I’ve only just discovered Malcolm Gladwell’s 2004 article on S.U.V. safety. It’s quite the dramatic read. In typical style, he grabs you in the first few sentences:

In the summer of 1996, the Ford Motor Company began building the Expedition, its new, full-sized S.U.V., at the Michigan Truck Plant, in the Detroit suburb of Wayne. The Expedition was essentially the F-150 pickup truck with an extra set of doors and two more rows of seats—and the fact that it was a truck was critical. Cars have to meet stringent fuel-efficiency regulations. Trucks don’t. The handling and suspension and braking of cars have to be built to the demanding standards of drivers and passengers. Trucks only have to handle like, well, trucks.

S.U.V.s have appalling safety records in comparison to any other type of car, it seems. Such large cars may be better at protecting you in the event of an accident, but the inherent control difficulties result in accidents being far more difficult to avoid, more than offsetting any protection benefit. He quotes life-threatening injury risk percentages, from studies of 35mph crashes, that are just ridiculously high. A Porsche is safer than a Ford Explorer, statistically speaking.

Gladwell goes on to talk about the psychological effects that work to make people feel that S.U.V.s are safer. Sheer bulk, soft surroundings and height all contribute. Cupholders, believe it or not, are also a major factor! This leads to a discussion on the perceived risk of factors that are out of our control. It’s far more likely we’ll die in a car accident resulting from irresponsible or drink driving, but when a manufacturer recalls tyres thought to be responsible for a small number of deaths it’s big news. We’re actually far more at risk from factors we can control (to an extent) than those we can’t. This obviously resonates with the news of recent days, and the general climate of fear.

I don’t know much about cars - how do S.U.Vs such as the Ford Explorer compare to 4×4s more common in the UK?

The aforementioned wankathon took place last weekend at a London photographic studio. According to The Observer the ‘dozens’ of volunteers were mostly male. Well, yes. The studio contained:

Moroccan-style lanterns and cushions, red and gold drapes, ornate mirrors and erotic pictures and statuettes.

Ornate mirrors? I can’t decide whether looking up to see a reflected room full of guys namedropping M.C. Masturbation would be a complete turn-off or just very, very funny. Women and men were given separate rooms, although I don’t know what to make of this:

Gazing slightly nervously up the testosterone-heavy queue was a Czech student who gave her name only as Jana. The 27-year-old was not taking part but acted as an interpreter for her friend, Marcel Rimel, 20, one of four Czechs who had been sponsored to make the journey for this event.

I am entertained by the idea of Jana interpreting Marcel throughout. Also, in case people had trouble getting into the mood:

Lubricants and pornographic magazines were provided, as were bottles of water, boxes of Capri-Sun and

…sorry, Paul…

packets of Cadburys shortcake biscuits.

There was one protester: a male primary school teacher and, you guessed it, Christian. Because without religion there’s no need to obsess over other people’s orgasms. He held placards saying “People of Islington? Do you want this? Are you not offended?’ and ‘Masturbation or public degradation?’”. He also argued that his children might explode, or something, if they read about the event in the newspaper. Tom Hamilton’s response to this made me laugh.

Apparently one of the event’s security guards ‘quit on the spot’ when he found out what he was protecting. To be fair, he was in a sticky situation.

I can’t find anything on the competitive aspects, sadly. The event raised over £500 for HIV charities, and I’m assuming everybody went home happy.

I’ve been reading Girl With a One Track Mind for a couple of months. It’s an anonymous blogger’s accounts of her sexual thoughts and experiences. I admit it’s a little sexy - I suspect women talking about sex is always appealing to men - but mainly it’s just fascinating. I’ve never particularly followed this kind of sex blog, but the quality of writing sets GWaOTM apart. With grace and wit ‘Abby Lee’ writes of a world completely different from mine, which is exactly the kind of thing I like to read.

Some months ago she was given a book deal for collected blog posts, and the resulting tome was published a week ago. Last weekend The Sunday Times took it upon themselves to expose her real identity¹, and in so doing demonstrated their complete lack of journalistic standards. From a recent post of ‘Abby’s’:

I have been in hiding for the last seven days, scared to go out, because I don’t want to be confronted by the journalists pursuing me or have more ‘paparazzi’ shots taken, like that secret, hidden, shot of me last week. This isn’t just my paranoia speaking: photographers have been camped outside my home, and also my parents’ home, ever since that despicable article which named me was printed.

Journalists have also been contacting people from my past – even the vaguest acquaintances of mine - and offering them money to talk about me, or provide photographs of me.

Ugh.

