I had to buy new gloves this winter. I’d had my old ones for about ten years, but I was walking home from the pub on a frezing night and there was a policeman on guard duty without any gloves so I gave him mine.
I had cold fingers for weeks until I bought a new pair, but a rosy glow inside.
So this is your task for the week: find at least one way to do something unexpectedly nice for someone else.
There has been a major discovery in the fossil record of evolution announced today. Several examples of a new species of fish have been found with a functioning neck and bones in its fins. This means that there is now physical evidence of the shift between sea-dwelling species and tetrapods, the main type of large animals that exist today.
Animals such as the newly discovered ‘Tiktaalik roseae’ (the name for this fish-with-nearly-legs) constitute some pretty weighty evidence on the side of evolution being factually correct. Previous to this, one of the main arguments from Creationists has been that no animals have been found that are at an intermediate stage between the major groups that we currently have (despite several examples already existing… But never mind, this is an even better one). You would think that this would be taken as a bit of a blow to the Creationists, demonstrating as it does that animals did live that were halfway between one type of being and another, but apparently not. You’ve got to love ’em really:
Duane T. Gish, a retired official of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, said, “This alleged transitional fish will have to be evaluated carefully.” But he added that he still found evolution “questionable because palaeontologists have yet to discover any transitional fossils between complex invertebrates and fish, and this destroys the whole evolutionary story.”
Yep, previously it was:
‘there are no transitional animals, so evolution must be wrong’
and now it’s
‘there are no transitional animals for this other bit of time, over there, you know, that bit where things were squiggly, no, no, left a bit, yeah, you haven’t got anything to cover that bit over there have you? Ha! You’re so lame! And you smell! Phew-y! You love digging up bones ‘n’ stuff, I bet you’re weird.’
Err… Well, it’s something like that anyway.
Blimey, who’d have thought it? I was forwarded an email telling me to visit http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/ and to click on it to help raise money for mammograms. While 50% of the stuff written in the email is way out of date (it’s been circulating for five years), the site is actually real and does raise a huge amount of money through the advertising revenue from people visiting. They already get a massive amount of visitors, but everything helps and it’s going to a good cause. Visit and click today!
Yesterday I went to an extras casting session for The Golden Age, which is a follow-up to the film Elizabeth (UK link
Anyway, they have described it as ‘a very beardy film’ so for the first time in my life I will be growing a beard. It will probably only be for a week, because if I’ve not been called by next Saturday then I’m not cast, but it will be interesting nonetheless.
it’s not him again.
The American ambassador has told Shiite officials that President Bush does not want the Iraqi prime minister to remain the country’s leader in the next government, senior Shiite politicians said Tuesday.
In another resounding blow for democracy, the Bush administration has been trying to tell the Iraqis who they are allowed to choose as their leader. If it wasn’t for the simple fact that hundreds of people are dying in Iraq almost every day due to American-led coalition action over the past few years then this would be funny. The American government has said that they believe that Iraq needs ‘a government of national unity with strong leadership that can unify all Iraqis.’ In other words, they need a charismatic dictator that the Americans approve of.
Yes, Saddam Hussein is a loony, yes, he needed to have his wings clipped, but the history of the area suggests that it needs an authoritarian regieme to prevent civil war. Iraq was made through the decision of Europeans to unite opposing areas into one country eighty-ish years ago, and now it’s ripping itself apart again because the only glue remaining was a despot.
To say that I find all this a bit frustrating is an understatement.
Wushu is a cover-all set of Chinese martial arts that has a strong emphasis on jumping around all over the place looking rather cool, which is one of the reasons why I’ve always liked drunken style so much. Rather than having the more classically minded inspiration of animals, drunken style takes its inspiration from drunk people. The principle is that you fight with deception, pointing away from yourself or looking in another direction to confuse your opponent then flicking out a strike while they are distracted.
I had never seen the whole form performed in one go, but thanks to the fun of Google video here it is. It’s really rather funny to watch the guy fall over, sway, then perform an astonishing flip with almost no effort.
