things I learned today

Beer is a far older invention than I thought, and some people suspect that beer making may have been the trigger for the ancient Sumerians switching from gathering food to cultivating it.

Speaking of which, I think I'll go out and drink some now.

posted @ 4:23 PM -

...stop worrying and love the bomb

I was absolutely dumbstruck today when I read the LA Times' articles about the US Nuclear Posture Review. For most of my lifetime the one positive thing about nuclear weapons seemed to be that the likelihood of them ever being used was decreasing, and now it seems Doctor Strangelove is alive and well. If this were a generalised risk assessment I think the review's shifting of the focus of American defence worries from Russia to various smaller states (the usual suspects) would be a pretty realistic response to changes in the world, but the whole idea of nukes is just so emotionally and politically charged that any talk of increasing their usability will just make countries jittery. That can't possibly be a good thing; jittery governments are more likely to develop weapons of mass destruction themselves (OK, so admittedly in some of these cases it means they will prioritise nefarious schemes that were already underway, but that's still bad), and much more likely to do stupid things.

posted @ 4:14 PM -

best toy ever?

The Incredible Rubber Band Machine Gun - I want one!

posted @ 11:15 AM -

Unsurprisingly enough, the government's positive steps about drug control were followed very soon by the Opposition accusing them of going soft on drugs. I do wish they would grow up and start considering what might actually be good for the country....

posted @ 4:26 AM -

I can, like, see the colour of the universe, man

it's beige

posted @ 5:30 PM -

Sven says yes

To a new stadium for the Albion. I know such decisions ought to be based on more substantial considerations, but I am more than a little suspicious that Sven Gøran Ericsson's endorsement has just guaranteed that we will get out nice new ground after all....

posted @ 2:16 PM -

steel, steel, steel

Going back to my little rant about steel tariffs, there's (unsurprisingly) quite a lot about it in the press now. Of particular interest are a typically thorough backgrounder by the FT, and an opinion piece in the Independent that says what I was trying to say far better.

posted @ 12:53 PM -

why johnny joins the taliban

Yes, it's true, being a liberal has dire consequences. One case of a liberal parents' son doing something incomprehensibly bad proves it.

posted @ 12:26 PM -

drug control

Now this is promising. The government has just proposed a new drug safety plan that aims to make clubs into safer environments for people on illegal stimulants. For various reasons the UK looks like it could be on the verge of a fresh moral panic about drugs like the Leah Betts episode while I was at school. It's very easy in this sort of situation for a government to just jump on the bandwagon and propose more draconian laws, more misleading anti-drug publicity campaigns, and so on. Fortunately it looks like this time round they might not give in to that temptation, and might actually do something positive.

The problem with things like the Leah Betts story is that kids just aren't stupid enough for those sort of scare tactics to work. They just do what I did - when confronted with obvious nonsense being presented as the truth we just start to mistrust everything we are told. This leads to a dangerous sort of empiricism, where people don't believe warnings about anything unless they experience side-effects themselves, by which time it is clearly too late.

There's also a related issue of precisely what principles the law should be supporting. Prohibition is an example of the lawmakers telling individuals what to do to themselves, which I believe is utterly wrong. An approacch based on controlling the harm done by drugs, rather than their use per se, shows a different sort of concern - it's a (sadly isolated) example of lawmakers sending out a signal that they are concerned about peoples' welfare, as opposed to trying to impose their moral standards on all of us. Unfortunately it will still be some time before any government finds drug decriminalisation palatable, but this is a good start.

For more background information: the Guardian has a special report about drugs

And finally, as a contrast, the extent to which drug policy has not been dictated by genuine public health concerns so far is shown up by recent condemnation of the government for not doing enough about the two drugs that do the most damage to society - yes, you guessed it, alcohol and tobacco.

posted @ 9:41 AM -

there is a light that never goes out

...or at least not for a century. The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania has had an anthracite seam on fire for 40 years so far, and according to this report in the wonderfully titled Failure Magazine it could continue to burn for another 100.

posted @ 7:36 PM -

game for small sounds

First, hear the sounds. Then, read Paul Ford's page on the game to see why it sounds so.

posted @ 9:25 AM -

man attacked by weasels

Full story from i know what i know. i sing what i said

posted @ 7:07 AM -

royal samba

I saw this on the TV news yesterday - Prince Charles is on tour in Latin America, and he ended up dancing in the street in Brazil. Not hugely surprising, but what I was surprised at was that he actually looked quite good. Somehow I didn't expect a royal to be able to dance a graceful samba....

posted @ 7:04 AM -

principles

This is one link in a cascading chain of blogs - Andrea attempts to answer some unusually big questions on her blog, that were initially asked on another site. I think I'll attempt an answer a little later because they are interesting.

posted @ 7:00 AM -

free trade for us only

I can not comprehend the arrogance behind this. It's not OK for the EU to ban hormone treated beef, because that is considered a trade barrier against the US, even though there is a clear medical reason for keeping it out, but it apparently is OK for the US to impose heavy tariffs on steel. This is such an obvious case of the US having their cake and eating it, but because they are the US they will probably get away with it. If the US government is going to dictate laws to the rest of the world, shouldn't we all get to vote for it?

Things like this have been making me increasingly pro-EU as I realise that the world needs a power able to counterbalance US hegemony, and the only thing that can come close to doing that is a strong and politically united Europe. Euro-sceptics tend to argue that we are losing our precious British sovereignty to Strasbourg and Brussels, but I trust those institutions more than Washington, and at least there could be 2 authorities balancing out each others' excesses to some extent.

On a much happier note, the US State Department's annual human rights report has received a mostly positive response from human rights groups. There were fears it would be politically skewed, and these seem to have been unfounded.

posted @ 6:54 AM -

cold fusion?

