Via Lisa, a proposal c/o Neil Gaiman. The pictures are priceless.

I don’t use Google Maps for Mobile often, but when I do it’s a godsend. It’s slow, though. Trying to pin down the current position takes most of the time - invariably I’ll type in road names / an area and after a 20 second delay it’ll come back with ‘location unknown’, or lots of possibilities, most in Scotland. It probably won’t be long before all phones have GPS built-in, but for now Google have launched ‘My Location‘, which uses phone-mast signals to trace you to a circle with roughly 1km radius. Mine is 1.7km, centred roughly on Stratford. I can then search the local map for a street name, and I’m sorted. It’s possible to search for local businesses too - this would have been handy a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to locate a particular restaurant in the centre of London.

Shortlisted passages from this year’s Bad Sex Awards. This is my favourite, from Boy Meets Girl¹:

Her hand opened me. Then her hand became a wing. Then everything about me became a wing, a single wing, and she was the other wing, we were a bird. We were a bird that could sing Mozart. Her beautiful head was down at my breast, she caught me between her teeth just once, she put the nip into nipple like the cub of a fox would.

Was that her tongue? Was that what they meant when they said flames had tongues? I was hard all right, and then I was sinew, I was a snake, I changed stone to snake in three simple moves, stoke stake snake, then I was a tree whose branches were all budded knots, and what were those felty buds, were they antlers? were antlers really growing out of both of us? was my whole front furring over? and were we the same pelt? were our hands black shining hoofs? were we kicking? were we bitten? We were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician, were arrows fired by a god, we hit heart, we hit home, we were the tail of a fish were the reek of a cat were the beak of a bird were the feather that mastered gravity were high above every landscape then down deep in the purple haze of the heather were roamin in a gloamin in a brash unending Scottish piece of perfect jigging reeling reel can we really keep this up?

It’s so much more silly than the explicit stuff. Norman Mailer wins the most horribly memorable simile award with ‘[the penis] was now as soft as a coil of excrement’. Ew.

1. according to the Guardian, anyway - it’s possibly Girl Meets Boy [↩]

They: Who fancies a boogie after this?
Others: [murmur]
They: Andrew, do you boogie?
Me: Yes sir. Well, I can boogie, but I need a certain song.
They: Which one?

There is no dignified way out of this conversation.

Last week The One Show presented Charles Kennedy with his own star. This came in the shape of a gift certificate from the International Star Registry. Looking at their website, this probably cost a minimum of £30. I can’t remember whether it was framed, but if so it’d go up to £80.

Just in case anyone reading isn’t aware: the International Star Registry is completely bogus. They, along with all the other star naming companies, are purely commercial and have no connection to anything official. The name of the star will not be registered outside of their internal databases. It’s not possible to name stars, like it’s not possible to buy land on the moon. This information can usually be found in the small print of their websites. It’s not exactly a con, but they don’t go out of their way to point out their unofficial nature. I’d argue it’s misleading at best.

I guess you could say ‘what’s the harm?’. So what if it isn’t real, isn’t it just a bit of fun? This is true, but why pay £30 (and the rest they’ll undoubtedly try to get out of you) to people who are clearly trying to rip you off, just for a bit of paper? Doesn’t the duplicity completely ruin the sentiment, anyway? It’s a lovely, romantic idea that’s completely spoiled by not actually being true.

If I had any design skills, I’d create a beautiful PDF certificate saying ‘If I could, I’d name a star after you’, and let people download it for free. I should so do that.

A teacher in Sudan is facing prison, or 40 lashes, for a terrible event she allowed to take place in her classroom. I can hardly believe it myself. I can’t bring myself to type the words, so will simply have to quote:

she allowed her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Isn’t that disgusting? What’s the problem, you ask? Clearly, it’s insulting to Islam. Here are the horrific details:

Ms Gibbons, who joined the school in August, asked a seven-year-old girl to bring in her teddy bear and asked the class to pick names for it, he said.

“They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad,” Mr Boulos said, adding that she then had the children vote on a name.

Twenty out of the 23 children chose Muhammad as their favourite name.

Mr Boulos said each child was then allowed to take the bear home at weekends and told to write a diary about what they did with it.