Personally, I do Wing Chun Kung Fu, in the ‘Wing Tsun’ style of Leung Ting. It’s not very pretty, but it is effective! Here’s some people who are very good at it, and here is the first form in all its bland glory!
Sadly, like many martial arts, and other old organisations, there are political arguments about who has the best form of Wing Chun which has led to lots of different schools and various spellings of the name being trademarked, such as Wing Tsun, Ving Chun, Ving Tsun etc. Each school has various good and bad points, but people only really begin to appreciate these fully after about fifteen years of practise, at which point they usually seem to split off and create their own version which is different from the others, gets its own trademark, and says that everyone else’s version isn’t right… Fortunately, unlike religion (where this also seems to happen a lot) this usually only creates a bit of tension rather than the death of millions, but it’s a shame that people can’t get together and try and agree on these things.
I used to go to a gym, and they had posters on the walls with things like ‘Only those who follow their dreams can soar above the clouds’ on them. It was a nice thought, until you factored in the lack of oxygen and the imminent plummet to your death.
Demotivators is a whole website devoted to that kind of thinking. Here’s my favourite:
You can see them all here.
If you’re in London tonight you could do far worse than go see the band of a lovely chap on my forums.
You can hear a little bit of their music over on their mySpace page.
‘Tis rather jolly stuff. I won’t be there, what with living in a different city, but it should be a good night out. Have fun!
but in secret.
In a blatant excuse to fill a page of the newspaper, The Guardian has decided to cover a recent doctoral thesis that argues that goths end up in well paid jobs. The theory runs that the goth attraction towards art, literature, and music creates networking, aesthetic, and other skills that then come in useful in education and the workplace.
Sometimes I wonder why I bothered to write about literature at all, I could have just said ‘goths are picked on and find solace by reading stuff so end up well read’…. That’s a bit of an unfair summary of a thesis, but that does appear to be the revolutionary proposal put forward by it.
A PhD is supposed to be a genuinely original contribution to a field of study, and while it seems logically obvious that many goths will be pushed to achieve good academic results it doesn’t seem like this proposal ranges much beyond common sense. I assume that the study is backed up by analysis of groups of society and their fashion choices during their lives. Given that ‘goth’ in the modern sense has only really been around as a recognised group since the 1980s then it is only now that a reasonable study of the life-impact of the movement can be made on its followers. Perhaps it’s not such a daft thing to study, when we have now reached a point where anecdotal hypotheses can be made into workable theories.
There is another reason why this proposal may be considered to be worthy of a PhD: the thesis only has to be an original contribution to a field of study, so if no-one has bothered studying this before then it naturally it will count as an original thesis, even if it is common sense. In this line of thinking, for my next thesis I shall be working with the title: ‘Eventual career paths of teenage poets: Do they all end up a bit floaty or do they become outwardly more normal?’
Hahahahahaha… ‘Next thesis’!
The Guardian article also has a handy ten tips to spot if your boss used to be a goth. They’re pretty accurate, and once again reveal that I’m not a goth. Or at least, not a proper goth!
As you may know, my thesis is about the author William Gibson. He invented the term ‘cyberspace’ and now wishes that everyone would shut up about that and read his new stuff.
Anyway, if you ever wondered what William Gibson was like before he was famous, here’s some footage of him in 1968. Now, I understand that this won’t be exciting for very many people, but I found it quite amusing to see Gibson in his dropout stoner days and to spot the occasional seeds of what he became ten years later when he started writing short stories:
Sex doesn’t really have any importance attached to it. I think it’s really not differentiated from eating or sleeping or breathing.
Here you’ve got the beginnings of a post-modern attitude to sexual activity, where the whole body and all actions available to it become placed on an equal level.
Do you see God when you take LSD?
Do Gibson’s characters see God when they go into cyberspace?
On the other hand, it’s also pretty similar to a lot of the waffle spoken by other hippies at the time, so perhaps what is stranger is that he managed to turn it all into something that really did shape a new direction for western culture.
Hibin wa roboto des! (‘Naaza’ means snake in Japanese, so I have no idea what that actually means, but the presenters sound very excited about it.)
