Sell More Subscriptions or You Get Beaten Up!

Young people are being recruited in America to sell magazine subscriptions on the street. According to this New York Times story, the business is very dubious.

Picture of a sandstorm approaching in Iraq and Carbon Offsetting

This is a Featured Picture in Wikipedia. "Cheatneutral" is a funny piss-take of carbon-offsetting. You pay via them for someone to "not cheat" in order to offset your cheating. Offset your guilt!

Flying People Photos

The World Press Photo Contest has some cool pictures of people flying through the air - it's dance!

Edit photos online

This is a cool idea; you can edit your images online at this website. You don't need photo-editing software and you can work with your flikr pictures. It's only in beta so far and it's only got basic controls, but it looks cool. Mac / PC ads are all around now, but I found a Japanese one that looks cool - Domo

Animated film

A nicely animated film about a fantasy explorer.

Vista Security hole... I know but this is also funny

Apparently if a wav file is downloaded and played at sufficient volume and quality on a machine running Vista where speakers and microphone are enabled, the machine may respond to commands issued in the wav file. There's also a technet article about it. Funny stuff!

Development

This video on YouTube is of a fascinating lecture about development across the world (as in economic / social development, not computer development) presented as data on charts. Presented by Hans Rosling

Funny ads from IKEA

A sense of humour is good when advertising your products. IKEA furniture isn't great, but it's cheap and anybody can enjoy these ads (all videos) - woman has lost something in her untidy house. Visit from the girlfriend. Little Boy finds a new toy

Isaac Asimov Story

An amusing story from Isaac Asimov

New Word Processor (Joking...)

You can have some fun with (Flash gimmick) this.

Drug Patent Politics

This sounds pretty awful. Novartis, the Swiss drugs company, is challenging the patent law in India and if they are successful, the price of some drugs could skyrocket. A woman who reported a rape was arrested and refused a morning-after pill in Florida.

You Are What You Eat Revisited

An interesting (and substantial) article in the New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan about the rise of "Nutritionism" and decline of nutrition in the American diet. Before and After retouching shots of models from (Flash Movie) Christiane Beaulieu

Pictures of New York People

These pictures are very New York

"Isotope 2" Online Drawing Game

You set the parameters for the machine to draw and set it off

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I've just finished a book by Jonathan Safran Foer called "Extermely Loud and Incredibly Close", which I found very moving. I was on the tube as I got to the end of the book and I could feel tears coming. Reviewers have criticised the book for its whimsicality and there are elements of that, but overall I thought it was a great read.

I'd read Safran Foer's previous book "Everything is Illuminated" and found it interesting but mixed - he tells the story in several different voices, not all of which are so easy to read. The main voice is a very entertaining one though, a young, naive "translator" (that's what he calls himself) called Alex.

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" uses some of the same devices as the earlier book - various voices, some of which are heavier going than others and a foreground character who this time is a clever young boy with apparently autistic tendencies. In the first book Safran Foer dealt with Holocaust survival and in this one his main character's father dies in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Oskar (the young boy) describes his grief as "heavy boots" and he thinks up inventions in order to stop himself thinking of bad things. At one point he has the idea that there should be a channel under everybody's pillow to drain their tears to the reservoir in Central Park. Each morning a special report would tell everyone the emotional state of the city and occasionally, on the worst days, everybody would be called upon to bring sandbags to shore up the banks of the reservoir and stop it from overflowing. If you think that kind of metaphor is silly or cloying, don't read this book. I found it lovely.

In "Everything is Illuminated", the author himself appears, looking for the person who saved his father from the Nazis. There is a parallel in the later novel (perhaps there being so many close similarities is a weakness, well, let's see if the next one is the same); Oskar goes on an impossible quest in search of the lock which fits a key he finds in his father's closet. He has many wonderful adventures which in the end seem to have become therapy for Oskar and when he comes to the end, he realises that the search made him feel closer to his father than reaching its conclusion.

Dealing with the trauma of the aftermath of 9/11 is obviously very hard for a novelist and I guess it's inevitable that writers will do it obliquely (for instance by using the voice of an autistic child). One scene that I thought benefited from this was where Oskar gives a talk at school about the experience of people in a Japanese city hit by an atomic bomb. His schoolmates are grossed out by the horrible details while Oskar enthuses over technicalities. We see Oskar's isolation from his schoolmates and in the process a question occurs; how do we feel about 9/11? Because there were no survivors and hardly any remains, there are no similarly gruesome stories for 9/11, just the haunting phone messages and the images of falling bodies. Oskar has his own reactions to both these motifs.

