Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in HairyEars' LiveJournal:

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Saturday, February 11th, 2012
12:45 pm	The Twittering Classes, and a classroom for principles I followed a link from a tweet by @KayGeeUK: For those who don't yet know why I love Stuart Hall, go read this interview. Bear with me on this one: I clicked anyway, because I rather like @KayGeeUK, but left-wing academics rarely interest me and the thought of reading an extended Guardian interview with one of them fills me with dismay. So I skimmed it, until I got captured by this quote: It is this failure of the Labour party to make a strong moral case, to dare to inspire people, that Hall takes as the main threat to the political landscape. Then I stopped skimming, and I started reading. ( A longer, and quite devastating quote... ) Take out the phrase "nobody can think of the principle to refute that" and hold it up to the light... Perhaps he's wrong: I can think of of a principle to refute that - and so, I hope, can you. But we're a bunch of nobodies, powerless voters in a sham democracy where the powers we choose between refuse to make a case on principles, or have no 'principle' but the pursuit of power and profit for the powerful. I await, with glee, the usual tedious libertarian 'corrections' to all who criticise 'The Wealth Creators': buried deep within that article, there is a very cutting remark about the intellectual poverty of that generation's conformist ecomomic orthodoxy. Meanwhile, I will cheerfully describe Ed Milliband, his band of wannabee-Lib-Dems, and his morals, as the fluffers in a snuff movie. Which is funny, until you realise that snuff movies are obscene and people die. This is a copy of my post here, on Dreamwidth, which has comments. OpenID will allow you to comment there from your LiveJournal session: contact me if you have problems. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
9:51 pm	Writing down, down, and down the rabbit-hole Odd the things that you can follow from Twitter: Charlie Stross linked to A parody of Twilight, set in Ian Banks' Culture, written by whump. Amusing stuff; and he, in turn, posted a link to the original source of the idea: Elizabeth Stark's blog, where she has invited us all to imagine If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight... ...So I had a go. A word of warning: Crooked Little Vein, the book that I've pastiched so ineptly here, is far worse. Superbly-written, but disturbing in the themes that Warren Ellis has chosen to develop. You might not actually want to click through the cut tag if you've eaten heartily. Or recently. ( Down the reeking cloaca that should've been a rabbit-hole... ) Some of you have urged me to write more; I suspect that more of you will now urge me to write less. The Win from this is that I've discovered Elizabeth Stark's blog. The potential downside is that my comment (the piece above) might emerge from moderation and see the light of day. This is a copy of my post here, on Dreamwidth, which has comments. OpenID will allow you to comment there from your LiveJournal session: contact me if you have problems. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
10:59 pm	More Paypal news that isn't in The News. This deserves a wider audience: you can't pay for Dreamwidth (or support the Diaspora project) using Paypal. Or Google Checkout. Here's what Dreamwidth have to say about that: We've seen a bunch of people questioning why we don't accept payment via PayPal. We used to, but PayPal closed our account with them, after demanding that we censor our users' content to remove material that did not violate our Terms of Service but that made them uncomfortable. We refused to place restrictions on our users over and above the restrictions placed by US law, and so PayPal refused to process payments for us. (The same thing then happened with Google Checkout, before we found a payment processor that was willing to accept our business without placing further restrictions on user-generated content other than "is it legal".) It's easy to conclude that Paypal are evil, and it won't take you long to find compelling evidence for it. Nevertheless, denise is very careful to paint Paypal in as positive a light as, I think, they can possibly be portrayed: The short answer to your question is, banks and other payment systems are very risk-averse. The long answer involves what azurelunatic and I were both getting into in the above thread: "adult content" services have very high chargeback rates ("goodness! of course I wasn't subscribing to that porn site! someone must have stolen my credit card!") and credit card companies will disconnect payment gateways whose clients have high chargeback rates, so as protection most payment gateways will just pre-emptively say, even if you're not an adult content service, if you accept user-generated content and don't prohibit