This is someone you’d likely recognise (if you’re from the UK, anyway), disguised with make-up. Any guesses?

Click here for the answer. I was quite taken aback.

Flickr’s new geotagging tools are fun. Apparently they’ve had over 1.5 million photos added to maps since they launched the service at the weekend, which is quite impressive! I geotagged all the shots from my March trip to New York, and it’s cool to look at the resulting map then turn off the filter so that everyone’s photos are visible. You can see similar shots at all different times of the year, which works particularly well in Central Park.

While trawling around the forums I came across a good method for geotagging photos before uploading. If you use Flickr to store your photos online, Picasa to organise them and would like to geotag them easily, there’s coolness afoot:

1. Pick up the new beta version of Picasa from here (you’ll need a Google Account, I think) and the Google Earth 4 beta from here.
2. While they’re downloading, make sure you’re logged into Flickr and go here and confirm you want EXIF data imported automatically.
3. Using the new Picasa, select a bunch of photos that you want to locate, then go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Geotag’ -> ‘Geotag with Google Earth’
4. GE will then open, and you can use the full power of its search capabilities to find the correct location. Hover the crosshair over the appropriate area and click ‘Geotag’, and repeat for each picture in GE’s window before hitting ‘Done’.
5. The latitude and longitude data have now been added to the actual JPEG file and are combined with the existing EXIF data. Send the pics to Flickr in the normal way (I tend to email them from Picasa, or if there are a load I’ll export them and use a bulk uploader). Flickr will automatically recognise the mapping data and add the images to its geotagging database.

I only found out about the Flickr’s EXIF Import option from a post in their forum - it doesn’t seem to be accessible from the standard Account options screen as yet.

Obviously this doesn’t work for photos already uploaded, although it’d theoretically be possible to ‘replace’ each one with a mapped-up copy. I’ve been using the localize bookmarklet, which works well but is far slower than the built-in interface would be. However, Flickr today released their mapping APIs and have explicity stated that people can build applications using other providers’ maps, so hopefully there’ll be a decent equivalent within a week or two.

I’ve read a lot of Philip K. Dick, and was intrigued to see A Scanner Darkly last weekend. It’s certainly the closest I’ve seen any film come to capturing the frenetic mania of his novels. I have no clue what somebody unfamiliar with his work would think, though. I was expecting the wildly meandering conversations, the uncertainty about what’s real - pretty much every PKD novel has the nature of reality as its theme - and the abrupt sci-fi twists and turns, but even so I had to concentrate.

The film was shot with real actors, then an effect was applied to the image to make it almost cartoony, but not quite:

This is very subjective, but I felt the style represented the story and atmosphere well, although it took some getting used to. I had trouble understanding Robert Downey Jr. for a few minutes, before realizing I needed to watch his lips; this was interesting: even though the image was highly stylized and there wasn’t much detail around his mouth, it still worked.

The film had plenty to say about, or at least provoke discussion of, the future of technology as it relates to privacy and crime, as well as the ever-present questions of how we know what to believe. To be honest I was less interested in this than PKD’s extraordinary use of language and how this would adapt to the screen. The guy had an abrupt, unique style that’s instantly recognisable, but I’ve never seen anybody try it on film. Other adaptations, such as Minority Report or Total Recall, have kept the plots (kinda) but rewritten the dialogue. This didn’t, which was possibly risky, but I think it worked well. It certainly meshed well with the slightly unreal, drug-addled atmosphere.

But that’s just me - I like words Definitely an interesting couple of hours, if you fancy seeing it.

Tagged by Tom…

1. Name one book that changed your life.

I do actually have one of these: The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. I read it at 18, and found it to be a clear, detailed and convincing argument for evolution over any kind of design theory, but also much more than that: a compelling ode to a rational worldview. These were not the scientists I’d envisaged from years of reading the pseudosciences. As a direct result of the attitude and reading recommendations of this book - Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman etc. - I went from vaguely religious to atheist, and from credulous fan of pseudoscience to a skeptic supporter of the scientific method.

