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New CSS framework. Based on Blueprint but without all the non-semantic markup.
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Simon Wardley points out that Tesco aren't quite as philanthropic as they like to appear.
February 2008 Archives
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The BBC homepage has a new (and I think, rather nice) design.
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Excellent new sport. Collecting photos of Foxtons Cockmobiles. The discussion page is also a great place to vent your spleen about Foxtons. Might start taking photos of some of the cockmobiles we see around Balham.
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Steve Jones nicely sums up the problems with having a doctor who denies evolution.
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The current project of the objectional Becky Fischer (of Jesus Camp). Looks like they're planning a visit to the UK later this year.
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"Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world."
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Me on FriendFeed. Looks like this might be a good way to build a "personal planet".
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"Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion." Interesting (and bold) move by Turkey. This is really needed.
Last night I watched This Film Is Not Yet Rated, the documentary about the MPAA's film ratings system. It was an interesting film that raised a number of valid criticisms about the ratings system, but ultimately I think it was too intent on blaming the MPAA and completely missed a far deeper issue.
First the good bits.
It certainly seems strange to me that the people on the film ratings board are all anonymous. The MPAA says that this is to ensure that they are free to do their job without the threat of any kind of coercion, but if that's really a problem then surely it can be addressed in other ways. Having an anonymous group of people making these decisions really doesn't encourage people to believe that this process is fair and open.
The film also demonstrated that the ratings have been wildly inconsistent over the years. For example gay sexual scenes always seem to be rated more harshly than similar straight scenes. Or, perhaps that's not inconsistent. Perhaps that's completely consist, but bigoted - which would, of course, also be a problem. It's also the case that sexual content is often rated more harshly that violent content. For example, all of the extreme violence in American Psycho was fine, it was a relatively brief sex scene that had to be re-edited in order for the film to avoid an NC-17 rating.
All of this shows that there are problems with the way that the ratings system is administered. But in my opinion there are deeper issues that are completely outside of the MPAA's control which also need to be addressed. In many (probably most) cases I agree completely with the ratings board's decision to give a film an NC-17 rating. There was some spectacular naivety shown by some of the film-makers interviewed when they expressed surprise that the ratings board didn't want their films seen by people under the age of seventeen. Of course there are some things that should only be watched by adults. And remember that NC-17 is the only US film rating that has any kind of age restriction. It's not like the UK where you can give the film a 12 or 15 rating. Anyone in the US can see an R rated film as long as they are accompanied by an adult.
So the NC-17 rating shouldn't be avoided. It should be used more. There should be many films released each year that are given an NC-17 rating. But that doesn't happen currently because an NC-17 rating is seen as commercial death for a film. Many cinemas won't show NC-17 films, newpapers won't carry advertisements for them and some DVD rental companies refuse to stock them.
This is the fundamental problem. The NC-17 is avoided for commercial reasons when actually it should be embraced. There should be a market for NC-17 films. But something in the puritanical US society won't allow that. Adult films (and I don't just mean that in the sense of porn films) are doomed to commercial failure by the moral majority. Can't they see that this is counter-productive? If there was an acceptable market for NC-17 films then you wouldn't have so many people trying to push back the boundaries of what is acceptable in a R rated film.
There are definitely changes that need to be made to the way that the MPAA's ratings board works. But I don't agree that they need to rate fewer films as NC-17. If anything they should rate more films as NC-17. And the rest of the US film industry (in particular the distribution sections) need to promote NC-17 films more.
First the good bits.
It certainly seems strange to me that the people on the film ratings board are all anonymous. The MPAA says that this is to ensure that they are free to do their job without the threat of any kind of coercion, but if that's really a problem then surely it can be addressed in other ways. Having an anonymous group of people making these decisions really doesn't encourage people to believe that this process is fair and open.
The film also demonstrated that the ratings have been wildly inconsistent over the years. For example gay sexual scenes always seem to be rated more harshly than similar straight scenes. Or, perhaps that's not inconsistent. Perhaps that's completely consist, but bigoted - which would, of course, also be a problem. It's also the case that sexual content is often rated more harshly that violent content. For example, all of the extreme violence in American Psycho was fine, it was a relatively brief sex scene that had to be re-edited in order for the film to avoid an NC-17 rating.
All of this shows that there are problems with the way that the ratings system is administered. But in my opinion there are deeper issues that are completely outside of the MPAA's control which also need to be addressed. In many (probably most) cases I agree completely with the ratings board's decision to give a film an NC-17 rating. There was some spectacular naivety shown by some of the film-makers interviewed when they expressed surprise that the ratings board didn't want their films seen by people under the age of seventeen. Of course there are some things that should only be watched by adults. And remember that NC-17 is the only US film rating that has any kind of age restriction. It's not like the UK where you can give the film a 12 or 15 rating. Anyone in the US can see an R rated film as long as they are accompanied by an adult.
