Conclusions On The Wall

[photographs] Snow, snow, snow

2010-01-06T22:39:01Z

It may not have escaped anyone's notice that Oxford is under six inches or so of snow. I called into work this morning, to see what was happening, and got told "--- isn't coming in, nor is ---. And neither are you."

Well, I know better than when to argue. So, a day off to go photographing!

The real delight was Hinksey Lake, which was entirely iced (or at least slushed) over. Large amounts of it were covered in loose drifts of snow, with occasional duck-tracks; here and there were small craters where a duck had flown in and landed too heavily, or some snow had fallen in and broken through the crust.

The last couple make me think of photographs of an icy surface somewhere in the outer solar system; craters on Europa or Callisto, perhaps. (The one with a buoy, meanwhile, looks like an Antarctic research station seen from the air.)

[crossposted from the blog]

statistical risks of terrorism

2010-01-04T12:37:47Z

Two posts on the statistical dangers of airline terrorism:

The Odds of Airborne Terror (27/12)
The Skies are as Friendly as Ever (4/1)

The latter one is the more interesting - with the exception of the unusually pacific 1990s, the number of deaths (both in the air and on the ground) attributable to violent activity by passengers on aircraft is basically constant since the 1940s; around 150-200 deaths per billion passenger-flights, or one death per six million passenger-flights.

the year, recapped

2010-01-02T02:27:07Z

So, my plan to actually write something interesting about what I read last year sort of stalled in disarray. Oh, well, so be it.

I did, on the other hand, manage to keep track of everything I read. 156 books, not counting a couple I used as reference material sufficiently enough that I effectively read them cover-to-cover, and four more still on the go. 133 of those I still have with me in Oxford. About a hundred of them were definitely worth reading.

(The four unread... two are still on the go, one here and one at Iona's; the other two stalled mainly because I lost them for a month and then didn't really muster the enthusiasm to continue. No reflection on the quality of either!)

150 is a decent number, I think; maybe see if I can hit 170 next year. (The amount of reading I've done has dropped measurably since I stopped taking the bus to work every day)

The other project this year was keeping track of my finances. I may have gone into a little too much detail for this; my notebook is filled with scrawls of "30/11 £1.85 + £1.50 cafe / £1.40 bus". Still, it worked out; only about £100 of my outgoings are not accounted for.

Outgoings were 25% tax (council & income), ~25% living expenses (rent, bills), 12% food, 8% gifts & charity combined, 5% two short holidays, 5% pension payments, 5% transport costs, 3% entertainment, 3% books, and the rest in a myriad of smaller categories. [Some of "food" should perhaps be classed as "entertainment"; I'm a bit vague about when eating dinner out stops being reasonable and starts being done for luxurious intent]

Incoming is a little more than outgoing, bolstering the savings, but not by enough to make me rich. We can but hope.

The new toy: after several years procrastination (you'd be amazed), I finally have an actual blog. I have not done desperately much with it (in seven weeks, nine posts by me and six by Iona), but it's good to know it's there, and I have something I can point at over which I have complete control and no danger of it vanishing.

(No danger except when I run an upgrade and then forget to reset the file permissions. You'd think after doing that twice I'd remember to check, but no. Administration: it's a learning sine-curve.)

Should any of you want it, you can even have a magic RSS feed.

And the future. Well. I didn't get the job I applied for in November - and, in retrospect, I am not unhappy at all about this. Because, as most of you will know, Iona and I are likely to be moving in a year or a year and a half. So, we shall see what happens; this time two years from now, I expect to be in the wilds of the East. The rest is a haze, which is perhaps as it should be.

more flying farce

2009-12-27T01:34:09Z

Every time someone asks me why I try not to fly - I haven't since 2006, or maybe 2005, and not internationally since 2004 - I say "Because I don't like being treated like a criminal", which sounds glib, but is pretty much true. (I know, I know)

So, quoth the New York Times today:

Among other steps being imposed, passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps.

Aaaaaaargh, is my reasoned response. Aaaaaaaargh.

Would that prevent this incident? No. Will it prevent the next person who smuggles explosives onto a plane from finding a way to try to detonate them? No. Will it make a hundred thousand people a day stressed, irritable, discomfited, and feeling like a guilty six-year-old who can't sit still in class? You hardly even need to ask.

I wrote a more detailed summary on the blog, but "aaaaaargh" is about the gist of it for now.

Oxford: book notes

2009-12-16T21:38:31Z

The discount bookshop on St. Aldates - which has surprisingly good stock, all things told - has something interesting at the moment; copies of both The Yiddish Policeman's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for £2 apiece.