There was no point to the original exposé by The Sunday Times; in fact the article is simply wretched. It insinuates that the book is a fiction, makes a snide comment about the standard of the writing, and is at pains to point out that ‘Abby’ worked on the Harry Potter film set, because clearly sex = corrupt = contagious. But worst is the supposed moral high ground it takes and invites the reader to share.

The book will reignite the debate over female “raunch culture”, sparked by Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy’s book about the eagerness of young women to indulge in sexually overt behaviour. Levy argued “raunch” was corrupting women rather than empowering them.

The rest of the article seems to assume the veracity of this argument.

[Abby], whose mother is a Hampstead-based psychotherapist, is said to be an ardent feminist but she does not hide from the potential ambiguities of her situation.

Firstly, what does her mother’s profession have to do with anything? Secondly, from what I know of Female Chauvinist Pigs the argument is hardly applicable. Being sexually active is not part of the argument that the ‘raunch’ culture of Girls Gone Wild and Legs Eleven, and women who (supposedly) strive to be the sexiest rather than the most accomplished, are betraying feminism. There’s a definite undercurrent of ’sexual promiscuity = slut’ about this article; my feminist knowledge isn’t great, but I’m pretty sure this is exactly the kind of backwards attitude feminism fights against.

With such a shameless interest in sex it is no surprise [she] has gone to great lengths to try to conceal her identity.

Shameless? You could argue the literal meaning of the word, but it’s clearly meant to be read as a moral statement; one that is, imho, both completely ridiculous and thirty years out of date.

[Abby] declined to comment when contacted this weekend. But she happily signed for a bouquet of flowers when told they were from her publishers.

I don’t know what this is supposed to mean. Is she obviously an attention-seeker, unashamedly signing for flowers like that? Turns out that the reporter sent the flowers with the sole, and successful, intention of snapping a picture.

It’s a pointless, purely destructive piece of writing. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of exposing somebody’s anonymity, to do it for no reason whatsoever is simply vindictive, and I thought The Sunday Times was supposed to above this kind of crap. If you want to see a far more reasonable article, ‘Abby’ has an interview in today’s Guardian.

1. tagged with ‘nofollow’ [↩]

I very cheekily sent Norm two short stories when he originally asked for <250 word tales - I couldn’t decide between them - and he’s graciously published the second on his site today. The first went up a few weeks ago. Didn’t spot the irking repitition of ‘hand’ when I sent it in, though.

My site was kinda down since midnight. Something confused a mysql database table and the Wordpress admin pages fell over. On my own computer Firefox gave me blank pages while IE displayed them fine; not sure what was happening for other users. I don’t really understand what happened, but it’s all fixed now. Textdrive support reminded me that there’s a ‘repair table’ option in the mysql admin, which did the trick.

For I am back. You may begin celebrating. Hop to it, then.

The few days on the boat were very pleasant and relaxing. And now it’s close as near enough to the weekend. Hurrah.

I’m feeling particularly chirpy because I just managed to loop the slow foxtrot multiple times without messing it up. That dance has been a pain for over a year, and I’m finally getting somewhere with it.

Much to catch up on, although I’m already a bit distracted by B4L posting a picture of Gillian Anderson…Can’t be expected to concentrate after that kind of thing.

Good job Ben and Nod aren’t here, they’d be scared

Two days without blogging! I’m having withdrawal symptoms.

I’m away on Mum and Dad’s narrowboat for a few days. We’re currently on the Thames at Oxford, being passed by rowers with noisy coxes This being Oxford I obeyed the Law of Visiting Blackwells, where upon asking for the location of a particular book was told ‘it’s on the shelf, next to his other books’ which was helpful Still left with a few - damn shop has too many interesting things!

I’ll check emails once or twice a day via my phone. Google’s mobile gmail interface suspiciously doesn’t work via my (Orange) gprs connection, but pop3 is ok.

Update: Formatting fixed. Back in Stratford for the evening after a client’s internet connection went down and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong over the phone. I finally arrived there to find it had all started working again not long after the phone call (looks like it was just the adsl line going down for a few hours). Bitter? Me?

I hate it when people tell me I should watch what I blog in case a future employer reads it. This comic has two responses to such a challenge: one flowery, one succinct. Both work.

Your results:
You are James T. Kirk (Captain)

James T. Kirk (Captain) 55% Jean-Luc Picard 55% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 55% Geordi LaForge 40% Deanna Troi 40% Spock 37% Data 37% Mr. Sulu 30% Will Riker 25% Beverly Crusher 25% Uhura 20% Chekov 20% Worf 15% Mr. Scott 10% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 0%

You are often exaggerated and over-the-top in your speech and expressions. You are a romantic at heart and a natural leader.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz

Why do they think I’m like Kirk? It’s a mystery. I don’t like mysteries! They give me a bellyache, and I’ve got a beauty right now.

