We lost our 100% positive rating on Amazon today, after getting ‘neutral’ feedback from somebody unhappy with the condition of a book. The comment said something along the lines of ‘I was hoping for a better condition, but maybe given its age this was too optimistic’. It’s tricky as the book was a (used) 20-year-old hardcover in good condition for its age, but obviously less so compared to anything you’d find in Waterstones. Amazon aren’t entirely clear on whether age should be taken into account in grading, so it’s a little ambiguous.

Unfortunately our 30-day rating is now 93%, as we’ve only sold 14 books in the last month, and our overall rating is 98%. Hmph. I refunded her 50% in the hope she might change the feedback, but no such luck - she replied saying the money didn’t matter, and she was mainly annoyed because she thought she’d got a bargain. Grrrrr.

Damian = linux ninja, and has been working very hard trying to restore some semblance of sanity to this site. Some mysql tweaks, coupled with local caching, appear to have made a difference, but it’s a bit of a waiting game to see whether it goes over again. We’ll see…

It honestly never occurred to me that my site might be so badly-constructed as to cause this many problems. I’m being an enormous pain to my host, so am going to do some testing offline + different servers etc. to try and track down exactly what’s breaking.

Probably won’t be around for a bit, and if the site keeps crashing we’ll take it down entirely, but anybody interested can follow my twitter updates.

Right. I think I’m back. For good this time.

For the last year, if not more, I’ve been plagued by mysql dropouts. I tried disabling themes and plugins, but nothing made any difference so I assumed it was my old hosts - Textdrive. Unfortunately the problems recurred after moving to my new hosting with Damian, and he worked waaaaaaay harder than one would reasonably expect of one’s webhost to track down and fix the problem.

It turned out to be something in the Wordpress database itself. The mysql server would sporadically go mental with hits to the wp_options table, to the extent that it brought down the entire system. I’m not sure whether this was the result of some broken plugin hooks or just corruption (can you export/import corrupted tables?), but whatever the cause, rebuilding the database from scratch and re-importing posts/comments seems to have solved the problem.

Ra.

RSS feeds will probably go mental as a result of manually re-importing posts from the last week - sorry about that - and I think the database of ’subscribe to comments’ has gone away, but neither are anything I’m too worried about. I’m back on www.wongablog.co.uk rather than wongablog.co.uk due to redirects having fights, but that’s no big deal - I’ll have to get over my irrational hatred of the www, though

‘Into the past’ is broken currently as I’m scared of pages that make massive database queries - hopefully it’ll be back at some point. Other than that, please let me know if anything seems awry…

Down to a basic theme as there’s something, somewhere in the depths of my site, breaking the database and affecting other sites on the same server. I feel rather bad about this. It doesn’t seem to be caused by any of the obvious plugin candidates, so I’m leaning towards it being some odd code in the theme. Hopefully. I’ll strip and revamp my main theme (actually I may just start again, given how messy it’s become over the past couple of years).

Readers who do not wish to know the depths of my geekiness should look away now. Really. This is actually a post especially for Young Jim, probably the only other person on the planet who would get excited by this, somewhat more blurry than intended, image¹:

Young Jim - observe the new Pay@Pump hotness! Keypads! You know what this means, don’t you? Pay@Kiosk-ers have no excuse, barring barley sugars. We win!

Normal service will now resume.

1. I would like to point out that the hopefully-not-illegal use of a mobile phone on a petrol station forecourt is fine because the dangers are made up [↩]

Srsly.

29. An Ceiling Cat sayed, Yo, Beholdt, the Urfs, I has it, An I has not eated it. 30 For evry createded stufs tehre are the fuudz, to the burdies, teh creepiez, An teh mooes, so tehre. an Ceiling Cat sayz u mus hav da moneyz 2 git da milkz. 50$ plez
31. An Ceiling Cat sayed, Beholdt, teh good enouf for releaze as version 0.8a. kthx bai.

It’s not surprising this project works so well, given that the Bible was the Wikipedia of the first millennium. Genesis 2:

11 An he said, hoo told u dat u was nakd? I was enjoying watching you. hast thou eaten ov teh tree, dat I told u dat iz not ok u eatz?
12 An teh man said, teh woman u gave me saw teh tree An told me ’bout it. At first I was liek “Noes!” but then, I was layk NOM NOM NOM.
13 An Ceiling Cat said unto teh woman, wat did u dun? An teh woman said, teh serpent playd dirty trick on me, An i eated it.
(…)
16 Unto teh woman he said,
“im gun make babies hurt alot An cause pain An stuff;
in pain u gun brin forth childrenz.
An ur desire shall b 2 ur husband,
An he gun rool ovar u and ask for beers and sammiches.”
17 An unto adam he said, because u hast listend to her An hast eated teh tree wut i tellz u U NO EATZ!
“cursd iz teh grawnd cuz of u
An u is b wrkin ur ass off ur hol life
An makin cheezburgers will be vry hard now
srsly.

