Britain’s got wind
January 18th, 2007 at 20:17

Today’s the first day in a while that I’ve felt personally involved with the news agenda. Unfortunately, this isn’t because I’ve resigned my post as a government minister to “spend more time with my family” (my corruption is still secret) but is because nothing else seems to be going on in the world.

The only stories on the news channels are “ooh, heck, its a bit windy, like”, and “celebrity moron is also racist”. Unfortunately, I’m not a celebrity. Or a racist, for that matter.

Commuting to and from University today was a bit of a chore. It turns out that the entire rail network can be sent into chaos by a couple of gusts of wind. Given the delays and havoc it was causing, anyone would think that there were leaves on the line or something.

Speed limits have been imposed nationwide, causing trains to move slower than the Middle East Peace Process, and as a result, my trains were delayed by around half an hour each.

There’s a tip for any budding terrorists who are reading here: don’t go to the effort of making bombs or whatever, just get yourself and a thousand mates to go to a railway station and start blowing on the track, and you’ll cripple the rail network. Presumably.

It makes me wonder what will happen if we ever experiences the horrors of snow.

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De-crappy-tation (ie: I’m implying the execution was carried out badly)
January 16th, 2007 at 00:28

So, they’ve executed two of Saddam’s henchmen, and quite incredibly, they have managed to fuck it up more than Saddam’s murder itself.

Like Saddam, they were hanged. Unfortunately, it went a bit wrong: one of the murderees were decapitated. Barzan Ibrahim’s head came off. Beheaded. Seriously.

Now, I’m not being funny, but you’d think that if you’re doing something so important in the public eye, you’d at least do it right. You’d double check and triple check the rope- as you wouldn’t want everyone thinking that your idea of “justice” is medieval… and not just medievil.

I think its disgusting that they managed to mess up so bad. I hope that heads will roll over this.

It looks like the procedure was much the same as Saddam too – the executions all wore balaclavas, dead professional, like. But unlike Saddam, the two men being executed were wearing orange boiler suits.

The video of the hanging/beheading hasn’t been released- presumably the “hot potato” with the head afterwards would prove too embarrassing for the Iraqi government. However, I have managed to get hold of this exclusive screencap of the execution:

Oh, hang on. Sorry, wrong picture there… that’s actually Ken Bigley, who was beheaded by insurgents in Iraq a few years ago. I cannot believe I got the extra-judicial murder of a Briton by terrorists confused with these executions.

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Rubbish band names
January 14th, 2007 at 03:08

I recently discovered that there’s a popular musician at the moment who calls himself “Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly“. I haven’t heard any of his music, nor have any desire to. I don’t know anything about him other than his name. Yet his name irritates me.

I don’t understand why solo artists would give their self a name that implies that they are in fact multiple people. If he must have a name that sounds like something a ‘wacky student’ might have on a t-shirt along with “amusing” stick-diagrams of each action, then he should at least have the decency to be in a proper band.

Morrissey, despite of all his crimes against optimism, at least has a name that sounds like a singular person.

GCWCF isn’t the worst offender either. A few months ago now I went to a gig where one of the support artist’s name was “The Fantastic Foxes“. The key thing here is the plural foxes. There was one of him. And he wasn’t even a fox. It just sounds wrong.

Other band names irritate me too. I don’t mean irritate me in the “I’m going to do something about it and cause a fuss” sense, but just make me slightly more passively worked up- enough to write about it on the internet at any rate.

Just what is an “Arctic Monkey” anyway? Its the sort of name that’d entertain someone who enjoys “nonsense comedy” that’s so intentionally ‘crazy’ it just looks ridiculous. Like The Mighty Boosh.

And what is a “Kaiser Chief” exactly? And when did it become cool to name a band after the bloke who was assassinated and provided the catalyst for the first World War? Does this open the door for a tribute band called ‘Anwar Al Sadat‘? In a few years time, will people be saying things like “Have you heard Ronald Reagan’s new album”?

I think a band’s name should reflect its attitude, or explain who the band are. So I guess Franz Ferdinand would have to be unpopular in Bosnia if they want to ‘justify’ their name.

The bands I listen to have clever names. Rage Against the Machine immediately tells you that they’re all about sticking it to the man in angry way- which is an accurate description of their music. Capdown are all about the, er, downfall of capitalists, Propagandhi are portmanteauing two key themes in their music. And so on. By contrast, Snow Patrol means nothing.

