nickbarnes

Sea level rise:a modest proposal

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:29:50 GMT

Global sea-level is forecast to rise a metre or so over the next century. In the spirit of dumb-ass geo-engineering proposals to combat global warming, we should consider the most obvious geo-engineering approach to sea-level: pump sea-water into endorheic basins (that is, areas which don't drain into the global ocean), such as the basins of the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea, Lake Chad, Lake Eyre, and the Tarim basin. These five alone have a combined surface area of about ten million square kilometres, and could easily contain the 4e14 cubic metres of water of a one-metre global sea-level rise.

Exercise for the reader: list five insurmountable obstacles to this cunning scheme.

The Conservative Bible

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:02:23 GMT

The "conservative base" in the US is disintegrating. They are going off the deep end, and the "movement" is certain to tear itself apart. How can I be so sure? How can I tell, absolutely and for certain, that these are the End Times for the Know-Nothings?
This is how. Conservapedia, a site mocked since its start by sensible people everywhere, but taken very seriously by the right-wingers who created and edit it, has launched a project to "create a conservative Bible translation". Yes, really. To remove the liberal bias in existing translations (fostered by famous revolutionary communists like the Catholic Church, or James I). Based solely on this, I predict the schism of the Republican party within a decade, into one party including the people who thought up this crazy idea, and another party who think the bible is God's Word and that people who mess with it need to be taken out and shot. And possibly a third party of people who can think for themselves.
While we're waiting for that happy apocalpyse, I recommend you read about their little project. That page is laugh-out-loud, coffee-down-the-nose funny on its own. A particular highlight for me was this line:

The committee in charge of updating the bestselling version, the NIV, is dominated by professors and higher-educated participants who can be expected to be liberal and feminist in outlook.

You see, you can't trust anyone with a university education to translate all that ancient Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. Their minds have been twisted by Exposure to Education.

Once you've cleaned the coffee off your computer screen, take a look at the first draft of their translation work. For instance, the gospel of Mark. Mark 1:3 is like this in a couple of familiar translations:

KJV:The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
NIV:"a voice of one calling in the desert, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'"
Young's: `A voice of one calling in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, straight make ye his paths,' --
NJB: A voice of one that cries in the desert: Prepare a way for the Lord, make his paths straight.

As you can see, these are all pretty much in agreement. The Greek for Mark 1:3 is well-attested as this:

φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ἑτοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς τρίβους αὐτοῦ

Transliterated, that's

Phônê boôntos en têi erêmôi Hetoimasate tên hodon Kuriou, eutheias poieite tas tribous autou

That's the text in both the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus (both 325-350 AD; the book was probably originally written between 55 and 85 AD, although some experts favour a 2nd century date).
The wingnuts at Conservapedia, bless them, would have us translate this verse as

The messenger preaches among skeptics, "Prepare for the way of the Lord and make straight His path."

Now I don't know enough Greek to read a menu, but it's obvious even to me that this is crap. Taking the second half first, even this surely wouldn't get a B in an introductory Ancient Greek class. There's the Lord (κυρίου) and making straight (εὐθείας ποιεῖτε), but the τρίβους are most decidedly plural, and there's no basis for the word "for". "Prepare for" means "Prepare yourself for", which is entirely distinct from "Prepare".
But enough quibbling with the second half. The first half shows the true colours of the editors, and in them we can see how and why this project is symptomatic of the end of the right in America. The Greek is pretty clear. There's this desert (ἐρήμῳ), and a voice crying (φωνὴ βοῶντος). My rudimentary skills and some terrific online tools let even me do the rest. Yes, there's an ancient disagreement about where to punctuate this verse (is the voice in the desert, or is that where we have to prepare the road?), but there's no messenger, there's no preaching, and there most certainly aren't any skeptics (in fact, a reason to punctuate the voice into the desert is specifically to give the sense that it goes unheard). You can't just go adding this stuff in whenever you feel like it, and any "translator" who does is going to find themselves at the pointy end of an inquisition before he can say knife (or do I mean Hot Needle of Inquiry?)
An added irony is that Mark is here quoting from Isaiah 40:3, who says (ahem)

