Last night’s Doctor
Spoiler warning.
Stonking. Four things to say:
- Who didn't well up, even just a little bit, when the Doctor turned to see Rose? Anyone?
- I love how the only non-Doctory person to figure out the truth was Richard Dawkins.
- The twist at the end was quite the shock, but it took me out of the episode a little. Mainly because I was thinking 'Nooooo, David Tennant is the best Doctor ever - please don't leave!'. Given that a new actor wasn't introduced at the end, I'm guessing he doesn't, but I'm totally intrigued as to how they'll get out of it...
- Gwen rules. And many thanks to RTD for the crossover - such things make a geek very happy.
In case you doubt Mr Tennant's credentials as Doctor, here he is recording a message for Martha. It's from 'The Family of Blood', and, as will become apparent, the script calls for Martha to fast-forward the middle section:
Not just crows
A local village has an annual tradition of building scarecrows. The results are placed by the road / on public benches / leaning against lamp posts, for everyone to see. It's obvious that a lot of work goes into them, and I'm sure it's a lovely endeavour for the whole family. However, driving through this village at 0030 creeped the living shit out of me. *shudder*.
Boom de Yada
For anyone confused by today's xkcd (as I was):
(and that is a truly great ad).
Via willia4.
Noisy neighbours
The ground floor of my block of flats is owned by an old person's Housing Association. I thought this would mean quiet neighbours, but I was mistaken. The lady below has always had the occasional yelling session with her relatives, but in the last couple of weeks it's gone nuts. There've been two doorstep screaming matches, one at 0100 and one at 0200, and both eventually moved inside to directly beneath my bedroom. It's annoying, but I try to be liberal about it - I don't know what's going on in their lives, after all, and for all I know she could be ill in some way.
Then this evening things went mental. I was sitting at my desk, blogging away, when hysterical screaming started coming down the street. There's a pub at the end of my road so you get the odd bit of shouting, but this time it stopped at my building. And got louder and louder. There were a group of teenagers, but the actually-quite-astonishing amount of noise was coming from one girl, with the others trying (unsuccessfully) to calm her down. It was bad enough that I was pretty worried for a while - I've never seen (or, heard) anyone quite so upset. This was coupled with running around the building, banging on the doors and windows, obviously trying to get the attention of the lady below.
I figured this was enough that I might need to get involved. I had no idea what I'd do, and didn't much fancy squaring up against f-ing-and-blinding teenage lads, even if they seemed to be on my side, but I was worried the other (perfectly quiet) elderly people downstairs might come out. Or that this girl might get in downstairs, and who knows what would happen. So I found shoes / keys etc. and tried to figure out what was going on.
The banging stopped, and the histrionics increased. Really, I don't think I could get that loud if I wanted to. I couldn't make out most of the words, but she was clearly in some serious distress. I couldn't see the main group, but I saw a few of the surrounding kids give up and leave, which didn't help. The houses across the street were all taking an interest, and I heard an adult voice trying to calm the situation down. It didn't work, and I didn't hear her again. Eventually a door across the street opened and a guy stormed over the road, threatening to call the police. That had an immediate effect, and a minute later she was let in downstairs. The voices got calm pretty quickly, and it's been quiet ever since. I'm hoping that'll mark the end of whatever's been going on. I'm still shocked at the noise coming from this girl, and I wonder if there's a problem there.
I'm a bit inexperienced here. Stratford's a fairly quiet town and I've never lived in a busy residential area - is this bizarre, or just something teenagers sometimes do?
I do like having a first-floor flat, though. All this stuff can go on below and I'm protected enough that it doesn't affect me such that I need to worry. But I do feel for the others downstairs, and I wonder whether there'll be repurcussions. I wouldn't complain unless this went on for a lot longer, but I wouldn't blame the older residents for saying something. I wonder if the Housing Assocation would do anything.
eStarling wifi photo frame review
We bought my Dad an eStarling Wifi Photo Frame for his birthday. I picked it out, after specifically looking for a frame that worked over the wifi. In my experience memory-card based units are disappointing - you update the images regularly for a couple of months, then the novelty wears off. I wanted a frame that would be constantly changing.
