Author: geoff

Everything, everything

Over on the Al Stewart mailing list, there’s been a discussion of the forthcoming boxed set by EMI. Many of the list members already own everything in the set, including the “unreleased” and “alternate” versions, so the obvious question is, do you buy it, and if so why? My comment:

I used to be a completist – everything by Al, everything by the Legendary Pink Dots, everything by the Pet Shop Boys, everything by Faithless…. But as John Cleese put it in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “I got better.” I think what did it was the torrent of “Dick’s Picks…” live recordings of the Grateful Dead; I realized that I didn’t need eight different versions of “Franklin’s Tower”. From there it was a short step to giving up my ambition of collecting every single different remix of “West End Girls”. Subsequent recovery was uneventful.

Besides, I couldn’t bear to think of myself as the kind of anorak whose Last Will and Testament proudly bequeathes: “my entire collection of Freddie and the Dreamers records to my dearly beloved grand-nephew Cyril, knowing that he will treasure them as I have”.

(You may recognize the subject line as the title of a CD by Underworld. I own this CD; in fact I think I have everything that they’ve released. Oh, well.)

Cricket for baseball enthusiasts

Many of my American friends are mystified by cricket: not just the rules, but the very mechanics of the game. They assume that bowling is like pitching, and can’t seem to understand that in cricket one is dealing with movement in the air (as in pitching) and movement “off the pich”, generated when the spinning ball bounces. The BBC have put up a series of brief video masterclasses on various cricket techniques; the one called Learn the basics of leg-spin is particularly good. Recommended.

Ashes 2005

52306.icon.jpgIf British Airways wasn’t all screwed up… and if I could get a ticket for the match… I’d be sorely tempted to fly back to England tonight to watch tomorrow’s play in the Third Test match at Old Trafford. How often do you get to savour news like this? “Simon Jones and Ashley Giles took three wickets apiece as Australia closed in deep trouble 234 runs behind England.”

It can't be Web 2.0 – not enough people are complaining

Tim Bray and a cast of thousands are debating whether the term Web 2.0 is a useful term to describe today’s Web. He cites Tim O’Reilly’s argument that “The content is getting bigger and richer and deeper, user interfaces are getting better, and interesting new applications are showing up. His premise, basically, is that we need a name for this renaissance, and “Web 2.0 is as good as any, and it seems to be getting traction, so where’s the harm?” Nonetheless Tim Bray thinks it’s a “faux-meme” – that we’re really up to 3.0 or even 8.0. I too think it’s a bogus idea, but in the other direction. We’re still running Web 1.x.

First, it isn’t a renaissance – to have a re-birth, you must first have a birth and a loss, and this web stuff is simply too continuous and too short term (even in dot-com years). Second, we haven’t done anything to justify the leap from 1.0 to 2.0 yet. In particular, all interesting 2.0 transitions in history have involved a painful dislocation as people realize, “oh shit, we didn’t get it quite right, and we can’t achieve backward compatibility.” It’s going metric, it’s like changing from steam to diesel, or AM to FM. What might such a dislocation look like in the web? It’s hard to know until we actually run into the wall, but something like TBL‘s nirvana of semantic mark-up might do it: we can imagine that, fairly quickly, a large amount of web content would become second class, which would be painful. (There’s a related idea about evolving the web from a resource for people to a resource for autonomous agents, but I’m not quite sure how to describe that, and whether that would be 3.0.)

When I hear people complaining about the next web transition, I’ll think about changing from 1.x to 2.0. Not before.

Mighty Mouse

Yes, I did get a Mighty Mouse. I love it. The scroll ball feels absolutely natural, and the touch-sensitive shell works well. The only thing I need to work on is that, when mousing left-handed*, my ring finger sometimes brushes the left side of the shell just as I’m right-clicking. Since the logic seems to be “it’s a left-click unless it’s unambiguously something else”, I’ll have to fix this. As for the side buttons, I haven’t use them much so far. The default setting is to bring up Expose to switch windows, but I prefer to task-switch by using scroll-ball-click to bring up the application list, horizontally scrolling with the scroll ball, and selecting via left-click. Very easy, better than repeated cmd-tabs.

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* Even though I’m right-handed, I’ve taken to mousing left-handed about 80% of the time. Good for incipient carpal issues.