So the NC-17 rating shouldn't be avoided. It should be used more. There should be many films released each year that are given an NC-17 rating. But that doesn't happen currently because an NC-17 rating is seen as commercial death for a film. Many cinemas won't show NC-17 films, newpapers won't carry advertisements for them and some DVD rental companies refuse to stock them.
This is the fundamental problem. The NC-17 is avoided for commercial reasons when actually it should be embraced. There should be a market for NC-17 films. But something in the puritanical US society won't allow that. Adult films (and I don't just mean that in the sense of porn films) are doomed to commercial failure by the moral majority. Can't they see that this is counter-productive? If there was an acceptable market for NC-17 films then you wouldn't have so many people trying to push back the boundaries of what is acceptable in a R rated film.
There are definitely changes that need to be made to the way that the MPAA's ratings board works. But I don't agree that they need to rate fewer films as NC-17. If anything they should rate more films as NC-17. And the rest of the US film industry (in particular the distribution sections) need to promote NC-17 films more.
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"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? "
Bugger. I've just seen some photos of KT Tunstall playing in my local pub last night.
It's all very well living so close to such a cool music venue, but I really need to find a good way to keep in touch with what's going on there. Their web site really doesn't seem to be kept particularly up to date. But I think a lot of their best gigs are deliberately low-key and unadvertised. Maybe I need to buy a few beers for their events organiser.
Update: It seems I would have known more if I had been listening to Capital Radio. Not even the chance to see KT Tunstall live is worth that torture.
It's all very well living so close to such a cool music venue, but I really need to find a good way to keep in touch with what's going on there. Their web site really doesn't seem to be kept particularly up to date. But I think a lot of their best gigs are deliberately low-key and unadvertised. Maybe I need to buy a few beers for their events organiser.
Update: It seems I would have known more if I had been listening to Capital Radio. Not even the chance to see KT Tunstall live is worth that torture.
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Web-accessible database containing the specimens that Darwin collected on the Beagle.
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Interesting piece in the Guardian about "Naked", Mike Leigh's best film, which has never been released on DVD.
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DVD release of Mike Leigh's "Naked" imminent. At long last.
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Murray's notes on creating an rsync.net clone using Amazon's EC2 and S3 services.
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An oldie but goodie. Texans shocked and confused by the FreeBSD devil logo.
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The previous OpenTech conference (in 2005) was a lot of fun. I'll definitely be there.
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A recent disk crash (luckily not as fatal as it could have been) means that I'm seriously thinking about backup solutions. This looks good. Oh, and discounts for Open Source developers.
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Excellent atheist review of four of the christian books published in response to "The God Delusion".
A few day ago, I noticed this Russian blog entry which used one of my photos of Montserrat. When adding the link to Delicious I commented that it would be good if could read Russian so that I understood what was being said.
(Another) Dave reminded me that Google has a translation service which claims to do Russian to English translations. So I tried it, and the results were really pretty good.
City after volcanic eruptionIn summer 1995, in one of the islands in the Caribbean eruption occurred. As a result, Plymouth city was almost completely filled ash. A layer of ash in a half meters.
In the town of 4000 people lived, and was the capital of the island. Clear solidified lava flows and ash was too expensive. The capital is moved to another city. A Plymouth declared a zone of exclusion.
The single comment just says "terrible". Of course the translation isn't perfect. But it's a lot better than I expected it to be.
You don't have to be stupid to work for Radio 1. But it often helps.
Someone called Dom, writes on the Chris Moyles show blog:
Makes you wonder what they teach them at school these days.
Someone called Dom, writes on the Chris Moyles show blog:
Now then - the BBC has its own in-house magazine called Ariel. This name is very clever as it can relate to a TV ariel or a radio ariel.Two basic mistakes here. Firstly if you're talking about a TV or radio antenna, then the correct spelling of "ariel" is "aerial". Secondly, the BBC magazine is called "Ariel" after the Eric Gill statue of Shakespeare's Prospero and Ariel on the front of Broadcasting House.
Makes you wonder what they teach them at school these days.
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Interesting tips on improving your blog.
It's over two years since I wrote my piece on ways to record TV programmes. Quite a lot has changed in those two years, so I thought it was worth writing an update.
