So how can you get involved in this conspiracy to otherthrow the government without making too much effort or getting your hands dirty? Well the answer is to spend, spend, spend!

The Decadent Action Manifesto. Link from Popism.

posted @ 6:41 PM -

The leaving party was good. Flattering turnout, much drinking, and surprisingly little hangover. Then this morning I went to the Albion's victory parade to celebrate something that happened while I was in Canada - promotion to Division 1, followed by winning Division 2. My interest in football has been waning because I get to matches so rarely, but it was still good to see a crowd in blue and white and hear one final roar of Seagulls before leaving town. I also took many pictures, of people last night and of the crowd today, but I can't do anything with them until I get my computer back to full working order. This is very annoying - my total 80Mb of memory card now has no space left on it at all.

Time to see if upgrading to Windows XP will sort my problems out. In theory it ought to, but I am far from convinced.

posted @ 6:36 PM -

Supply of Scientists and Engineers

The long-awaited Roberts Review of the Supply of Scientists and Engineers was published recently. I probably won't have time to read the whole lot for a few weeks, but the foreword makes all the right noises:

Scientists, mathematicians and engineers contribute greatly to the economic health and wealth of a nation.... The challenge we face is to continue to attract the brightest and most creative minds to become scientists and engineers.

It is a welcome change to see someone with influence in government recognise that access to and attractiveness of education are about bigger issues than the choices open to one individual, but actually end up benefiting the whole country. Thanks are due to the NPC for being the only student body to actually provide input for the Review; it looks like they have been listened to, which is also a refreshing change from the usual story with education policy.

Meanwhile, there is other interesting UK University news - a committee set up to look into general funding of institutions has come out with a fairly scathing report about how low a priority the government has been making this issue, and how detrimental the current system of research assessment is. I have just a glimmer of hope that this might be about to change, though I think it's still fairly unlikely....

posted @ 10:55 AM -

The world's fastest supercomputer has just been built in Japan. I think I ought to repeat Alex's comment on the article:

I'm sure it can't just be me that thinks these say something about international research priorities...

"The new machine...is being used by the Japan Marine Science and Technology Centre to make predictions about the future of the Earth's climate and its crust."

"The previous record holder, ASCI White at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the US, was built by IBM and is used to simulate nuclear weapons explosions."

posted @ 9:22 AM -

I walked about a mile around central Brighton today in the course of tying up some loose ends before I move. What really struck me was how very nearly every business that I walked past or into has changed in the time I've been here. Those that haven't changed ownership enitrely have either moved or been renovated. I'm not quite sure if that means Brighton is unusually unstable or that I've been in one place for too long, but either way the fact that I'm about to leave made me much more aware of this.

Booking a one way train ticket was a strange sensation.

posted @ 9:05 AM -

Oh dear. I seem to have left sorting out my accommodation on arrival in Bristol too late. It's not that I can't find anywhere, it's just that I have a choice between either paying large sums of money to stay in an inappropriately upmarket hotel, or moving between various establishments for my first week there, thanks to the Bank Holiday and the football (FA Cup Final in Cardiff - apparently this is filling up Bristol guesthouses for the relevant weekend). If I were actually seeing different cities I would quite like to be upping sticks every few days, but it seems like a bit of an unnecessary hassle if each move is only a mile or two.

In other news I have noticed that there is a place called Catbrain only a couple of miles from where I will be working. It's too disconnected from Bristol itself to be a practical place to live, but I am quite tempted anyway just so I can have that in my address.

posted @ 3:22 PM -

Are humans dumber than rice?

posted @ 2:30 PM -

Mission accomplished. I handed in the last bit of coursework this afternoon, so now all I have to think about is the one project that I can focus on for 4 months. What a luxury! Meanwhile I have some minor details like van hire to sort out for this move, but I'm looking forward to that....

Oh yeah, and just in case you're in the Brighton area and I haven't already told you - you can celebrate never having to see me again tomorrow evening at the Evening Star. Well actually you can celebrate it wherever and whenever you like, but if you want me to be there that's my plan.

posted @ 12:18 PM -

A further upsetting twist in the general trend of stories that imply racism, and particularly anti-semitism, is on the rise again in Europe: a Berlin policeman apparently issued advice that Jews should avoid displaying identifying marks like skullcaps or stars of David when walking the streets because it puts them at risk of attack. Unlike the other reactions I've read, I can't bring myself to be angry with the copper for issuing what might actually be sensible advice. What does upset me is that a climate exists in which it could even be thought necessary to say it.

Personally I choose not to wear any signs that I am a Jew; not because I am afraid, but because I don't want people I meet for the first time to judge me by that, not even other Jews whose prejudice would probably be a positive one. It's not important enough a feature of my self-identity for me to want people to notice that before they get to know me a little. I still think it's very important that I could wear such things if I wanted to, and I can (and do) tell people about my roots without fear, and for religious Jews this is a really big issue because wearing the outward signs of the faith is an important part of their religious observance.