all adult content across the board, we won't do business with you, in case the card company decides to get pedantic. We were really lucky to find one that was willing to be a little less risk-averse based on actually looking at how we operate and what we sell, although we do pay a premium for it. (Please note that the bold emphasis is mine, not the original author's). So the short answer is that ALL freeform discussion and community sites are subject to pervasive commercial censorship. In every discussion I have seen of such a matter, some Libertarian or shill pops up and condescendingly explains that it's a private space, purchased between consenting adults in a freely-entered-into trade that Paypal, GoogleCheckout and the Credit Card companies can freely choose to participate in, or choose not to. We have no 'right' to demand that they trade with us, let alone support our views, passively or actively, in choosing to allow us to rent their services. Well, quite. We have no right to demand that any private citizen supports our views, allows us to express them on their property, or supports our right to speak them freely. But I think it's reasonable to ask whether any company has a 'right' to obstruct us in expressing our views. Because a dominant company in a pervasive service, or a cartel of service providers, or a monopolist, has powers that can be misused in ways that are damaging to all. And they are, at the very least, very poor 'citizens' if they fail to defend a general right to speak and to associate - especially if they are, effectively, the private owners of a 'square' that has become the town's public space. On the other hand, what's the moral position of (say) any Gas stations who refuse to serve the Westboro Baptist Church, whenever they are identified as such, upon their missions of hate and the disruption of servicemen and women's funerals? Our commitment to free speech and the civil rights of others is measured in our actions and our attitudes to people whom we detest - not just towards those we find agreeable. But I could not bring myself to sell anything other than a plywood coffin and six-foot-by-two plot of land to Westboro supporter. So where do we - and they - stand if they cannot travel, or publish, or speak, or work, or hold a bank account? The essential difference is that they (Westboro BC) can do all these things, because I don't own a three-hundred-mile deep ring of all the gas stations around Westboro. Nor am I the only bank in that town, the TV station and the paper, the sole employer, nor the monopoly telecomms provider. With greater power comes greater responsibility and, if I were any of those things, I would no longer be a private individual who can make whatever gestures he pleases in pursuit of his own illusory moral gratification. I could make my opinions damn' clear - and would! - but I could not effectively imprison them, imposing obstacles and punitive sanctions that are rightly the preserve of the courts. Nor, in such a position of power, would I be permitted to make 'purely commercial' decisions that undermine the society - and the market - that I operate within. Free-marketeers and Libertarians would do well to look again at Standard Oil, and why it became necessary to pursue the apparent paradox of using regulation to ensure the survival of free trade and a free market; and all of us would do well to ask - and to be more vigilant! - about the opportunities to act as monopolists and rent-seekers and censors in a linked-up networked world that doesn't always automatically route around the damage. This is a copy of my post here, on Dreamwidth, which has comments. OpenID will allow you to comment there from your LiveJournal session: contact me if you have problems. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011
6:49 pm	No Comment Regrettably, I will no longer be able to comment on LJ, except on those rare occasions when I settle down in front of a Windows Laptop at home; I mostly read LJ on the move, and the new LJ comments page does not work on any browser I can run on my Android phone. There may be a workaround, and I would welcome any hint of it; but I would advise anyone else against relying on working *against* their technology of choice - working that way always fails when you need it to work most; and it's a doomed endeavour, twice over, when the other end of the technical relationship is working against you, too. And LJ's team are definitely doing so: in specific terms, by implementing critical features using proprietary technologies that they know will fail on an increasing number of mobile clients (and open-source less-mobile ones); and in general terms, in that they do not consult and do not care about such issues - neither in the specific sense of technical choices, nor in the general choice to change what they do, as well as how they do it, without regard for the customers' expressed preferences. They are, of course, free to do so. And we are free to move elsewhere. This entry was originally posted at http://hairyears.dreamwidth.org/225608.html. There are comments there. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 18th, 2011