2. One book you’ve read more than once.

Northern Lights - Philip Pullman.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island.

The Third Policeman - Flann O’Brien.

4. One book that made you laugh.

The Amulet of Samarkand - Jonathan Stroud.

5. One book that made you cry.

Bag of Bones - Stephen King. Those bastards.

6. One book you wish you’d written.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.

7. One book you wish had never been written.

Dianetics - L. Ron Hubbard. Even books like ‘The Bell Curve’ could be argued to have some virtue in that they provided an opportunity for counter-arguments to be clearly and forcefully thought-through and expressed. But imho the manual of Scientology is completely worthless, and actively wrecks lives.

8. One book you’re currently reading.

Fallen Dragon - Peter F. Hamilton. Except I left it at my parents’ house yesterday, which is really annoying.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read.

The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker. Not one I can read in small daily chunks - need to take it on holiday, I think.

10. Now tag five people.

The usual suspects

The prestigious Hugo Awards are voted for each year at the World Science Fiction Convention, and this year’s winners were annouced on Saturday. I was very happy to see that ‘Dramatic Presentation: Short Form’ was won by Steven Moffat’s double-bill from the first series of Doctor Who: ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘The Doctor Dances’. I thought those episodes were really, really great. ‘Dramatic Presentation: Long Form’ was won, I suspect overwhelmingly, by Serenity. I haven’t heard of the rest, other than Connie Willis, but shall be adding them to my wishlist
Update: Joss Whedon’s acceptance speech for Serenity is short but sweet, and read by Morena Baccarin (Inara in the film).

Just back and looking at Flickr’s new geotagging tools, which allow you to specify the location your photos were taken. They’re very cool, in theory. Groups / sets / search terms / individual users’ photos can be viewed in a very swish interface - mine are here, for example - and there are plenty of searching options that seem most impressive. Full details are here. It’s all great and very well done, but they’re badly let down by the underlying map software: Yahoo Maps. It just sucks, especially when you compare it to the greatness that is Google Maps. I know it’s early days, but adding a location just now was nearly impossible.

I tried to add a location to the photos from the Bloggers4Labour meetup last Thursday. The postcode was EC4M 9EH. Type this into Google Maps and you get:

The location marker shows the actual postcode location, and there are street names and other details. Great. Do the same in Yahoo Maps, via the ‘Organize!’ Flickr interface, and you get:

Which is just the Eastenders credits. The small blue circle is a preexisting image I’d eventually tagged from satellite imagery (it was taken on a bridge which was thankfully easy to spot). The postcode I want is actually centered in the view, although that isn’t mentioned. Zooming in to full detail gives:

Which is probably right, but I’ve no idea which building it is. I can’t even figure it out from street names, since they seem to have no data for central London.

I just tried tagging a photo from this weekend’s festival and had a similar problem. Yahoo just shows me a large area, whereas Google shows me a map of the locality that’s actually useful.

Maybe these are just teething problems, and Yahoo Maps will probably improve over time, but it’s a disappointment currently. The drag and drop interface is a great idea, but I hope somebody writes a greasemonkey script to change it to Google Maps. From what I’ve seen of the UK data it’s not really useable atm.

I had forgotten that the National Waterways Festival site has wireless internet access for the first time. With a USB adapter hanging out of the boat window(!) I can pick up a low signal on my parents’ laptop. What’s more amusing is that I barely have a mobile phone signal, but I managed to take and upload this just now:

The weather’s been pretty good and apparently visitor numbers have been high so far (I have insider knowledge as Dad is in charge of the whole event). Hopefully it won’t rain tomorrow.

Under attack from comment spammers atm, and a fair bunch seem to be sneaking past Akismet for unknown reasons. Ugh. Trying to keep on top of it right now, but shortly I’m off to the National Waterways Festival so things may get a little messy for a while - sorry about that.