Many people will find this book too trite to handle its subject, and the author crass for turning 9/11 into entertainment, but as I say I found parts of it very moving. Oskar is sent home from school on the fateful day and plays five messages from his dad on the answerphone. He replaces the answerphone with an identical one so that he can protect his mum from the messages, but feels compelled to keep playing them. Later we hear that the fifth message was his father repeating "Are you there?" eleven times. Oskar was in the house and heard his father leaving this message, but was unable to answer the phone. he carries a burden of guilt for that. You finish the book wondering whether he would shed that burden.

Problems with the Vista User Interface

Steve Wiseman over at IntelliAdmin laments Vista's problems in this piece called "The 5 Sins of Vista"

Fortune Cookie Website

Blogthings will tell you all sorts of things about yourself and all free. It's like a fortune cookie machine that will spout on various subjects, such as What American City You Are, and Are You a Drama Queen or King?. It does also have a Fortune Cookie Generator, which told me "A man can keep his youth by giving her money, furs and diamonds".

I made a password generator in Excel, maybe I could do something like this with it. I remember David Bowie used to create the lyrics for his songs by chopping up lines of text and juxtaposing them.

Driving With a Shattered Steering Column

I was talking in an earlier post about how problems with your house can seem mysterious, obscure and hard to solve. As often happens when I make such a statement, I then recalled a case that suggested the same could happen with cars. I remembered a problem we once had with a car, that could also have been much more dangerous in retrospect. There were just two of us (my partner and I) at that point and we had a yellow Mini. Our previous car was also a Mini but had been wrecked by a BMW driving slowly into the back of the car behind us in a traffic queue. The Beamer driver was just bending down to pick something up with his brakes off. His car pushed the car behind us into our mini's boot and his insurance didn't match the quality of his car. To fix the dented boot would have cost more than the car was worth, so we gave it to a scrap metal merchant for twenty quid.

So the next car (another Mini) we got was a bit nicer and more reliable, except after a while you could feel it pulling the steering wheel a bit to the left as you drove. You could keep pulling it back and it didn't seem like a bad problem because the car still ran alright, but we took it to the garage several times trying to get it fixed. The garage tried wheel tracking and replaced the bearings and said it would be OK, but it wasn't. We must have been driving it for six months or so after first noticing the problem when we took it back in again and said the things they had tried so far had not worked. They looked again and this time said they had found that the head of the steering column was shattered. After we'd let it sink in we felt relieved that we'd kept trying to get it fixed!

Plumbers and Builders

I've had a bad relationship with plumbers and builders. I'm trying to think of the word that means a relationship isn't working very well, (is it disfunctional?) This probably stems from the fact that I'm not a confident handyman, not well-endowed (steady...) in the arts of manipulating resistant materials. "Resistant Materials" is what woodwork, metalwork, and plastics are now called at school, instead of just woodwork and metalwork (see, we didn't make anything except model airplanes with plastic when I was at school). I wasn't good at making them do things at school and didn't develop much in the way of DIY post-education. When we moved into our current house, I met our next door neighbour, nice guy, and the first thing he said to me was "Are you 'andy?" So I thought he'd misheard my name, but he meant was I good with tools.

I was about to say that this lack of ability with hammers nails and saws has led us to pay for some bad work, but actually we've probably been lucky, because most of the work we've had done seems to have been good. So why the dissatisfied feeling? Well, it is often difficult to get them to come round to do a quotation and then sometimes they're just too busy to do the work, though I must admit to once having got a plumber out to fit a washer on a bathroom tap that I had broken by trying to fix it myself, on a Bank Holiday. He did come out and fix it, but it was expensive. I know not to try to fix plumbing on Bank Holidays now. Or, it could be that half the time we don't know what the problem is, so we try various fixes for the same problem that don't seem to fix it, for instance damp walls are a mysterious phenomenom that can apparently be caused by all sorts of things, and if only we could know the spefically relevant thing we'd be happy. Fixing car problems has been less difficult, why should that be; are cars more insulated from Nature? Or just always newer and subjected to that endless cycle (spiral?) of renewal, ditching your old car and buying the newer model with all its improvements; better brakes, side-impact bars, better fuel consumption, whereas fixing our house is like keeping a rusty old Ford Cortina on the road. And perhaps that I don't feel at all guilty about not being any good at fixing cars.