12:59 am	The art or science of sewing stripes onto a hakama As I have recently gained 3rd Dan in the art of Aikido, I have the traditional task of sewing the three stripes that indicate my rank onto the tabs of my hakama. Three neatly-sewn, straight, and evenly-spaced stripes. Having done this before, with difficulty, with the simpler task of sewing on two neatly-sewn, straight, and the-spacing-doesn't-matter stripes, I thought I'd show you, and Google-savvy fellow-Aikidokai, how I did it slowly, but easily and successfully. ( With a little help... ) So now you know another little detail of my exciting life. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
10:41 pm	10% of our undergraduates believe... Following on from a conversation in the Pembury Tavern*, I note that it is the start of the academic year: some of you are helping the new intake of undergraduates with inductions and orientation; some of you will be teaching them; and a few of you will actually be among them. Take a moment to consider this: the matriculating class of '11 were born in 1993. What do they think? What do they know? Is the Berlin Wall another make-believe knocked up in a Hollywood backroom with cgi, just like the 'moon landings'? What's a 'Communist'? What's *wrong* with televisions, having no pause button and no right-click? Let's not mock them for not knowing stuff that seems terribly important to everyone over 30, but doesn't mean much of anything today - like Paul McCartney being famous for being Stella McCartney's husband... What do they actually believe? And what's 'out there' in the stuff that ten percent of them believe, on the fringe and shocking... And some of which is also on the fringe, however shocking, but gaining ground and likely to become 'accepted wisdom' and the things that everybody 'just knows is true' without examination in another 20 years? * This isn't necessarily the identifying mark of a really bad idea. (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
6:51 pm	Posting for Posterity's Posterior While I collate the results from my previous post, about housing, here's a more frivolous question... Far below my lofty office in a skyscraper, the new CrossRail station for Canary Wharf is being constructed in the pumped-out basin of West India North Dock. The shell of it is largely complete, and soon they will be pumping back the water in a (now much smaller) dock. A smaller dock, and evidently a much shallower one: they are putting back all the mud they excavated, ever-so neatly, and compacting it down into a space that is, at best, half the area it used to sit and gather shopping trolleys, bicycles, and less-successful businessmen from London's underworld. What would you bury in the mud today, to help future generations understand their past through archæology? Feel free to be educational and thoroughly wrong. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
9:18 pm	The future's arriving in the wrong New Order... If you don't mind my asking, How much of your income goes on your accommodation? Answers will be screened, unless you ask me to unscreen them. By 'accommodation', I mean rent, or on the mortgage plus the bills that you, the homeowner, are paying - and a landlord would be paying from his rental income just to keep the property. I bet, for most of you, it's half your income after tax. For the 'working poor', it's somewhere between sixty and seventy-five percent, depending on where you count housing benefit and whether they receive it: some of the undocumented Eastern Europeans chipping in for the right to sleep on a sofa-bed in a *very* shared household must be paying less: at least, in weeks when they get a full week's paid employment. It's difficult to imagine anybody paying more but, some weeks, there's people struggling to cover rent - and very little else. Or less. I've noticed that this is a massive transfer of resources from the poorest to the richest. It's just as well that Labour, and the various rumps of Socialism, Communism, and the Liberals are of and for the Middle Classes, and will never meet and talk to someone on an actual low income. They'd talk about housing, it's embarrassing and no-one's interested nowadays; there's no votes in it, and we know that sort of talk lowers the tone of the neighbourhood and reduces the value of our nice suburban houses. Meanwhile, the people 'down there' spending all that money for decidedly substandard housing are astonishingly passive and accepting of this unequal economic order. In the total absence of engagement by any organised political party, they probably do not regard themselves as disenfranchised, as they have never thought about themselves, or seen themselves