Cracked

OK, this is an essential add-on for PSPs: the Akihabara News reports on “a new wallpaper for the PSP”. Sounds innocent enough…. But on further examination, there doesn’t seem to be a download link. Hopefully this will be rectified soon. I did a quick search trying to find other images of this kind – it seems like a natural theme – but I only came across one modest effort (registration required). Odd.

Science and varieties of theism

My contribution to the Priests in Lab Coats debate going on at Salon.com:

Science, including evolution, says nothing about theism in general. Given the wide variety of gods that people have believed in, this should not be surprising – it’s not clear that ANYTHING speaks to theism in general.

However it is true that science – evolution, of course, but also geology, physics, and biology – is incompatible with certain religious viewpoints, particularly those that hold inerrantist positions concerning various ancient texts. Science explores regular relationships between phenomena – gravitational (stuff falls), chemical, kinetic, and so forth. If such relationships are merely the whimsy of a capricious deity – if water can be conjured into existence to create a flood and then made to vanish – then such regularities are impossible. Evidence becomes meaningless: we may as well believe in solipsism or Last-Thursdayism (the reductio ad absurdum that the universe was created last Thursday, complete with people with memories of a longer existence).

Scientists MUST disbelieve in a world that is phenomenally capricious. If a theist believes in such a world, they cannot accept science. There is no coherent worldview that is consistent with both. But this is not an argument about theism, merely about a particular fundamentalist worldview.

Oxgate Gardens, London NW2

I love FriendsReunited. I don’t make many contacts there, but every few months something comes up in a serendipitous way. Sometimes it’s a happy serendipity, sometimes not. For example, I came across the name of someone that I was at school with back in 1962-3 at St. Benedict’s School in Ealing. I sent off an email, received no reply, and thought nothing of it. And then a few months later I had a message from his account, written by his wife – or rather his widow. He had died suddenly, and she’d been cleaning up his electronic personæ and come across my query. That felt strange.

The most recent connection was just today. FriendsReunited have expanded from their original school and college contacts to include workplaces and now street addresses. Back in 1954-1963 we lived in a suburban semidetached house in north-west London: 75, Oxgate Gardens, London NW2. (Google Maps only shows the street; number 75 was on the north side, about three houses from the corner of Coles Green Road.) Just across the street and a few houses down there was a slightly larger three-storey house that had been converted into a small private school: Blenheim House. Both my brother and I went there between 1958 and 1962. (It’s mentioned towards the end of this history of schools in the Willesden area; apparently it closed a year or two after I left.) I noticed that another FriendsReunited subscriber had lived at an address that must have been next door to the school, so I sent her an email. We exchanged messages, and it unlocked a torrent of memories from about 50 years ago. Delightful. Thanks, Sally.

First, find a dictionary

I was just chatting to my brother about library information systems – he works at the Bodleian Library in Oxford – and he mentioned that “the Bod” is implementing some new systems from VTLS in Virginia. Naturally, I checked out their web site. I assumed that the VT in the name stood for Virginia Tech – after all, both institutions are based in Blacksburg, VA. Nope – VTLS stands for “Visionary Technologies in Library Solutions”. (That has to be one of the most blatant acronym redefinitions I’ve come across.) Digging further, I came across this gem:

“Built according to the standards and best practices set forth by the Digital Library Federation’s Electronic Resource Management Initiative, VERIFY brings a plethora of benefits to staff and users alike.”

Plethora?!?! Perhaps they should try using their own software to locate a decent dictionary or thesaurus….

So passes a courageous, red-headed maverick who spoke truth to power

The Guardian, BBC and others are reporting that: “former Cabinet minister Robin Cook, 59, has died after collapsing while hill walking in north-west Scotland.” Apparently he was fell-walking with his wife Gaynor near the summit of Ben Stack, and he had a heart attack which led to a severe fall; it took some time for rescue services to reach him.

Robin Cook was the most senior politician in Britain or the US to take a principled stand against the invasion of Iraq. I blogged about his book, Point of Departure, last year. It’s still essential reading. What a great loss to British politics.

(I note that Jack Straw, John Prescott, Gordon Brown, David Blunkett and others have issued statements expressing sympathy and appreciation for Cook’s contributions. But there’s nothing from Tony Blair yet.)