Aww! Hugging salt and pepper!
I’m obviously in a fluffy mood at the moment because I saw these and melted:
hugging salt and pepper shakers
They also look like a Yin-Yang symbol when viewed from above. Yes, people have probably already got salt and pepper shakers, but I bet they’re not as adorable as these are.
Good Gifts
Now here’s a website that lives up to its name:
Perhaps you won’t personally benefit from any of the things on there, but it’s a compilation of some very nice things to buy, ranging from decommisioned tanks that get turned into farm tools (£1000) to bikes to help midwives travel more easily in developing countries (£35). Or you can buy an elderly person a pair of slippers (£15) which might be a nice idea if you’ve lost someone this year and fancy doing something in their memory.
I think my personal favourite so far is paying £750 to get a book translated into braille:
The plot so far: the children’s section at the National Library for the Blind is under pressure. The huge demand from blind and partially sighted children and from blind and partially sighted adults to read to children outstrips supply. Please help: £25 buys a Braille book, £100 buys a book with giant print. And £725 actually provides transcription and master copying of a new title. And the name of the Good Giver (or receiver) is entered on the flyleaf. What a nice place to be.
How’s that for spreading Christmas cheer?
The JCB song
You might have seen this already, you might not, but it’s truly lovely, and they want to get to number one in the UK charts this Christmas. Good luck to ’em:
The video is a great piece of animation and the song is adorable. Do you get the impression that I like this?
ID cards video
The government has made a little video to explain about why ID cards are the way ‘to answer why identity cards are necessary and how the scheme will work’.
The amusing thing is that it doesn’t actually answer why ID cards are necessary. Surely a little bit more data in a passport would do exactly the same thing? We’ll end up with biometric data in those anyway, so why do we need a massively expensive new scheme that actually produces extremely little?
‘Well, you’re the first goth I’ve met’
Aww, bless ickle Fox news people. They tried to get Voltaire to talk about Satanism and goths and it really didn’t work.
http://www.mobenloft.com/stuff/Voltaire–Fox_Interview_2005-10-22.mpg
(Thanks to Closetgoths for the link.)
Goth poems
Goth poetry is easy: all you need is rhyming couplets and the words ‘dark’, ‘soul’, ‘night’, and ‘black’. Past that you get bonus points for the inclusion of ‘abyss’ and any classical mythology reference you can think of. Bear in mind that the classical reference doesn’t actually have to make sense, only to fit in the rhyming scheme. Let’s try this:
Oh my soul,
Lost in a hole,
Of darkness and melancholy,
Like the dress on a depressed dolly,
Raging in the abyss,
My anger I miss,
Like Eve’s first kiss,
That is my heart’s wish.
Hurrah for Goth poems!
Organising your ideas when writing
I had a meeting with my tutor yesterday to discuss the first draft of my conclusion chapter of my thesis, and he liked it! This is a big thing for me because it’s the first time that I have ever submitted a first-draft of a chapter and he’s come back saying it’s fine.
Writing a PhD thesis is about many things. You have to be saying something new about your material, but that was never the problem for me. I tend to come out with a torrent of ideas that put new spins on things, the issue is organising them into a form that other people can follow. Usually this process of organisation takes several drafts before it finally coheres into something that is well-structured. For me, writing a thesis is about learning how to structure your ideas.
This time, when writing my chapter I went back to an old method I used back when I was doing my degree. I wrote my ideas out in my usual fashion, moving between topics in a way that felt natural to me, until I had reached a little below my target word count for the chapter (ten thousand words in this case). I printed it out, sat down with a pencil, and read through the whole thing, numbering the paragraphs and writing a few-word summary of what each paragraph was about. I then turned this information into a list of topics.
By looking at the summary of each paragraph it became far easier to see what overall points and patterns I was making in my writing. I then reorganised the paragraph-summary list until it was neatly grouped by subject. I then cut-and-pasted the paragraphs into their new order using the numbers that I had previously written on the hard copy. All that was then left to do was to ensure that they followed together by adding linking sentences and occasionally editing references to previously earlier points that were then made later in the chapter. The result of this process is a long piece of writing that has been organised quite quickly and efficiently into sub-headings that build into a coherent whole.
Sometimes it’s hard to get a grip on all of your ideas, but any task can be achieved if you just break it down into smaller pieces.
Email is better than drugs*
*if you are in organised crime.
Yep, apparently last year computer related crime, covering such nasties as corporate espionage, child pornography, stock manipulation, extortion, and piracy, generated more income for the criminals than the sales of illegal drugs. Together it is thought to have made $105 billion, that’s around £65 billion. Blimey.