He said the children’s entries were collected in a book with a picture of the bear on the cover and a message which read, “My name is Muhammad.”

Nothing about this is funny. The school has been closed until January. There are reports of men gathering outside the police station where she’s being held. The woman could get lashed. It’s completely obscene. Even the BBC don’t seem to know which particular bit of scripture she’s supposedly breached. Let’s look more closely at this.

• It can’t be the name itself, as literally millions of people, all clearly not the original Muhammed, are named Muhammed.
• Islam doesn’t permit images of their holy dude - it doesn’t seem like this was an image, just a name given to a bear. To say that the bear was meant to actually represent Muhammed is something of a stretch.
• Most religions seem to have their own arbitrary animals that are great / awful. Cows, pigs, magical flying horses, dogs, whatever¹. But bears? Afaik, Islam has no problem with bears.
• The children aren’t being punished. This is odd. They chose the name! They have insulted the prophet.

Hmmm, let me think. What about this female teacher could possibly have annoyed so many people? What about her could have annoyed so many misogynistic young men? I just can’t think what it could be.

Googling has found a few Muslim bloggers who think this is stupid. Good. It’s easy to get the the impression that Islam is millions and millions of people buying into arcane bigotry, and I really don’t want that to be true. Fewer women saying how great their burqa is and more saying how dumb Islamic states are would be, you know, nice.

It’ll never happen in a million years, but wouldn’t it be great if the UK government said “we fundamentally disagree with your law. Lay one finger on her and we will impose sanctions. Let her go, right now, or we’ll do it ourselves”. Sigh.

1. no exotic creatures in there. How curious [↩]

I can see both sides of the Griffin/Irving freedom-of-speech debate, but I’m leaning towards the Oxford Student Union’s view. Giving cretins a platform doesn’t inherently grant them legitimacy, and the only people who’ll think it does are those who were fans in the first place. The media hyperbole seems to be badly thought through, too - isn’t getting all hot under the collar about it playing into their hands even more? The appropriate reaction is not bluster and disgust, but ridicule. It’s great that these two tossers are being given a stage where we can laugh at them so easily. Just say ‘these two have the critical reasoning skills of a dead sheep, and let’s all enjoy watching the Student Union rip them to shreds’. Assuming they do, of course - I don’t see any problem with inviting mental people to speak, but there’s no excuse for not calling them out on their pathetic arguments while you’ve got them.

Dr. Steven Novella today has a good post on the ‘faith’ involved in science. He takes on the common accusation that the assumption of a rational universe is an underlying, unjustified assumption of science¹:

Let us conduct a thought experiment. If we do live in a naturalistic world that predictably follows its own laws, then empirical hypothesis testing should be able to, over time, work out those laws and how the universe works. There would be no theoretical reason why science could not eventually understand any natural process. So far all the evidence seems to be pointing to the conclusion that we live in this type of universe.

What if, however, we lived in a “paranormal” universe - meaning that there were phenomena that did not follow naturalistic laws. Or perhaps our universe is somehow embedded in a grander universe that lies outside out ability to examine scientifically, but can occasionally intrude into our world. In other words, perhaps our reality, the reality to which we have access, is only a tiny slice of ultimate reality. Therefore, while we can only examine the tiny slice in which we live, it is subject to phenomena outside of that slice but part of the grander reality.

In such a paranormal universe, we would still only have science as a way to examine the world. Science could still mostly work. However, we would encounter phenomena that would not yield to scientific examination - that could not be explained or understood no matter how hard we tried. Centuries, even millennia, of examination would not penetrate these mysteries. They would forever lie outside the methodology of science as enduring anomalies.

Either way, the scientific method is the only game in town. There’s no need to assume the naturalistic universe for science to work, and in either universe science would give us some indication of which we inhabit.

The only ‘faith’ that I know of in science was pointed out by David Hume, and that’s the broken nature of inductive reasoning. As Stephen Law puts it, why should we expect the sun to rise tomorrow? Inductive reasoning says that the laws of motion have been constant and there’s no reason to think they’ll change. But that’s begging the question - Hume says that arguments from experience will always produce a circular argument, and claims to anything other than experience always use inductive reasoning. It’s a supremely irritating bit of argument.

