From the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego:

Webb … demoed a little plastic robot that falls over when your friends go off IM and stands up when they come back online.

I want one! I’d like different poses for different people. Some would have happy raised arms, others a snap salute, ‘talk to the hand’ or a gorilla stance, and I know one person who definitely deserves Saturday Night Fever pointings.

I had a 400-word writeup published in the Midland Amateur Dance Club magazine this week. Unfortunately copies are only available to members (I’m not one), and it’s not online. So I could be making this up, and nobody would ever know. Having said that, everything I write here could be made up and nobody would ever know. I once held a tarantula.

For years I’ve very occasionally heard Elton John’s ‘Roy Rogers’ on the radio and thought what a lovely song it was. It’s one of those tracks I only remember when it’s playing, and I’ve never put any effort into locating it. Happily, Elton John’s entire back catalogue was released onto iTunes this morning, so I now own the song. I somehow thought it was a rare one, but apparently it’s from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, so wouldn’t have been tricky to find. Still, nice to have it finally.

It’s always such fun when my iPod decides to delete and re-copy all purchased music. Not like I’m in a hurry or anything. Ah well. Something that amused me today:

Last week’s xkcd (linked to host site if it doesn’t fit):

Cory at ETech on Tuesday:

Made me laugh, anyway.

Last year I posted about my (bad) experiences with ‘neurolinguistic programming’, the professional-sounding but scientifically dubious psychological help technique. I just found a group of NLPers discussing the post. They’re polite enough, even if they do suggest I have:

a strong external authority reference, and, like most (?) people, is convinced that the answers to hir [sic] problems lie outside rather than in hir [um, sic] own resourcefulness.

Not true, although it’s a false dichotomy to begin with. I do indeed defer to the external authority of the scientific method, though. Also:

the author’s scepticism seems, to me, to be more about metaphysics, reincarnation, quantum physics, etc. than NLP per se. In short, anything that lacks the seal of approval of the readily proven.

I’m not all that skeptical about quantum physics, but I think I know what they mean. ‘[A]nything that lacks the seal of approval of the readily proven’ isn’t fair, however. Skepticism is simply going where the evidence leads - if there were evidence for reincarnation or the tenets of NLP I’d happily believe it.

It’s always interesting to see these kinds of responses. One of the posters wants to provide a point-by-point rebuttal of the Skepdic dictionary’s take on NLP, which would certainly be an fascinating read.

IE7 isn’t displaying the comments on the original post for me - shall work on that.

The new Stardust trailer is rather spectacular. Based on the Neil Gaiman novel, it’s the tale of a boy’s search for a fallen star, with pirates, princes and bewitchery blocking his path…I’m looking forward to it. I highly recommend the 720p HD version, if you can spare the bandwidth.

I took a geekily pleasing 256 photographs this weekend, and I was planning to use Adobe Lightroom to process them. I’d heard good reports of the new photo management / editing app, so last week I downloaded the 30-day trial. After a few hours play I was impressed, with a few caveats (that I now understand). A trial run with this weekend’s photos seemed like a good idea.

Immediately I ran into a problem. There were differences between the appearance of photos in LR and anything else:

Even exporting from LR produced something almost identical to the right-hand image, when viewed in anything but LR - what was going on? I considered asking for help on the LR Flickr group, but a quick Google suggested my question was common. To understand it, I needed to learn about colour management. I’m not there yet, but here’s what I know so far:

The average photograph viewer assumes everybody has a perfect computer monitor. They see a photograph with a blue sky and tell the monitor to display a blue sky. However, monitors are not perfect. Yours may be bad at displaying reds, mine might be too strong on the greens. The differences can be dramatic. The solution to this is the monitor profile, which contains information on the shortcomings of the particular unit. ‘Colour-managed’ applications look at the blue sky and adapt it according to the monitor profile: if your monitor isn’t good with blues, it’ll punch up the blue by an appropriate amount that you see the photograph as it ‘actually’ is.

My usual picture management utilities - Picasa, ACDSee and Microsoft Picture Viewer - don’t support this kind of colour-management. Adobe Lightroom does, hence the differences.