The biggest change for me is that at home we've dragged ourselves into the 21st century and have stopped recording programmes on VHS tape. We currently have two digital video recorders and together with TV on demand services and internet "services" they have revolutionised the way we watch TV. Here's what we currently use.
V+ box from Virgin Media. This is great. Because it comes from my cable TV provider, it's completely integrated with their services. We have access to an eight-day programme guide and setting a recording is as simple as pointing at a programme in the programme guide and pressing the record button. The box has three cable decoders in it, so that you can record two channels whilst watching a third. It also enables you to easily record all programmes in a given series. It also allows you to pause and rewind live broadcasts. The only slight downside is that it has a relatively small hard disk so you can only record eighty hours of programmes. So far this hasn't been an issue, but I can see it being a problem if we go on holiday for a while.
Commercial DVR. Before Virgin released the V+ box we bought an off-the-shelf digital video recorder. As it wasn't specifically made for Virgin, it didn't integrate quite so well with their services, but it did have a good programme guide and recording programmes was pretty simple. It has a far larger hard disk than the V+ box and could record up to three hundred hours of programmes (although I suspect some of that improvement is down to the fact that we were recording programmes in a lower quality format). It's possible to move recordings from the V+ box to the DVR, so that's one way to get round the 80-hour limitation on the V+ box. The downside to this, however, is that transfers take place in real time. So moving a two hour film takes two hours. One popular approach in this area is a DVR box that has a built-in Freeview decoder. I've never used one of these but I know a number of people that are very happy with them.
TV On Demand. I believe that Virgin Media has one of the most comprehensive TV on Demand services in the UK. This falls into two categories. Firstly, there is the Catch-Up TV section where you watch shows that were on in the last seven days. This covers BBC and Channel 4 broadcasts (along with a few smaller channels that I can't remember). There were a few glitches early on when popular programmes were missed off the listings, but they seem to have fixed most of those problems now and you can pretty much guarantee that anything you want to watch from the BBC or Channel 4 will be on there. Then there's the TV Choice section where they have hundreds of old TV shows available. Again, there's a lot of old BBC and Channel 4 stuff there, but they also have deals with a number of US channels so you can watch old seasons of things like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Lost.
Bittorrent. If I forget to record something and it's not on Catch-Up TV, then there's always the internet. When I last wrote about this I pointed out that not all shows were available as you're relying on the generosity (and TV tastes) of the people who share their recordings. But I can't remember the last time I looked for a programme and didn't find it. Oh, there's one time that I rely on bittorrent. Virgin Media still aren't carrying the Sky basic channels (following on from their contract dispute a year ago) so if there are US programmes that are on Sky One then I get them from bittorrent. Currently the only programme I do this for is Lost.
iPlayer/4OD. The BBC and Channel 4 both have their own online catch-up TV services. I think that ITV has one too, but I watch ITV so rarely that I've never tried to look for it. Both the BBC and Channel 4 services were originally Windows-based systems and therefore useless to me. However the BBC now has a Flasg streaming version available and I've used that a couple of times. The Channel 4 stuff is exactly the same material that is available through Virgin's TV on demand service, so I never have a need to use it.
So that's an overview of the systems that I use to record TV currently. I'm pretty sure that most people who I know use some combination of these technologies. The main point of this technology is to avoid missing programmes that I want to watch but as a side-effect I'm completely ready for the digital changeover (the three cable tuners in the V+ box mean we never watch terrestrial broadcasts) and we also have access to HD channels (not that there's much HD content available in the UK yet).
The biggest change for me is that at home we've dragged ourselves into the 21st century and have stopped recording programmes on VHS tape. We currently have two digital video recorders and together with TV on demand services and internet "services" they have revolutionised the way we watch TV. Here's what we currently use.
V+ box from Virgin Media. This is great. Because it comes from my cable TV provider, it's completely integrated with their services. We have access to an eight-day programme guide and setting a recording is as simple as pointing at a programme in the programme guide and pressing the record button. The box has three cable decoders in it, so that you can record two channels whilst watching a third. It also enables you to easily record all programmes in a given series. It also allows you to pause and rewind live broadcasts. The only slight downside is that it has a relatively small hard disk so you can only record eighty hours of programmes. So far this hasn't been an issue, but I can see it being a problem if we go on holiday for a while.