And yeah, I am deliberately not mentioning [spunge], (hed)pe and Less Than Jake’s contribution to my record collection.

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Globalisation
January 12th, 2007 at 03:31

It seems like only yesterday that I was blogging about reaching my intellectual limits- and it was only yesterday I was speculating about when I’d reach my intellectual limit for my degree course, which is titled: International Relations and Globalisation.

Today, I collected an essay that I handed in before Christmas for my globalisation module. I only got 59%, which I wasn’t too pleased with, although I didn’t put that much effort into it. What really got me was the comment made by the guy marking it:

“You don’t seem to know what globalisation is… which is a problem“.

I’ll remind you again: I am studying to hopefully achieve a BA in International Relations and Globalisation.

Bollocks.

At least I know what “international relations” means. Sort of.

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Intellectual Limits
January 11th, 2007 at 03:24

I think one of my biggest fears in life is reaching my intellectual limits. My other biggest fear is being stabbed up by the homeless.

I’d hate to one day come to the realisation that I simply cannot understand something, and that any attempt to learn something would ultimately end in failure. And the worst thing is that I can already see this happening.

I’m terrible at the sciences. Sure, I got an A at GCSE Science, but I think that must have been my limit: I got an E at AS level Physics and promptly dropped it and resigned myself to a life of staring slack-jawed in wonder at lightbulbs and stumbling around the town centre, hunched over with a coat covering my head, cowering, occasionally glancing upwards, terrified that the sky is going to fall on top of me.

Since I stopped having science lessons nearly four years ago now, I seem to have become unable to comprehend anything that requires more than a balloon-based analogy to understand. At the New Years Eve party I was at a few weeks ago, one of my old science teachers was there (don’t ask), as well as a number of my friends who are studying science subjects at university, and the conversation turned to the sciences. My best contribution to the conversation was asking them what they’d do if a terminator had eczema.

I think the problem is not that I’m stupid- nor that I’m uninterested in the sciences (see various uninformed tirades about evolution or my trip to the space centre), I think I’m just lazy. Unlike politics and history, where you can get away with firing off baseless accusations and warped interpretations of the facts, you actually have to make an effort with science, as unlike artsy subjects where they’ll say “there’s not a right or a wrong answer”, with science there is a right and a wrong answer- and usually the right answer is hideously complex and involves balancing chemical equations, the emission of electrons after absorbing electro-magnetic radiation or playing the gravity of the earth and the moon off against each other.

This means that I can’t just tell my opponent to shut the fuck up and claim that a classical realist would interpret it differently, before making up a fake statistic to back up my assertion.

Is the fact that I’m too lazy to learn about the sciences merely confirming my fears about reaching my intellectual limit? How much higher up in the field of, say, International Relations and Globalisation, can I go before I’m punched in the face by the fist of apathy, and not be willing to argue the toss with its use of knuckle dusters?

I can see it starting to happen too. I’ve reached a level in education where I might have to read say, The Prince, The Communist Manifesto, The Rights of Man, The Road to Serfdom, The Wealth of Nations, The Gospel According to Chris Moyles, and so on… and I can’t be bothered. I’ll read a bullet pointed list, if that’ll earn me any bonus points, but I don’t feel too compelled to read some old-timey bloke tell me old-timey opinions about things that no longer reflect the modern day status-quo, using analogies involving the Holy Roman Empire, or whatever.

I’m terrified that one day I’ll reach a point where I’ll decide to watch a heart-warming ITV premier starring Martin Clunes or Pauline Quirk rather than something that might actually expand my mind.

Another sign this is happening: I’m not sure why point I’m trying to make here.

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What the FOI?
January 6th, 2007 at 02:50

I’ve been messing about with the Freedom of Information Act recently, and its yielded some (fairly) interesting results. What is the Freedom of Information act? Long story short, you’re allowed to write to any public sector organisation and ask them to, er, free information.

You could waste a serious amount of money by sending all sorts of requests in – they don’t even have to be in a letter, as an e-mail will do just fine! In fact, that’s probably why they’re apparently trying to limit the act- because idiots like me are wasting so much government time.

At work a few weeks ago I received an e-mail outlining the guidelines on reporting paper-cuts and near miss reports for when you narrowly avoid a paper-cut. Seriously. Paper-cuts. Minor cuts caused by paper colliding with the skin. Seriously.