Actually what prompted this post - become whinge was a story over on the Velo-Gubbed Legs blog about nmj's boiler engineer being very young. She talks about standing over his shoulder while he worked and that reminded me (obscurely) of my daughter when she was small, standing behind a plumber that we had got to work on our heating. The plumber was recommended to us by friends. He was middle-aged and had a family (he was the guy that came out on a Bank Holiday; at that time I asked him about his family but he wasn't too bothered. I know I'd hate to work on a Bank Holiday, but he seemed happy enough to get away). So my daughter was following this guy round watching what he was doing, she was fascinated (twelve years later she's a lot more self-concious), but I'm not sure what the fascination was, probably just curiosity; I think she was too young to be concerned that he was doing a good job. I must ask her whether she remembers that plumber - she did have a bit of a thing for older men (I mean when she was four), she loved meeting a Father Christmas at my sister's house. She followed him around until he gave her a kiss, then went back for a couple more.

Flash Game Fun

Try this Flash game - it's fun.

Guantanamo: Set Them Free

Guantanamo Bay is an illegal detention centre run by the US Government. They run it in a different country in order to avoid judicial regulations in their own country. Amnesty International is campaigning for the closure of Guantanamo or the fair trial of its prisoners, but the camp continues and the suffering continues. Join the (Flash movie) Amnesty Flotilla and call for the closure of the prison.

More Best old Music

Thinking back over what were my favourite things in music, these songs stick out from the seventies and eighties. Here's a bunch of YouTube links:

Golden Earring "Radar Love" (What a cool groove. I never owned this single but it was always one of my favourites - and check out the skin-tight jumpsuits on those guys!)
Elvis Costello "Watching the Detectives" (for skanky rhythm and lyrics sharp as a stick)
P.P. Arnold "The First Cut is the Deepest" (for as much soul you could get from a little piece of vinyl. I thought that song was written by Steve Winwood or Jim Capaldi, but apparently not - Cat Stevens wrote it!)
Chaka Khan "Ain't Nobody" (Great disco shakes. Mmmm what a fabulous bass line. Sorry I couldn't find a better quality clip.)
Evelyne Champagne King "Shame" (Brill riff, sparkling and fizzy)
Parliament Funcadelic "One Nation Under a Groove" (For the funkiest funk ever)

All these are still great songs, I get a rush just thinking about each one; it's just a pity I couldn't find good links for them all. I did find several great links on TheBurnleyBoy YouTube channel

Give a Water Buffalo

You know those gifts for poor families that you can by proxy, like where you pay for a goat for a family in an African village or something like that? Well apparently sometimes nobody actually gets a goat; the money goes into a development pool. So if you thought you were sending a direct gift, well not actually. There's a guy called Robert Thompson who lives in Yunan province in China. He's American and he went there with his Chinese partner to get married. He's also a violinist and he's doing a tour over there. Anyway he saw a story on Philip Greenspun's blog about this guy who bought a water buffalo and then realised nobody actually got a water buffalo. You can see the comment from Bob Thompson under the blog post and then you can see the resulting video (pretty professional) on Thompson's site. I came across this on Jason Kottke's site.

I've Forgotten my Password

Did you forget your password over the Christmas holidays? Daily Dose of Imagery has a nice picture of BCE Place in Toronto. Sam Javanrouh, who takes the pictures, also mentions how it was stitched together using this "panorama tool"

John Coltrane

John Coltrane (1926-1967) is one of my favourite jazz musicians and has been for a long time. I think him and Miles Davis were the Kings of Jazz for a while and when I first heard their music at college I thought it was the best thing ever. The Official John Coltrane site has (Flash movie, with no controls - you have to close the browser to stop it) a cool set you can listen to while reading up about his life (though his life was really just the music). There's not so much to say about Coltrane except that he was a great musician who produced some fabulous music (particularly A Love Supreme), not always appreciated in his time. His wife, Alice Coltrane, also a jazz musician, recently died.

Cheeky Boys Help Dad With Painting the House

If you're a parent you've been there (well not always that far!). Satellite Navigation is becoming popular and apparently people are trusting it too implicitly. There have been crashes reported in Germany and the UK and people making unsafe turns, because "the satnav told me to".