portrayed in the media expressing themselves, in the alien vocabulary of the politically-active. None of them, below the age of fifty, can remember what it's like to be engaged in an effective democracy, with politicians of and among them, engaging with and talking to them, representing them, and achieving tangible improvements in their housing, their employment and their children's education. For most of you, that has to sound like laughable idealism, or a throwback to the failures of the much-derided nineteen-seventies. I guess the best that we can hope for is that 'they' - not 'us'! - are thoroughly ground-down, exhausted, and resigned to their place in someone else's free economy. Above all, we have to hope that this exhaustion peters out in dull resentment, instead of building up a sense of justice and of anger, and that 'they' are disinclined to violent insurrections. Meanwhile, rents are still going up in London: is this true elsewhere? It's not the bright and shiny future we were promised, but it seems to be the future that we've got: take care that you don't get used to doing less on your diminishing disposable income, and then a little less again, and then working just a little more. And then a lot more, just to catch up on the bills and maybe on the credit cards you didn't quite pay off, and struggling to make deposit on the next move, and the next, because the rent keeps going up and everything is dearer. Or if you can't take care, try at least to notice. And I wonder who is actually profiting from all this: 'this' being what it means, down on the ground, when the economists talk about the accelerating concentration of wealth into the hands of a tiny minority, before they all go home to read each other's economics columns in the Guardian in their nice suburban houses. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 29th, 2011
10:22 pm	The Dollar Llama Would you believe that someone's found a way of monetising the End of the World? Enterprising Atheists are taking money from Christian Fundamentalists,offering a pet care service for the animals left behind when their owners ascend to Heaven in The Rapture. Which got me to thinking: how can anyone make money from the 'End of the World' scenario of a US Treasury default? Bright and dangerous minds have been exercised by this very question, on trading floors the length and breadth of London, and the answer is unanimous: "Buggered if I know. Maybe we can take advantage of buying opportunities when it all blows over..." Clearly pet care isn't the way forward. It occurs to me that the worst-case scenario involves Republican senators ascending Heavenward with the aid of a rope and a lamp-post, and their pets will end up barbecued on piles of worthless green paper when the slack-jawed 'Red State' voters who believe Glenn Beck and Fox are forced to recognise the downside of living in a country with no money to pay for the imported oil that powers the McDonalds supply chain... There are intermediate scenarios: the very best one is that they've already sorted it out, and the budget's gone through, and no-one needs to worry about missing any payments on the Treasuries... Except that this 'blown over' best-case is already damned expensive: Treasury notes are no longer 'above question' and everyone, everywhere, is going to pay a risk premium on every loan and on every transaction that relies on borrowed money for materials, cash flow, investment or even for insurance. So much for keeping taxes low. I could take a view that an economic overclass of rentiers, who benefit from lower taxes and less 'Government interference' will benefit from much of the Republican agenda - incidentally, they don't benefit from policies that would reflate the economy, promote domestic manufacturing, and rebalance the wealth distribution - but that view fails under the test "who benefits from a default?" The billionaires don't gain from it at all. So my best guess is that they, too, are horrified by the monster they have unleashed in the form of the Tea Party. Useful idiots they may be, when campaigning for lower taxes and no labour rights, environmental regulation, or market supervision; but they have turned into dangerous and destructive idiots in damaging the US credit rating and threatening a partial or complete collapse of the economy. Yes, they were a great bargaining tool in the budget bluster-fest: "Take our moderate Republican proposals for these welfare cuts, and more deregulation, or we'll leave the field for... THEM" but now that bargaining position has proved to be more than just a posture: there are loonies in the Tea Party who would actually do it. So I think we can predict a much-reduced Tea Party, starting from next week, with far less funding, far less media access, and possibly less-favourable coverage from the dominant media channel of the Right. Of course, if Fox is still supporting Teatards after Monday - or