Commercial DVR. Before Virgin released the V+ box we bought an off-the-shelf digital video recorder. As it wasn't specifically made for Virgin, it didn't integrate quite so well with their services, but it did have a good programme guide and recording programmes was pretty simple. It has a far larger hard disk than the V+ box and could record up to three hundred hours of programmes (although I suspect some of that improvement is down to the fact that we were recording programmes in a lower quality format). It's possible to move recordings from the V+ box to the DVR, so that's one way to get round the 80-hour limitation on the V+ box. The downside to this, however, is that transfers take place in real time. So moving a two hour film takes two hours. One popular approach in this area is a DVR box that has a built-in Freeview decoder. I've never used one of these but I know a number of people that are very happy with them.
TV On Demand. I believe that Virgin Media has one of the most comprehensive TV on Demand services in the UK. This falls into two categories. Firstly, there is the Catch-Up TV section where you watch shows that were on in the last seven days. This covers BBC and Channel 4 broadcasts (along with a few smaller channels that I can't remember). There were a few glitches early on when popular programmes were missed off the listings, but they seem to have fixed most of those problems now and you can pretty much guarantee that anything you want to watch from the BBC or Channel 4 will be on there. Then there's the TV Choice section where they have hundreds of old TV shows available. Again, there's a lot of old BBC and Channel 4 stuff there, but they also have deals with a number of US channels so you can watch old seasons of things like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Lost.
Bittorrent. If I forget to record something and it's not on Catch-Up TV, then there's always the internet. When I last wrote about this I pointed out that not all shows were available as you're relying on the generosity (and TV tastes) of the people who share their recordings. But I can't remember the last time I looked for a programme and didn't find it. Oh, there's one time that I rely on bittorrent. Virgin Media still aren't carrying the Sky basic channels (following on from their contract dispute a year ago) so if there are US programmes that are on Sky One then I get them from bittorrent. Currently the only programme I do this for is Lost.
iPlayer/4OD. The BBC and Channel 4 both have their own online catch-up TV services. I think that ITV has one too, but I watch ITV so rarely that I've never tried to look for it. Both the BBC and Channel 4 services were originally Windows-based systems and therefore useless to me. However the BBC now has a Flasg streaming version available and I've used that a couple of times. The Channel 4 stuff is exactly the same material that is available through Virgin's TV on demand service, so I never have a need to use it.
So that's an overview of the systems that I use to record TV currently. I'm pretty sure that most people who I know use some combination of these technologies. The main point of this technology is to avoid missing programmes that I want to watch but as a side-effect I'm completely ready for the digital changeover (the three cable tuners in the V+ box mean we never watch terrestrial broadcasts) and we also have access to HD channels (not that there's much HD content available in the UK yet).
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Город после извержения вулкана — постъядерный мир, катаклизмы, города-призраки, зомби на deadland.ruWish I spoke Russian. This seems to be an article about Montserrat (or, at least, its capital Plymouth). It links to one of the photos I took at Christmas 2006.
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A history of the Clacton-on-Sea lifeboat. Including a mention of my great great grandfather , James Cross, who drowned whilst on a rescue in 1884.
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Guardian gives blog space to Guardian travel writer's son as he travels for his gap year. Guardian readers supremely unimpressed.
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It seems that for £36,000, you can buy the services of an ex-cabinet minister like Jack Cunningham who will arrange meetings with the government for you. I call that a bargain. Justin is looking for 1000 people to donate £36 each.
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Tim Bunce canvasses opinons on Perl. Seems to be pretty accurate. I hear very similar things when I ask non-Perl programmers about Perl
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Predictable, but very disappointing. And it rather misses the point of the original petitiion
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"The CharmingBurka sends a self-defined picture of the wearing person to every mobile phone next to it. Laws of the Koran are not broken." This surely has to be a joke?
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February 15th is John Frum Day. Cargo cults are an interesting view into how religions get started.
It's difficult to think of last night's Cutting Edge documentary, Baby Bible Bashers without getting very depressed.In it we met seven-year-old Samuel Boutell (see picture), nine-year-old Terry Durham and Ana Carolina Dias (who was, I think, about twelve). These three children firmly believe that it is their mission in life to fervently evangelise the christian faith to everyone they come across. All of them have been giving sermons in church for years. To see them standing in church proclaiming messages that they couldn't possibly understand was a disgusting sight.
And preaching in church isn't enough for young Samuel. He likes to get out on the street and annoy passers-by. He spends most Saturdays standing outside his local abortion clinic shouting "don't kill your children".
Of course, none of these children came to these beliefs unaided. In each case you can look behind them and see a deeply religious family. A deeply religious family that, in my opinion, should be locked up for child abuse. Samuel's father proudly tells the story of how, at the age of three, Samuel asked how he could be saved from burning in eternal hellfire. I think the child protection agencies should be asking why a three-year-old is worrying about hellfire. Who has been introducing him to such concepts?
