them that they don't need to believe all the patriachal nonsense that the men in their communities confront them with every day.

This country has laws which aim to prevent sexual discrimination and I really wish that someone would start to use those laws to confront the obvious sexual discrimination that takes place in muslim communities (and I realise that it's not just muslim communities, other religions have the same problems, it's just more obvious within islam).

This is similar to one of the questions that Richard Dawkins raises in The God Delusion[1]. Why is it that we are so happy to ignore discrimination, prejudice and bigotry if it has a religious basis? Why are religious communities seemingly exempt from the civilised levels of behaviour that we'd expect from anyone else?

[1] I've just started reading it, so expect lots of references to it over the next week or so.

This is really pissing me off.

My current contract ended yesterday. The clients want to extend me for another six months. I'm happy to stay there for another six months.

However, since I started there in April, the clients have outsourced the running of their temporary workers HR department to a third party. And that third party want to impose new standard contracts on everyone they deal with. And this new contract imposes terms that any contractor who knows anything about IR35 would run a mile from.

I'm sitting at home trying to work this out as appearing in the office could be seen as accepting the new contract.

Don't you just hate middle men.

Update: I'm back in the office today. I heard yesterday that we've got an extension on the old contract until the end of the week in order to try and sort out the contract. And this morning I've heard that the extension might well be... er... extended to one month.

Some advice for passengers on London Underground.

When the tube breaks down and the announcements are telling you to use alternative routes, in the vast majority of cases you are better off staying where you are and waiting for the problem to be fixed.

It seems to be standard operating procedure in these cases that tube staff try to get as many people off the tube as possible. And they'll keep giving that advice right up to the moment before the tube moves on.

Here's an example. Last night I got to Moorgate at about 17:15. There was a tube in the station. A few people were getting off. I got on. As I got on there was an announcement that there was no service on the line due to a person being taken ill a couple of stops down. More people got off. I got a seat (another good side effect of these situations). We sat there for about five minutes with announcements every thirty seconds that strongly implied that the tube wasn't going anywhere for some time and that we'd be better off walking home. A few more people got off, but most of us (the ones who knew how this usually works) stayed put.

And then suddenly one of these announcements was followed by a different voice announcing that the train was about to leave. And off we went.

Had I followed their advice, I would have added thirty minutes to my journey home. By ignoring them I ended up getting home five minutes later than expected.

Ignore the advice. Stay on the tube.

I was just signing up with a web site and I made a mistake when typing either my password or the password verification. I know that because I got this message:

Both passwords are different. They must be identical.

Both of them were different. I'd like to see how to get just one of them to be different.

If you use Bloglines to read your Gmail account (or if you're considering doing that), then you need to read Martin's piece about what he found out over the weekend.

RSS can be a great way to get access to a lot of useful information very conveniently. But you need to ensure that you're not accidently sharing confidential data with the world.