before then - you can take it as a certainty that Rupert Murdoch's found a way to profit from Apocalypse. I mean, with all his recent troubles, he could't possibly be contemplating Götterdämmerung? On a more serious note, we can look towards an accelerated decline in the Dollar. There isn't much that can be done to replace it - Greenbacks really are the World's currency - but what can be done, will be done. Oil will become increasingly expensive, in Dollar terms. Imports of all kinds - and that now means ALL manufactured goods - will become more expensive, for Americans; and I'm not convinced that factories in the rustbelt will reopen, even if the dollar halves in value - America has a very, very long way to go before they can compete with Chinese factories and the point of equilibrium lies at an unimaginably low subsistence level for the workers. There is also a question of capital: can the banking system support the necessary level of investment? There definitely isn't any kind of money for the infrastructure to support a manufacturing revival - and there might never be the will in Washington to raise taxes. Parts of the American economy will, of course, still lead the world. But high-end manufacturing and internationally-tradable services will only ever provide employment for a narrow segment of the population in a country where a narrow - and still-narrowing - segment of the population benefit from education to the necessary level. That, too, is an infrastructure issue; and it has proven intractable for both Democrats and the Republicans. . Whatever. The best-case scenario leads to a secular decline in living standards for the vast majority of Americans, and reduced economic growth for the rest of us, with a real risk that our economy will drop below the 'stall speed' of 1-2% growth and fall into stagnation or recession. The worst-case scenarios are apocalyptic and it's worth considering that they have already happened to Americans remaining in Detroit, subsistence-farming with hand-tools in the ruins of the factories and the vacant lots of the demolished suburbs. More of them are going there: or rather, 'there' is coming to them - and 'Hoovervilles' and shanty-towns are coming back. Or rather, they've arrived: it's just a matter of how how many, and how hard we try not to notice, aided by compliant media who might - despite my gibes of Götterdämmerung - continue to support a party with an economic policy far worse for the economy than Herbert Hoover. Meanwhile, how can anyone profit from it? (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 25th, 2011
7:16 pm	Eastercon 2011: a taste of the present Eastercon: a magnificent feast of geekery, and I find myself trundling back to London in the Pendolino, contented and replete... ...And, of course, completelely knackered. I cannot possibly describe a Science-Fiction Convention in its entirety, so I will give you a flavour of this morning's panel, 'Nuke them from orbit, its the only way to be sure', a discussion among SF authors about invading a planet from orbit. ( Not what I expected... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
9:44 pm	Franklin: a word for a free man "The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. ” — Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Recommendations Relative to the Strengthening and Enforcement of Anti-trust Interesting fellow, FDR. Both he, and Teddy Roosevelt, said some very interesting things which have been conveniently forgotten. Hat-tip to oxfordgirl , who posted an excerpt from the Bull Moose speech a while ago... (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
2:32 pm	The Minster Mash Ewt & I are spending a not-the-weekend break in York, enjoying the fine hostelries and visitor attractions of the city. This being our last full day, postcards are being written while K. waits for her cheeseburger and I await the arrival of a roast suckling piglet in apple sauce. Alas that all the postcards on sale in the Minster are all respectable and dull, so I have been forced to make my own entertainment: ( Cut for a profane Limerick... )Full restaurant reviews will follow: there are some damn' good restaurants in York. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 14th, 2010