Picasso's Great Masterpiece Was Created a 100 Years Ago

Many people say Les Demoiselles D'Avignon is the greatest masterpiece of the twentieth century. It was created in 1907 by the young Picasso and started a revolution in the Visual Arts. Even now the picture looks violent and shocking, but at the time it must have been quite an experience to see it. The painting is so radically different from what went before and was so important to what came after that more than any other work it can be seen as pivotal in the development of Modern Art.

You don't look at this picture and think "How beautiful". It seems determined to be ugly, in fact by standards of the time it must have seemed slapdash, though apparently Picasso made around 800 studies for it. The figures are unrealistic and the whole space of the picture looks broken. The painting seems to have gone through several stages and the way some figures are painted is very different from others. Famously, some of the figures are inspired by Iberian sculptures, but the more brutally painted ones resemble African masks. It looks as if it was painted in a reckless manner, even after so long; Picasso obviously disregarded any requirement for the painting to be attractive and instead created a breakthrough painting, one that broke up the imaginary picture plane that most other painters used. The picture was only later understood to be crucial in the development of Modern Art, and when you look at it, it is a very forceful and compelling painting, both because it has an immediacy and because of how Picasso's art and the History of Art changed after this painting.

There's an interesting article on the Financial Times site which reminds us a little of the context of the Demoiselles. The writer, Jakie Wullschlager, says that other artists were also searching to reinvent the old outmoded methods of representation and they were also looking to art from other cultures to inspire them, as Picasso had looked to iberian and african art. The same article mentions the El Greco painting "The Opening of The Fifth Seal (The Vision of St. John)" as a major influence on Picasso at this point. I wasn't entirely convinced by that, but it's an interesting idea.

"Hold Your Wee For a Wii" Contest Ends in Death

A competition at a radio station in Sacramento USA ended with the death of a woman who had been competing. The contestants were given water to drink, but to win they had to hold it until everyone else had given up and relieved themselves. The woman died of "Water Intoxication". The prize? A Nintendo wii.

Book Review: "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith

I recently read this and enjoyed it a lot. The main thing I liked is that the characters are engaging and believable. It's about two families, one mixed race and one black, the fathers / husbands of which are both college professors. These two guys are at opposite ends of the political and critical (they are both art historians) spectrum and are involved in some kind of arguement, but the best bits of the book are not about them or their squabble; the best bits (and most of the book) are about the family of the white guy his mixed race family and a young rapper they come into contact with.

The book is about middle class black families living and working in a university town, and probably some people will find their lives a little easy. These people don't have real problems like some of the people they meet; they are protected from trouble by their wealth, but I still found Kiki, Zora, Levi, Jerome and Howard (the father) compelling, even when I was wincing at the things they put themselves through. Howard in particular, even though he's obviously a very intelligent guy, does some very stupid things, apparently designed to hurt those he loves and by proxy himself. Howard blunders around the book like a big bear, taking whatever is close by. There's a scene where the family are at a funeral and Howard decides he can't take it anymore, so he leaves the church and goes to visit his father, who he has not seen for several years. The two men can't communicate and in a very well observed scene Howard soon loses patience and walks out on his dad.

Zora and Levi are the two younger children and a lot of the book is about them and how they struggle with their contradictory lives. Levi wants to be a cool bro'. He meets some young haitians selling pirate dvds on the streets and soon he wants to bury himself in their cause, but he can't admit to them where he's from and pretends he's from the poorer part of town. Zora wants to be respected for her equality politics but her father is the professor. She campaigns for a young local black rapper to be allowed to attend the same poetry course as her, but she herself has been allowed on the course by means of political machination.

What makes all this such a great read is the understanding with which it's written. I felt these people could really exist and Zadie Smith had been living with them for months at a time, sharing their private thoughts and even when they made their stupid mistakes I could feel with them.

For the first few pages I wondered whether I was just going to find the book a flat farce about ridiculous people at university (it vaguely remined me of the Wilt books), but it soon got going and proved to be a lot better than that. We could have had more sympathetic treatment of Professor Kipps, Howard's reactionary nemesis, and his attractive daughter Victoria, but the one I would like to have heard more from was Jerome, Howard's christian son, who has gone to live and work with Professor Kipps and fallen in love with Victoria (thus a double betrayal of his father). Perhaps it's the false tone of the emails at the start of the book that let the book down to begin with, but I never got to feel for Jerome in the way that I did for the others; a pity, since the tension setup by his "betrayals" sets up the first great scene, where Howard shows up at the Kipps residence in an effort to sort the sorry business out. I get the feeling Zadie Smith doesn't empathise with christians very much, perhaps her talent led her to conjure up Jerome too easily - a stronger Jerome would have given the Belsy family more depth I feel. This is only a slight criticism of a very good book, which made me want to go back and read her others as soon as I can.