The above still applies, in a way - science doesn’t actually claim things will always be the same, and if things changed science would simply examine what was different, but in practice science is probably wedded to the idea that results are repeatable. Anything else is practically unmanageable. Of course religion - always the opposing side in this kind of argument - suffers from exactly the same problem, no matter how much it plays around with the definition of its deity.

I’ve only been reading about this recently, and I’m sure Hume’s views are more nuanced than I’ve suggested. I also don’t know the responses of modern philosophy, but it’s certainly a fun one to think about.

1. I like that this argument apparently accepts the pejorative sense of ‘faith’ [↩]

I once investigated a beginner’s course in horology - the study of watches and clocks. I didn’t get any further as the course was £500, but I’ve always loved the beauty and intricacy of that kind of machinery, and it’s something I’d still like to try one day.

I may not go as far as the Untergunther, a group of French ‘cultural guerillas’ who in 2005 set up shop in the Paris Panthéon and, picking the lock every night, spent a year repairing a large clock broken since the 1960’s, all without the knowledge of the museum owners. They were recently in court for this ‘plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco’¹ but were released without charge. That is seriously cool.

That link was via BoingBoing, who recently sent me to a lovely gallery of orreries, which also includes planeteria and, new to me, tellurions. It turns out that orreries depict a planet and its moon, a planetarium the entire solar system and a tellurion the days, nights, tides and eclipses produced by a set of bodies. I want them all.

Horology and astronomy are combined in this planisphere watch, which is actually rubbish as it doesn’t turn. This is much more like it, but is five times the price. Nice though.

1. I know somebody who really isn’t going to take well to this sentence [↩]

I’ve never understood all the attention paid to Powerpoint, and the fuss over Google’s new online presentations tool was baffling. Who uses presentations? Well, apparently everybody but me and, it turns out, I’ll be using them a lot during my degree. I had to figure out how they work in order to talk for 10mins about Philippe Halsman last Friday.

I used Google Presentations for its convenience - I shuffle between a few places in the week, and it’s handy to edit from wherever I happen to be - but was very impressed overall. The interface is snappy and fairly free of annoyances. New slides are created quickly, and always appear after the currently selected slide - handy when you’ve over 30. They can also be drag-and-dropped into the correct order, rather than having to mess about with ‘move up/down’ buttons. The template system is initially a little confusing: when you create a new slide you’re given five basic layouts, which seems limiting. Actually all of these are completely editable, and are nothing more than a starting point. I used many images of different sizes, and GP was clever enough to resize them appropriately for online storage - I didn’t need to download 700k pictures during the presentation itself, but I couldn’t detect any drop in quality.

Actually presenting it worked ok - I used Firefox on a Mac, and there was no difference from my tests at home (although I didn’t know how to go full screen, unfortunately). All pages are pre-loaded, so there was no delay in moving to the next slide. GP automatically loaded the chat window for use with online presentations - people could connect and view remotely if they wanted - but thankfully it was easy to close. The only slight disadvantage is having to log into Google Docs and having your recent documents projected for all to see (I couldn’t care less, but I imagine this would bother some), although I realised afterwards that you can get around this by publishing the presentation and typing the URL directly. Alternatively it’s possible to export from GP into an HTML slideshow, and I had one of these on a USB stick in case the laptop had no internet connection - the only issue with this is the local javascript throwing security errors (IE7 whines).

I think it’s a decent system, but there were a few annoyances. It could do with an align option for blocks, as centering images on the page by eye is difficult. It’s also not currently possible to export in powerpoint format (.ppt files - but not .pptx - can only be imported), although this wasn’t a problem for me. The Printable view could do with some love, as my printer was happy to spread a single image across two pages - I think there should be a way to separate pages in CSS? My only other issue was being unable to check the order of slides from my mobile - I’d planned to write out my script on the train, but stupidly neglected to print out everything. Apparently there’s a mobile interface if you have an iPhone, but nothing for us plebs yet.

