Brian Cathcart on my mother

The writer Brian Cathcart recently wrote a short priece for the New Statesman entitled A history lesson. It begins:

Not many authors publish a book at the age of 90, and fewer still do so when they are already halfway through another book. Can there be more than one in that position, and who is also virtually blind?

The author he’s talking about is my mother, Lorna Arnold (about whom Alec and I recently blogged). The first book to which he’s referring is Britain, Australia and the Bomb: The Nuclear Tests and Their Aftermath, which is the new (and substantially expanded) edition of her classic book about the British A-bomb tests in Australia. And “another book” is the volume of memoirs that all of her friends (and I too) have been urging her to write for many years.
Lorna Arnold Britain, Australia and the Bomb
Occasionally people will ask me what I plan to do when I retire. I have always replied that I don’t understand the question: what is this “retirement” of which they speak. Perhaps my mother’s example explains my attitude….

And they wonder why some of us think organized religion is cuckoo…..

David Farley has a piece in Slate entitled Who stole Jesus’ foreskin?. OK, we can all enjoy a chuckle about medieval superstition, and holy relics, and stuff like that. But the sophisticated types in the Catholic hierarchy would never take such things seriously, would they? But in 1900…

Facing increasing criticism after the “rediscovery” of a holy foreskin in France, the Vatican decreed that anyone who wrote about or spoke the name of the holy foreskin would face excommunication. And 54 years later, when a monk wanted to include Calcata in a pilgrimage tour guide, Vatican officials didn’t just reject the proposal (after much debate). They upped the punishment: Now, anyone uttering its name would face the harshest form of excommunication—”infamous and to be avoided”—even as they concluded that Calcata’s holy foreskin was more legit than other claimants’.

It’s pure Monty Python, isn’t it? (And for the record, Farley believes that the Pope arranged for the “holy foreskin” to be stolen. It makes as much sense as the rest of this stuff.)

"Ask the pilot" on the "gels, aerosols and liquids" idiocy

From the 2006 retrospective edition of Salon’s excellent column Ask the pilot:

Speaking of things that never happened, how could we forget last summer’s liquid-bomb terror scare. In case you were living on Neptune at the time and missed the news, British police broke up an alleged London-based scheme to bring down several U.S. airliners using hard-to-detect liquid explosives. The public continues to believe that authorities rushed in and saved thousands of lives in the nick of time. Quite the contrary. What makes the story so special is how much of an overblown ruse the whole thing was, and just how preposterous our reaction to it has been. The fact that both alleged ringleaders of the plot have been released without charge has gone scarcely noticed by the press. Meanwhile, despite assertions by experts that the types of bombs alleged in the scheme are all but impossible to brew, millions of travelers remain subject to absurd prohibitions of liquids, gels and aerosols from their carry-on bags.

And the result: the insane, chaotic scene from Heathrow that I blogged about recently. But to fix this, some politician somewhere is going to have to violate the most important taboo in politics: Never Admit That You Made A Mistake. Apparently it is more important to be consistent than to be right. (Probably because in this complex world, nobody can actually tell if you’re right, but any idiot can tell if you’re consistent. Dumbed-down political discourse. Good grief….)
P.S. Did you know that the plot ringleaders had been released? I certainly missed it….

Tim on JSON and XML

From ongoing · JSON and XML:

There used to be an argument about whether platform-neutral, language-neutral data formats were important, or whether distributed objects were the right answer. That’s over: HTML, XML, JSON. ¶

There used to be people who argued that network interchange formats shouldn’t be text-based, but use binary where possible, for efficiency. That’s over: HTML, XML, JSON.

I used to be in the people who argued camp, but at this point I’m almost convinced. It’s a little spooky using an over-the-wire format that looks like the kind of pseudocode we’re used to scribbling all over the whiteboard, but perhaps that’s the whole point. We’ll see……

Happy solstice to all

Seasonal greetings to all who are celebrating the longest-running holiday in the world. People have been marking this occasion ever since they were able to make calendars, and I don’t expect that to change as long as there are (moderately) intelligent species inhabiting the planet. The event has always been tricked out with various cultural and mythological decorations, and most of them are entirely charming. (There are some obvious exceptions, like “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” and store-bought egg nog.) Just don’t let any group claim that their “meaning” of the season is The One True Way. Those silly folks just have no sense of history.

Remembering Carl

carl sagan buttonToday, December 20th 2006, is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s untimely death. Among his many gentle – but uncompromising – admonitions, this was always a personal favourite:

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

If only more people realized this….
Check out the Celebrating Sagan blog – part of the Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon. People have posted video and audio clips, anecdotes, reminiscences, photographs, and personal tributes. Lots of stuff to make you think – which is the whole point, isn’t it?
UPDATE: My colleague Werner has just posted his thoughts about Sagan the educator.

A rude awakening

I’ve got into a nice, relaxed pattern on Sunday mornings: I make a pot of coffee, curl up in front of the TV with the coffee and a pack of oatmeal-and-raisin cookies biscuits, and watch back-to-back English Premier League matches for four hours. It’s a nice, predictable, comfortable habit.

Until this morning.