Nerdy Cartoon Nice Design Work

xkcd is a cartoon website that occasionally comes up with gems like this one. Lovely. Nice design work on Misprinted Typ e

Favourite Tracks from 2006

We (me, my partner and daughter) generally do a "best tracks of the year" excercise and this year came up with these:

Kanye West - Spaceship
Sufjan Stevens - Decatur
Trivium - Rain
Head Automatica - Please Please Please (Young Hollywood)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Date With The Night
Manu Chao - Clandestino
Orchestre de la Pailotte - Kadia Blues
Novalima - Malato
Evanescence - Going Under
Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra - Ya Fama
Lost Prophets - A Town Called Hypocrisy

Actually some of these have been around for a while, but I guess some years we just don't discover a lot of new music. Last Christmas I got given Kanye West's "Late Registration" and this year I thought I'd buy the first one for my daughter but she doesn't like it much, so I'm listening to it. The Sufjan Stevens album "(Come on Feel the) Illinoise" was my favourite music last year and this Christmas I got another one by him. Trivium and Head Automatica are both my daughter's choices; Trivium in particular is a bit heavy for me. I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs though, me and sprog can agree on that. We've been into Manu Chao for a while and learnt Clandestino together in the car driving around Wales this Christmas. Orchestre de la Pailotte and Novalima are my partner's choices, Novalima is great stuff, we've been playing that all year. Evanescence is another of the young lass's - that's the name that most people have recognised, I've been going round saying "Oh, this year is quite mixed, our tastes have diverged a bit", thinking the daughter's heavy stuff might be a bit over the top for most people, but Evanescence is the one everyone said they knew and liked. Toumani Diabate is a great african musician playing lovely music. We went to see him in Brighton this year and had a great time.

Giorgio de Chirico

One of the greatest Surrealist painters, de Chirico produced eerie masterpieces like these (strangely hosted at the Maths and Computer Science Department of California State University; somebody there knows a good thing) and these at the de Chirico Foundation. de Chirico was actually making these paintings before the First World War, whereas the Surrealists got together in the 1920s. He later painted much more traditional pictures, not very well.

Trying out Linux

I've just installed Ubuntu Linux and I'm starting to learn how it works and what I can do with it. So far I've been impressed, except the installation took several attempts. I have a 700mhz cpu, 256 MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive, so the server copy of Ubuntu that my boss gave me wasn't going to work. I had started to download the free version of RedHat Linux called CentOS, but I had only downloaded 1 out of 4 cds and I saw lots of stuff about Ubuntu and it was only one cd, so I decided to switch to that. I've a feeling that I'm not getting the best out of it yet though; there are some issues with the media player, but actually I've been pleasantly surprised at the applications and the ease of use. I had to try the installation several times, but I didn't get any difficult questions and most of what I need has worked without me having to make any changes. I've been able to play cds on the media player (called Sound Juicer), browse the Web with Firefox (which means the Operating System auto-configured my broadband router), play games... haven't done much work yet though – having too much fun. My printer installed without a problem and Ubuntu saw my usb stick itself.

Hopefully I'll be able to improve the performance a bit with some tweaking; the Word Processor is a bit slow to start, but it's quite easy to use and some of the most common shortcuts work fine. Surprisingly the dictionary doesn't include Firefox or shortcut (what are those several dictionaries?).

Adult wii news

There's an interesting story on the Opposable Thumbs site about how a porn site has added a "wii-friendly interface". It would be cool to have other ways of working with a website than a keyboard and mouse. You need a lot more room with a wii though. Here's a nice article on neatorama called "13 Photographs that Changed the World".