Sadly, no consumer frames were capable of grabbing images from a networked computer1, but the eStarling comes close - it downloads its images from your account on the eStarling website. The site can grab images from RSS feeds, email or direct upload, and resizes them to 800px for the frame. This is a free service, but means you're locked into their system. However, if eStarling ever go under the frame can work from memory-cards too (although not both at once).
Verdict after a couple of months: it's ok.
The good:
- The website picks up Flickr / Picasa Web Album RSS feeds pretty well, updating them every 6hrs (ish - it's occasionally taken much longer). Or you can 'push' a manual update.
- Emailing photos to the system has worked every time. You get a (somewhat garbled) confirmation response, and there's a filter to prevent obvious hijackings.
- The quality. Images are resized to 800 pixels and look terrible on the web interface, but pretty good on the frame itself. Viewing angles aren't wonderful, but I've been spoilt by my fancypants LCD monitor. They're good enough if you can put the frame at an appropriate height.
- It's a nice looking frame. Black and sleek, it looks good on the shelf. It's not too deep, is heavy enough to be stable, and is completely silent.
- It has a sensible 4:3 aspect ratio. This is the same as my parents' digital camera. Mine's a 3:2, and the frame puts bars on the edge rather than cropping. Plenty of other 'widescreen' frames might look nice, but they must either display *tiny* photos or crop them to hell.
The bad:
- It originally crashed a fair bit, but turning it off overnight seems to have helped with that. It has a built-in activation/deactivation timer, but if it crashes overnight it just never turns back on. A bit of googling suggests this is common.
- There's no random mode, so images loop in the same order. This is a shame, and quite odd - the website lets you view/add/delete images, and I can't think it's too much database work to (roughly) randomise a list. It's fair enough that the frame doesn't support automatic randomising, but it'd be nice to do it manually.
- It doesn't remember all its settings. It can change images every 10s, 60s or 180s. I prefer 180s, but it reverts to 10s each restart.
- The website claims 'unlimited storage', which is a bit OTT. Even at 800px, that's quite the claim from a company I've never heard of.
- Flickr's RSS feeds are limited to 20 images. Not a problem with the frame, but annoying when you've added a batch.
- The transitions are a bit...1980s corporate training video. And can't be changed.
- I couldn't connect to WPA2 security, but to be fair I'm can't see this explicitly supported anywhere.
- It wasn't cheap. ~£200 is pretty expensive for something with all these problems.
The ugly
I logged on last week and spotted a new feature: Facebook / Flickr integration. Great! I hoped that would get around the 20 RSS-image limit, so I clicked the button to link into my accounts (via the API so it doesn't need any passwords). Nothing happened. I figured it was broken, and forgot about it.
A few days later I arrive at the house when nobody's in. I'm walking through the kitchen and do a classic double-take. Why is the frame displaying drunk people in bars? Who are these people? Has the frame been hacked? Is the website broken? It's not like Mum and Dad will mind, but it's not exactly the intended use, and I have no idea what could appear next...So I log onto the website.
It turns out, they fixed the Facebook / Flickr integration. But it doesn't grab my images, it grabs my friends' images.
If you're on Facebook, you'll appreciate why this is Not A Good Thing.
So I turned that off pretty sharpish. The 'organise' section isn't that great, and it took a while to manually delete each shot, but I got there in the end.
Verdict
The eStarling, as I said, is ok. I've managed to work around most of its little quirks, and my research suggests none of the consumer frames are any better2. I'm not sure it's really really worth ~£200, but it's not a total rip-off. Mum and Dad like it, which is the main thing.
I really like the idea of wireless photo frames. If I had one I'd set it to show images from my flickr contacts, updating every 5 minutes or so, and I'd probably waste half my day looking at the thing. I imagine the technology will improve and they'll eventually be cheap and cheerful, but right now it's way more effort than it should be.
Itching
Itching. How interesting a medical topic can it be? Turns out, very very:
Now various phenomena became clear. Itch, it turns out, is indeed inseparable from the desire to scratch. It can be triggered chemically (by the saliva injected when a mosquito bites, say) or mechanically (from the mosquito’s legs, even before it bites). The itch-scratch reflex activates higher levels of your brain than the spinal-cord-level reflex that makes you pull your hand away from a flame. Brain scans also show that scratching diminishes activity in brain areas associated with unpleasant sensations.