Numbers 22 is always worth a look:

28. And Ceiling Cat maeks teh donkey talk and stuff, and teh donkey wuz all liek “Oh hai, me is talkin’ donkey”.
29. And Balaam wuz all liek “LOL stupid donkey, me kicks ur butt now, me kicks ur butt real good”.
30. And teh donkey sez “Oh but WAI? Me is just talkin’ donkey.”

Genesis 19 is lovely as ever, with ‘Cot’ realising the prospect of imminent man-on-man action and making the rational decision:

8. Lol taek my hot daughterz whu r virginz. Let me get em ann we kan bang them. But don’t do theze doodz, they iz in mah house.

I suspect this is actually quite linguistically interesting - there’s a surprisingly coherent grammar to ”kitty pidgin”. I love that people are spending time doing this.

Last night I went to a talk by Dr. Aubrey de Grey, who explained why he thinks the elimination of human ageing is a reasonable technological goal, achievable within the lifetimes of people alive today.

I’d been invited by a friend and, honestly, for a few minutes I wondered whether it was going to be whackjobbery. By the end I was impressed enough to want to read more on the subject.

In hindsight, he reminds me of Ray Kurzweil. And not just because of the beards. Like the man behind the Singularity, Dr. de Grey’s ideas seemed, from a lay perspective, to hang together. They certainly didn’t collapse under their own weight, and I eventually hit the limit of my own ignorance: I’m not a biologist, so have no idea whether his claims actually make sense in the real world. But I was impressed by the logic and apparent ingenuinty of his arguments, as well as his willingness to say ‘I don’t know’ to some questions - ‘what would be the effect on the brain of reversing ageing?’, for example.

Dr. de Grey’s idea goes something like this:

• Ageing and death are caused by the accumulation of ‘damage’ in our bodies.
• The cumulative effects of this damage eventually causes a pathology, which, no matter how it is treated, must eventually be a downward spiral to death.
• We don’t understand enough about the human body to prevent the damage happening in the first place. Any intervention in a system we don’t understand is likely to result in failure, if not more problems.
• The treatment of the damage, however, need not be reliant upon an understanding of the underlying causes. Once we have a solution that can treat all types of damage, at least up to some degree, we can begin to extend lifespans.
• Once the rate of progress of damage treatment methods reaches what he calls the ‘longevity escape velocity’, repeated applications will allow people to effectively live forever.

As I said, I’m no biologist, but I’ve read enough popular science that the damage theory of ageing isn’t completely new to me. So I don’t think this was made up. The damage hypothesis seems reasonable on the surface, but I wanted more detail, even at the risk of not understand it. What is this ‘damage’?

He went into detail, listing the seven types of damage that are thought to result in all the problems of ageing. He claimed that this list, not of his writing, is widely accepted among scientists, and hasn’t changed since 1982. They seemed specific: mutations in DNA, protein crosslinks, junk in cells, junk outside cells…At this point I had to take his word for it that this was indeed the case.

Dr. de Grey pointed to two of the damage types and said that theoretical treatments are already in the pipeline, although far from trivial. One of these was stem cell therapy, which is obviously quite the exciting and challenging area. He then pointed to the remaining five, and said that there were theoretical possibilities for treatment that, reading between the lines, research hasn’t started on yet. But, he said, none were insurmountable.

He went into detail on one specific problem, relating to the issue of breaking down harmful components inside cells. This, he said, is extremely difficult because the harmful components are by their very nature difficult to break down, or the body’s repair mechanisms would have done it for you (these mechanisms are extremely efficient, but can’t handle the extreme cases, which become ‘damage’). So what’s to do? Well, his idea relates to the wonder of microbes. In any environment, microbes will adapt to break down substances. There are apparently microbes found next to motorways which can break down rubber. This is a major part of research into the disposal of environmental waste. But where could we find microbes that would break down these hard-to-attack substances inside cells? His answer: graveyards. Bodies are being decomposed all the time, so there must be microbes present that can deal with these problems. So, it seems, it has proved.

Obviously I had to take his word for it that this was true. But this solution is elegant and out-of-the-box rather than ridiculous - exactly the kind of thing that turns up regularly in scientific breakthroughs. While skeptical, I was prepared to believe this could be the case.

He claimed to have similar approaches for all of the types of damage, and soon after this the talk ended. He was hammered with questions from the Oxford Science Society audience, and on the whole did a good job of responding. As I mentioned, he was prepared to say ‘I don’t know’ when necessary, and he expertly fielded the nuttier end of ‘are you going to make people get licenses to have children, then’ queries. He’d obviously spent plenty of time thinking about the ramifications of a ‘post-ageing society’, including that we’d all be a damn sight more careful crossing the road, although didn’t claim to have solutions to every problem.

