and the number of casualties is rising

posted @ 9:37 PM -

I am no fan of the Israeli government, but none of their sins justify this

posted @ 9:32 PM -

I've just stumbled across a site by a rather cool artist: Eddie Breen

posted @ 9:25 PM -

For over a year now I have been living with a chronic illness. It's actually far less dramatic and horrible than that makes it sound (please don't confuse "chronic" illnesses with "terminal" ones - only extremely stupid mismanagement could make my condition terminal), but it can be mighty annoying at times.

I'm guessing you don't want to read the details (I have no qualms about publishing them if people do, but they are more unpleasant than they are interesting unless you happen to be a doctor), but basically I have colitis, which is a disease so poorly understood by Western medicine that the name just describes the symptom - inflammation of the colon. Symptoms range from none at all (for 5 or 6 months this year I had no trouble and though that therefore I was cured) to diarrhoea so bad I am virtually chained to the toilet. When it gets bad this causes a few knock-on effects - I stop wanting to go out (for fear of being caught short), it's really hard to do anything because whatever I try to do is interrupted so often, and I start to badly lose energy because my digestive tract basically loses its ability to use what's in food.

For the last week or so I have been particularly ill, in spite of the fact that I've been trying the treatment that seemed to sort out the last bout. This has also been getting me down badly, because I've been losing so much time when I ought to be doing quite a lot of work (I feel quite inspired by my course at the moment, and I've picked the projects I'll be handing in in January, so it's time to start properly working on them), and feeling pretty helpless. There's a condition known to psychologists as "learned helplessness", which is basically a type of depression that can be induced in most lab animals if they are punished randomly and arbitrarily, even if the punishment is not all that frequent. I was beginning to feel like that, because I was eating the right foods, taking the right medicines, and getting more ill.

My doctor is the most unreliable man in the world (claim not corroborrated with the Guinness Book of Records), but I stick with him because he was the one person who actually had a logical explanation of what was wrong with me and how to deal with it, and he was the only person whose treatment seemed to actually help me for more than a couple of weeks. Last week I got so fed up that I arranged appointments with a few other people; I'll still keep those and see what they can tell me. Meanwhile I did manage to make contact with my doctor, and he gave me quite a lot of new advice about managing the condition with diet and eating habits (most important thing being not to let myself get hungry). I wish I didn't have to wait till it got bad to get this sort of information, but anyway it has helped a great deal.

On Friday I wasn't exactly bursting with energy, but I had far less trouble getting out of bed, and during the day I was very highly productive, even reading academic papers while in a noisy common room and on a noisy train, and not just passively reading but actually having ideas stemming from them. Today I've not been on quite such good form, but I think that this is part of the story with my insomnia. The thing is that it's not the really horrible sort of insomnia that leaves me unable to sleep even though I feel groggy and tired; I actually feel quite alert and alive.

There's another useful psychology concept known as the "opponent process theory", which is an almost Daoist way of looking at neurotransmitters - after an excess of one mood or state of mind (as directly measured in terms of the opposing brain chemicals that are linked to these things), an excess of the other will follow, until finally the system settles into stable mediocrity. This is normally used to explain drug comedowns - after a drug-induced excess of serotonin (to simplify somewhat, serotonin can be considered the "happiness hormone"), as the drug wears off the result is an abnormal drop in serotonin secretion, hence the comedown. I think I may be experiencing the mirror image of this - after a serious dearth of energy (possibly also serotonin related) I'm now swinging to the opposite extreme.

Anyone who's spoken to me over the last couple of days will know that my symptoms have not gone away, but the knock-on effects seem to have done, and that is a vastly improved state of affairs.

I love being able to look at myself like this. Contrary to popular belief, having a psychology degree doesn't compel people to do this, but it does make it an option, and that makes me glad I studied that subject even though it has probably not advanced my career anywhere near as much as something like computer science might have done....

posted @ 9:15 PM -

wow!

posted @ 9:05 PM -

insomnia. Strange.... I haven't had this for years, and recently I've been on particularly low energy. Maybe all that annoying extra sleep I've been needing over the last few weeks has charged some huge internal battery and I'll be a productivity machine for the next couple of weeks. Or maybe I just think that because Finest Worksong is playing at the moment. Actually I do have a rational explanation, which will follow, with some background that might even make it make sense to other people.

posted @ 8:36 PM -

Today is World AIDS Day, and it seems worth playing my small part in raising awareness. This simply shouldn't be an issue these days - anyone within 10 years of my age has grown up with AIDS being relatively known about and through major awareness campaigns, but people seem to have forgotten. Rather than repeat myself I'll link to what I had to say about this earlier.