First West Ham beat Manchester United 1-0, which means that Chelsea are only 2 points behind ManU (sorry!) the Red Devils at the top of the league. And then Spurs, hitherto winless on the road, beat Manchester City, breaking their perfect home record. The second match included one of the prettiest goals I’ve ever seen: a glorious 20-yard half-volley by Tom Huddlestone (pictured).
Tom Huddlestone after scoring his first EPL goal

Great viewing, but hardly the relaxing Sunday morning I had anticipated. In fact I’m going to have to dig out the vacuum cleaner to clean up all the cookie crumbs….

Photos from Oxford & Edinburgh

Belatedly following Alec, I’ve posted some of my photos from my recent trip to the UK. There are rather a lot of “views from a train window” which capture an utterly typical (but not particularly photogenic) view of England. Oh, well. I particularly enjoy the shots I took in the Covered Market in Oxford with Alec, such as:
Alec's choice
and
Feathers too
Oxford itself was as photogenic as ever, e.g.
Timeless style
And finally, here are my mother and Alec in conversation:
Lorna Alec
Enjoy.

A very long day

I’m back in Seattle after a long day’s travel. Door-to-door (i.e. Edinburgh hotel to my apartment) it took 22 hours 30 minutes. Segment by segment:

  • The taxi to Edinburgh airport was wonderful. The driver was a great character: something of a social philosopher, with a wicked sense of humour.
  • EDI-LHR on a British Midland A320, BD53: a classic business-person’s shuttle flight. Most people were clearly going to London for the day: suits were immaculate, briefcases full of the right papers. The striking thing was the depth of the cloud bank over the northern UK: we climbed out of EDI, entered cloud at about 400 ft. AGL, and didn’t break out into sunshine until 30 minutes later at about FL320. Of course due to the new British rules (“only one piece of carry-on baggage, INCLUDING laptops, handbags, purses, etc.”) I had to check my case. Inevitably it was one of the last ones off the carousel at LHR. I retrieved it, and headed over to Terminal 3.
  • United occupies the remotest spot in Heathrow’s Terminal 3, and it’s always a hassle to get there. When I did, the self-checkin machine refused to check me in and told me to see a human. (I could have predicted this, since I’d been blocked at the same point during online checkin.) There was one person handling “Special needs”, and 30 people ahead of me in line. All of a sudden, my 2 hour connection time started to look awfully inadequate. Eventually I got checked in and headed upstairs. It was now 11. I was herded into a line, six people wide, running the length of the terminal building, just to get into the security area. 30 minutes later I reached the head of this line, showed my boarding card, and entered the serpentine queue for the X-ray/metal detector/pat-down screening. When I did reach the X-rays, I was pulled out for a thorough pat-down by a pimply youth who examined me as thoroughly as it’s possible to do without actually removing clothing. I smiled politely, retrieved my shoes, jacket, laptop and case, and headed for the gate. I arrived at 12:05pm; the plane was due to depart at 12:20pm. That is closer than I ever want to be on an international connection.
  • The flight itself (LHR-ORD, UA949, 777, seat 22J in Economy Plus) was completely uneventful. We took a northerly route, just skimming the southern tip of Greenland, and things went very smoothly. There were a few noisy kids around, but I plugged in my noise-cancelling headphones and listened to channel 9. (During the oceanic segment, I dug out my iPod and chose two albums: the new Love mash-up of Beatles’ classics, and No Roots by Faithless. Both highly recommended.)
  • ORD was efficient, in a kind of robotic way. After clearing Immigration and Customs and schlepping over to Terminal 1 [What idiot decided to have both terminals and concourses? I was departing from gate B5, which meant the B Concourse, which corresponded to Terminal 1. Stupid.], I got through security (third time of the day) hit the RCC and grabbed a gin-and-tonic before logging in to check email. Bad plan: I should have eaten.
  • The final flight was UA949, ORD-SEA, B757, seat 12F in Economy Plus. I keep forgetting that row 12 is bad, because it doesn’t have a window. Never mind, it was dark, and I was tired. 12E was empty, so I spread out, kicked back, plugged into channel 9, and went to sleep. This meant that I missed the stupid “snack box” food for sale thing. I went back to sleep, as best I could, but it was a miserably bumpy flight: 170 kt. headwinds, continuous light chop to moderate turbulence, all aircraft hunting vainly for clean air. With that kind of weather we inevitably missed our 8:05pm arrival time, but it was OK: I’d carried on my bags, and so I was able to catch the 8:54pm bus (Route 174) and get home by 9:30pm.

No predictions for how I’m going to get through tomorrow. And speaking of tomorrow, Seattle is due for the same kind of weather as Edinburgh: blustery rain, with sustained gale force winds. Meanwhile the East Coast is basking in unseasonably warm weather……
But overall it was a really delightful trip. It was great to be with my mother for her 91st birthday, good to see my brother and get into Oxford, and a wonderful bonus to spend time with Alec. The Amazon Development Centre team in Scotland blew me away; I hope I don’t offend anyone in Seattle when I say that ADC includes some of the most imaginative engineers that I’ve met at Amazon. They’re a really cool team, and I learned a lot from them. (And special thanks to Joan L. for handling the logistics – it all went flawlessly!)