קוֹל קוֹרֵא--בַּמִּדְבָּר, פַּנּוּ דֶּרֶךְ יְהוָה; יַשְּׁרוּ, בָּעֲרָבָה, מְסִלָּה, לֵאלֹהֵינוּ

(Joshua, please jump in here if my bilinear text has gone all wrong). So are the Conservageniuses going to bugger up the Hebrew too? Wait and see.
Along with many actual commentators, I've been expecting the right-wing Grand Alliance of minarchists, political conservatives, social reactionaries, kleptocrats, and religious fundamentalists to disintegrate for a couple of decades now. For all of that time the kleptocrats and the social reactionaries have essentially been taking the others for a ride (witness the progress made under Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II towards, say, smaller budgets, smaller deficits, Burkean conservatism, or pro-life legislation). But this kind of nonsense from the social reactionaries is going to make the religious fundamentalists thank the Lord that Obama hasn't come for their guns yet.

Iain Banks, "Transition"

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 09:55:11 GMT

A stylistic return to form, but plot holes you could drive a multiverse through.

Free Speech Zones

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:10:52 GMT

What ever happened to Free Speech Zones?

Compassion

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:06:36 GMT

When deciding whether to release or transfer Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds, of what possible relevance is the degree of compassion he has shown in the past?
Other irrelevant facts on which the news media dwell: the views of the US, the views of politicians, the views of the victims' families.
Edited to add: Most frustratingly of all, why is nobody making these fundamental points about justice and morality in the news coverage of this story.

Quakers, marriage, continuing revelation

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:36:58 GMT

The Quakers in the UK have decided to marry same-sex couples, 22 years after first considering the question and after many years of blessing same-sex partnerships.
Here's the epistle from the yearly meeting.
Here are the meeting minutes [PDF], of which the most relevant are minutes 17 and 23.
The essential parts of minute 23, for me, are these:

"marriage is the Lord's work and we are but witnesses"
"take steps ... to arrange ... so that same sex marriages can be prepared, celebrated, witnessed, recorded and reported to the state, as opposite sex marriages are."

The part which is most provocative, looking forward, is this:

We will not at this time require our registering officers to act contrary to the law, but understand that the law does not preclude them from playing a central role in the celebration and recording of same sex marriages.

Note "at this time". Now minutes of meetings are drafted by the clerk and then read out for consideration by the meeting before being agreed, and they do sometimes end up with wording which is not quite the sense of the meeting. But it's hard not to read this as the government being put on notice, and it's easy to imagine - given the long history of Quakers carefully, deliberately, and collectively breaking unjust laws - a future Yearly Meeting reporting itself en masse as a criminal conspiracy to conduct unlawful marriages.
Note that Quaker weddings have been special in the law in England and Wales since 1753 (when Quakers and Jews were exempted from the requirement that weddings take place in an Anglican church). As I understand it, it is still the case that Quakers are on a very short list of organisations able to conduct marriages.
Yearly Meeting, by the way, is an astonishing and wonderful experience. Many hundreds of Quakers meeting in silence to discern the movings of the Spirit, which does, then, move. I didn't go this year, but it seems I missed quite a doozy.

One simple diet rule

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:35:17 GMT

I've noticed a huge number of web ads lately for "one simple diet rule" for me to lose N pounds of stomach fat in M days (for various values of N and M). Now, of course I'm not ever going to click on any of these ads, and I hope nobody reading this would do so either. I imagine they will want $X money to reveal the simple rule. But my question is this: is there any way that this "one simple diet rule" is going to be anything other than "Eat Less Food, Dumbass!" ?