Well, sort-of-blimey. This would be a great story if it wasn’t for the simple question of how on earth they calculated these amounts. The point of crime is that it’s hidden from authorities and as such they might be catching 5% or 95% of the criminals without ever really knowing for sure.
I love the next bit though:
Asked if there was evidence of links between the funding of terrorism and cybercrime, McNiven said: “There is evidence of links between them. But what’s more important is our refusal or failure to create secure systems, we can do it but it’s an issue of costs.”
Of course there would be evidence of links between them. There’s always evidence of links between anything naughty and terrorism these days. Funny that, isn’t it? Could it be that this is just a way of scaring people and trying to justify government funding? Oo, perhaps.
Let’s also look at that list: ‘corporate espionage’ that’s got to be a fairly specialist market there, child porn is seriously nasty and I can’t imagine (and I certainly hope) that there are very few people involved with that, then tacked on at the end of the list we have ‘piracy’. Hm. Bearing in mind the competing definitions of piracy that could potentially be almost every person who has ever used any sort of media. Lending a CD to a friend could be classed as piracy, by some company’s perspectives, and the amount of non-licensed copies of Micro$oft Windows floating around is astonishing although clearly that really is piracy. On the list you’ve got some significant but essentially small, organised markets, and then a huge group that probably covers most computer owners in the world. I can’t help but feel that skews things a little.
We all know that ‘cybercrime’ is a problem, but this kind of story is just scaremongering: yes! Lend that CD to your friend and you let the terrorists win!
Am I the only person who, on hearing the word ‘cybercrime’, envisions a devious looking robot that’s twizzling a 1920s silent-film bad guy moustache?
Source here.
Fight AIDS with your PC
You may have heard of SETI@home, a distributed computing project that allowed people over the world to let their computer use its spare processing cycles to help analyse radio signals from deep space in the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Now there’s a similar project that’s working on something a bit more practical: finding a treatment for HIV/AIDS.
It’s very easy to download and install and does research into genes and an illness that is killing millions around the world.
Download it from here
(Currently Windows and Linux only. No plans for the Mac have been mentioned.)
Once you’re set up you can click this link:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=J49BZGBSP1
and join the Matazone team so we can see how we’re doing together!
Go drugs, go!
‘Give me a D! Give me an R! Give me a U!’ Err…
Possibly one of the most amusing things I’ve read in the New York Times for quite a while:
On Sundays she works the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. But weekdays find her urging gynaecologists to prescribe a treatment for vaginal yeast infection.
Apparently cheerleaders are being recruited to be drugs sales representatives. No, that’s not ‘reprezentin’ da streets posse’ or something like that, the cheerleaders are going around to (predominantly male) doctors to encourage them to stock particular brands of pharmaceuticals. I presume that they aren’t asked to do this in their previous uniform, but from the sound of things the doctors may get to see it as a side benefit if they place a large enough order.
You’ve got to admire the optimism of this person though:
Dr. Carli, who notes that even male drug representatives are athletic and handsome, predicts that the drug industry, whose image has suffered from safety problems and aggressive marketing tactics, will soon come to realize that “the days of this sexual marketing are really quite limited.”
Yes, I think that marketing things with sex is definitely getting old, it’ll never last. In ten years everything will be sold by ugly people in dirty rags, that’s the future of marketing! … Or perhaps not.
“The cheerleaders now are the top people in universities; these are really capable and high-profile people,” said Gregory C. Webb, who is also a principal in a company that runs cheerleading camps and employs former cheerleaders.
So there’s no conflict of interests there. Call me crazy if you like, but I fail to see why a cheerleader would logically be in ‘the top people in universities’. I see no reason why physical health, a strong relationship with attractive individuals, and standardised beauty would not mean that you are intelligent enough to be among the top people, and these things do suggest that in our aesthetic world they will probably do well, but they are also people who have to train very hard and so generally will have less time to dedicate to their studies, making them less likely to be academically successful. There is also the possibility that they have survived on performed charm, so they may be academically weaker than other students. These things apparently don’t matter for a person whose job is to convince doctors of the benefits of drug choices. Are you feeling worried yet?
Speaking of conflict of interests:
“Obviously, people hired for the work have to be extroverts, a good conversationalist, a pleasant person to talk to; but that has nothing to do with looks, it’s the personality,” said Lamberto Andreotti, the president of worldwide pharmaceuticals for Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Ah, so the people defending this are all coincidentally involved in drug sales? Spooky. It sounds like doctors are getting some very wrong messages too:
One informal survey, conducted by a urologist in Pittsburgh, Dr. James J. McCague, found that 12 of 13 medical saleswomen said they had been sexually harassed by physicians.