All three children seemed to live in quite small and insular communities. Communities where christianity is rife and their precocious preaching is welcomed. The documentary followed Samuel on a trip to Washington DC and New York City, where he seemed genuinely surprised that people on the streets weren't quite as open to hearing his message.
I see no difference between what these children's parents are doing and what the Gaede twins' mother did to them. The last time we saw the Gaede twins, they seemed to be rebelling against their mother's influence. I can only hope that these children do the same thing.
If you haven't seen the programme, it'll be on 4OD for a week. And I expect there will be plenty of copies available on bittorrent. If you like to be outraged, then I strongly recommend that you watch it.
I've been playing with the new Flickr stats pages. I can't give a link as each page can only be seen by the owner of the account, but your page will be at http://flickr.com/photos/<username>/stats. You need to visit that page initially to opt in to the service. It will then start crunching all your numbers and will suggest that you come back to have another look tomorrow. I signed up yesterday, so I've just been looking at what you get.
From top to bottom of the page:
Update: Oh look. There's a help page that explains it all.
From top to bottom of the page:
- A line graph showing the number of views of your account each day for the previous month or so. From this it's easy to see when a picture of yours has attracted some kind of attention which causes a spike in the graph.
- A table showing the numbers of pages views for your photostream, individual photo pages, sets and collections. Numbers are given for the previous day, this week, last week and all time.
- Lists of your ten most viewed photos both yesterday and for all time. Each of these lists has a link to a full list.
- Information about the referrers for your photos. This is a list of the pages that people were looking at just before they came to your page. From this you can find pages where people are linking to your photos. Obviously most of the links come from within Flick (clicking on the "next photo" link, for example) but it's interesting to see where else links come from. I particularly enjoyed exploring the Google referrers. It's nice to know that this photo is the first result on a Google search for "frobisher crescent" and I'm really rather proud to see that a search for "working in banking" returns this photo in the first page of results.
- Finally, there's a breakdown of how you've organised your photos. There are graphs showing how many of your photos have the various privacy levels assigned, how many of them are tagged, geotagged, in sets and in groups, and how many of them have comments, are in someone's favourites list and even how many have never been viewed. It seems that thirteen of my photos have never been viewed by anyone except me.
Update: Oh look. There's a help page that explains it all.
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It's probably time to take another look at this.
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Martin has some fun with the Daily Express and statistics.
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Jane says she is going to kill herself in 90 days, because she's an atheist and life has no purpose. I think she's a liar. I think that she's a christian pretending to be an atheist. I expect she'll discover that god is the meaning of life before the end.
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Free NAS software. Maybe I should be considering some kind of network backup solution.
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If I ever get my blog working properly again, I'll take closer look at interesting MT toys like this.
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The University of Oxford are looking for applicants for the Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science. This is currently Richard Dawkins' post, but he's retiring from it in September 2008. Tough act to follow.
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Discussion of the Simonyi post advert on the Richard Dawkins foundation web site.
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Another of those "click to give" charity sites. It's in a good cause. Why not give it a click? I wonder if anyone has written an automatic charity site clicker?
Happy Darwin Day everyone.
Today, it's 199 years since Charles Darwin was born and later this year it will be 149 years since he published The Origin of Species. So this year will only really be a practice for a far bigger celebration next year.
Update: Removed extra 9 from 199. Thanks Murray!
Today, it's 199 years since Charles Darwin was born and later this year it will be 149 years since he published The Origin of Species. So this year will only really be a practice for a far bigger celebration next year.
Update: Removed extra 9 from 199. Thanks Murray!
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The Guardian seems to be a year early in celebrating both Darwin's bicentenary and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. Interesting stuff though.
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To celebrate his blog's 7th birthday, Neil Gaiman is going to put one of his books online for free. And blog readers get to vote for the one they want it to be.
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Emily Bell describes the next phase of the Guardian web site redesign which took place over the weekend. The comments are full of the predictable complaints about change.
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Fortune Magazine interviews Melinda Gates. Much as I dislike Microsoft's products, I approve wholeheartedly of the charitable work that the Gates do. It sounds like Melinda is the driver for much of that.
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Nik Silver on the more technical aspects of this weekend's Guardian web site changes - and how they managed to make it all go so smoothly.
Rowan Williams has certainly opened a bit of a can of worms. In a BBC interview yesterday (which was a prelude to a lecture he gave later) he said that it is inevitable that Sharia law will be adopted by muslim communities in the UK. This has, predictably, induced apoplexy in the readership of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the BBC's Have You Say.