As it happens, I think the right-hand image is far more representative of the actual scene. It appears my Dell-supplied monitor profile is a bit dodgy. But even if I had a perfectly calibrated monitor, the only people to see exactly the same colours as me would be the ones using equally well calibrated programs. Neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer have this kind of colour-management (although the Mac-only Safari does, I think), so the vast majority of people are not going to see the image exactly as I intend. Having said that, I haven’t seen major differences when viewing my images on other people’s computers, suggesting that gambling with colours works passably most of the time.

However, I’d like to use a colour-managed application like Lightroom, as then I at least know similarly equipped people will see the colours as intended. I need to calibrate my monitor. How to do that? With a calibration device like the Pantone Eye-One Display Pro 2, currently listing at £140. Screw that. Adobe Gamma might be able to produce a roughly-correct profile without attached hardware, but AG only comes with Photoshop, the 30-day trial of which isn’t currently working…

Even if I can’t properly calibrate the colours, Lightroom’s management and editing facilities are excellent and I’d like to use them. Unfortunately as of now the colours are too far out for it to be useful, and LR doesn’t have an option to turn off colour-management (which makes sense). I could get around this by changing the monitor profile to a ‘perfect’ monitor. This would effectively turn off all LR’s colour-management functions and cause photos to display identically in all my programs. It’s frequently described as heresy.

I’m a bit stumped by this. I’ll have to stick with Picasa for the time being.

Live from Paignton Zoo.

Damn, if only we’d been at Paignton Zoo last month I could have found out ’some amazing facts about poo’! An opportunity missed.

Whoever came up with the phrase ‘cardboard jeans’ deserves an award. I’d never even considered buying fabric conditioner before.

This afternoon one of the two highly-skilled people working on my flat glanced at my dvd collection and said something like:

Is that the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2?

I blinked. I’d come to the conclusion that nobody is interested in the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2, much less has heard of it already. I’ve tried explaining it to people, but they just don’t care. And they should: it is a whole new version of Superman 2! It has a different ending! It fundamentally changes the nature of the first two films! It incorporates clips from the actors’ screen tests in order to tell the story differently! There is fascinating real-life backstory involving underhandedness and betrayal! Nevertheless, despite my best efforts most people just nod politely and steer the conversation onto the price of cheese in Bolivia / Other Boring Things.

Until today. Not only had he heard of the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2, but he was interested in talking about it! I then had to admit to not having watched it yet, despite having received it for Christmas. Ahem.

I’m glad it’s not just me

Spotted by a commenter at Bad Science, this from today’s Daily Mail:

Despite homeopathy’s popularity, there is little evidence that it works, other than as a panacea, making people feel better simply because they are receiving care and attention.

Admittedly there are a few problems with that sentence, but I think the word the author was looking for is ‘placebo’. It’d be great if homeopathy only worked as a panacea. The article’s on the right track otherwise, though. Offering BScs in homeopathy etc. is just appalling.

A friend of mine is having some trouble with her neighbours. A couple of weeks ago she (politely) asked a local 11-year-old to turn down the music he was playing in his front garden, and received a mouthful in response. Ever since he’s taken to yelling foul abuse at her from his bedroom window whenever she leaves the house, and playing the music even louder whenever possible. His family recently kept half the close awake by having a midnight argument in their back garden involving such lovely phrases as ‘he wouldn’t be such an irresponsible f*cking c*nt if you weren’t such an irresponsible f*cking whore’, and my friend is justifiably worried that mentioning the problem to the boy’s parents would just make the situation worse.

Does anybody have any experience of this kind of situation? Should she stick it out until he gets bored, or do something more proactive?

If taxes go up: typical Labour tax and spend EVIL. Poor value for money…Many are asking where the money is going.

If taxes go down: an obvious bribe from the future PM. How stupid does he think we are?

If taxes stay the same: not brave enough to make any changes. Pathetic.

Going to play around with the website code to fix comments etc.. Things will likely break.

1018: Broken broken broken. Good news is, I get the same problems with the most basic theme. Bad news is, that means there’s a data/server problem of some kind. I’ll leave it on this theme while testing…

1048: Seems to work if I disable every plugin in the world…time to re-enable one by one

1307: This makes no sense.

1314: Everything’s working now. I didn’t do anything other than dis-and-re-enable all the plugins. Have discovered a possible Wordpress bug, however.