Most likely back tomorrow. Hope everyone has a good bank holiday!

I didn’t know I could go to the B4L meetup until about 1530 on Thursday, and jumped onto a train after hurriedly packing a bag. A few minutes later I realised I’d forgotten to print out the details of the venue. My Nokia 7610’s web browser isn’t up to much and kept crashing, but after three attempts I finally managed to find the postcode at the B4L site. I plugged that into the surprisingly useful Google Maps for Mobile application, which downloaded a street-map of the area and showed the nearest tube stations. I also had the iPod London Tube maps loaded, so checked which line I had to use. This all took about ten minutes, so isn’t much good if you’re in a hurry, but I was quite impressed it was all possible.

I was sitting on the Tube when somebody sat down opposite. I thought I vaguely recognised them from a blog photo, but wasn’t sure. I then started wondering who else I might recognise from photos, and promply stopped concentrating and missed my stop. I’m obviously getting comfortable travelling around London - that’s never happened before! I made it to the venue without further mishap, thankfully

Clockwise from the lamp - Andrew (hidden), Tom, Kerron, Baby Washington, unknown (can’t remember his name - am a bad person), Paul and Andrew. Luke was there too, but left before I took the picture.

It was a fun evening. Conversation ranged from what next for B4L to Doctor Who to whether we’d require payment if we were King of Canada (it was decided that we’d forego a salary if we could declare such things as ‘everybody must wear a red hat’-day). As always my brain wants to overanalyse it and obsess over every time I said something stupid (I seem to remember making up and using the word ‘deradioactify’, for example), but I’m trying not to. I was maybe a little quiet, but was comfortable and had a good time. Definitely glad I was able to go - they’re a great bunch of people.

Other write-ups here and here.

Sorry it’s been a little quiet around here for a couple of days. I’m just back in Stratford after heading to London for the Bloggers4Labour meetup and staying with my uncle for a couple of days. Caught the train back this afternoon and then changed into smart clothes (as smart as I get, anyway) for a ball. Fairly tired atm. Couple of things I want to post, but I think I’ll head to bed for fear of my writing style descending into mush.

Nearly forgot about this. I was tagged with The Meme of Three:

1. Things that scare me

Walking alone in the dark
Socialising
Killer crickets

2. People who make me laugh

Aaron Sorkin
Bill Bailey
Joss Whedon

3. Things I hate the most

Cynicism
Cruelty to animals
Killer crickets

4. Things I don’t understand

Why it isn’t easier/mandatory to recycle newspapers
How people manage to make bed sheets completely flat
The Eucharist

5. Things I’m doing right now

Listening to Annie Lennox
Looking up train timetables
Browsing podiobooks.com

6. Things I want to do before I die

Be published
Live to 1000
Make a working paper clock

7. Things I can do

Juggle
A mean botafogo
Draw a fish

8. Ways to describe my personality

The greatest
Fantastic
Wherever there is danger he’ll be there

9. Things I can’t do

Maths above GCSE standard
Any sport involving a ball
Listen to crazy old people the opinions of the general public as read out on the Jeremy Vine show without getting annoyed

10. Things I think you should listen to

Escape Pod
The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
“Kim Jong Il” saying ‘goodbye’

11. Things I think you should never listen to

Cynics
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan
Cricket commentary while driving or operating heavy machinery

12. Things I’d like to learn

German
Biology to a-level standard
The guitar to a high standard

13. Favorite foods

Marks and Spencers’ chocolate-orange mini-bites
Kit-kat chunkys
Skittles

14. Beverages I drink regularly

Apple juice
Generic ‘tropical juice’ found in the same clear containers in every supermarket
PG-Tips

15. Shows I watched as a kid

The Poddington Peas
Bravestarr
Bucky O’Hare

16. People I’m tagging

Lil…Ummm…I think most people have been tagged already.