I can recommend both of these fairly unreservedly; they have their flaws, but both are excellent novels and should you have not read either this is as good a pretext as any. I mean, £4, really.

11/11

2009-11-12T00:06:24Z

Nothing involved and thoughtful, this year, but I didn't want to not note it. The atmosphere this year is slightly different to previous years; you can feel the gradual drift towards emphasising "and those presently". I suppose this is a cyclic thing...

Last year, I wrote that there are maybe a hundred and fifty thousand people - no doubt less now - in the country who can remember 1918, fuzzily, as little children. Tens of thousands will be old enough to have been permanently touched by it; to remember the awful hushed silences and the drawn curtains along deserted streets, or a strange man, dusty and unshaven, who came to the door one day after the shouting was over, and announced himself as Father.

And, of course, twenty years later they saw it all again; they had grown old enough to be the ones sitting in empty houses, or the ones sitting somewhere grimmer; and, for some, it all came around a third time a generation later, sitting and waiting to have a knock on the door and someone offer condolences for their son.

So, have a little sad music. Mothers, Daughters, Wives; I turned up a copy of this years ago, and have been haunted by it ever since.

(This version, despite being sung in a somewhat different voice to the narrative, seems to work a lot better; the original just doesn't quite seem to have the same emotion in it. This is worse than either, mind you.)

Triumph!

2009-11-08T20:24:19Z

http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/

Well, that's one task I've been procrastinating over for a while. Now to find all that half-written - well, more half-digested - material and start making it coherent enough to put online.

(The plan is to use this journal for personal material, transfer anything vaguely contentful there, and then use the fact that it exists as encouragement to actually do the vaguely-contentful writing. We shall see...)

I don't even want to think about this.

2009-10-28T12:54:00Z

There is a list of phrases I hope never again to hear in my life. This article has just added a particularly choice one: "self-administered concentrated hydrofluoric acid enema".

(The sentence continues "...while intoxicated from intranasal cocaine administration." I suppose that helps explain certain questions.)

Online banking: another one not to use

2009-10-19T19:46:10Z

I have just registered a savings account with Alliance & Leicester. This involved waiting for them to send me three letters over the course of a week - one with the account details, one with the customer ID number, and one with a five-digit PIN.

I then logged in. They made me create, as passwords:

a "phrase" linked to a randomly generated image;
a new five-digit PIN;
a new password (which couldn't contain non alphanumeric characters);
three "memorable things";
and quite possibly one other thing I've already forgotten about

Hum. I appreciate the principle of the thing, but I really can't see this one working out well.

The vastly delayed booklog

2009-10-18T22:34:59Z

Checking my records, I have apparently not posted one of these since August 2nd. So, what have I read in the intervening two and a half months?

In rough order...

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal - Christopher Moore
The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson
A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet - John Naughton
Accidental Time Machine - Joe Haldeman
Oxford - Edward Thomas
International relations : a very short introduction - Paul Wilkinson
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - Michael Chabon
Paul : a very short introduction - E. P. Sanders
Hangman's Holiday [short stories] - Dorothy L. Sayers
The Significance of the Frontier in American History - Frederick Jackson Turner
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy - Arundhati Roy
Quite Ugly One Morning - Christopher Brookmyre
Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil - Christopher Brookmyre
The European Union : a very short introduction - John Pinder
The File: A Personal History - Timothy Garton Ash
The Confusion - Neal Stephenson
The various flavours of coffee - Anthony Capella
Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
The Sopranos - Alan Warner
Zarafa - Michael Allin
Pandaemonium - Christopher Brookmyre

Note (with a couple of exceptions) the absence of anything with particular, y'know, merit. It's been an easy couple of months; lots of fiction.

That makes... what, 130 this year, plus the three I'm currently reading? Hmm. Puts me on course for about 160-170 in the year, then. We shall see.

Dear internet: blogs

2009-09-28T19:53:37Z

I have, sometime in the last six months, lost the RSS aggregator service I used to use; this is on balance probably a good thing, as it means the vast backlog of "keep this post to look at later" will no longer be there looming at me.

On the other hand, it means I am now reading very little, and I occasionally am forced to do productive things rather than procrastinate. So, to avoid this horror: what should I be looking at? Advise me!

(Assume I currently don't read anything, it's simpler that way)

Canoe!

2009-09-27T11:54:39Z

It is an implausibly clear and sunny late-September day. Iona and I are taking the canoe out on Hinksey Lake this afternoon. Anyone interested in joining us? 2.30pm here for, hopefully, 3pm at Hinksey Lake - if we're not at either we'll be somewhere in the middle carrying the thing.