It seems utterly bonkers to me that someone would go to the trouble of reporting a paper cut, so I did the one thing anyone in my situation would do: I sent a FOI request to loads of government departments asking them how many paper cuts they’d had reported in the last year. Admittedly, the response wasn’t fantastic, but it did highlight some interesting limitations and problems with the current act- and shows why information isn’t really that free.

So I started off by e-mailing my local district council: they had a grand total of zero paper-cuts reported in the last year- surely a miracle given the amount of paper pushing that goes on in government. Leicester City Council on the other hand reported an incredible three paper cuts in the last year- one each in October, November and December.

I also got in touch with the Ministry of Defence. As you might have guessed- its probably a pretty dangerous place to work. They had seven paper-cuts during 2006 (four of which occurred during March). I think its fair to say that our boys are making an incredibly brave sacrifice to ensure our security. Obvious satire: I guess the bad guys could be developing staplers that can deploy within 45 seconds.

I just hope some of the paper-cuts happened whilst some James Bond types were out shooting terrorists.

The other organisations I hassled contacted were a bit more awkward about it. HMRC denied my FOI request stating that they cannot “create” new data- apparently each office has an accident book, but there’s no central store of this information (well, tedious fact: there apparently is in former-Customs, but not in former-IR). Basically this means that if I had a bucket containing ten fingers that had been severed by paper cuts, I could probably tell you about each finger individually if you ask about a specific finger, but I wouldn’t be willing to count how many fingers there are in there. Er, the analogy breaks down about here, I think.

This strikes me as a pretty big problem with the FOIA- if you don’t know the structure of the organisation you’re contacting, then it could be very easy for them to not tell you what’s going on. It presumably also makes it easy to hide any potentially scandalous information, as providing the dodgy news only exists scrawled on the back of discarded envelopes that have been distributed and hidden around the country, the organisation are at no obligation to provide you with this information, as they don’t have to compile it for you.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office cited a different section of the act to try and get me to go away. They claimed that my FOI request was “lacking in serious purpose or value and can only be treated as vexatious”. How dare they?! I said in my e-mail I was doing some “research into office safety” – I thought that made me sound pretty official. Clearly not.

I also looked up vexatious in the dictionary to see what it actually means. It apparently means “annoying: causing irritation or annoyance”. To use a dictionary example of when the word would be appropriate: “a pesky mosquito”. The Foreign Office are calling me a pesky mosquito!

I don’t know if this is a badge of honour or something I should sit in the dark and have a cry about.

So they can deny you access to information because they think that you’re irritating. That doesn’t strike me as very democratic: a democratic society should give even Richard Littlejohn access to vital public information.

The Foreign Office also exposed another massive flaw in the act. I submitted a separate request to see if I could get hold of a list of gifts Tony Blair has received whilst in office- unfortunately, they got out of this one by telling me that it’d cost over £600- or equivalent to three and a half working days of a civil servant’s time to get hold of this info. Damn.

This makes me think two things though: just think of how much government money you could waste by submitting loads of annoying but just about passable FOI requests? You could have an entire department of office juniors working on finding out all sorts of tedious information- and it’d cost loads in both money and time.

Secondly… if they have to research whatever inane request I send in, are they not creating information… something others claim that they don’t have to do? Or does this mean that other organisations might actually have to create information? It seems odd to me that despite being covered by the same set of rules, one organisation will tell me one thing, yet another will apparently do exactly the opposite (providing its under six hundred quid).

So yeah, the Freedom of Information act is a bit of a mixed bag… hopefully I’ll have some more FOI fun soon, as I’ve submitted a couple of other exciting requests. Check back regularly, kids.

UPDATE 26/02: Just got a reply from the Home Office. They’ve had four paper cuts – two in April 2006, and two in May 2006.

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Space Centre
January 5th, 2007 at 20:53

Today Katy and I went to the National Space Centre in Leicester. Neither of us had been before, and I think its fair to say that it’s probably the closest either of us are going to get to actually going into space, so it was all good.

Here’s a picture of me and a rocket (Katy refused to be pictured, presumably because she thought you readers would be too busy looking at me to notice her anyway):

It was much like you’d expect- exhibits, old spacey things, and visual metaphors to illustrate the relative mass of the planets.