My gods, these things will kill us all:
There is no confirmation yet, but it is thought that Nintendo is already designing their next interaction system based on fighting a hoard of robotic snakes while being cheered on by excitable Japanese television women with microphones. Shigeru Miyamoto might have said ‘Yes, it is a super new professional play method! It is a new gaming opportunity!’
As Kent Brockman would say, I for one welcome our snake-robot overlords!
2mins 50 secs is quite fun, where the two female presenters are clearly amazed by the robot snake as it swims around behind them.
In other technology news, $ony have said that the PS3 will be released worldwide at nearly the same time in November this year, 2006. This means that the Xbox 360 will have had a one year head-start in the market, so it will be very interesting to see $ony’s sales figures. There were earlier reports that the PS3 would be released around spring-summer time, but there appear to have been delays. $ony states that this is due to optimising the release date, but there has been some speculation that this is due to $ony trying to reduce component costs. The system is believed to be going on sale for an initially high price, even compared to the full 360 pack, which in the UK retailed for around £400. I’m looking forward to the system, but over £400 would definitely be enough to make me pause for a while.
Some good news about the system though: it will be 100% backwards compatible with existing PS1 and PS2 titles. While this isn’t an essential for a new system it is a very nice add-on, and certainly helps during those early months when the new titles are thin on the ground. Interestingly, they are also saying that there will be a 60GB hard-drive fitted as standard in the machine, which suggests that they won’t be going down the two-tiered road that Micro$oft used when releasing the 360 (the standard system lacked a hard-drive and various other useful bits).
I noticed while writing this blog a few days ago that the title sequence to The Simpsons takes about a minute to run. That got me thinking: I’ve watched a lot of The Simpsons, so exactly how much of my life have I spent humming along with that tune?
… So I built a script to work it out. And then to work it out for everyone else too. And then add up the cumulative loss of time throughout our lives (based on an average age of 20). And then I decided to figure out how many years of human life have been spent watching the title sequence to The Simpsons globally. And then I stopped, because any more would have been a bit silly.
http://www.matazone.co.uk/animpages/thesimpsonstimer.php
As always, if you like this then please pass it on 🙂
A quick reminder, if you’re buying anything from Amazon, please use the links on the bottom of my site pages because I really could do with the money! When you start a shopping trip to Amazon .com/.co.uk using one of my search boxes then I get 5% of whatever you buy on that journey. Thanks!
I’m still busily working away on the new game site that I’m building and it’s coming along well. I hope that a beta version will be available for trial runs inside the next couple of weeks, until then it’s still a secret what I’m up to!
I knew it! Google is conspiring with aliens:
Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
I have worked out how long I have spent watching the title sequence to The Simpsons. By my very quick calculation I have come to the conclusion that I have spent approximately twelve hours of my life watching it. That is a very, very sad thing indeed. I just hope that my calculations are wrong…
Anyway, Sky (the main channel that shows The Simpsons in the UK) have created a live-action version of the title sequence, so there’s another minute of my life gone. If you can overcome the growing sense of nihilism that I am facing then you can download it here. It really is very good indeed.
It’s a pie-rat!
because it is shooting fish in a barrel.
Presenting a whole new form of aerobics: Thesercise!
Do you want to get fit and study at the same time?
Do you ever feel the need to get away from your work but you just can’t spare the time on activites that don’t stimulate your brain?
Then you need Thesercise!
Thesercise is aerobics to the sound of audio-book philosophy all placed over a house beat, so you can get fit and educated at the same time.
Our first DVD called Post-feminist toning is out now:
“Your body is fine the way it is, and you should have pride in it! Now twist at the waist to look the back of your legs, Andrea Dworkin tells to you appreciate the novelty of your body, so twist and look, twist and look, twist and look!
“Understand that your body is fine, but you can be empowered through using classical sexuality. By embracing stereotypical feminine values you can control them, now stretch! Stretch! Stretch like you are making an assumption based on a Westernised patriarchal ideology!”