Most other people used Powerpoint and dropped the file onto a USB drive, which also worked well. I don’t have Powerpoint so can’t compare the two applications directly, but I didn’t find myself wishing for more features online, although admittedly I don’t know what I’m missing. Overall I’d recommend GP: it’s intuitive and, unlike other online office products, as fast as a desktop app. The convenience of being able to edit anywhere is, as ever, a killer feature.

The BBC have an interesting article on Tony Blair’s religious convictions, but it’s this quote from Menzies Campbell that particularly catches my eye:

The public might have been less willing to give him the triumph of three consecutive general election victories if they’d known the extent to which ethical values would overshadow pragmatism,” Sir Menzies said.

Weird thing to say. Aside from the underlying assumption that it’s only the religious who have strong ethical values, is he suggesting that doing the right thing should always come second to doing the practical/easy thing? Possibly not, but that’s the way it’s presented.

It’s odd that this is perceived as something the public would see as a bad trait - I’d have thought a politican who says he’ll always do what he thinks is ethically right would actually be more popular¹. Tony Blair’s suggestion that the public would have labelled him a ‘nutter’ if they’d known he never went away without a Bible is far more likely to be true.

1. not trying to specifically defend Tony Blair here, I just mean in general [↩]

Bit annoyed with Google Groups today, after it completely mangled my attempts to set up a mailing list. I sent invite emails to 20 people, but the acceptance link only worked for 5 or 6 of them - everybody else gets “You cannot view the group’s content or participate in the group because you are not currently a member”, then demands they set up an account - something I explicitly told them they didn’t have to do. Irritating. I directly added everyone’s email addresses to the list in the end, after sending out apologetic and explanatory emails, which isn’t ideal. Hmph.

Albert Einstein called photographers lichtaffen - german for ‘light monkeys’.

Bleurgh. Cold. Inevitable really, given that everybody around me has been going down for weeks. Lemsip ftw.

I’m giving a presentation on the photographer Philippe Halsman this Friday. This is probably his most famous image, Dali Atomicus:

A collaboration between him and the pictured Salvador Dali, it’s possibly the most famous surrealist photograph¹. If you look at a larger version, the position of the cats mirrors their image in the left-hand painting. It’s a wonder the shot took ‘only’ 28 attempts (with a darkroom development period between each). I always feel sorry for the cats.

But here’s what’s confusing me: the water. If the picture truly is a one-shot affair with no manipulation, it’s a very odd result - the path of the water doesn’t conform to Newtonian gravity. The obvious possibility is an assistant with a bucket moving the path, but the shot’s apparent short shutter-speed seems to rule this out. The most plausible method is suggested here: the person threw the water then got the hell of out the frame. That seems unlikely, looking at the scale of the room, but might be possible. Or maybe the water was released above the frame? Would water retain that kind of a path when falling? Given the disruption of the stream by the uppermost cat, the water must have been ’spread’ from left to right. It’s much thinner towards the bottom left, which is curious.

There are wider-angle shots, but nothing that gives any hints. I think I need experiments to figure out how this was done, but they might not go down well in the university studios…:-)

1. prepared to be proven wrong on this [↩]

It’s half a year since I began my Year 25 project, in which I take a picture every day and add it to a Flickr set. I’ve only once forgotten, but as luck would have it I’d taken one accidentally - albeit the most boring one ever - so haven’t yet had to invoke Mork.

It took me a while to get into the habit of taking a shot during ‘normal’ days in which nothing special was happening - I’d usually remember in the evening and try to find something relevant. I’ve become better at this, partly through conditioning and partly through recently acquiring a second-hand Nokia N91 with a 2 megapixel camera. It’s not great quality, but is a huge step up from my old phone, and it’s certainly good enough for quick snapshots when my proper camera isn’t around. Having said that, there’ve been occasions where using my SLR would only have taken an extra 15 seconds and I haven’t bothered, so that’s a disadvantage.

I like the challenge, and it’s certainly prompted me to try out different techniques and styles. My main aim for the next six months is to be braver when it comes to photographing people - I regularly meet interesting people and think “they’d make a good subject for today’s picture” but am too timid to ask permission. Must try harder.

Incidentally, this also means it’s only 6 months till my birthday. Just so you know.