2:11 pm	Inland Revenants: The 'Zombie' Department of the State Here's an interesting quote: I thought Osborne reached new lows last week. This week he ’s going out of his way to support the criminal classes – albeit those, no doubt, drawn from amongst his friends. It's from Richard Murphy's tax blog. Yes, I know: taxation isn't bedtime reading, unless you suffer from insomnia. One of the comments on the blog post describes the hollowing-out of the Inland Revenue's internal culture - pursuing investigations against prominent citizens and international companies is now a very career-limiting move - and that remark rings true. It sounds a lot like the after-hours conversations among traders, bankers, and -especially - the 'sales traders' and account managers at two of my previous employers, and I am certain that the anonymous commentator is an accountant or solicitor assisting tax evaders. The Vodaphone debacle is the most extreme known example of this moral decay. As it was well underway when New Labour were in power, there is no reason to believe that a change of government will have any effect. What's new is the overt support at ministerial level: I draw your attention to this blog post, which explains how the latest concession to the Swiss places inherited wealth beyond the reach of the Revenue, and acts to entrench the economic priveleges of the latter-day aristocracy. Acknowledgements and thanks to juggzy, who gave me the Link to Richard Murphy's blog. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
1:11 am	I've read recent blogs and socially-minded op-ed pieces about equality, fairness, income gaps and they seem to be voicing an increasingly-popular criticism of our economic system: winner takes all. This has been known to economists for a quarter of a century, as Tournament Theory. I would urge you all to read the second reference on that Wikipedia page, as the bland 'Forbes article' header hides a surprising article by Tim Harford: Why your boss is overpaid ( this gets Long... ) Or, in other words, The more unequal the pay distribution, the less meritocratic the organisation. ( Further points... ) (30 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
8:20 pm	A disaster-movie script for an economist Take a train or drive out of London, at least a hundred miles, and pick a destination: a medium-sized town of a hundred thousand citizens or so. Look around you or, better still, conduct a survey: find out who employs the middle class - for our purposes, white-collar workers who describe themselves as 'financially-secure', or can be demonstrated (in their consumption patterns) to have a disposable income, rather than a desperate struggle from payday to payday. You will find that there are towns where the *entire* white-collar population is employed by the state - teachers, civil servants, local authority employees - and even 'independent' professionals like solicitors are dependent for much of their income on legal aid or other contract work from public bodies. Now picture a 30-50% cut in public-sector staffing levels in that town - or higher still, because those cuts will not be made in London, where the media will notice, nor in Conservative constituencies. I had a taste of this in Leicester, in the early 1990's, when the insurance companies moved all their management and admin functions out to Norwich, Nottingham, and Peterborough, leaving just the salesmen and a receptionist - and the effect on the local economy was quite noticeable. Scale it up, and think of second-order effects in the local service sector, retailing and 'deferrable purchases', business confidence and house prices. It is entirely possible that a town or city will fall into a near-total cessation of any and all economic activity outside the provision of public services and the purchase of consumer basics - food and non-leisure clothing - and fall into a house-price spiral that will trap the middle-aged and lead to the kind of youth migration I gave only seen or heard of in the towns of Ireland and in Southern Italy. If you thing that this is scare-mongering or sensationalism, think of towns like Redcar and Corby, where the dominant employer closed down and left the economy as dormitory-or-dole for decades. And laid-off public sector workers have no better employment prospects than a miner or a steelworker, in a town - or region! - with no significant private sector employment for graduates and clerical staff, and a public-sector hiring freeze. As a final note, this is new territory for amateur economists - Cabinet ministers, bloggers and media panjandrums - because there's never been a sharp contraction in the affluent economy of the middle classes: it always hits the poorest first, in First-World countries. Professional economists might point to Chile and to Argentina, where the middle classes were bankrupted by the debt crisis (and by appalling economic policy mistakes that we would do well to study) ; but no-one can quite bring themselves to say that parallels could possibly exist between economics there, and the oh-so-different rules of economics here. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 14th, 2010