Torchwood: Children of Earth

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:08:40 GMT

Hmm.How come the deeply evil female minister (Home Secretary, perhaps?) gets to survive this (and become PM)?
Other than that: this was OK. Surely the end of Torchwood, as the crew is reduced from five or six to a heavily pregnant Gwen.

I would have swapped the children-as-drugs sideshow, which was really pointless, for a bit more on Mr Dekker, or for more of the Operative running around in her hot black kit. The plan for gathering 10% of children, without any contingency for what happens if some parents object, was ridiculous. Any government as ruthless as that would attempt to gather 20%, and send the loose change home.

Lots more nitpicking could be done. The 456 could just take what they wanted, harvest their 10%, without all the silly posturing. The Torchwood contact lenses were silly the first time around and they're silly now: you can put a camera in a contact lens, but it can't have a microphone? The gas mix (a) wouldn't be stable (b) would need a proper space-suit, not a zip-up hazmat suit (c) would instantly kill the child symbiont. Ianto should have had Rhys's job yesterday. What sort of bullet-proof materials did the government use for that fish-tank? How come Mr Dekker survived so easily in his hazmat suit? How did they decontaminate Thames House? And so on.

I think my main objection was to the wavering moral tone. We are meant to hate the ruthless calculating government (the "Gold Council" or whatever-the-heck they called themselves; and incidentally their unanimous ruthlessness was disappointing - not a single contrary voice in COBRA? Not a single resignation?) Torchwood want to fight, the Evil Government want to capitulate, to sacrifice the few for the many, the ends justifying the means. A classic trolleybus problem. And then when the Hero is presented with essentially the same dilemma, he makes the Wrong Decision. Sigh.

Having said that, I'm a sucker for the blunt political propaganda. The weasel-worded meeting deciding on selection of the 10% was terrific.

Overall, an excellent week's worth of TV, much better than Torchwood is supposed to be.

Torchwood: Children of Earth

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:57:10 GMT

This rocks. Much better than average Torchwood or Who. Just shows what you can do with a bit more time for plot and character development.
Good things:

The children; the best and most memetic NuWho bad guys since the Family of Blood. And knowingly so: "We want a pony". Fantastic. Expect mimicry in every playground. There is a long tradition of this in Classic Who and NuWho ("are you my mummy?" "Burn with me"), right back to the original blooming pepperpots, and this lives up to it.
well-realized above-top-secret conspiracy-theory stuff, handled entirely by mild-mannered civil servants - very English; "Blank Page";
Gwen, Rhys, Ianto. All very strong. A blessing to have less Jack;
Peter Capaldi. Just great;
Jack's family;
Ianto's family;
Gwen/Rhys;
Jack/Ianto: enough, but not too much;
Gwen/Jack: understated but well done;
Rupesh Patanjali, who is obviously going to replace Owen until suddenly he's not;
The entirely plausibly ropy MoD installation
Stealing the room;
Lovely lovely HD.

Less good things:

"Order to Kill". This was completely unnecessary and ruined the excellently understated "Blank Page";
Plausibility of Lois stumbling over everything, so easily, on her first day on the job; why can't she be more of an insider, who finds her conscience?
Lois, generally;
Very very bad snipers - No donuts;
Gwen's first shots with the automatics look all wrong;
Jack and Ianto both turning to their relatives for a convenient child to investigate;
The black hats, so efficient in Cardiff, are shit at security. And where's their helicopter?
What, exactly, made that truck burst into flames? Incendiary rounds in Gwen's automatic?
Terrible subtitles. "BREAKS SQUEAL"

Absent common weaknesses of [NuWho and] Torchwood:

No super-technologies which would solve the problem if only the stupid characters remembered that they had them in the Hub vaults. Because no Hub vaults, hurrah.
No stupid innumeracy;
Not too much Jack;
No six rushed extra endings tacked onto each episode.

Cake porn

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:38:09 GMT

As promised:

and the cake porn movie:

More cake porn may follow, if any more friends contribute their photos.