What I do want to add today is just briefly to celebrate some good work being done in my local area:

I'll start with what is really my community - the University. Part of Brighton Uni is across from the road from Sussex Uni, yet we rarely organise anything together. A rare exception is Unisex. It's a sexual health awareness project aimed at all students, but especially new arrivals. Unfortunately there's still such a stigma about sex education that plenty of people get to University not really understanding why they should do basic things like use condoms, and while most new students are not actually virgins, they tend to get far more promiscuous when they get here, so the message becomes all the more important.

Next up is a local charity that are important because of one of the peculiarities of Brighton. This place is known as the gay capital of Britain, and whether or not it has the biggest gay community in the country it certainly has a significant gay scene. An unfortunate side effect of this is that we also have a higher than average HIV infection rate, and Brighton Body Positive aim to help HIV positive people cope with their status. They are well respected both for supporting people through the stigma of being infected, and for directing people to complementary therapies that help them to deal with the nasty side effects of HIV drugs.

Finally a national organisation who have a particularly high profile locally because of one of the nasty things about Brighton. The city also has one of the highest (possibly the highest - I'm not sure) per capita heroin abuse rates in the country. Unfortunately the belief that zero tolerance is the way to deal with drugs is still widespread, but Addaction are one of many progressive charities who recognise that this is an unhelpful approach. No matter how harsh the law is, it won't stop people from taking drugs, but education can at least cut down addict numbers, and if people are addicted Addaction recognise that there are a lot of services that can still help them, rather than trying to sweep the problem under the carpet. By providing treatment and advice to drug addicts, they reduce the rate of drug-related crime (and one interesting thing about Brighton, where they are particularly active, is that the theft rate is among the lowest in the country even though drug addiction and theft usually correlate), and by providing education and needle exchanges they also reduce the spread of HIV in the population.

Health to their hands, as the Turks say.

posted @ 2:17 PM -

It's World AIDS Day today, in case that's managed to pass you by. I'll write something more worthwhile after a good night's sleep. Though I've had the good fortune not to have any personal stories to tell in relation to this I do think there are some things worth saying.

posted @ 8:47 PM -

Those French people, they know how to do a protest. Latest weapon on the streets of Paris: giant baguettes.

(thanks Blather for digging this one up)

posted @ 4:43 PM -

Worrying news came out today about just how fast world fish stocks are declining. To my mind this is a far more important, and far more immediate issue than the ethics of cloning (or most of the guff that gets written up in the media for that matter), because it directly affects resource availability for all people, and availability of a particularly healthy food resource at that.

All is not doom and gloom though, shortly after this story came out there was another one (I saw both at the same time) about how well managed marine reserves can replenish fish stocks while also providing larger commercial catches for those who exploit nearby waters. A real win-win situation, if only fishing fleets around the world were less unwilling to accept management of their stocks....

posted @ 4:16 PM -

I've just seen a couple of my friends on the local TV news, soing highly honourable things. Some years ago Simon Jones, a Sussex student, was killed while working as a docker in Shoreham Harbour. To anybody who heard the story from his friends (I never knew the guy, but some of my friends did) it was fairly clear that his death was a result of negligence by his employers, who used a ludicrous procedure (basically his head was crushed in the grab of a crane whose driver couldn't see him) and provided no safety training. Various people set up the Simon Jones Memorial Campaign to prosecute the employer (Euromin) and raise awareness of negligence-related deaths at work in general. They acted both within the law (pursuing this through the courts and holding demonstrations) and outside it (occupying Shoreham Harbour), and eventually had some success.

Today the verdict was announced in the court case. Because of this there has been TV coverage, and I've seen a very distinctive profile in the occupation (Chris Bunny), and Commie Colin giving a statement to the press.

It's nice to see that the more radically political among my friends don't just gas, and don't just go to mass demonstrations, but also organise responses to local issues, and stick up for their friends when things go so horribly wrong. This is what political activism is about, at least as much as headline grabbing international movements.

posted @ 1:52 PM -

Why exactly did London play host to a memorial service for victims of the WTC attacks today?