Previous similar announcements have turned out to be either frauds or errors, so I wouldn't get too excited about this, but some researchers claim to have produced exothermic nuclear fusion in a desktop experiment.

posted @ 7:16 PM -

below and beyond

It seems to be the season for it - there's been yet another announcement of life discovered beyond what were thought to be the limits of the biosphere. The Ocean Drilling Program have disovered microbial life several hundred metres below the sea bed.

posted @ 9:28 AM -

partially cloudy,
82% chance of rain

I've just come back from a very short trip up to London to see magnolia. I don't want to write much about the film, because I went in knowing nothing about what to expect (beyond that it is long and emotionally intense), and I enjoyed it much more. What I will say though is that it is a fantastic film that will take me a long time to fully digest, and that I'm very glad that Alex (my flatmate) owns a copy on DVD because I think I'll be watching it a few more times.

On the way up I missed my scheduled train to Victoria, so ended up getting one to London Bridge and only just making it to the cinema in time. This all worked out perfectly though, because if I had caught the planned train I would have been even later due to a security alert and missed the first scene at least. Only a matter of chance?

posted @ 9:07 PM -

the wayback machine

That previous post just reminded me of a nice site I've been meaning to mention here. The web is almost the antithesis of the kind of enduring record that people are trying to create with things like the Domesday Project. It is easy to publish a page, and easy for it to disappear again, and it is a bit of a shame because printed matter automatically leaves a record of how it has developed over time. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine tries to do something about this, by keeping copies of pages as they looked at regular intervals through their history. No doubt one day I'll be laughing at the naïve design of this page; certainly I do laugh at my early efforts....

posted @ 12:48 PM -

how soon is forever?

There is apparently a 'crisis in digital preservation' in the world today, as exemplified by the obsolescence of the 1986 Domesday Project, even as the 11^th Century Domesday Book still endures. The problems is technology, or rather our reliance on specific technologies. There is a team working on transferring the data from 12" laser discs that can no longer be read in up-to-date computers, but they are worrying about what to transfer it to that will have more permanence. Why should a desktop PC's hard drive be any more useful in another 16 years' time than these discs are now?

The article makes the obvious comparison with paper, and at first I thought they had a point - William the Conqueror's Domesday Book is still useable, and there are far older documents than that, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Predating these, there are archæological finds of inscriptions and paintings on stone that have survived far longer, and it's hard to imagine (for example) my hard drive lasting as long as these have done (or at least still being readable).

Natural forms have done far better even than this - a couple of years ago an American researcher discovered 250 million year old spores which he managed to cultivate in his lab. Those simple information-carriers lasted unimaginably long and still worked, while our newer technology has managed less than my lifetime.

To fuss about this is to completely miss the point though. What is important about most documents is not the physical medium they are recorded on, but the information itself. No historian of the future is likely to care all that much about whether they are reading the original Domesday Book or an n^th generation clone, as long as it still contains accurate records of the same thing. In the same way I don't mind (beyond it wasting a little time) that I have to copy gigabytes of information when I buy a new PC, but if I couldn't copy that information I'd be pretty concerned. If I stopped bothering, the chances are no-one else would do it, but that's because I'm not important enough. What is important enough will be preserved in one form or another, in a sort of survival of the fittest.

Perhaps for our analogies from nature we should not look at spores preserved dormant in crystals, but at such things as the 12,000 year old creosote bush, whose survival is not measured in terms of years that the same matter is in the same place, but years of uninterrupted life, while its constituent atoms are exchanged freely with the surrounding world.

By coincidence I read a poem about exactly this this shortly before seeing that Observer article.

posted @ 11:59 AM -

compatibility update

I think I've now got the page looking reasonable in Opera - there are lots of IE-specific details that I don't think I can make cross-browser compatible, but none of them are important - the layout is almost right (one table slightly out of line - I'll live) and the background colour is more or less right; it's just that in IE you aren't stuck with a flat background....

Meanwhile it turns out that Netscape 6 now renders the page horribly. Very few people actually use this browser, but seeing as it is supposed to be a reasonably standards-compliant one I will try to fix it. Trouble is I don't know how just yet, but I'm working on it. I've also lost a minor detail (the border around the page) in the IE version, but I'll work out how to get that back soon enough.

posted @ 6:53 AM -

people's front of judea

Monty Python's Life of Brian is on the idiot box at the moment, and it's depressing how much the colosseum scene reminds me of real life....

posted @ 5:43 PM -

new look!

All that hassle with changing hosts and then finding that some things don't work anymore has prompted to me to start that redesign I've been telling myself I'll do for ages. It will take me a while to change the other pages I want to change, but I've done this page without waiting, because it was rather overdue.

You'll only see it the way I intended if you use Internet Explorer (I've only tested in version 6 so far, but it ought to look the same in 5.5, and pretty similar in 4 and 5). I don't know how to do the same things without using IE-specific JavaScript, but I have tried to make the page easily usable to everyone else. If you use Netscape 6 or Opera (tested in v6 but should be similar in 4 and 5) then the layout will be pretty much the same, it's just the background and some subtle effects that are different. If you use an older browser than those then it will look pretty horrible. If you're using Netscape 4 then I apologise, but there is so much wrong with that browser that the only way I could make the page work there would be to either break it for other browsers or drop half of my ideas. If you're using a pre-version-4 browser then there's really no helping you. It may seem arrogant but I can't face designing for a tiny minority of users, who also won't see anything else on the web looking nice....

At the moment there are two things missing: comments and photo browsing (you'll get an error message if you try). I should be able to sort both out tonight.

posted @ 4:01 PM -