3:59 pm	More iPhone Woes I'm not the only iPhone user with problems following the botched operating system 'upgrade' for the iPhone 3G: feel free to Google for examples of 15-20 or 30 or 60-second delays for menus and pages to go 'live' and start responding to user inputs… But I've now discovered that the 'slide to answer' dialog for picking up incoming phone calls has the same delay. So an unusable browser and almost-unusable apps are sharing a platform with an unreliable mobile phone. Yeah, I could restore from the backup point predating the system 4 'upgrade'. That might work, or it might not. I could switch off and restart a couple of times a day; that might work, but actually it doesn't. I could wait for a patch from Apple: that might work, but the OS 'upgrade' didn't and everyone with an iPhone 4 now knows they're dealing with a company that does very little testing and is reluctant to acknowledge bug reports from users. Or I could replace the damn' thing. That might work, and rather well: can any of you call to mind anything the current HTC Android doesn't do, that I might reasonably expect an iPhone to manage? I had the opportunity to play with an Android a couple of days ago: among other advantages, the Opera Mobile browser is allowed to work in full - which means I can save pages for offline viewing, a feature that will always be impossible on iPhones due to Apple's obligations to media and content owners (and the decision to hide the concept of 'save' or, indeed, a file system from the user). Textboxes render correctly without overspill. Bluetooth is allowed to work. You can install a monitoring app that allows you to kill apps. And you are permitted to remove and replace the battery. Oh, and they have removable storage. When I bought the iPhone, I believed it to be the best of the smartphones: indeed, the only small usable smartphone on the market at the time. It had bugs, some of which were fixed as time went on, and the remaining annoyances never justified the canard of being 'the worst possible phone, except for all the others'. I was probably right at the time. But the rival offerings have caught up, and they look infinitely preferable to putting up with a long series of botched 'upgrades' that will progressively degrade the performance of the iPhone 3G to being worse than useless. And if I buy an iPhone 4 today, I think I will be saying exactly the same about Apple's 'upgrades' and operating system patches within a year. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 1st, 2010
10:34 pm	Quantock Analyst So it's August, and I'm down in Darkest Somerset for the Ki Federation Summer School. I usually hire a bicycle from the guest house when I'm down here for any length of time,so that I can get out and about and see a bt of the countryside... ...Which I seem to have done today: at a rough guess, fifty miles of it. ( Cut for cycling details... ) ( An encounter with bullocks ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, July 30th, 2010
11:07 pm	Sand won't save you this time... Yay! They're advertising a sports drink with extra 'zing': Chlorine Trifluoride - Energy drink? No shit, Sherlock: I'd find the energy to run like f*** if I had to outrun an ClF3 spill.  It is, for your reference, hypergolic without detectable ignition delay in contact with all organic material. Athletes and terrified sand-surfers included. It will indeed, as the picture shows you, sent a sand dune merrily alight - the link above includes a 'hazards' section with a brief description of an incident in which a ton of it breached containment. If you are aware of anything else that'll set alight a bucket of sand, let me know.* [EDIT] Originally posted with Oxygen Difluoride as the subject: I was mistaken - after polite comments from readers, and rereading the source Sand won't save you this time, it is indeed ClF3. * By email: no samples required. (24 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
8:38 pm	The poetry of the professions ( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. ) (23 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 28th, 2010
4:39 pm	The curse of the Vuvuzealot Tell me, O Wise Ones of The InterWeb: are there long-term health effects associated with blowing the Vuvuzela? And if not, why not? I ask merely for infomation... And in the hope that the benighted oiks who play* the blasted things will die a horrible death. Or better still, be struck by some embarrassing debilitation that will make their fellow-citizens and denizens stop in horrified dismay and pity. Or point at them and laugh. Burst blood vessels? Ruptured eardrums? Disturbingly misshapen heads though asymmetric inflation of the sinuses? Some unmentionable gastrointestinal malady arising from the small percentage of swallowed air which, with excessive blowing and without the training of a proper wind-instrument, adds up to several times the volume of the vuvuzealot? It would be a terrible thing if I were forced to do the work of The Almighty by myself, and impose the medical consequences by seizing every voovelist and ramming the repellent instrument up one nostril. Or some other orifice, with a more fitting sound, so that they can play the instrument as they walk, albeit somewhat uncomfortably. *Play? What is the verb? Perpetrate? Parp? Honk? Blow? Give wind? Operate? Flatulate? (12 Comments |Comment on this)