Excuse me for being insensitive, but surely the time for memorial services, and particularly for tear-jerking media portrayals of individuals' loss, is close to the event. Then possibly at anniversaries, but not arbitrarily 2½ months after the event.

Could it possibly be part of an attempt to whip the great British public up into a fresh righteous indignation, as the popularity of the war in Afghanistan wanes, the war itself looks close to conclusion, and the powers that be are trying to widen things to encompass an attack on Iraq? Could it possibly be conveniently timed to draw attention away from the inevitable protests about the conduct of military operations abroad and suspension of civil liberties back home that normally would be expected to get stronger at the end of a conflict?

Or perhaps I'm just being cynical, everyone means well and I shouldn't be so ready criticise.

posted @ 1:32 PM -

There is an awful lot of terrible science reporting out there, even in the peer-reviewed academic press, and far worse in lay publications (more on this later). The Economist this week has nicely cut through the grandiose claims made by Advanced Cell Technology that they have achieved human cloning. All of this furore brings to mind another big question though: what exactly is wrong with cloning?

I'll stick to a distinction between types of cloning that the Economist article makes and deal with the two seperately:

Therapeutic cloning refers to using a patient's existing genetic material to grow fresh stem cells that could then be used as grafts or transplants - potential life saver that never involves creating another human life, just culturing cells. I can't see in any way what could be worrying about this, except for the dogmatic insistence that any collection of cells counts as life, in which case any microbiological experiment ends in murder (as does any infectious illness, because either the patient or the pathogens die). The media seem desperately set on the idea that there are 'ethical issues' with this, but their justifications for that claim tend to be so vague/absent as to be worthless.

Reproductive cloning strikes me as more controversial, and more worth discussing, but I still don't see what's wrong with it. Normal reproduction involves two parents, cloning involved one, and that is the extent of the difference. Yes so the child is genetically identical to the parent, but that doesn't produce identical offspring. I am convinced that if I were to bring up a child that were a perfect clone of me he (let's leave out the confusing possibility of creating a clone of the opposite sex for now) would not turn out the same as me. I don't know if the result would be better or worse, but my parents brought me up in a certain way, in a certain environment, and even if I tried to repeat their style I'd be doomed to failure. For starters I am not an exact duplicate of my father, and if I found a woman to take part in this experiment she wouldn't be an exact replica of my mother. Even if I gave the clone to my parents to bring up they are not the same now as they were 24 years ago, the world certainly isn't, and neither is their world. So what exactly is the distinction (morally, I know the biological distinction) between cloning and sexual reproduction?

Please give me ideas about why I should be worried about these things.

Oh yes and if you're from the Army of God please tell me how evil I am. It would make me feel important.

posted @ 1:07 PM -

Finally. I've managed to get myself tickets for my first football match of the year (and yes it has been that long). My team are stuck in a complete joke of a stadium, so I can rarely get tickets. Meanwhile I always seem to be too busy to make it to the away matches (though I keep promising myself I'll start to), but finally the FA Cup has provided some non-sell-out home games for us, so I shall be along for the second round in 10 days' time, sat in the rowdy section (it's officially called the singing section but I think that's a rather flattering name). A good time to be had by all no doubt.

posted @ 11:13 AM -

Tying in with my post from Monday about AIDS and complacency, I've just seen a report from BBC News entitled: HIV creeps up in 'complacent' UK, which unfortunately shows that my worries were entirely justified. When I write things like that I'd really rather be proven wrong....

posted @ 12:47 PM -

Possibly not the most sensitive name or slogan for a piece of software: "Password Nazi takes no prisoners".

posted @ 5:58 AM -

Absolute bloody genius. Having already announced the withdrawal of ILAs in a semi-controlled manner, which would at least have allowed people to use their remaining grants, the government announced (on Friday evening) that they have just decided to simply scrap the scheme with immediate effect.

ILAs were one of the few positive things this government have actually done about the glaring inequalities in our education system, but the system was always flawed. Of course a sensible government would have tried to fix the system rather than scrapping it all, but we don't have a sensible government. We have a government dedicated to PR management and damage limitation, which is why this latest move was announced on a Friday evening, the official announcement claims this action is to "protect account holders" (bollocks - ILAs give account holders money, they don't take money from them) and gives virtually no information (yes police investigations are an awfully convenient smokescreen aren't they) and the Department for Education and Skills website doesn't even mention it in its news. One of the ILA websites promises that "Further information will be available by midday Monday 26th November 2001", but 26 hours later there still isn't any.