Party

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:38:57 GMT

House duly warmed, by several splendid neighbours and esteemed friends from hither and thither. Those who didn't come missed a good one.

There are pictures on various cameras, which will appear here in due course, including some cake porn (and, I believe, at least one cake porn movie). I know my public. Three cakes: strawberry sponge, chocolate fudge, lemon.

Now: sleepy.

Cakes

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:51:02 GMT

Sixteen year-5 girls,

seven hours,

three cakes,

one adult. W000t!

[Edited to add: the recipes are in the comments.]

Isle of Wight

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:39:23 GMT

It was luvverly. The sun shone, the waves lapped at the shore, the sandcastles arose and were washed away.

ETA: added link to Flickr set.

Obama's Cairo speech

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:07:56 GMT

This man is incredible. We haven't had a president as smart, as eloquent, or as bold during my lifetime.

Spaceships versus horses

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:34:51 GMT

Time to enlarge on this comment I made in my last post, as a criticism of Firefly/Serenity:

no effort to rationalize the different technology levels. Spaceships versus horses. This can be done in several different and interesting ways, none of which have, I think, ever been done on TV or in the movies. They're just not trying.

The essential problem here is as follows: any culture which builds and uses interplanetary or interstellar craft - certainly anything as fancy as Serenity - has the knack of generating, controlling, and safely using huge amounts of energy in quite small spaces. Serenity's engines are generating and directing many gigawatts of power. The same team of engineers who designed her engines could also build, say, a hand-gun with self-propelled rounds which could destroy a small town, or a hand-grenade which would dismantle a space station. And yet the crew are using 19th century guns, or their close equivalent, and get into O.K. Corral style gunfights. Why?

I think the problem (which applies to almost all TV/movie SF, and is certainly not limited to Firefly/Serenity) arises because the writers of TV/movie SF don't know or care about scale, technology, science, or anything much beyond plot and character. They don't give a toss. Serenity is just a wagon train to them. My view is that they should be honest about that and write a drama in which all the technology fits together. Like Little House on the Prairie, or the Waltons. Because there are some really interesting questions which come up when different technologies interact, and the writers are completely failing to engage with those questions, probably because the questions involve ideas which are too difficult for their teeny tiny imaginations.

So: if you want to have spaceships versus horses, how do you do it? Off the top of my head, here are a few ways, many of which would make more interesting TV than the usual dodging-the-question.

- spaceships belong to a long-dead alien civilization; people can (with some effort and at great risk) pilot them, but don't have a clue how they work. Attempts to take them apart are always fatal. Pohl did this in his Heechee books, which IMO started well and deteriorated.

- spaceships belong to some sort of extant aliens, who are not interested in our petty squabbles. Or maybe enjoy provoking them. Or maybe are entirely unaware of and indifferent to us. Or maybe we can't tell. Or maybe they prohibit all technology more advanced than a Colt-45, under penalty of planetary space-time edit.

- spaceships belong to themselves. AI. Blake's Seven, but more sassy and less subservient. They know damn well how they work and aren't interested in telling us. Some of them are cool with humans and tag along with our little adventures. Maybe sometimes one of them can be persuaded to deploy her unimaginably powerful gadgets to save the day.

- spaceships and other high technology is tightly policed by the Federation, or by the Church.

More suggestions for this welcome.

Firefly and Serenity

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:36:21 GMT

How grumpy am I allowed to be about SF on TV and in the movies, after having stayed up late catching up on the end of Firefly and then watching Serenity?

Pros:
- fun characters;
- snappy script, sometimes very funny and/or insightful;
- some interesting new takes on old stories;
- shiny shiny effects. See the shiny. Lick the shiny;
- (Serenity) lovely lovely lighting and camera work, (maybe a bit too much glow filter);
- hot cast. Where do I sign up to crew this ship? Man.