The most surprising thing about this whole affair is that the Archbishop seems to be ignoring the fact that Sharia law is already practised in parts of the UK, in much the same way as some jewish communities use the Beth Din to arbitrate in civil disputes.UK law allows parties to use whatever arbitration mechanism that they want in order to resolve disputes. So it's quite legal for muslims to go to their local Sharia council, for jews to go to a Beth din or even for bikers to go to their local Hells Angels chapter. There are, however, two important caveats.
Firstly, the findings of the arbitrators must be legal and reasonable. This means, of course, that some of the worst excesses of Sharia law (stoning offenders or cutting off the hands of thieves) can never be used by Sharia councils in the UK.
Secondly, both parties in the dispute need to agree to be bound by the findings of the arbitrator. This should prevent husbands invoking a Talaq divorce when their wives don't agree or a parent using Sharia to punish a daughter who decides against wearing a Hijab.
These two protections are vital to prevent Sharia law (or, indeed, any of these minority legal systems) from taking precedence over UK law. And people in these communities need to know that those protections are in place and that they can't be forced to succumb to their local arbitration system. Any arbitration panel of any kind that breaks these rules should be closed down.
But with those protections in place, then I can't see why communities shouldn't be allowed to set up their own arbitration panels. It has been legal in the UK for years and it should continue to be legal.
Of course, if Williams is suggesting anything outside of this existing system, then I'm completely against it.
The first of a (hopefully) monthly series. I say "hopefully" because I've tried do to things like this before. It never works.
Here are the books I read last month:
Atonement - Ian McEwan
I really don't know why I've only just read it. I bought it when it was first published and even started reading it. But for some reason I put it down and didn't pick it up again for about five years. I remembered that I hadn't read it when the film was released last year and wanted to read the book before seeing the film. But I couldn't find it then. It turned up whilst I was looking for something completely different over christmas, so I decided to finally read it.
I love Ian McEwan books. This one isn't quite up to the standard of Enduring Love or The Child in Time, but it's thoroughly enjoyable. And the basic plot device is really clever. If you've seen the film, then you'll know the story. The film is a pretty accurate retelling of the novel. Still worth reading though as books are always better than films. Ok, maybe not absolutely always, but certainly when the book is as literary as McEwan's are.
The Big Picture - Douglas Kennedy
I've joined a book group at work. So you'll see me reading books that you wouldn't normally associate with me. This is the first.
I really didn't like this at all. The initial set-up introduced a number of stereotypical characters that I had no interest in. At times it just read like a shopping list of expensive photographic equipment. Then a Big Thing happens and the book changes direction. It doesn't get any better though. The protagonist goes off and has a big adventure and meets a number of uninteresting people on the way. The book is purely plot-driven and the plot relies on some ridiculous coincidences. The best that can be said of it is that it's a very easy read. I only wasted four or five hours reading it.
This is obviously a minority opinion though. The Amazon reviews are unremittingly positive. I expect they're written by idiots. I recommend avoiding this book at all costs.
On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan
Having taken years to read Atonement, I decided to get in really early with McEwan's new novel. Or, more accurately, novella. It's very short. The story is a interesting study of sexual innocence in the early 1960s and it's full of McEwan's trademark descriptive detail. Like Atonement it's not one of his best, but it's well worth a read.
The Ladies of Grade Adieu - Susanna Clarke
This is going to be a love it or hate it book. If you loved Clarke's previous book, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, (as I did) then you'll love this one too. It's really just more of the same. Except that in this case you get a series of short stories instead of a really long novel. All of the stories are set in the same world as Strange and Norrell. Actually, there's one exception - a story that is set in same universe as Neil Gaiman's Stardust. But to be honest, there's not much to differentiate Clarke's universe from Gaiman's. If you like the idea of an alternative history where fairies and wizards exist in England at the start of the nineteenth century, there's a good chance that you'll enjoy this book. If not, then you should probably avoid it completely.
Catalyst - Jonathan Rockway
Something a bit different to finish. This is a technical book about Catalyst, a framework for building web sites in Perl. This was a review copy, so I'll be writing a full review which I'll publish elsewhere on this site. It'll be there soon. Honest.
Here are the books I read last month:
Atonement - Ian McEwan
I really don't know why I've only just read it. I bought it when it was first published and even started reading it. But for some reason I put it down and didn't pick it up again for about five years. I remembered that I hadn't read it when the film was released last year and wanted to read the book before seeing the film. But I couldn't find it then. It turned up whilst I was looking for something completely different over christmas, so I decided to finally read it.
