Best series so far. No question. Most episodes were very good, the worst were mediocre at their lowest, and the best were up there with the triumphs of S1+2. Spoilers spoilers spoilers.

Did I mention there’ll be spoilers?

Continue reading ‘Doctor Who Series Three’

One of the most impressive optical illusions I’ve seen in a while. Which way is she rotating? She started off clockwise for me, but is now firmly anti-clockwise and won’t change back for more than a second or two. I managed it by looking at the edge of the screen, rather than concentrating on her shadow, but ymmv…

Update: Re-reading the above, I see I didn’t really express how amazing this illusion is. Usually with ’switching’ illusions I can see how it works - that is, which part of my visual system is getting confused, and how the image is constructed so as to create the effect - but this one’s a mystery to me. It’s completely unintuitive. I haven’t had a good dig around the site yet; I got stuck on this one and haven’t progressed further. Anybody?

Last night somebody¹ told me I look like Tyrannosaurus Alan. I am now torn. One the one hand, tiny little arms and generally jurassic sensibilities. On the other, a possible family connection to T-Rex? We could so hang out. It would be awesome.

If you don’t know who Tyrannosaus Alan is, you need to stay in more:

Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Goddamn it.

1. who shall remain nameless [↩]

I managed to miss this one. Jonathan Edwards, the evangelical olympic athlete who famously refused to compete on Sundays, has revealed he is now an atheist:

“Once you start asking yourself questions like, ‘How do I really know there is a God?’ you are already on the path to unbelief,” Edwards says. “During my documentary on St Paul, some experts raised the possibility that his spectacular conversion on the road to Damascus might have been caused by an epileptic fit. It made me realise that I had taken things for granted that were taught to me as a child without subjecting them to any kind of analysis. When you think about it rationally, it does seem incredibly improbable that there is a God.”

*shakes head in amazement*. It’s really, really rare for such high-profile and evangelical believers to change their minds like this. Great news, obviously. He has interesting things to say about the role of faith in his sporting success:

Would Edwards have been as successful a sportsman had he been assailed by such doubts? It is a question that the world record-holder confronts with bracing candour. “Looking back now, I can see that my faith was not only pivotal to my decision to take up sport but also my success,” he says. “I was always dismissive of sports psychology when I was competing, but I now realise that my belief in God was sports psychology in all but name.”

Muhammad Ali once asked: “How can I lose when I have Allah on my side?” Edwards understands the potency of such beliefs, even as he questions their philosophical legitimacy.

“Believing in something beyond the self can have a hugely beneficial psychological impact, even if the belief is fallacious,” he says. “It provided a profound sense of reassurance for me because I took the view that the result was in God’s hands. He would love me, win, lose or draw. The tin of sardines I took to the Olympic final in Sydney was a tangible reminder of that.”

I hadn’t thought of it like that before. I don’t quite see where the desire to be the best would come from, but I can see that it relieves the pressure of major occasions to think that it’s all in god’s hands, and that there’d be no shame in failure. It was always interesting how his largest jumps were consistently in the finals of major competitions, when you’d think more relaxed occasions might be more conducive to the very best results. Fascinating.

The article remains religiously-neutral for the most part, but at one point drifts into the usual negative connotations of atheism, when it says that JE came to believe:

that life is not something imbued with meaning from on high but, possibly, a purposeless accident in an unfeeling universe.

If you want to phrase it like that, sure, but only for certain definitions of ‘purposeless’ and ‘unfeeling’. They’re usually negative words implying something is lacking, whereas atheists tend to see them as null. It’s like not having a banana versus there being no such thing as a banana. In the first case, you might want a banana. But in the second case there is no concept of a banana, so it means nothing.

I certainly wouldn’t have predicted this one. I wonder whether we’ll see more public figures ‘come out’ as atheists, as the non-religious become more higher profile.

Two men have lost their appeal to European courts over the use of speed cameras. They claimed it violated their human rights to be forced to reveal who was driving the car. Or something. Maybe they had a case. I don’t care: it’s transparent bollocks, and everyone knows it. 

I wish they’d just come out and say what they really mean: “I want to drive faster”. This is it. This is the sole motiviation behind complaints about speed cameras. They couldn’t care less about road safety, and they couldn’t care less about their civil liberties. Nobody spends time talking about speed limits and safety measures on the railways. It’s obvious what this is really about, and I’m sick of it.

The never-ending complaints about devices that punish people for breaking the law are moronic, laughable and pathetic. ’Money-making devices’, ‘nanny state’, etc. etc.. For crying out loud! It is not obvious to me that it’s safe to do 90 on the motorway. It is not obvious to me that it is safe to do 40 in a 30 zone when ‘it’s quiet’, ’the houses are set back’, ‘I have a 2 litre car’ or whatever tedious excuse people come up with when they just want to drive faster¹. Neither is it apparently obvious to the road safety experts who create the laws.