There was one exhibit there that claimed to be a “Martian meteorite”- I’d love it if any scientists reading could explain to me how a bit of rock can go from Mars, float up out of Mars’ atmosphere across space and then hit the Earth, as I can’t even make a ridiculous uninformed assumption to explain that.

On the journey there, I also thought of another irritating science question that seemed to scare Katy a bit: gravity is proportional to mass, right? So if we keep sending stuff into space and not getting it back, there’s less matter on Earth, and thus Earth’s gravity will decrease? Similarly, if technology gets to a point like in Red Dwarf where we’re mining on Jupiter and bringing resources back to Earth, surely it will reach a point where Earth’s gravity will increase, fucking a few things up? I realise these will only have a tiny difference, but surely even that will (eventually) make a difference?

And energy and matter can be “changed into each other”, for lack of a scientific sounding word… and energy doesn’t have mass, right? Thus, if we keep burning all of the oil and so on, surely the earth will lose a lot of mass and thus gravity?

I’m not sure what point I’m making. I’m probably talking rubbish.

But anyway, also there was an IMAX style cinema, where the pictures are projected on to a dome on the ceiling, meaning that you get essentially 180 degrees of video. Disappointingly, the film was a Toy Story-esque computer generated, but it was still interesting. Beforehand there was a safety announcement, with the advice being that if you feel nauseous, you should, er, close your eyes. The one scene that stood out for me was when a character had the dangers of space travel humorously demonstrated on him- freezing and weightlessness, and so on. At the end of the scene the character took revenge on the professor character subjecting him to these things by sending him up into space on a firework.

As the firework was being set-up on screen, the narrator told us how most space fatalities occur on take off and landing. The firework takes off and explodes in almost exactly the same way as the Challenger space shuttle. Tasteful.

Perhaps the scariest part of the day was when I had a go at presenting the weather. (You’ll see me explain all this on the video below too.) Inexplicably, like every museum or place of learning that I’ve been to, all have a chromakey setup going that lets you pretend you’re a weather presenter. I think the tenuous link here is that satellites are used to forecast the weather.

So I enter the booth, and press the “go” button, and the TV instructs me to read the autocue and point at things on the map. It starts up, so I try my best for a few seconds, reading accurately and pointing and everything, before suddenly becoming incredibly self concious. I believe I just stopped, looked out of the booth towards Katy and remarked “what the fuck am I doing? I look ridiculous”, before leaving. Unfortunately for me, the booth had been recording my performance, and played it back on a TV outside after the autocue had finished doing its thing. And it had a loud speaker. So all we heard was “What the fuck am I doing? I look ridiculous” echoing all over the Space Centre, with me on the TV screen… which was being watched by a few small children. Whoops. I think it must have played it back a few times as well – it certainly felt like a long time.

Here’s a video of my day:

I’d like to thank Katy for coming, and TomTom for getting us there. And the Cold War for developing the technology that made the Space Centre possible.

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Medical Ethics
January 2nd, 2007 at 16:01

My friend Fundar (that’s a nickname) is training to be a doctor- not the cool time travelling or snooty academic kind, just a normal boring medical one. Personally, I can’t think of anything worse than spending the day looking at a parade of goatses, tubgirls, and hideous combinations of the two, but each to their own, I suppose.
The other night at the New Years party he was telling me about his medical ethics lectures, which appear to be basically “Don’t do a Shipman, please”. I think medical ethics is an interesting subject. If there’s any doctors reading, I’d be interested in seeing what you do in the following situations:

A man comes into A&E with an embarrassing problem: he has a dog embedded into him and can’t remove it. When you’re operating to remove the dog, which is still alive, you notice that the dog has a cut on its arm… do you treat the dog, or do you call a vet? Bearing in mind you’ve got a box of plasters handy, what with you being in a hospital? What if the dog wouldn’t shut up once you’ve removed it… do you chuck it a spare bone to keep it quiet?
Fundar was adamant that he’d only treat humans- what with only being a human doctor. So I asked him what about if a mermaid comes in with a broken arm? There’s nothing fishy going on: just a regular broken arm. Do you treat her? Its the human half of her that’s broken afterall.

What about a Terminator that has eczema? That’s technically human flesh that’s just growing on a robot body. Do you treat that?