I love Ian McEwan books. This one isn't quite up to the standard of Enduring Love or The Child in Time, but it's thoroughly enjoyable. And the basic plot device is really clever. If you've seen the film, then you'll know the story. The film is a pretty accurate retelling of the novel. Still worth reading though as books are always better than films. Ok, maybe not absolutely always, but certainly when the book is as literary as McEwan's are.
The Big Picture - Douglas Kennedy
I've joined a book group at work. So you'll see me reading books that you wouldn't normally associate with me. This is the first.
I really didn't like this at all. The initial set-up introduced a number of stereotypical characters that I had no interest in. At times it just read like a shopping list of expensive photographic equipment. Then a Big Thing happens and the book changes direction. It doesn't get any better though. The protagonist goes off and has a big adventure and meets a number of uninteresting people on the way. The book is purely plot-driven and the plot relies on some ridiculous coincidences. The best that can be said of it is that it's a very easy read. I only wasted four or five hours reading it.
This is obviously a minority opinion though. The Amazon reviews are unremittingly positive. I expect they're written by idiots. I recommend avoiding this book at all costs.
On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan
Having taken years to read Atonement, I decided to get in really early with McEwan's new novel. Or, more accurately, novella. It's very short. The story is a interesting study of sexual innocence in the early 1960s and it's full of McEwan's trademark descriptive detail. Like Atonement it's not one of his best, but it's well worth a read.
The Ladies of Grade Adieu - Susanna Clarke
This is going to be a love it or hate it book. If you loved Clarke's previous book, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, (as I did) then you'll love this one too. It's really just more of the same. Except that in this case you get a series of short stories instead of a really long novel. All of the stories are set in the same world as Strange and Norrell. Actually, there's one exception - a story that is set in same universe as Neil Gaiman's Stardust. But to be honest, there's not much to differentiate Clarke's universe from Gaiman's. If you like the idea of an alternative history where fairies and wizards exist in England at the start of the nineteenth century, there's a good chance that you'll enjoy this book. If not, then you should probably avoid it completely.
Catalyst - Jonathan Rockway
Something a bit different to finish. This is a technical book about Catalyst, a framework for building web sites in Perl. This was a review copy, so I'll be writing a full review which I'll publish elsewhere on this site. It'll be there soon. Honest.
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Blog about HD broadcasts on Virgin Media.
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Usually more up to date than VM's own web site.
Last weekend, Derren Brown presented another of his occasional television specials. In this one he told us that he had invented a fool-proof system for predicting the winners of horse races. To demonstrate this system he introduced us to Khadisha who had received anonymous five winning tips from Derren. On the basis of these previous wins she borrowed £4,000 which she wanted to place on one final bit.
What Khadisha and the audience didn't know was that there was no real system. Khadisha was one of 7,776 who Derren had initially contacted. All of those people had been given a tip for the first race. That first race had six runners and each of those horses was sent as the tip to 1,296 of those people. So 1,296 of them had a winning prediction and the other dropped out. This continued for four more races, with 5/6 of the group being eliminated at each stage. Over the course of five races this whittled the original 7,776 people down to one, Khadisha, who had received five winning tips. But because of the way the experiment was arranged, one of the original group had to have received five successful tips. Of course, at the beginning of the project, Derren had no way of knowing which of the original participants this would be.
So after five races, Khadisha is convinced that the system works. But that's because she didn't have the full picture. She only saw the system from her point of view. But that (flawed) perspective gave her enough confidence in the (completely fake) system to borrow a huge sum of money to bet on a horse race.
This was then used as the set-up for a magic trick where her horse loses, but Derren changes her betting slip to be a bet on the winning horse. To me, that's not the interesting part of the programme. To me, the interesting thing is what this experiment shows about the nature of believe.
Going into the final race Khadisha had total confidence in the system. She had seen it working on the five previous races. She didn't know how it worked (if you stop to think about it logically, there's no possible way that it could have worked) but that didn't matter to her. She just knew that it worked.
Of course, if she had seen the full picture there's no way that she would have had the same amount of confidence in the system. If she had seen the full picture then she would have had no confidence in the at all. With all the information, she would never have borrowed that huge sum of money.
Derren hinted that this was a similar process to the one that convinces some people that homoeopathic remedies or alternative medicine works. A small number of people do see positive results following these treatments. But for a far larger number of people there's no effect at all. But you rarely hear about the failures. If you went against you better judgement and tried a homoeopathic remedy that didn't work, you probably wouldn't shout about about it. You'd probably feel a bit embarrassed and want to keep it quiet. It's the tiny number of people who feel better that you hear from. They are the ones who the homoeopaths shout about. They are the people who are only too happy to give you anecdotal evidence about how doctors could do nothing for their mother but how at the first sniff of primrose oil she was leaping around the room again.