If you really, really think that it’s safe to drive faster, bloody well start a campaign to have the limits raised. Or a variable speed system. Or a free-for-all where the onus is on fragile humans to keep away from massive kinetic machines. Whatever. Something tangible, backed up with proper, statistical evidence that isn’t something you heard Jeremy Clarkson say. Complaining about enforcement and not the law itself just makes me think you have no case.

I’ll bother listening once speed-camera campaigners have something to say that doesn’t smack of a complete disregard for the expertise of road safety experts, other road users and the legal system. Until then it’s just the ramblings of a bunch of speed-junkies.

1. incidentally, I suspect the feeling of speed is entirely subjective: 50 feels terribly slow once you get off the motorway. People don’t want to drive faster, they want to drive faster than everyone else [↩]

My brain is broken. Twice in the last five minutes Megan the labrador has jumped up to see me and whacked her head into the corner of the keyboard tray. It makes a particularly unpleasant crack as she does so. She, of course, isn’t bothered in the slightest, but now my head is hurting. I can feel the woozy, neauseous, copper-tasting feelings of a head injury. This is stupid. I am developing sympathy pains with the dog. 

I am hoping this does not continue, given that earlier this week she was spayed.

While on top of Walla Crag last week I took eight hand-held shots in a panorama. I hadn’t played with panorama software for years, and didn’t have fond memories of getting any working properly. It turns out things have improved dramatically, and much of it is free. Top of the search results was Autostitch, a free, fully-automatic photo stitcher. I wasn’t expecting great results, in less than a minute it produced this:

Which is pretty impressive! You can barely spot the photo blends, and the wavy orientation is to be expected without a tripod. Autostitch offers very few options, however, and I wanted to change the photo order so the lake was more prominent. After downloading three separate programs - Autopano SIFT 2.3, hugin and enblend - and spending an hour trying to get them working properly, this was the final result:

It’s a little straighter, and the blending is of a slightly higher quality. But the programs failed miserably when the photos were placed in a different order, even when I used a tutorial. This was probably due my lack of understanding rather than a bug, but I couldn’t get it to make sense. I’m sure it’s worth persevering with the complex software, but for quick, high-quality results, I can’t fault Autostitch. All good fun. I’ll have to try more of these.

Via Paul, my blog rating:

Result! This is apparently because of ‘rape’, ’sex’ and ‘kill’ all being on the front page. I think there is an important lesson here: never mention rape, sex, or death to anyone under 17. I don’t know what would happen, but it would be bad. I put my Jerry Springer post through the system, and it objected to ‘gay’, with an NC-17 rating.

I recently had somebody get stroppy over my quoting of ‘obscene words’, so maybe I should put this on the front page? Nah, fuck it.

I’d heard it said that Tony Blair was a presidential Prime Minister, but I didn’t realise what it meant until today. In one aspect, anyway.

At times of heightened emotion it seemed natural that TB would make a statement - he was the face of the government and, it seems reasonable to say, the country. On 9/11, the death of Princess Diana, the success of the Olympic bids, or any kind of national problem, Tony Blair was always there, expressing the appropriate emotions. Whether or not they agreed with him politically, I think most people came to expect this. For lack of a better word, TB was a spiritual leader as much as a political one.

Today I heard someone claim Gordon Brown will be far less of a media Prime Minister. He won’t make such statements. He’ll run the country politically, but won’t speak for the country in quite the same way.

I find this a strange concept. To me that kind of spiritual leadership seems modern: the way of the future; a government without that quality seems to be lacking something. Maybe I feel this way because it was happening during my formative years, or possibly it’s the influence of US tv. I’m very possibly wrong, and a faceless government won’t seem as different as I anticipate.

But the media are used to having a go-to guy. So, at least a little, is the country. If it isn’t Gordon Brown, who’s the obvious man to turn to? Who in modern politics has the necessary charisma and media savvy? David Miliband, possibly. But also David Cameron. Which is worrying.

Applause and a standing ovation at the end of the final PMQs - both fully justified if you ask me. There were no snarky comments or hurling of insults at the other parties; it was dignified and impressive. I think I saw David Cameron waving his arm to demand his party rise, which is cool.

I don’t know enough to comment properly on Tony Blair’s politics - others Bloggers4Labour will no doubt do a great job - but I agreed with him more than I didn’t. BBC2 cut away during the final thirty seconds of the speech, which was annoying as hell, but once I saw it I thought the final tribute to politics was worthy and well spoken. I think only Bill Clinton compares when it comes to gravitas, or quality of leadership.

Having said all that, it’s always embarrassing watching the House of Commons in action. I don’t care if it’s century-old tradition - the roars, cheers and boos are just pathetic, and I cringe every time. Not, however, quite so stupid as anti-war protesters. What kind of moron thinks yelling ‘war criminal’ from the gates of Downing Street is a clever thing to do?

Gordon Brown will no doubt bring interesting change. Exciting times.

Tidying, cleaning, more tidying, photo processing…At some point I should get back to earning money, I suppose. In lieu of anything exciting, a photograph of what I assume is a doggingmobile, and a completely bizarre chocolate set:

And speaking of speeding, this is the funniest thing ever. I hope it catches on.