But some basic features of itch remained unexplained—features that make itch a uniquely revealing case study. On the one hand, our bodies are studded with receptors for itch, as they are with receptors for touch, pain, and other sensations; this provides an alarm system for harm and allows us to safely navigate the world. But why does a feather brushed across the skin sometimes itch and at other times tickle? (Tickling has a social component: you can make yourself itch, but only another person can tickle you.) And, even more puzzling, how is it that you can make yourself itchy just by thinking about it?
The article describes cases of chronic itching that weren't solved by cutting the nerve endings. Neuroscientists studying this phenomenon have linked it to phantom limb disorders and various issues often classified as psychiatric. This has lead to radical theories on our brain's use of external stimuli. Atul Gawande, the author, compares it to a car: a sensor reports a problem, so you fiddle in the engine. Nothing fixes it so eventually you treat the driver, when it's actually the sensor itself that's broken.
How do you treat this? I won't spoil it, but the research does have some practical applications. Highly recommended, and very well written - I've just ordered a cheap copy of the author's first book.
Warning one: it's a little gruesome, and I'll be impressed if you don't get any wide-eyed pauses, with an optional 'oh my god'.
Warning two: Metafilter commenters report this article causing massive itching. I got a very mild outbreak, but some have it much worse...
Firefox 3 extensions I like
Firefox 3 came out a week ago. Its memory usage is apparently far improved (even if it still takes an age to load) and javascript performance is lovely - Gmail and Google Docs are snappy as anything.
Feature-wise, there's nothing stand-out jaw-dropping, but a lot of small, great stuff. I particularly like the 'AwesomeBar' - the address bar that searches your history for possible page matches. This means I can type page titles rather than domain names, and, for example, go straight to an amazon product page I saw yesterday by typing 'monkey brain jelly mould' or whatever. FF3 also has browsing stats, new themes, and colour-profile support (already causing a lot of confusion over at Lifehacker, which isn't surprising given how complex colour profiling can get). There's a full field guide here.
After a week I've finally got it configured properly. Here're the extensions I ended up with:
All-in-One Sidebar: Adds a small sidebar with quick access to bookmarks, history, downloads, extensions, source code and page info. It collapses nicely into an unobtrusive set of icons, and is just more handy than the menu bar.
Better GReader: Improvements for Google Reader, as compiled by those useful people at Lifehacker. I only use it for Bypass iGoogle Choice, which skips Google's annoying 'which reader do you want to use' page, and Preview Button, which adds an option to load the actual post page inline.
Compact Menu 2: Frees up screen space by replacing the Menu bar with a drop-down button. Once installed a new button appears in the Customise... options, and once this is dropped onto a toolbar the Menu bar disappears. You can't actually hide the Menu bar manually, so the trick is then to drag everything from the Navigation Bar onto the Menu bar, then hide the former. It's most useful when used in conjunction with the All-in-One sidebar, as you'll rarely need the menu bar.
Delicious Bookmarks: I think del.icio.us is far more useful than any built-in bookmarks manager, and their extension makes it as convient. It adds a toolbar with a local cache of all your tags, plus a quick bookmark button. If you're new to del.icio.us, it can also copy over all your existing firefox bookmarks.
DownThemAll!: This is designed to do clever things like download batches of files, but I use it as a regular download manager. I used to have FlashGot to link into my (paid for) copy of GetRight, but the latter is increasingly unable to understand download pages, while DownThemAll just works. Its one-click downloading is handy, and the I've-finished noise is endearingly pretty.
dragdropupload: Lets you drop files into upload boxes, rather than Browsing explorer. Quicker for email attachments.
FaviconizeTab: Adds an option to shrinks tabs to just their FavIcon. Means I can shove gmail, google docs and twitter into a corner without them taking up too much space. Compatible with Tab Mix Plus, happily.
Gmail Manager: Lets me log into multiple gmail accounts simultaneously, and adds an Unread Mail count to the status bar. I leave the latter checking for 'You've sold a book' emails on my Google Apps account, while my personal email is open all the time. It's been a touch flaky since Firefox 3, though, and I'm expecting a bug release soon.
Google Notebook: Ridiculously useful link to Google's scrapbook system. Highlight text in Firefox, right-click 'Note this' and it and the corresponding URL are saved to an online 'notebook'. You can create as many as you like, too. I use it to research essays and collect bad jokes1. I've had a bit of trouble with picture ratios, and they seem to have b0rked my fix, but text works fine.