Of course I have a personal stake in this - my income may just fall to negligible as a result - but that's not really why I'm so angry. This was something really positive, that at work I could see helping people stuck in dead ends break out of them, and now it's just been withdrawn arbitrarily in the face of all the good it was doing, with no sign whatsoever that anything will be put in its place.

posted @ 11:20 AM -

Fantastic invention this - plates and trays made from potato starch so that they biodegrade. Why would I want biodegradable plates and trays? Well obviously not to serve food on, but to replace all that horrible polystyrene and plastic packaging waste that supermarkets and fast food chains generate. Not only is the waste biodegradeable, but its production is carbon-neutral, unlike plastic which is derived from oil, and it can even be made from the potatoes that get discarded from the food crop because they are diseased.

posted @ 8:48 AM -

This is why I get so angry when America claims to be the land of the free and claims that it's bombing of Afghanistan is in defence of freedom. Displaying a dissenting poster can get you in trouble with the law there.

posted @ 8:20 AM -

The United Arab Emirates are trying to break the record for the world's tallest flagpole, on which they are planning on flying an 800m² flag.

posted @ 8:15 AM -

Can't people think for themselves? This page summarises the self-reported moods of a group of web users (and therefore mostly of Americans), and when I first discovered it I thought it might be an interesting project. It has actually turned out to be utterly dull. I had never seen anything other than "tired" be the most selected mood, until Thanksgiving, when suddenly "thankful" took over by a huge margin. I tried to put a hold on my cynicism, thinking maybe Thanksgiving just really does make people reflect on their lives in a thankful way, but I had another look today. First day back at work, and "thankful" has almost disappeared from the list. If people really were led to reflect they wouldn't forget that quickly, but as soon as they are not being told to feel "thankful" any more they revert, en masse, to all saying another thing in unison.

Maybe I should start a "really interested in the world outside my neighbourhood and learning about science and foreign cultures and music with real passion and stuff" day, and just for a day people would follow my lead. But then I'd probably need to invade and rape an entire continent before people will take their cues for sentiment from me.

Oh well. Tomorrow. (But the sky will fall on our heads tomorrow anyway)

posted @ 8:11 PM -

Frightening statistic from this evening's Newsnight: 20% of teenage girls in South Africa are HIV positive. Also frightening - the prospects for an HIV vaccine are very poor. Even more frightening to me is how complacent my peers have become about AIDS.

I remember being a young boy in the 80s and watching the first news coverage about HIV/AIDS, and actually being scared by it. There was a considerable effort of public education, together with genuine uncertainty about how fast and how widely this disease was going to spread, and there was a general fear caused by this. The fear had a beneficial effect (as intended) in that it did make people change their behaviour.

Now there is a widespread perception that this is a disease of gay men, intraveinous drug users and the third world. The perception isn't entirely wrong, but the reason this is so is that people in the developed world had once responded to all the publicity and reduced their own risk, so that within the developed world only the highest risk groups saw much infection. That is changing, or at least our behaviour is, and I worry that the epidemiology will follow.

It is by no means uncontroversially accepted by the medical world, but I do think that if straight people continue to act as if AIDS is not an issue, it will simply become one again. For the moment AIDS has proved to be only a minor threat to non-drug-injecting heterosexuals in the wealthy world, but I think that is directly because people have been following medical advice, which they just don't seem to be doing any more. Among too many of my peers safe sex seems to be regarded as optional, perhaps a matter of taste.

This Saturday is World AIDS Day, and a group of web folk are trying to do some co-ordinated awareness-raising; basically getting everyone to link to AIDS-related information on the day. I'll be taking part if I have anything left to say on the subject - fortunately this has so far remained completely outside my and my friends' collective experience. I hope it stays that way, but I just don't feel like British 20-somethings are acting in a way that will keep it so.

posted @ 6:50 PM -

I find it deeply sad that in this age of unprecedently easy travel and communication people are still completely ignorant and uninterested in other peoples' cultures. It's easy for me as a relatively privileged person to get on my high horse about how people should travel, and forget that many people don't have that option (and would probably love to if they could), but this is not about that. What really makes me angry is people actively shutting out lines of communication that could be open.