I’m now off to catch up with Doctor Who. I saw the Family of Blood and Blink episodes while we were away. Fantastic stuff. Particularly the latter - Steven Moffat rocks. Skuds informs me Mr Moffat is the writer of Jekyll, which I happily recorded on a whim. I’ll catch that soon, but it’s Utopia tonight, then Drum Thingy asap, hopefully before I accidentally come across the entire plot.

Feel free to kick my ass if I’m way out on this, but the coverage of a ‘lenient’ rape sentence seems to be a little off-base. It’s being reported as “man who raped ten-year-old girl gets only two years in prison, after judge makes comments about her ‘provocative clothing’”. Various children’s groups are up in arms about it, as you’d expect. But there are more details: the defence apparently stated that the girl in question looked 16, and that doctors treating her thought she was at least in her mid-teens. Furthermore, the sex was ‘consensual’ so the ‘rape’ is because she was underage. This seems to at least require a little more thought, and the hysterical headlines aren’t helpful.

Just to be clear: I am obviously not defending the person involved. Clearly the ‘consent’ of a 10-year-old is meaningless, and the defendant committed a crime that deserves punishment. The charities are completely correct that any suggestion of blaming the victim should be nuked from orbit, and the guy may be everything he’s portrayed as - the coverage is spotty and I don’t know many details of the case. But nevertheless it does throw up an interesting thought experiment: there could be shades of grey here that don’t mean saying the victim did anything wrong, but equally don’t mean ‘lock him up and throw away the key’.

Let’s say the defence is true. If so, couldn’t comments about ‘provocative clothing’ be in reference to her looking older than ten? Yes, the phrase usually implies despicable she-was-asking-for-it sentiments, and that’s how it’s been interpreted by various charity spokesmen, but it needn’t. If a ten-year-old could pass for 16 physically (and that’s a big if) it seems reasonable that ‘provocative clothing’ could add to the impression - it’s at least a valid issue for a judge to raise. If true, though, doesn’t it raise a possible distinction between deliberate and non-deliberate child abuse? Does somebody who thought they were having consensual sex with with a 16 year-old deserve less punishment than somebody who knew her true age / forced it?

In this case the guy was 24, and it’s possibly tempting to make assumptions about the type of 24-year-old who goes after 16-year-old girls. But creepy isn’t illegal, and shouldn’t be equated with such. What if he’d been 16? If you want a black/white demarcation, isn’t the only way to require mutual proof-of-age before sex? Otherwise, the only reasonable solution I can see is to judge each case on its own merits, which is difficult when people ignore such merits and write headlines implying there are easy and obvious answers.

I’ve no clue what an appropriate sentence would be in this (possibly hypothetical) case. Two years may be too few, but the impression given by the broad-brush use of ‘paedophile’ is that he deserves life imprisonment, only some crazy misogynist judge has let him off. The suggestion that “[t]his sends out all the wrong signals to paedophiles” is clearly disingenuous, as it’s not necessarily sentencing a ‘paedophile’ in the colloquial definition of the word. Reporting it as ‘yet another paedophile gets light sentence’, however, might very well send out the wrong signals.

Like I said, feel free to yell if I’m talking crap.

Helpful Royal Mail, marketing-speak at Philips, and something that must have seemed like a good idea at the time…

and, this morning I drove through this:

Possibly a mistake. My car seems less than chipper. Ho hum.

I am back! I got you some cake! It’ll go off if posted, so I’ll eat it on your behalf. YUMS.

Our week in the Lakes was surprisingly dry after the first couple of days, although we saw many skies like this:

It was a great escape, and I’ll write it up properly soon. I now have 702 photos to process, a flat that looks like a bomb went off (including a bag of soup that I’m fairly sure used to be bananas), and an inability to turn off the tennis. Currently catching up with post / email / facebook etc..

I’m away for a week from tonight, so blogging will be light. Abi and I are heading to the Lake District. I admit it always rains in the Lakes, but this is just silly.

We booked through country-cottages.co.uk, which was rubbish. After finally deciding on a place to stay, I went through the order process and had £35 of travel insurance added to my basket. This was ‘optional’ yet unremovable. We didn’t want to miss out on the booking, so completed payment and Abi phoned the next day to remove the insurance. They told her the order hadn’t been processed yet, as Internet orders always take 2-3 days to go through. Confused, Abi asked what would happen if somebody tried to book by phone in the meantime. She was told all phone orders are processed and confirmed immediately. So she placed the order by phone instead, resisting the hard sell on travel insurance. She then had to chase for a confirmation email, which was missing after being sent to ‘abigale’, despite having had the name spelt out to them.

Their website appears to be completely different now, so maybe they realised the error of their ways. Still, I won’t be using them again.

I’m heading up to Nottingham this evening, then we’ll drive over to the Lakes first thing tomorrow. Have fun without me. I’ll buy you some Kendal Mint Cake.