(Let me know if you need directions to either)

A subtle semantic difference

2009-09-26T10:59:56Z

This is a lovely piece of analysis of LibraryThing data - books tagged as "geek" versus books tagged as "nerd", filtered to avoid overlap.

("nerd" gets you Tolkein; "geek" gets you perl and cyberpunk.)

Today's carefully selected statistic

2009-09-07T20:00:56Z

From the "outreach newsletter" of a university which shall remain nameless:

Job opportunities on graduation from ---- are excellent. For example, in 2007, 100 percent of our teacher training graduates, and 95 percent of our radiography and nursing graduates, gained employment within six months.

Spot the two reasons that might not generalise very well to most graduates in 2009.

Advice wanted: mp3 players?

2009-09-02T23:12:07Z

Among everything else, my mp3 player died today. Well, it's not dead dead, but it's dying; randomly hanging due to being unable to access the drive, which is not desperately conducive to doing its job. I rebooted it seven times in twenty-five minutes today, and got about ten minutes running time out of it at most.

I could try rebuilding it (for, what, the third time?) but that approach is probably into diminishing returns by now; it's six years old, and the chassis is now so battered that the power and headphone sockets need gentle treatment in order to work.

So, I should probably think about getting a new one.

What I'd like is something fairly simple, robust (I currently have one of these, which has all the aesthetic solidity of a North Korean factory block), and with a decent capacity and relatively easy-to-use control system. An ability to navigate a directory structure rather than rely on file metadata would be nice, since it's what I'm used to. Preferably, not an ipod or anything with that sort of interface; I've always found the clicky-wheel to be unpleasant to try to work.

I don't particularly want video capability or anything desperately flashy, but enough of a screen to see what I'm looking at would help. Primarily, it has to be able to just plug in to the computer with a USB cable and transfer files as though it were an external drive - no software interface! - and thus reduce the chance of it falling over horribly when faced with a non-Windows machine.

Size and weight, not a problem. The Archos is, currently, half the volume and four times the weight of a standard fat paperback; it fits in a trouser pocket, and that's all that worries me. I don't envisage anything out there being as bulky.

Advice, please! What's out there? What should I avoid? Should I just buy an old Archos off ebay, a fresh hard drive, and take a screwdriver to it again?

Today's pleasant discovery

2009-08-29T22:15:55Z

Blackout - Connie Willis. (2 Feb 2010)

I think the phrase is finally.

Bike query

2009-08-20T12:34:45Z

As some of you may recall (I can't remember if I posted about it or not), last April my bike had a rather catastrophic collapse of the back wheel - the axle bolt sheared completely in half whilst I was in traffic. The wheel itself jammed into the frame, there were horrifying noises, and it was all quite a mess.

So, I walked it home, and that weekend bought a new axle and so forth and fitted it. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. I've had to reattach that a couple of times - the nut occasionally begins to work loose and the wheel "drops" in its housing - but it's not broken again. On the other hand, the back wheel's got more and more precarious over time; the brakes got jammed against it at one point, needing some complicated reworking to fix, I've had to wire the back mudgard to stop it chafing against the tyre; and now the whole wheel's inexplicably wobbling from side to side, about half an inch of yaw each way, no matter how firmly I bolt the axle.

So, today or tomorrow, I'm going to strip it all down again and see if I can get it working anything like smoothly. Unfortunately, I suspect this is a pretty deep-rooted problem, and the wheel itself - or the mounting point on the frame - might be screwed.

So, the actual request here: this is probably beyond my capacity to fix. Can anyone recommend a bike repair shop in Oxford (preferably not too far from South Oxford, since I'll need to walk back), who'll be able to look at this and fix it for a reasonable price for me, or alternatively tell me upfront if it's beyond help? I should try and get this fixed before I have to commute again...

Hurrah

2009-08-14T20:08:06Z

Finally, finally, British politics has gone past the point of diminishing returns.

Health Secretary Andy Burnham has accused a Tory MEP who attacked the NHS on American TV of being "unpatriotic". [BBC]

"Unpatriotic", hurrah. There really isn't much left for them to accuse each other of, is there?

On the road again

2009-08-06T19:19:35Z

I am currently belting happily along the East Coast Main Line, on that nice stretch where it runs parallel to the A1 through the Borders, and you get to stream past a couple of struggling lorries every few minutes.