A reverse centaur that has the top half of the body as a horse, and the bottom half of a man wants a sex change… do you operate? When the centaur asks do you say yay or nay?

A Cyberman comes in. A Cyberman has a human brain and a robot’s body- and it has manic depression. Do you treat him? Its a mental health problem in a human brain, after all. Similarly, Doctor Who comes into A&E having just had a heart attack on one of his two hearts. He looks like a human but is actually an alien- do you help him?

What if the man with the ‘dog problem’ comes in, but had accidentally switched brains with the dog… do you treat the man or the dog?

Fundar was also big on medical morals- always opting to save the most people, regardless of the situation. For example, I asked him if he’d quietly bump-off a bloke’s mother-in-law if he offered him half a million quid. Fundar said he wouldn’t. What if he had to make a decision between saving either Gandhi, or the entire Nazi party? He claimed he’d save the Nazis as there’s more of them.

If a patient he was about to treat left everything to him in their will, would he “accidentally” muck up their operation? How about just forging a ‘do not resuscitate’ form, just in case?

I asked many questions. He didn’t have many answers.

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Halo 3 available first in Iraq
January 2nd, 2007 at 00:32

I read with interest that Microsoft have, in an excellent publicity stunt act of charity, sent out beta copies of Halo 3 to the American soldiers in Iraq, to let them have a go.

Is it me, or is sending them a shooting game in slightly poor taste? Not only are they getting the troops to beta test their own flawed product, they’re saying “you’re not good enough at your job [killing people], have some more practice”*. Playing Halo 3 must be a bit of a busman’s holiday – like giving a milkman a cow, or a terminally ill patient a new disease.

I think its terrifying that the people out in Iraq sort-of representing my country in an illegal war are essentially being trained by a video game. They’ll get to shoot innocent civilians when they’re off duty too. Surely it will make them more daring, as they just think they’ll respawn at the nearest checkpoint when they die?

I think it might also cause trouble for the military higher-ups, and might get the soldiers to ask some awkward questions:

• “How come the soldiers in the game have all of the necessary equipment that they need?”
• “Why do the guns in the game never stop working despite the desert conditions?”
• “Why isn’t there caches of ammo, force fields and health lying around on the streets of Tikrit?”
• “Why is there no prisoner abuse mini game?”

I think they should have sent them copies of The Sims, so that they’d learn a bit more about winning hearts and minds, and wouldn’t have to fiddle with awkward dual-analogue controls.

(* quip credit: Katy. Yeah, I’m stealing other people’s material.)

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Cokewatch – Another year gone
January 1st, 2007 at 21:56

As long time blog readers might know, for the past 691 days I’ve been logging the amount of Coke that I drink. Why? The dentist told me that I drink too much, so I started keeping a note of the number of “servings” of Coke I have every day. By ‘Coke’, I mean all cola drinks… Coke’s just become a genericized trademark.

What is a serving? I count a serving as “one glass” or “one can” or whatever, as I’d look ridiculous carrying around a measuring cylinder to do this any more accurately.

See the full log: here.

One New Years Day last year I took this a step further and started logging the different brands of Cola that I’ve been drinking. Why? So I can make this incredible diagram:

So the Coca-Cola company are winning by a massive margin… I wonder how many Columbian trade unionists I’ve inadvertently killed by drinking so much of their produce? I’m thinking of buying shares in BAE and financing some civil wars and dictatorships, so that drinking Coca-Cola will be slightly more ethical by my standards.

So anyway, in the last year I’ve had 1275 cokes. If we assume each Coke to be 330ml- a conservative estimate, as I often go for 550ml bottles or, er, pints: that’s about 420.75 litres.

Looking at the totals since I first started logging Coke, back on 9th February 2005, I’ve drank 2140 Cokes. That’s an average of 3.09 a day. Things get really interesting (!) when you look at this stuff graphically. Look at the Cokes per Day average (CPD) over time. Try as I might to give up Coke, it seems that I’m stuck at about 3cpd, as things are sort of levelling off again after a massive increase since leaving school.

The sliding average is perhaps more useful- its the average number of cokes over the last three days, and the graph shows how that average changes over time. Its showing a gradual increase to 3 a day.

I’m sure there’s some sort of conclusions I can draw from this. There must be some purpose, and some reason why I’m keeping track of this sort of thing. Any ideas, anyone?

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