It seems there are moves afoot in America to stop issuing visas to students from Cuba, North Korea and much of the Middle East, because one Iraqi who studied in America 30 years ago is now working in Iraq's nuclear institute. Foreign students provide a fascinating two way cultural exchange, learning about the society they live in at the same time as they teach the people who they meet about where they came from. If we start cutting out the potential routes for different cultures to understand each other then (with apologies to Bob Marley and Haile Selassie) everywhere is war. Current events, and the ongoing conflicts in Israel and Northern Ireland (to mention only 2) should only underline how important it is that we stop walling ourselves in, yet there are many voices who would do exactly that.

I hope the American government doesn't actually pass this law, and I sincerely hope the British won't even consider it.

Here is the article that got me thinking about this. It's by an Iranian lecturer at Portland State University, Oregon, so he clearly has a vested interest, but I agree with his argument totally.

posted @ 6:17 PM -

I know things are supposed to disappear after parties, but this is a bizarre one. Someone nicked all of my biros on Saturday. It's not like 1 or 2 disappeared - I had lots in a jar on my desk, and now there are only highlighters and big marker pens left.

posted @ 10:56 AM -

I went to a pub last night hoping to hear a friend DJing. Turns out he was actually due on next week, but he was there anyway, and this week's DJ was a friend of his, who also used to play on local radio and now has a show on internet radio. I have only recently discovered that internet radio is a far better source of interesting music than actual FM radio (during the day at least - in the evenings we do get the great John Peel on Radio 1). What this DJ told me about was the show he's now doing, which is on totallyradio. Very nice discovery, as the one half-decent radio station in Brighton (Surf FM) was taken over recently, becoming Juice FM (it's even a terrible name) and losing all its good DJs. Now I know where they went, and I can listen in decent quality whenever I want to, and skip any shows I don't like or go back and listen to tracks again.

posted @ 10:40 AM -

Brilliant. The new commenting system was easy to install, works on all the browsers I could be bothered to test it in, and looks like it should be easy to customise it as and when I get around to making it look nicer (mainly making it look like the rest of the site).

Credit where it's due: I discovered this on Adnan's site while trying to work out how he does his commenting. I don't think it's quite the system he uses (Adnan if you're reading this please could you tell me how I can have the comment script email me when people leave comments?), but the page with the code and some explanation is here. I think the version I'm using was originally written by Sascha Beaumont, who I know nothing about.

To use it you will need to have PHP installed on your web server, but the instructions are fairly clear and it has the advantage that all the comments are also stored on your server, so you don't depend on anyone else's service (which was why my old commenting system stopped working - it was maintained by a student who quite rightly put their own work before maintaining reblogger).

Now that it seems to be working, show me love. If you are not here for the first time (or for that matter if you are but intend to return) please drop a comment in, because my readership has grown (from 2) over the past month or two, and I'd love to know who you are. If you can't use the comments for some reason (you don't need to leave a URL or email address if you don't want to, but I'd appreciate you leaving at least one) email me, and if you have any problems using the site in general please tell me what software you're using and what goes wrong. If you have never met me, it would also be cool if you could tell me how you stumbled across this site.

posted @ 9:54 AM -

this time I actually am testing a new comment system, but if it isn't easy to make it work, it might have to wait for a few days till I sort it out properly.

ignore the number of comments to this post - 7 of them are me testing the system out, and 2 of them are someone else telling me it works

posted @ 9:02 AM -

Very clever once again Mr. Bush. Because the companies involved are suspected of having links to Osama Bin Laden, the US has effectively shut down Somalia's entire information infrastructure. Now excuse me for twisting a metaphor beyond its sensible reach, but what happens when you use a mallet to hit a drawing pin?

posted @ 6:59 AM -

well as you may have noticed the promised new commenting system hasn't materialised. The Sunday demon swallowed up any attempt I made at doing anything more productive than cleaning my house yesterday. I'll try to sort one out soon, but I have some real work to do as well....

posted @ 6:27 AM -

Oh dear. The Euro coins that will become currency here in a month are poisonous to a proportion of people. It's not too much to expect that our great and good could have thought this through beforehand, or is it?

posted @ 3:25 PM -