Breaking Taboos in Drag

I saw this story linked on Reddit. It's about Salim Ali, a drag artist in Pakistan who presents a television show. There's also a selection of clips from her shows on YouTube, e.g. this one. It reminded me of a South African comedian called Pieter-Dirk Uys, who lampooned the Apartheid Government as the socialite Evita Bezuidenhout. I also found an article at the BBC about a Zimbabwean drag artist called Kudah Samuriwo. Perhaps drag is particularly effective in macho countries, but these artists are obviously pretty brave with it; imagine the intimidation they get from their countrymen! The African girls seem more radical and have now shifted their fight as much against HIV/AIDS as their governments, whereas Salim Ali is more mainstream. She is able to do this by virtue of the ambiguity of being a man dressed as a woman; women would not be allowed to do the same thing, yet she can take on this role and flirt with her guests in a way that would otherwise be unacceptable.

Microsoft Digital Rights Management

Charlie Dimerjian at the Inquirer says Windows Vista is not an option because of the heavy-handed way it protects content. Karel Donk says maybe piracy is a better choice. In 2004 Cory Doctorow gave a talk about DRM to Microsoft in which he pleaded that they "turn the wheel on the old Buick". Peter Gutmann wrote an article about the performance overhead incurred by adding in DRM to the Operating System. So is this storm going to grow into a tempest for Vista?

Church Bloopers and Richard Dawkins

The Daily Nooz blog has posted some old "church bloopers" that were circulated by email years ago. My favourite is this one: The Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 P.M. Please use the back door. Made me laugh. This made me cheer (quietly) though. Richard Dawkins has been named "man of the year" by this blog.

Velcro Photo

Here's an amazing picture of velcro being pulled apart, magnified hugely. Wikipedia have a map showing countries that have the Death Penalty and those that don't.

Teaching method

I found this article about a method that an American professor used in his lectures in order to get the students to pay attention. Authorities in America have found that gift token cards (in the US they seem to be called gift cards) are being used as money-laundering devices, partly because they are not counted as legal tender when it comes to border crossing, so you can carry as much as you like in gift tokens across US borders.

Disease and Invasion in the Multiplayer Online World

Second Life and Word Of Warcraft are "virtual worlds" created by developers and open to anyone who wants to play. Players sign up and create avatars and then interact with the virtual world and other players. According to the Wikipedia page about Second Life, its use has exploded in the last few months, going from 1,000,000 users in October to double that in mid-December 2006. World of Warcraft is a little different from Second Life, because it comes from a tradition of "Role Playing Games" (RPGs), starting with Dungeons and Dragons. World of Warcraft is massive at 7,500,000 players. Another difference between the two games is the extent to which the game has objectives. In WOW the player can gain money, skill and experience through winning fights against other players, whereas in SL there are no such developments; you develop your own goals much like in real life. What I find interesting is the particular kind of digital problems that have affected these virtual worlds. Blizzard, the developers of WOW, created a virtual disease called "Corrupted Blood" in part of their world. The disease got out of hand, because malicious players, or "griefers" intentionally spread it and laid waste to large parts of the world until Blizzard restricted its effects more decisively. Second Life has its own particular problems. Since it allows free accounts and doesn't monitor processor usage by players and you can run scripts, hackers can get away with a lot; in particular they create objects that self-replicate continuously and overload servers. Because Second Life mimics real life (RL) - for instance the money earned can be exchanged for RL money - some people have started to take it more seriously, to treat it in a similar way to RL, whereas the greifers refuse to allow that to happen unchallenged. They disrupt events by invading with multiple phalluses and swastikas, grey goo and rings.

Update 15 January: The number of WoW players has just been reported as 8 million!

Temple Grandin

Horizon did a (video link) programme about Temple Grandin, an autistic American lady who gained an awareness about her condition and realised she had an affinity with animals. She's now very respected in the US meat industry because of the work she's done to reduce animal suffering, all because she can kind of understand how animals (she mostly works with cattle) experience the world. The programme suggests a metaphor for understanding how autism makes you different from non-autistic people - the parts of your brain don't have such good connections and this inhibits intuition about some very complex processes, e.g. social interaction. Temple describes her emotional life as very simple and consisting of just a few emotions, principally fear. She says a lot of her energy throughout her life has gone into avoiding situations that she would find difficult, but that other people would not think twice about. It's her insight that this is similar to the way animals live that has helped her to be so successful in her work with animals. I wrote earlier about the British autistic guy Stephen Wiltshire.