Cons [ETA: these are, for me, outweighed by the pros, but still]:
- absolutely no sense of scale whatsoever, drives me completely nuts; slightly better in Serenity than Firefly but still. A planet is considerably larger than a village. It's even larger than the drive down to Starbucks. It's likely to have more than a few dozen people living on it, more than one marketplace, more than one port, more than one sleazy bar. Oddly enough, a solar system is very much larger than a planet, and a galaxy is way way bigger than a solar system. To get around one of these places in any reasonable timescale requires you to be going rather a lot quicker than, say, a jet plane. Stupid stupid writers with their crappy liberal-arts degrees and their teeny tiny imaginations.

- also, space does in fact have three dimensions, and is near-as-damnit completely empty. When travelling from A to B, you are considerably more likely to win the interplanetary lottery, even though it's rigged by the Federation, than you are to accidentally bump into something, or somebody. Especially if it's somebody or something you are trying to avoid. These writers failed arithmetic as well as physics.

- no effort to rationalize the different technology levels. Spaceships versus horses. This can be done in several different and interesting ways, none of which have, I think, ever been done on TV or in the movies. They're just not trying.

- some very very stupid plots. Off the top of my head: Someone is smuggling fancy-pants organs from A to B inside his body. At B, his own organs will be put back in. So how exactly are his own organs being transported from A to B? At least the plot of Serenity was better.

In short: if you wanted to make Little House on the Prairie, make goddamn Little House on the Prairie. If you're going to bother making SF, please put in a little bit of effort and make some actual SF. And hire at least one writer who can count past 10 without taking off his or her shoes.

The charnel pits below the city on the hill

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:53:02 GMT

Read them and weep, and walk away from Omelas.

Matthias Rath, villain

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:15:30 GMT

Ben Goldacre has published the missing chapter of "Bad Science" on his blog. Read it.

Joined-up government

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:24:58 GMT

So the economy is in crisis, the governments of the world need to increase public spending to combat unemployment and stimulate demand. Common sense and received wisdom is to take the opportunity to invest in infrastructure projects, especially ones which have long-term positive effects on national productivity.

Like building and refurbishing further education colleges, for instance. A few years ago the UK government announced a huge capital spending program to repair and replace the decaying buildings of our further education system. All the colleges were told to identify, plan, and schedule ambitious building improvements. They went off and did this, found construction contractors, and in some cases actually demolished their existing buildings to clear sites for the new build. These projects are as "shovel-ready" as they get.

But no, sorry, we've spent seventeen kajillion squid buying off city fat cats, so we can't afford to go ahead with these long-planned and much-heralded refurbishments. Back to the leaky portakabin, chaps. Hope that's OK?

What?!

Normandy

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:18:10 GMT

Spent the weekend in Normandy, helping emmabovary and zwell celebrate their joint birthday, along with far_gone and about 20 others. Just what I needed; arrived back in Staines last night reinvigorated - despite 1000km of driving - and ready to really crack on with work and with settling into my new house and new life.

Go lightly

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:14:15 GMT

You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness. You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somaliland. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

Selling out

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:50:47 GMT

Sky have a special offer on their HD+ recorder boxes this month. And my house doesn't have a TV aerial. Hmm.

Watchmen

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:49:53 GMT

Were the comics really this violent?

Yes, they probably were. But it's more shocking on the big screen.

So AAA stands for Absolutely Appalling Assets?

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:44:01 GMT

Some AAA CDOs are apparently only worth 5%.

Moved

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:56:34 GMT

I have moved. A mad unpacking weekend with my wonderful sister got all the furniture in place and emptied the first 70 boxes. A diminishing-returns effect has now set in: I'll probably get 20 more boxes done this week, and the remaining dozen might take a month.

The new house turns out to be just fine, a bit smaller than the old one (the craziest part of unpacking was probably planing 5mm off the guest bed frame to make it fit), but perfectly comfortable. I might be here for quite a while.

Back to Manchester for a day or two next week, for the last part of a root canal treatment and to make sure the empty house is clean and tidy.