The only reddish flag were his repeated references to the disdain in which his scientific colleagues hold him. He didn’t compare himself to Galileo or anything - the moment anyone does this you know they’ve lost it - but it was a little unnecessary. An orange-ish flag, I’d say.

I couldn’t come to any kind of conclusion - nobody without biological expertise could. He was a good public speaker, and I’m aware of my propensity for putting more trust into people with this skill. But my skepticism level is low enough that I’m interested in the opinions of others in the field, and shall watch out for his name in the future. He runs the Methusalah Foundation, which offers cash prizes to anybody who can extend the life of a mouse, and he’s written a book on the subject called ‘Ending Aging‘¹ that should be out in the UK before too long. I’ll try to read some reviews. A very interesting evening, and recommended if he ever comes to your town.

1. I have no idea how to properly spell the latter word [↩]

For no apparent reason, I am thinking that a Tony Clifton cover of Under the Sea would be great indeed.

Not exactly great examples of the genre, but I didn’t want the meme to die without it having been done:

Somebody must be able to do better?

I was going to make some LOLibdems, but I don’t think it’d work.

Spotted by my parents in Ireland:

I see a niche for Volvic.

(There’s a good joke near the end of this. Really there is. I am so proud). The first topic on today’s Jeremy Vine Show was the obesity study that’s all over the news, which concludes:

The causes of obesity are extremely complex encompassing biology and behaviour, but set within a cultural, environmental and social framework

But everyone’s ignoring that bit and concentrating on:

There is compelling evidence that humans are predisposed to put on weight by their biology. (…) Although personal responsibility plays a crucial part in weight gain, human biology is being overwhelmed by the effects of today’s ‘obesogenic’ environment, with its abundance of energy dense food, motorised transport and sedentary lifestyles.

This makes sense. On the pleistocene savannah it was evolutionarily advantageous to eat everything you found, and this has broadly been true for most humans throughout history (and, obviously, still is for much of the world). Nothing too controversial, you might think, except that the thrust of the radio show revolved around whether this simply gave obese people an excuse.

Obviously there were plenty of crackpot callers. It’s all their own fault / this is just the no-blame culture¹ / America = worse / blah. This is to be expected. But then came Richard D. North, spokesman for a Conservative party think tank. It’s not often I find my jaw literally dropped, but I did after he said something along the lines of:

Middle-class people aren’t obese. It’s the ex-working classes who haven’t got their heads around the concept of discipline.

To summarise, his argument was: stupid fat people should be ashamed, and making obesity a major social faux pas will solve the problem much faster than evil and useless government interventions.

My opinion: total cretin. I thought he was an MP at first, and am relieved to discover that’s not the case - he’s a ‘commentator’. I am concerned people pay him any attention at all, though. Sounds less like a think tank and more like a think wank. (told you it was worth waiting for).

I suspect 99% of listeners, no matter what their political leanings, also thought this guy was a nutjob. Why are radio debates so rubbish? Why do they always give a mouth to extreme nuttery instead of trying to progress the conversation? Jeremy Vine could easily point out that “middle-class people aren’t obese” is demonstrably untrue, or that saying “I don’t think that’s true and here’s an anecdote to prove it” in response to a scientific paper isn’t a valid argument, or that the topic of state intervention is of course something that divides right and left. But this never happens, on any radio station, and these kinds of debate never help with anything. Weird.

1. ok, this was on the BBC website, but I thought was too priceless not to include [↩]

They do everything they’re meant to, except appear. Working on it. Thanks for the heads up, L.

Update: This a caching problem on individual machines. If your comment doesn’t appear, a force refresh (before submitting) on the comment page - Ctrl-F5 on IE and Ctrl-Shift-R on Firefox - should clear it up. Thanks, Damian!

Hellos! Did you miss me? I’m back up and running on a zippy UK server, which should mean the end of the intermittent mysql downtimes I’ve been plagued with for the last year.

Many thanks to the ever-excellent Damian for all his help with the move, including cheerful receipt of rather disjointed 0330 emails

Off to Oxford this evening for a talk on the elimination of human aging¹, but I’ll be setting free a head full of blog in the very near future.

1. by “Dr Aubrey de Grey”, of whose name I am extremely jealous [↩]

Lots to say about Strictly, university, mental Labour ministers who think there’s a moral case for marriage-based tax breaks, and probably more Strictly, but I’m in the middle of a move to Exciting New Server atm so am freezing things until it goes through. It’ll hopefully only be a couple of days, but here are some ideas if you have trouble coping:

1. Get a parrot
2. Verify how much crockery will fit in the washing machine
3. Ponder the luck of Anton du Beck
4. Start a joke-a-day website that’s actually funny
5. Read a book called, I think, Tumbleweed, about a knight with some kind of dragon for a horse. Possibly. It had a knight in it, anyway. Was good.

Hope that helps. Back in a bit.