Note that I’m equally likely to be a completely expendable character At least I’m not Troi.

The police in Lincolnshire are worried. As is the case nationally, the majority of their burglaries remain unsolved. To help with this, the police have handed over details of break-ins and other unsolved crimes to…Who do you think? When I was told the story I thought it would be psychics / mediums¹. A couple of weeks ago I was told by a police officer that they use mediums for ‘guidance’ in their investigations. Seems to me that if you can talk to dead people you can do a damn sight better than ‘guidance’ - where the body’s buried / who did it / how it happened all seem like useful pieces of info. Oddly, this never seems to happen in the real world. But I was wrong - it’s not mediums. The crime information has been given to…churches.

Parishoners are to pray for divine intervention in the solving of crimes. This is the deeply stupid idea of the Lincolnshire Christian Police Association. A spokesman said:

“I know that praying can make a difference in my work, but it’s all a question of faith,”

I have to pick him up on contradicting himself. If it’s a question of faith then you don’t know that it works, you just think it does because you want to. If you’ve seen actual supporting data then you do know it works, and it’s not a question of faith at all. He then says:

He claimed winter casualty rates on the roads have been cut since the Bishop of Lincoln started blessing the council’s fleet of gritting lorries. “We pray over the gritters in the winter and the casualty reduction rate has plummeted, it really has.”

Have the number of casualties reduced? Even if they have, correlation doesn’t imply causation. I’d suggest that people are always trying to reduce road deaths in practical ways, and we’ve no idea what other measures have been taken, to say nothing of the severity of the driving conditions in recent years. There are just too many variables for raw accident data to be meaningful. This kind of data says nothing of any value, what you need is some kind of controlled, double-blind experiment into the effects of prayer. As it happens, we have this data.

A decade-long study in the US examined 1,802 coronary bypass patients, from six different hospitals. They were divided into three groups - those who were not prayed for, those who were prayed for and were told so, and those who were prayed for and were not told so. The patients were monitored for 30 days after their operations, and their post-operative complications were recorded.

There was no statistically significant difference between the prayed for and non-prayed for groups. In terms of raw numbers, more of the prayed-for patients had complications, and of the two-prayed for groups those that knew they were being prayed for suffered most. These are statistically insignificant, but worth mentioning to show that the data doesn’t support any religious interpretation.

If god doesn’t care about heart patients, why would he give a stuff about burglaries? What a waste of time.

1. media? Probably not [↩]

I like the language used in this article.

A £40,000 teddy which used to belong to Elvis Presley was among scores of toy bears destroyed when a dog meant to guard them went on the rampage.

A rampage. A dog went on a rampage against soft toys.

To be fair, rampage is defined as “a course of violent, frenzied behavior or action”. It’s just that you don’t often hear of rampages against soft toys Obviously it’s a shame for the owners of the toys, but it is quite funny.

I’m in love with Google Talk’s voicemail woman. I can’t leave a message without giggling.

It’s not often that I agree with the Daily Mail, but I think this article on James Blunt is right on the money. The guy doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong, yet is reviled by the press and the frequent target of abuse in the blogosphere. It’s hardly his fault if some radio stations have overplayed the singles. If people genuinely don’t like the music, fine, but much of it seems to be the usual I-must-sneer-at-anybody-popular snideness, and in many cases I wonder which came first.

Following on from the last post, the podcast also has a logic puzzle, and last week’s question was:

You’re in a boat that’s floating in a pond. You’re holding a cannonball. If you drop the cannonball over the side, will the level of the pond rise, fall or remain the same?

Mr Thinks-he-has-a-good-knowledge-of-physics here got it completely wrong, because I didn’t think it through properly. There’s no trick - cannonballs don’t float or anything - it’s pure science. What do you think? Highlight below for the answer.

Answer: The level of the pond goes down. When in the boat the weight of the cannonball displaces a certain amount of water. But when in the water it’s only the volume that matters - water doesn’t care about the density (and therefore the mass, and therefore the weight) of what’s in it, just the space it takes up. A cannonball is obviously more dense than water, so the volume displaces less water than the weight, so the water level goes down. I fully expected the level to stay the same, thinking that the displacement wouldn’t change. If not that, then maybe it’d go up. Going down was my last choice by a long way.