Saatchi Gallery

We went to the Saatchi Gallery in the 80s when it was in St. John's Wood. A few years ago it moved to the old GLC (Greater London Council) building and now it's in Chelsea. They have setup a virtual tour on their new website "Stuart" (sounds like a bit of a phoney name; Stu[dent]+Art??). The website's a sort of MySpace for artists. I like Julie Bennett's paintings

Photos Hangovers

Some nice photos of South Africa from a helicopter and a nice close-up of an insect (don't know what though). A good explanation of hangovers and hangover cures from the How Stuff Works website. They say the medical term for hangover, veisalgia, derives from the Norwegian word kveis, which means "uneasiness following debauchery", and algia, which is Greek for pain.

Psychopathy

I wrote here about the English psychopathic killer Peter Sutcliffe. Psychopathy is still little understood but there's an interesting article in Science News which looks at the work of Dr. Joseph Newman who views psychopathy as the product of attention deficiency.

Pat Robertson predicts major terrorist attack in late 2007

I've been checking No Se Nada at Science Blogs occasionally and saw this post about a prediction by Pat Robertson, the conservative christian. Mr. Robertson says God told him during a prayer meeting that there would be a major attack in America that would mean mass killings. He says this will happen in the later part of the year. He really provides a lot of good copy - the Wikipedia entry has a larger section on "Controversies and Criticisms" than the part that deals with his life and views. This guy ran for President in 1988! From reading the scurrilous Wikipedia entry you'd think this man's life was dominated by hilarious self-promotion, attacks on fellow christians, muslims and hindus and vague but bullying threats aimed at whole groups of people. Oh, and scandalous corruption. My favourite is the "Age-Defying Shake", which is not a convulsion brought on by a visit of the Holy Spirit, but a recipe for a refreshing drink that Pat uses, enabling him to leg-press 2000 pounds!

Inveneo Snowflake Bentley

Inveneo looks like an interesting organisation - They help developing communities access the Internet with open source solutions. I've posted about snowflakes before (they make cool pictures) and I just found this site about the man who first found that they were each unique - "Snowflake Bentley". I found that on my new favourite blog "The new shelton wet/dry"

American Paranoia Sheesh

Sheesh, there are apparently a lot of people in the Land Of The Free who think that their government cynically manufactured 9/11 (or stood by and watched it) so they could start a war in the Middle East. I don't believe it and I think it's amazing that so many Americans believe it. There is a video called "Loose Change" on Google that goes through some of the arguments, the main one being that the hole in the Pentagon looks too small for a large passenger jet to have crashed into it; it looks more like the hole a cruise missile might have made! OK the hole looks small, but the jump from there to the cruise missile theory is a bit of a leap. Here's a (video link of course!) copy of the same video with added comments from a disbeliever.

Chinese Police Shame Parade Backfired

Chinese police paraded prostitutes and their clients in an effort to shame them out of their behaviour. Here are some pictures of the event This is a tactic often used in China since the Cultural Revolution, but this time it backfired, because lots of citizens complained about the abuse of the privacy of the people involved. Lots of people stood up for the rights of these prostitutes and their clients!

Iranian Holocaust Denial

Iran has been organising a conference to investigate the truth behind The Holocaust. They said it would be a "scientific" investigation and unbiased because they were not involved in the issue, however President Ahmadinejad recently said that the Holocaust was a myth, or that if it were true, then Western nations were responsible and should pay the price. He has been saying this for some time. Here's another article by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian again (the Guardian is hardly the champion of Israel). On Al-Jazeera there's a report that links a statement from the Iranian Foreign Ministry saying that Israel's crimes are worse than what jews suffered in the Second World War to the furore about the Danish cartoons and "Freedom of Speech" debate, so maybe this conference can be seen as a demonstration by Iran of the West's hypocrisy over freedom of speech. Iran made a similar move in August 2006 with an exhibition in Tehran of "Holocaust Cartoons". More discussion of the conference on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" site. The Guardian also has this story from just after the liberation of Buchenwald about a young boy from Lodz who escaped from Auschwitz after witnessing the gas chambers in action.
Update Christmas 2006: Frances Harrison reports for the BBC on the Conference.

Tired Car, I Hate Websites That...

English Russia has a funny picture of a desperate car being taken in for insurance. I hate websites that are "jazzed up" by a little music. I'm playing my Yeah Yeah Yeahs cd and browsing at the same time. I click on this link and yeeuch. Photographs of the NYPD at work in the late 1970s by Leonard Freed (recently deceased). Another article in the New York Times about Freed with a small picture of his that I remember from a great exhibition of American Photography I went to see at the Barbican Art Gallery in the 80s.