And in a final twist of feminism, here’s Novartis:
But there have been accusations that a pharmaceutical company encouraged using sex to make drug sales. In a federal lawsuit against Novartis, one saleswoman said she had been encouraged to exploit a personal relationship with a doctor to increase sales in her Montgomery, Ala., territory. In court papers responding to the lawsuit, Novartis denied the accusation. The company has also said it is committed to hiring and promoting women.
Shouldn’t that be ‘the company has also said it is committed to hiring and promoting sexy women’?
This is all a logical extension of capitalism in a health system. You make a product, then to sell the product you package it in an appealing way. When you are selling drugs the boxes are never going to be sexy (and will often be the complete opposite) so instead you get human packaging. I’m more than a little troubled by the way that these people, attractive men are in this profession too, are being turned into an extension of a commercial product. It’s not quite prostitution but these companies are pimping out people because of their bodies and looks, it’s just that the sexual acts are not strictly encouraged as dessert. How long before lap-dancers are being recruited too?
I’m sure that there are many women like Ms. Napier, the former Kentucky cheerleader:
she was so concerned about the cute-but-dumb stereotype when she got her job that she worked diligently to learn about her product, Prevacid.
I also don’t doubt that there are many others that survive simply on their looks. There was legislation proposed to make sure that drugs salespeople had a degree in the sciences, but this was rejected. I can see why, how many scientists study so that they can go into sales? Despite this logical reason, it has allowed an unsavoury practise to continue.
Unspeak: something a little bit academic?
Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy (a very enjoyable book about computer games US link
Anyway, it’s all about ‘decoding the unspoken assumptions in public debate’. What this means is that he’s taking statements from public figures and interpreting them into plain English. This, a common satirical tool, has been done before but he does it very nicely on the fine line between humour and agression. Definitely worth a look if you like something a bit more thoughful on the web.
Here’s the official blurb about it:
Unspeak is language as a weapon. Every day, we are bombarded with those apparently simple words or phrases that actually conceal darker meanings. ‘Climate change’ is less threatening than ‘Global Warming’; we say ethnic cleansing when we mean mass murder. As we absorb and repeat Unspeak we are accepting the messages that politicians, businessmen and military agencies wish us to believe. Operation Iraqi Freedom did more than put a positive spin on the American war with Iraq; it gave the invasion such a likeable phrase that the American news networks quickly adopted it as their tagline for reporting on the war. By repackaging the language we use to describe international affairs or domestic politics, Unspeak tries to make controversial issues unspeakable and, therefore, unquestionable. In this astounding book, Steven Poole traces the globalizing wave of modern Unspeak from culture wars to the culture of war and reveals how everyday words are changing the way we think.
‘Sounds interesting. Although I don’t think ‘unspeak’ did turn up in Orwell’s 1984 it certainly wouldn’t have been out on place in there.
New Mittens T-shirts finally available!
Based on my Mittens series (in case you’ve no idea what I’m on about).
I’m also working on having full credit-card facilities up and running by the end of next week, so if you don’t like Paypal you only need to wait a little while before another option is available.
Who is stealing the lamp-posts?
This one definitely ranks in the ‘how are they getting away with that?’ category of crime.
In Baltimore a gang are stealing the lamp-posts, most probably to sell them for scrap. These people clearly know what they’re doing, and they’re not totally irresponsible either:
Left behind are half-foot stubs of metal, with wires that carry 120 volts neatly tied and wrapped in black electric tape.
So they drive up, sometimes disguised in workmen outfits, chop down the 30 foot pole, and then carefully secure off the dangerous wires so no-one gets hurt. Odd.
They would be getting 35 cents for a pound of scrap aluminium, so probably make a few hundred out of the poles, which is pretty annoying for the city because they cost around $156,000 to replace. Ouch. There are probably a few taxpayers who would rather the thought of electrocution from unsealed wires than the $20,280,000 bill that currently stands to replace the ones that have been stolen, so perhaps the gang’s social conscience isn’t that strong. Currently the police have no idea who is doing it either, and I have images of Chief Wiggum in my head: ‘That’s good stealin’ boys.’
The gang is clearly very organised, but you can’t help but wonder what they might achieve if the same level of ingenuity were applied to a legitimate business. Alternatively they could take the crime to the next level and start sending ransom notes to the city demaning $100k in return for every lamp that they don’t steal. Now that’s thinking outside of the box.
Money grabbing!
Would you want to use an investment company that, while telling you that they work hard for your money, finds time to make a cover version of a Donna Summer hit from 1983? This ranks among the most amusingly bad corporate videos I have ever seen, although it is car-crash hypnotic. Just try looking away once you’ve started watching, you can’t because you don’t want to miss the next embarassing bum wiggle or faux-jolliness of the poor investment staff forced into creating the video.