I walked past Holy Trinity Church this afternoon and saw it was closed due to ‘filming’. Two nearby streets were also cordoned off by police, and there was a severely dented police car in the middle of the road, which I’m assuming was related. I can see the church spire from my kitchen window, and while tidying up just now heard a loud bang. I looked up to see two more flashes/bangs and a definite explosion coming from the area of the church. There’s now rather a fair bit of smoke drifting over Old Town. It’s been five minutes and I haven’t heard any sirens, so presumably it was all planned!

Tom Cruise has been dropped by Paramount because “his recent conduct has not been acceptable”. There are rumours that he stormed into their offices and locked himself in a cupboard.

Bob Dylan is ranting about modern music being tuneless. Everybody thinks the next generation has no musical taste. Looks like he’s just another bitter old guy - what a shame.

Remember the guy who was mistakenly, and endearingly, interviewed on BBC News? Somebody’s thinking of making a movie about it. Seems rather odd - there’s really enough material there? - but interesting nonetheless.

The BBC has refused to broadcast a radio comedy show because of a sketch involving Rolf Harris painting Mohammed cartoons. The reason given was “anxieties over taste and decency”, not that they’re cowtowing to crazy people.

Madonna and her husband are lobbying the government with a proposal to treat nuclear waste with magical Kaballah water. According to The Times a BNFL spokesman said “the scientific mechanisms and principles were just bollocks, basically”. I have a suspicion that there’ll be real scientific breakthroughs in the dispoal of nuclear waste before too long. There are bacteria capable of breaking down radioactive material, and it seems like we just need to figure out how to use them to our advantage.

Tom and Jerry cartoons are to be edited to remove scenes of smoking, after an Ofcom investigation into a crackpot concerned viewer’s complaint. I think we can all agree that this is pretty stupid.

Somebody released two rattlesnakes at a screening of Snakes on a Plane. Hmmm. Lauren?

And, just because it’s great, cows have regional accents! In Germany they say möö. Scientists, however, are sadly behind the times when it comes to cow knowledge.

It’s long been known that with a clear view we can see only 5% of space. By looking at the movements of galaxies,as well as gravitational lensing, we can infer that they have substantially more mass than can be seen by telescopes. It was postulated that this might be taken up by dead stars, but careful surveys in our own galaxy have shown that these make up only a very small proportion. 25% of the universe seems to be dark matter, something only detectable by its gravitational effects. Dark energy makes up the other 70%, and is a different beast altogether - whatever is causing the accelerating expansion of the universe seems to be smoothly distributed, and that’s pretty much all that’s known. Dark matter is at least something we can get a handle on: some kind of particle we haven’t detected yet, presumably.

But what if dark matter isn’t caused by another particle? What if current gravitational theory is wrong for large distances, making it look like there’s far more mass than really exists? This has always been a possibility. However, a new study has revealed positive evidence for the existence of dark matter, a major development for something which could only be inferred up until now. It’s still possible that gravitational theory is wrong, but this seems less likely with confirmation of dark matter’s existence.

Cosmologists looked at two clusters of galaxies which collided 100 million years ago - very recent in cosmological timescales. Most of the visible mass of galaxy clusters is made up of hydrogen between individual galaxies. Dark matter does not, it is thought, collide with normal matter, so it was theorized that in a collision between clusters the gases would slow each other down but leave dark matter untouched, as shown in this animation. Eventually the mass of the dark matter would re-attract the gas, but a recent collision would show a large amount of dark matter offset from the gas clouds. And so it proved. There’s definitely something there.

It’s very cool. Physicists and cosmologists at least know there’s really something to detect, and aren’t worried about a refinement of gravitational theory rendering years of searching pointless.

Cosmic Variance explain it all with much more detail.

I just saw on Harry’s Place that Joe Rosenthal died. He took the iconic picture of US marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima during WW2, and won the Pulitzer Prize for it. I remember learning about him during my photography A-level. It was the example that brought home to me the power a photograph can have over a video (the moment comes at 22s):

There are continual rumours that the image was staged, but these have been roundly debunked.