Those people are like Khadisha. They don't have the full story. Arguing from your personal experience has no relevance in cases like this. Something that works for you might not have worked at all for the majority of people. You might, like Khadisha, just be the random person who it will work for.
Derren Brown is very interested in this area. In his book Tricks of the Mind he has a great section on evidence and how people jump to conclusions when given incomplete evidence. I really recommend that you read it.
What Khadisha and the audience didn't know was that there was no real system. Khadisha was one of 7,776 who Derren had initially contacted. All of those people had been given a tip for the first race. That first race had six runners and each of those horses was sent as the tip to 1,296 of those people. So 1,296 of them had a winning prediction and the other dropped out. This continued for four more races, with 5/6 of the group being eliminated at each stage. Over the course of five races this whittled the original 7,776 people down to one, Khadisha, who had received five winning tips. But because of the way the experiment was arranged, one of the original group had to have received five successful tips. Of course, at the beginning of the project, Derren had no way of knowing which of the original participants this would be.
So after five races, Khadisha is convinced that the system works. But that's because she didn't have the full picture. She only saw the system from her point of view. But that (flawed) perspective gave her enough confidence in the (completely fake) system to borrow a huge sum of money to bet on a horse race.
This was then used as the set-up for a magic trick where her horse loses, but Derren changes her betting slip to be a bet on the winning horse. To me, that's not the interesting part of the programme. To me, the interesting thing is what this experiment shows about the nature of believe.
Going into the final race Khadisha had total confidence in the system. She had seen it working on the five previous races. She didn't know how it worked (if you stop to think about it logically, there's no possible way that it could have worked) but that didn't matter to her. She just knew that it worked.
Of course, if she had seen the full picture there's no way that she would have had the same amount of confidence in the system. If she had seen the full picture then she would have had no confidence in the at all. With all the information, she would never have borrowed that huge sum of money.
Derren hinted that this was a similar process to the one that convinces some people that homoeopathic remedies or alternative medicine works. A small number of people do see positive results following these treatments. But for a far larger number of people there's no effect at all. But you rarely hear about the failures. If you went against you better judgement and tried a homoeopathic remedy that didn't work, you probably wouldn't shout about about it. You'd probably feel a bit embarrassed and want to keep it quiet. It's the tiny number of people who feel better that you hear from. They are the ones who the homoeopaths shout about. They are the people who are only too happy to give you anecdotal evidence about how doctors could do nothing for their mother but how at the first sniff of primrose oil she was leaping around the room again.
Those people are like Khadisha. They don't have the full story. Arguing from your personal experience has no relevance in cases like this. Something that works for you might not have worked at all for the majority of people. You might, like Khadisha, just be the random person who it will work for.
Derren Brown is very interested in this area. In his book Tricks of the Mind he has a great section on evidence and how people jump to conclusions when given incomplete evidence. I really recommend that you read it.
It finally looks like The Sun have finally fixed their RSS feeds. It's only three months since I first noticed the problem. In that time I've emailed them a number of times on the subject. They haven't bothered to reply to my mail, so I don't know if they even read them, or if someone in their web department finally noticed the basic error that they'd made.
I say that they've fixed the error. All I know for sure is that they've corrected the URLs in the feed so you now get absolute URLs that work outside of the Sun's web site. As Martin has pointed out, they've still done this in a spectacularly half-hearted manner and they have probably lost most of the RSS traffic that they had built up over the previous years.
And whilst the most pressing problems in their feeds seem to be fixed, it's worth noting that the feeds they're publishing now are far from perfect. Running their latest news feed through a feed validator (something that any sensible feed publisher will do) shows that there are still quite a few interesting errors. At the current rate, I expect them all to be fixed sometime around the middle of 2012.
I say that they've fixed the error. All I know for sure is that they've corrected the URLs in the feed so you now get absolute URLs that work outside of the Sun's web site. As Martin has pointed out, they've still done this in a spectacularly half-hearted manner and they have probably lost most of the RSS traffic that they had built up over the previous years.
And whilst the most pressing problems in their feeds seem to be fixed, it's worth noting that the feeds they're publishing now are far from perfect. Running their latest news feed through a feed validator (something that any sensible feed publisher will do) shows that there are still quite a few interesting errors. At the current rate, I expect them all to be fixed sometime around the middle of 2012.
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