XBox 360 updates the blue screen of death
The blue screen of death, AKA BSOD, is the page that appears whenever Micro$oft Windows crashes. Fortunately, with Windows XP this has become a far less common event, although still by no means unknown. It’s basically a bright blue screen with a basic font error message, telling you that your machine has died and giving you a reference number that means nothing to you at all and usually isn’t very helpful.
It’s nice to see then that the XBox 360 has a had a bit more thought put into it’s version of the BSOD, with a multi-lingual generic error message and a large pinstripe effect in the background. Have a look for yourself.
It rather worrying really that only a couple of days after the machine’s US release that there are already quite a few errors being reported. The usual ‘it’s not as next-generation as I expected’ complaints are standard, but it seems unusual for consoles to have problems loading software at the time of release. It may simply be that this is a major launch, with a huge amount of hype, all happening in an age of massive instant internet feedback. Even if 0.001% of machines have problems it can still seem like a massive issue if those people go online to a few notable forums.
Still, it’s nice that the BSOD has had some design work put into it! 😀
Fancy getting an Xbox? UK link
Xbox 360 BSOD info source here.
Pricing the War On Terror
Currently the UK and the US let their prisoners be sent to countries with lax ideas on interogation so that confessions can be gained from them. The CIA calls this ‘extraordinary rendition’ and in the UK it is termed a ‘friendly liaison’ with a foreign country.
So, in our names, in the War On Terror, what is being done? What do these polite terms ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘friendly liaison’ mean?
It means the woman who was raped with a broken bottle in both vagina and anus, and who died after ten days of agony. It means the old man suspended by wrist shackles from the ceiling while his children were beaten to a pulp before his eyes. It means the man whose fingernails were pulled before his face was beaten and he was immersed to his armpits in boiling liquid.
It means the 18-year-old whose knees and elbows were smashed, his hand immersed in boiling liquid until the skin came away and the flesh started to peel from the bone, before the back of his skull was stove in.
These are all real cases from the Uzbek security services which we viewed as friendly liaison, and from which we obtained regular intelligence, in the Uzbek case via the CIA.
A month ago, that liaison relationship was stopped – not by us, but by the Uzbeks. But as Manningham-Buller sets out, we continue to maintain our position as customer to torturers in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco and many other places. The key point is that none of the these Uzbek victims were terrorists at all.
[….]
We do not receive torture intelligence from foreign liaison security services sometimes, or by chance. We receive it on a regular basis, through established channels.
So who is telling us this? The British ambassador to Uzbekistan between 2002-2004. Do you feel sick yet? Do you feel safer knowing that these things are being done in our names, to supposedly protect us? Do you believe that in those circumstances that there is anything that you wouldn’t say just for a moment’s rest, or even a quick death? This price is too high.
I think that every generation has their shame, and this may well be ours.
Trying to get a decent government
There is one thing that always interests me about the gap between the US and the UK: in the UK it is usually seen as patriotic to question our leader.
Take backingblair for example. Here’s a website that says, for very valid reasons, that it is in the best interests of the UK to get rid of Tony Blair as soon as possible. I’ve had emails from Americans telling me that my questioning of my prime-minister and theirs is against democracy. The point of democracy is that we have the right to tell our leaders when they aren’t doing what we want them to do. They then are supposed to act in our best interests (which is sometimes a different thing). When they are neither doing what we want or acting to make us safer and more secure then they aren’t doing their job.
More gift ideas, for the UK this time
Following on from last week’s gift suggestions page for Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk have come out with something similar. ‘Tis rather handy really, click here for gift ideas from Amazon.co.uk
Here’s the .com link again, Christmas gift ideas from Amazon.com
$ony agrees to exchange any infected CDs
Back in the world of the Ditigal Rights Management (DRM) software put on CDs by $ony, which turned out to change deep-files in your operating system and exposes it to trojan infection, $ony have now agreed to run an exchange program for CDs containing the DRM software. The wording on the page is wonderful:
You may be aware of the recent attention given to the XCP content protection software included on some SONY BMG CDs. This software was provided to us by a third-party vendor, First4Internet. Discussion has centered on security concerns raised about the use of CDs containing this software.
We share the concerns of consumers regarding these discs.
Let’s rephrase that into normal English:
You may be aware of the recent attention given to the XCP rootkit software that we installed on your PC without telling you and that can be found on all recent SONY BMG CDs. This software was provided to us by a third-party vendor, First4Internet, so we are pretending that we didn’t really know what it did. Discussion has centered on security concerns raised about the use of CDs containing this software. We are avoiding stating that we knew that it hides its own files and alters a PC’s configuration, as well as the fact that it could not be removed without specialist knowledge at the risk of breaking the entire operating system.
We share the concerns of our lawyers regarding these discs.
I think that’s a bit more accurate.