Which is to say: I'm using the eee, for the first time in a while. I gave it a good going-over at the weekend, formatting and reinstalling it with Ubuntu, and it's now in that pleasant state where it Just Works. I sat down at London, took it out of the pouch, fired it up, and I've been happily working ever since without having to find power cables, or deal with anything falling over, or the like. It's been up for three and a half hours, and there's still a third of the battery left - in fact, comfortably enough battery to handle the whole London-Edinburgh run with the wireless running.

Oh, wireless. Because there's a free internet connection; a flaky one, which is getting about 2000ms ping times to the world outside and a packet loss rate of 10%, but it works for once. Which means I can do all sorts of useful things on the journey, a pleasant surprise. Including, just for the hell of it, photography.

(Yes, I know it's terrible. Proof of concept testing, that's my excuse)

...and now the sun is shining bronze on the Forth, sinking down out of a bank of cloud, and I'm almost home. Long-distance travelling really is pretty comfortable, sometimes.

Free to good home: heavy gloves

2009-08-04T19:02:41Z

Clearing out the wardrobe, I've found a pair of heavy-duty waterproof gloves I was given as a gift. They seem pretty good, but the reason they're languishing in the cupboard is that they're too big for me,

Anyone want them? They're large (size is given as "Men's Large"), black, padded, and made of some insulating-but-waterproof synthetic material. Look like they'd be excellent for cycling... if your hands are big enough.

Things I learned this morning

2009-08-04T14:01:17Z

...you can use a syringe effectively despite putting a ~70° angle in the needle. I'd have expected it to clog, or snap, or something.

(In other news, ow. Dentistry. Still, it was interesting.)

Booklog

2009-08-02T00:28:37Z

This seems to be becoming a once-in-three-weeks pattern. Er.

A song for Nero - Thomas Holt, 2003: published Abacus, 2004.

This is the second of Holt's "historical" novels I've read - the first was Meadowland - and I have to say, I vastly prefer them to his more usual fare.

The concept is ludicrous but simple - Nero doesn't die when he's deposed; he fakes his own death, and goes on the run with a common thief. The two eke out a living as con-artists, relying on the safe assumption that most people don't know quite what the emperor looks like, and those who do will pass it off as coincidence. There's a forgettable plot ticking over in the background - there's a buried treasure they're trying to find, etc - but, really, it's just two men wandering around the underbelly of the Roman Empire, living in each other's back pockets, and swearing blind they can't stand each other. You get the idea. It's surprisingly similar to Meadowland, in fact - the same sort of dynamic, two mismatched characters telling a narrative - though with only one narrative voice, not two.

It's well-written and well-balanced, funny without tipping into the forced surreality he normally works with. There are only one or two moments where his Rome really seems silly - but as one of those is a sustained rant about people treating Virgil's Georgics as a farming handbook, you can't really complain.

Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson, 1992: published Voyager, 1996.

A hundred hand-picked colonists travel to Mars; they create a loose-knit scientific settlement, not unlike one of the Antarctic bases, and set to work. Their little utopia slowly begins to chafe against later settlement; twenty years down the line, there are half a million people on Mars, terraforming and industrialising is underway, and the power is shifting into the hands of the multinational corporations. By an authorial sleight of hand (a life-extension treatment), our original protagonists are still around, and we see them schisming and splintering over how best to respond to it. Fifteen years further on, and there are restive shantytowns of migrant workers clustered around the cities, with power firmly in corporate hands. A strike, a riot, and suddenly a spasmodic and messy revolution. Some of our protagonists are ringleaders, some are trapped in it; but none of them can control it.

There's a nice pattern to it; the journey and the settlement, a growing and flourishing society, and then it begins to decay under outside pressures. After attempts to shore it up fail, we go back down the same path; settlement is replaced by destruction, with the painstakingly built townships wrecked, and our viewpoint characters are forced to flee in desperation, on a new and harder journey, through the irrevocable effects human terraforming has had on the planet. It's not a happy end, but it's a convincing one - and there is a sequel, after all.

Mars is beautifully described - Robinson has a certain way of writing about desolation, and it comes across well. The last section, a long journey across the changing planet to safety, really brings this out; you get the feeling that this is a real place, not a fictional construct.