I guess I could respond to all this by saying that we're lucky to have white skin, because at least we can hide our identity from strangers, but I'm not content to resign myself to that. Hiding one's ethnicity should never have to be a serious suggestion anywhere in the world, and when it starts to be an issue relatively close to home it just adds to my already mounting sense of unease.

posted @ 7:08 PM -

This, on the other hand, is highly amusing.

posted @ 8:24 AM -

Just what I wanted to read a week before moving to Bristol: there's been a huge surge in crime there over the past year.

posted @ 8:23 AM -

self-censorship online

Scott informs me that Dooce has shut down her blog. I don't read her site regularly, but I've been sort of following things since she was fired because of the site. At the time the general reaction of bloggers (probably best summed up by a lively MetaFilter discussion) was divided between those saying this was really terrible, and those saying it was not at all surprising. My first reaction was to write something here about how terrible it all was and how we should all be free to say what we like, but that post never got published because I realised how wrong it was. I severely restrict what I write here precisely because it is public, and there are different reasons why different things get restricted. I never explicitly wrote down my rules for what gets left out before, but I think I'll try now:

1. Trouble at work - like any employer-employee relationship, my relationship with the people I've worked for over the past couple of years has not been perfect every day. I gripe about this very readily to friends and family, but would never write about that here. Two reasons: people I work with might read it and be upset, and potential customers might read it and make the connection with where I work. I don't want either of those happening, and if I do cause either of those my employer would be entitled to be unhappy. There has been one sort-of exception to this, which was when I was in a dispute with the Vice-Chancellor of the University, but I wrote about that because it wasn't an interpersonal issue - it was a very public dispute between me in my public function on the Students' Union, and him in his public function at the University. Because I was raising publicity for it extensively anyway, there was obviously no harm in also doing so here.


2. Arguments with family or friends - there have been one or two exceptions, but those have been when I was very deeply angry and wanted to make a point by writing here. Normally I just keep those things between the people concerned and others who I single out to talk to about it. It's no-one else's business so I don't advertise it here.


3. Love life - admittedly this has been mostly uneventful for all the time that I've been writing here, but that's not the only reason I don't write about it. It's another case of things between me and one other person, which I have no right to share with the rest of the world. I'm sure if I were in a relationship it would be mentioned here, but certainly in no detail. I guess this one's actually pretty obvious; it's not something I'm accustomed to reading on other peoples' pages


4. The Middle East - this is a new one. I used to write about this quite a lot, because I have strong opinions and I think I'm less partisan and better informed than some of the other people whose opinions I read. However, I am tired of the arguments that entail, so this is now a subject that I have decided I will never raise in conversation (and might just deliberately avoid) with any Jew, Muslim or political radical. I can't change anything out there, and I'm totally reliant on second-hand information about it, so it's just not worth me wasting energy getting worked up about. All that sound and fury can be better used elsewhere.

When I started writing here my dad asked me repeatedly if I'm concerned about writing personal things in such a public medium, but the truth is that I don't write anything that I would object to you reading ("you" being whoever you are, because I don't know who all my readers are, though I think I do know who the 5 who actually come back are). To quote one of the MeFi responses: Don't write in your blog what you wouldn't tell your coworkers to their face. That's not just things about them, but anything I wouldn't share with the person sat next to me on the train, if, that is, they ever asked. There's lots here I wouldn't expect a stranger to be interested in, but you're reading it, and if you don't want to it's easy enough to stop - it's not like I'm being the pub bore and forcing anyone to listen.

So, do you write a public diary of some sort? If so, are parts of your life kept out of it? If not, doesn't this worry you?

posted @ 5:08 AM -

we are all goats.

link courtesy of Katherine

posted @ 12:47 PM -

Almost 1 in 5 of the people in France who bothered to vote chose one of the two far-right candidates. The only vaguely positive news is that this has brought people onto the streets in protest, but that hardly compensates, and to make things worse Le Monde stresses how the protesters (as with most headline-grabbing protest marches) are from only a limited section of society.

Le Pen is clearly not in danger of winning the Presidency (all of the other candidates' votes will clearly transfer to Chirac, leaving Le Pen with only his 17% and the other far-right candidate's 2% of the vote), but this is just one more thing adding to the many over the past year or two that has been changing my perception of racism. I had felt that racism was a slowly receding problem in Europe, with race relations slowly but reliably improving, but I have had to rethink that complacency after the riots in Northern England, attacks on refugees in the South, attacks on synagogues and congregations in France and Belgium, insane popular reaction to September the 11^th, and now the electoral resurgence of the far right in France, where a couple of years ago commentators said that Le Pen's career was over. I am actually starting to be frightened by all this. It hasn't touched me directly yet, but I can't help feeling that I am noticing a trend which will continue to deteriorate.

posted @ 11:58 AM -

The essay is complete. And printed. And in the box with my signature in the "submitted work" book. Quite a relief - if only quality were proportional to amount of time spent agonising over each paragraph this would truly be a masterpiece - but not the end. I still have a programming project to do, and 3 days to do it in. I really must stop doing this to myself....

On the way to campus to hand the thing in I had two near misses with other cyclists. This is very odd. I'm used to cars being a danger to me and pedestrians being a danger to themselves, but cyclists aren't normally a hazard to other cyclists. Of course it was the other person's fault both times. It always is.

posted @ 11:37 AM -

This is deeply worrying. Jen-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the Front National, looks like he might have made it to the second round of the French presidential elections. Even if the exit polls are wrong and he doesn't make it, the fact that he is close is bad enough.

posted @ 2:33 PM -