Google Gears: Google's synchronizing tool, letting you work offline in Docs and Reader. I actually turned off the Docs' offline support, though, as it kept breaking one of my spreadsheets. Haven't tried it with FF3 yet.
Google Toolbar: I like it because it's the only search bar that adds clickable 'find' buttons for each word (or quotation) in your search, so you can quickly search the page for that specific term. It also sets gmail as the default email client, although FF3 can apparently do that itself. This extension has been known to randomly kill Firefox 2, but seems ok so far on FF3.
Leechblock: Stops me accessing certain websites in certain timeslots. I use it to block BBC News, Twitter, Google Reader and Facebook between 1100-1300 and 1400-1730, as I have no self-control. It'll actually kill the pages if they're open when the time ticks over, which is Annoying As Hell but quite proper. It can also block sites after you've spent a certain amount of time on them. And you can set it to block its own options in these timeslots, although I haven't found this necessary. Yet.
PicLens: A pleasant system for viewing online photo albums. Easier to see than explain, but essentially it takes over the screen, showing blocks of images against a black background and downloading upcoming shots in advance. It understands all the usual photo sites, including Flickr and Facebook, and you can click through onto an image's individual page if you want to comment. The most recent version adds a 'return to PicLens' button so you can go back to where you left off, which was its one major annoyance.
Remember the Milk for Gmail: I'm not good with to-do lists, as I usually forget them after a few days. But RTM's extension adds a toolbar to Gmail, where you can view / add / tick-off tasks as they occur. I spend half my day in Gmail, so this is pretty convenient and probably the reason I've kept up with RTM for 6 months. I'll write a review at some point...
Tab Mix Plus: Honestly, I can't believe this isn't built into the main browser yet. It gives you total control over your tabs, from their maximum/minimum widths to their positioning and scrolling behaviour, to their colour schemes. Firefox 3 support is only in Beta, but seems fine here. I'm on v.0.3.6.1.080416, available here (it's the current dev build).
I guess I'm running more than the average browser, but I think it's about normal for my level of geekery. I've been very happy with its performance, albeit with the aforementioned load delay.
- Did you hear about the giant who threw up? It's all over town! [↩]
An Atheism Meme
I've been tagged by the ever-readable Scribbles.
Q1) How would you define atheism?
The provisional conclusion that there is no compelling evidence for the existence of spiritual overlords.
I still use the term 'atheist' as it's pretty easy to explain what I mean, which I'd have to do for 'freethinker', 'nontheist' etc. anyway. Don't get me started on 'agnostic', though (the director's cut of Donnie Darko defines an agnostic as 'someone who believes that there can be no proof of the existence of God, but does not deny the possibility that God exists'. WTF.).
Q2) Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?
Not really. I wasn't Christened, and I can't recall my parents ever making outright claims one way or another. But when I was a kid my (not all that religious) grandmother inexplicably bought me 'the Bible in 365 easy stories', or something, and I made my parents read it every night. I recently asked what they thought of that, and they said they didn't anticipate how violent it would be. I remember the artwork more than the stories, but some of the old testament stuff stuck. I've yet to re-examine the battle-watching dude who had to hold his arms aloft to prevent the mass slaughter of all his people, but even at 10 that was a bit weird. But I bought into anything that seemed mysterious, so I was Generically Christian until probably 14-15ish. By then I'd begun to realise the assembly-guest vicars sometimes came out with total rubbish, and I remember calling myself an agnostic (argh) in a discussion with über-Christian RE teacher1 at about that age.
Q3) How would you describe 'intelligent design', using only one word.
Dishonest.
Q4) What scientific endeavour really excites you?
My favourites have always been astronomy and cosmology. I mean, stars are only ever point sources no matter how big your telescope, but by analysing their light we can figure out their chemical composition. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a picture of the Pheonix Lander parachuting to the ground2. The light from the Big Bang is still bouncing around, making up 3% of the static on an untuned tv screen, and we can use this to figure out the conditions in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. It's just nuts. And brilliant.
But the older I get, the more I'm impressed by the basics. Just the easy little physics equations, and that they actually work. I get regular holy-shit flashes about natural selection, too.