I'm pleasantly surprised on re-reading; some elements I only vaguely remember seem a lot more prominent. The whole quasi-mythical status of the First Hundred, for example; the passage of people reminiscing about John Boone, which quietly shifts from "where were you when he died?" through ever more ludicrous stories - two of which we know to be untrue - until the stories switch to Paul Bunyan retellings, and the shift is complete. The background of the characters is interesting to re-examine - the First Hundred are explicitly stated to be mostly American & Russian, with a few foreigners; the settlements later are said to be from a wide range of countries, but we only ever seem to see a close focus on the Arabs (and occasionally the Swiss). I'm not sure why, but I suspect deliberate authorial choice to only write what he was comfortable with trying to get right. No-one seems to be excessively stupid or uncharacteristic, though it would have been nice were Hiroko and her farmers not quite so clichédly enigmatic.

All this aside, it caught me, this third or fourth time through, for an entirely unexpected reason.

There's a scene mid-way through the book where Boone, the first man on Mars, reflects on growing old. He was born in 1982, and is now in his sixties. I first read this in, what, 1999-2000? My generation landing on Mars in 2020 was just about conceivable. Now... well, we're debating whether or not we'll fit a sample-return mission in by that year. Of course, it's obsoleted itself before then. It's post-Soviet, but at the same time not really; the Russians and Americans are still effective superpowers, and there's passing talk of "the Commonwealth" in that weird federal-state way people expected the CIS might turn into. It's a little sad, to have it presented like that. It might still happen; it might even happen somewhat like this, barring the changes to Mars we've learned over the years. But it won't ever happen to us like this.

PDF copy, from the publishers, at the bottom of the page here. Get it while you can...

On an unrelated note, I see it's been planned for a television adaptation. This is the second or third time someone's announced that, so we shall see; but it certainly has the potential to work well.

Why the Germans lose at war : the myth of German military superiority. Kenneth Macksey: published Greenhill, 1996.

A promising idea for a book, but a disappointing execution of it.

The idea is simple - Germany, a powerful nation with a strongly militaristic history, fought two major wars in the twentieth century and lost them both. So, why? Was there a systemic reason for it?

The book implies there is an answer, but then evades giving one. Two hundred pages, of which three-quarters are a narrative of the ins and outs of what the German general staff did from 1936 to 1945, then six pages of vague remarks about overconfidence and it ends. There doesn't seem to have been an actual theory, or if there was the author didn't put it across even remotely clearly. It's a pity; it could have been an interesting topic.

Also a dozen others:

Fiasco: the American military adventure in Iraq - Thomas Ricks
Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
How I live now - Meg Rosoff
The dreaming void - Peter F. Hamilton
Yellow blue tibia - Adam Roberts
Rumpole and the Reign of Terror - John Mortimer
Islam: a short history - Karen Armstrong
Architects of eternity - Richard Corfield
Service of all the dead - Colin Dexter
Iron Sunrise - Charles Stross
Clarke County, space - Allen M. Steele
A dirty job - Christopher Moore

Planetary problems

2009-08-01T12:28:38Z

21/7: "The planet Jupiter shows evidence of having being hit by a large object, either a comet or asteroid. A dark mark has appeared in its atmosphere towards the southern pole." [BBC]

1/8: "Astronomers are puzzled by a strange bright spot which has appeared in the clouds of Venus." [BBC]

Life really does sometimes feel like Chapter 1 of a bad sf novel. Which one next?

Amsterdam: photographs, part 2: the city

2009-07-26T07:49:20Z

Full set is here; Iona's notes on the trip are here. Photographs are actually of scenic Amsterdam, this time. (Also, a kitten. Call it a bonus)

Around the canals.

A very small cat contemplating, with some trepidation, the way into a houseboat.

A gateway at the University of Amsterdam.

A heraldic pediment.

Cobwebs on a streetlight. (I'm allowed one silly monochrome shot, okay?)

It seems wherever you go in the world, there's a sad-looking Irish theme pub. (Okay, two.)

And, finally...

...yes, this photograph is not in any way staged. We did, in fact, discover a small religious statue sitting on the edge of a bridge on a quiet residential street somewhere near the docks. I wonder if he's still there.

Amsterdam: photographs, part 1: residences

2009-07-26T07:40:13Z

Because I am exceptionally disorganised, I don't seem to have ever got around to posting these. The full set is here, or edited highlights below:

Our outward cabin. The drawn curtains cunningly give the impression that behind them is something other than a blank wall.

Iona in the window of our flat...

...which was in this building.

The view from that window. The room with the two flags outside it made, perhaps, the best pancake I have eaten in my life.

The flat's balcony...

...and the view. (It's a bit less scenic looking away from the main road)

The flat itself was beautiful. I fear I will never actually live anywhere this nice.

We spent a worrying amount of time in this cafe. (It's not fair, it being all of two minutes from the door... lures you into bad habits)

(Iona's travel notes)