Includes a ten minute warm-down appreciation of late-stage capitalism’s use of the body as a metanarrative:
“Begin by keeping your neck long and stretching your arms and legs across the floor as wide as you can. Feel the texture of the floor with your skin and debate whether the material is authentic is a post-Rousseau discourse of the natural. As you elongate your limbs feel the length of them and ponder whether they are part of you, or whether they are simply a biomechanical device that permits you to interact with the space around you.
“And…. Relax… Into existential contemplation of Baudrillard’s celebration of the rejection of the body-as-authentic as a purely simulated narrative construction based on outmoded cultural tropes.”
****
Sometimes I get ideas that linger in my head but I know that they would never work. Perhaps there would be a selection of post-graduates out there who would think this was great, but it’s just a one-line joke that doesn’t really go anywhere. You never know, maybe I’ll work out how to use this properly in the end, but it’s been knocking around for months now and nothing better has come from it yet!
It’s been a bit quiet on my site for a while now, so you may wonder what I’ve been doing with my time. This week has been a good example, and I feel I’ve been really productive.
This week I got my complete thesis over to my tutors, I’ve been learning some new PHP, I’ve got through a few lessons in Japanese, I’ve got a dull-but-harmless temp job, I feel like I’ve progressed a lot in my Wing Chun class, and I’ve even had some freelance work helping Wateraid promote the upcoming World Water Day.
In more detail:
I’ve put through most of the changes suggested by my copy-editor friend in my thesis and got that sent off to my tutors on Monday. Next up with my Ph.D. is the response from the tutors, which will hopefully be ‘this is ready’ or might ask for a few changes. Either way we’ll probably go ahead with contacting the examination committee. You need two internal examiners and one from outside the university. Once they’ve agreed to examine my thesis and they’re ready then my thesis gets sent to them and I wait for three months-or-so while they read it. I then have an interview with them where they get to ask me questions about my ideas and generally discuss what I’ve written. This usually lasts about an hour, but apparently has been known to spill over into dinner and late-night drinking! I’m guessing that any interview that ends with a slurred proclamation of eternal friendship will generally count as a ‘pass’.
The most likely result of this will be a request for minor changes to be made. This is usually stuff to do with formatting and an occasional paragraph here and there. This is a common request these days because it’s so much easier to ask for changes in the computer age than it was when everything was hand-written and typed. Typically I will have six months to make these changes, but usually they can be done a lot faster and the thesis resubmitted. Assuming the thesis has been changed to the satisfaction of the committee I then pass and do a little dance. And then dance a bit more. I plan to graduate in October at the latest.
The PHP stuff is for a new website I’m working on (hence the haitus in animations recently). PHP is like html except that it allows webpages to talk to a database and create ‘dynamic’ content, which is just a fancy way of saying that it responds to what you do. I’m at the point now where I believe I can put together the basic structures of the site so I’m hoping to get that going in the next couple of weeks.
I’m learning to speak Japanese from audio-lessons on my MP3 player. It’s interesting, but the style of presentation could be done in a more structured way to help learning. Mostly it’s repeating stuff parrot-fashion, so you have to work out the grammar of what’s going on for yourself. Still, it’s a good start.
I’m not selling enough stuff in my shop to afford to live even on a very low wage, so I’ve started temping part-time to pay the bills. This is another reason for the lack of animating recently. Real jobs suck, but the one I’m doing at the moment is nice enough and quite easy. At least it gives me time to doodle!
Wing Chun is a type of kung fu, and the only major martial art system in the world that was invented by a woman. It relies on angles and sensitivity rather than strength so can help small people beat much stronger opponents. I studied it when I was first at university and I started again last year when a new class opened in my area. A lot of the form is based on the idea of flowing around and through your opponents defences, creating a system that becomes incredibly effective even when applying only the basic techniques.
Lastly, Wateraid are a great charity that I’ve worked with a few times before and I’m really happy to be helping them produce presentation for their build up to World Water Day on the 22nd March.
I feel like I’ve been really productive this week and I’m feeling generally very happy with life. As usual, and as you can probably tell, I’m ridiculously busy, but I’m getting results which makes me feel good. I’m sure you can see why my work on this site has been slower than usual!