It seems like most things, the more I think about them the more they descend into grey-area mess. Politics, photography, the day-to-day running of my life, whatever. But science is the inverse: the deeper I look, the more detailed and clearer things get, and it's both a lifeline and a joy. So I'm rather a fan of the endeavour as a whole 
Q5) If you could change one thing about the 'atheist community' what would it be?
Erm. I don't think the 'atheist community' share anything but a disbelief in deities, really. The Internet forums suffer from the usual problem of online communities, though, and I'd like to kick out the mental atheists who forget religious people are human too.
Q6) If your child came up to you and said 'I'm joining the clergy', what would be your first response?
Which one? Why that one? Will it make you happy? Can I be a guest speaker?
Q7) What's your favourite theist argument, and how do you refute it?
I quite like the ontological argument, which essentially says:
Imagine the most perfect being you can. Got it? Well, that one's just in your head. A really perfect being would actually exist, because existing is more perfect than not existing. Therefore god exists.
This one's quite good as it's obviously completely bloody stupid, but it's actually quite difficult to put your finger on why. People have, of course, and it's fun wrapping your brain in knots trying to keep up.
The ontological argument doesn't come up much in the cafeteria, though. Pascal's Wager is better: if you die and god does exist you're screwed, but if he doesn't there's no experience of any kind, so play the odds. That's always entertaining, as I reject it for the same reason I don't erect shrines to my toaster.
Other than that, there's the moment when someone looks at you with pity in their eyes and says 'Jesus'. As if that proves shit.
Q8) What's your most 'controversial' (as far as general attitudes amongst atheists goes?) viewpoint?
I suppose thinking the Iraq War was at least a tricky decision is pretty controversial. And I'm a total relativist on the arts. But these don't really count - they're counter to the general opinion of commenters on atheist forums, but only in as much as they're common to everyone.
As regards general attitudes amongst atheists, I can't think of much...I take the Dawkins / P.Z. Myers approach that critical thinking + scientific knowledge will inevitably erode religious belief, and that saying the two are compatible is duplicitous. That one does at least split the scientists in the atheist community.
I also harbour some suspicions about the arguments over the best ways to change people's minds. There are endless arguments over the merits of meet-them-halfway versus stand-up-for-what-you-believe-in, and I'm not sure there's evidence for any of it yet. Although I haven't yet read Carol Tavris' book, so I might be talking rubbish.
Q9) Of the 'Four Horsemen' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite and why?
Dawkins, for reasons that will be terribly tedious to anyone who's read this blog for a while. The Blind Watchmaker literally changed my life - I haven't looked at the world the same way since - and I'm thankful to and admire the guy such that I have to be careful not to let biases get in the way of critical thinking. A couple of years ago I got him to sign my original TBW, and I think it's time to read it again.
Q10) If you could convince one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?
Ahmadinejad. And Katie Holmes, because she seems so nice.
Also: Russell Brand. He's not specifically religious, but goes in for all sorts of spiritual mumbo-jumbo. It's a shame, as the guy would be such a force for rationality.
Pass it on
I'm setting you free, little meme. Run, run like the wind.
RIP George Carlin
Dead at 71. He made me laugh. A lot. I like comedians who make their politics and opinions part of their comedy, and he was no friend to religion or anything even vaguely right-wing. And he had a seriously cool voice.
Here he is making the 10 commandments more efficient:
Not safe for work or Christians.
Hello!
Hey, thanks for coming! I'm Andrew, and this is where my headthinks come to breed. They often meander around humanism and photography, but they're flighty and you can't trust them, so anything is possible.
Do feel free to email me - I get lonely:
Your hair looks swish, by the way - have you done something new?
Recent Comments
- vicky: going up this weekend having done all the welsh peaks except 4 snowdon, cant wait
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: what, how can u live in the 21 c and say that, probably a sexist thing
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: da iawn laura, cant believe what im hearing, all this fuss, anyway love the site, and i agree, normal people who swear and curse clomb mountains cos we live in the...
on Climbing Snowdon. - Andrew: Did a few quick test shots to check the light levels, then balanced the camera on the arm of a bench, set it for a 20s exposure and hoped for the best
on ISS. - lynsey: Wow, how did you take that photograph?
on ISS.
