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2004-01-30 tiddly-pom (utc)

"An area the size of Wales"

It is well established that when UK meeja wish to establish the size of an area of geographical proportions in a pithy and intelligible way, the standard unit they employ is "an area the size of Wales". This unit - which I do not think has yet been sanctioned within the SI framework - is used to explain the area of rainforest being cut down per year, the scope of fallouts from chemical or nuclear accidents, and many other things besides.

(I prefer "the size of Belgium," of course.)

And whatever you think of the Hutton report (into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly, a Government scientist who committed suicide after he was identified as the source of information used by the BBC to cast doubt on the accuracy and reliability of dossiers produced by the Government as part of its case for war with Iraq), you surely have to concede that it is a Good Thing that we live in a world in which the full document is just a click away.

Even if, like me, you are mostly intrigued by E-mails between 10 Downing Street and Foreign Office (could you really resist that? Really?) on page 3 of which we find, a propos "weapons of mass destruction":

I think we should also describe their destructive capacity as well - eg. p 26 UNISCOM found enough chemical warfare agent to kill x thousand people or contaminate an area the size of Wales.

So, in the interest of furthering the public understanding of complex technical issues I shall put aside my habitual idiosyncrasy this once so as to explain that the weapons of mass destruction found in the nine months since the US-led forces declared themselves victorious in the invasion of Iraq would be enough to contaminate an area zero times the size of Wales.

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2004-01-30 apr�s-samwidge (utc)

Waaaaaaaaht's that you said?

As Language Hat (the blog of record for languagey goodness)'s comments resound to yet another round of the animal communication/language debate, Lib�bladet brings glad tidings for anyone encumbered by an outbreak of babies; a Spanish firm claims to have invented a machine which can interpret the "meaning" of their cries.

(The "baby" is a small and largely pointless mammal noted for its crying. They are prized, unaccountably, as pets among tribespeople of Parents, who can be distinguished by their tight smiles, stained clothes, sleep-deprived absent-mindedness and peculiar dialect. Can't they? Yes, they can! Ooh, lookattem, yes!, aren't they silly! Yes! Silly parents!)

Le probl�me avec les b�b�s, c'est qu'ils ne savent pas parler. Qu'ils aient faim, mal ou peur, ils ne font que pleurer. Heureusement, une soci�t� espagnole vient de pallier cette lacune inadmissible, qui cause tant de tracas aux parents. �Analyseur des pleurs du b�b�, le Why Cry �r�sume le langage corporel�. �Apr�s avoir �tudi� les sons et les pleurs de plus de 100 b�b�s de toutes les races, un mod�le de pleurs universel a pu �tre �tabli.� Selon la notice, la fiabilit� de l'engin serait de 95 %. Capable, pour 110 euros, de d�terminer si l'enfant s'ennuie, s'il a faim, un malaise, etc.

The [sic] problem with babies is that they don't know how to talk. Whether they're hungry, ill or scared, all they can do is cry. Happily, a Spanish company has just filled this unfortunate gap, which causes so much trouble for parents. The Why Cry "baby-crying analyser" "summarises body language". "After having studied the sounds and the crying of more than 100 babies of all races, it has been possible to construct a universal model of tears." According to the advert, the engine is 95 % reliable. Priced at 110 euros it can tell if a child is bored, hungry, uncomfortable, etc.

The article, which isn't in the insolites section, perhaps because it lacks the necessary investigative rigour, plays it for laughs and soon decides it doesn't work. (You might think that they'd have found a journaliste with a baby to try it out, but they didn't.)

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2004-01-30 mornin' (utc)

One for my sn�kaos, and one more for the road

At th' Timber, whose crew is cleverer than a barrelfull of weasels and only slightly less desirable as a World Govermnent, there's been a discussion of the sn�kaos in London, beginning with a UKish poster observing:

If I were to criticise my fellow countrymen at all, however, it would be to say that we do have something of a tendency to panic when we see two flakes of frost sticking together. Look at this bloody circus. It snowed for precisely one hour yesterday evening round our way, a snowfall that had been forecast a week in advance, and left about half an inch of light white dust on the ground, which promptly started to melt. I was four hours late getting into work this morning because the trains couldn?t cope with it. The bloody Russians run trains across Siberia, for Christ?s sake.

It is a very popular belief in the UK that the UK is uniquely incapable of handling even the mildest outbreak of weather, for sure, but I attribute this to the legendary insularity and monolingualisme of the UKish population, which causes them to know no better. For the record, then:

Snowfall across large parts of western and northern Europe has caused chaos on the roads and at airports. The wintry weather forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights in Germany, Denmark and Britain. Belgium and Luxembourg faced road and rail delays, though the snow also led to the opening of several downhill ski runs in Belgium's southern hills. The Franco-Belgian border was closed to lorries overnight due to the bad weather but re-opened later.

The sn�kaos sensations are sweeping several nations, OK? (This will not be news to our Varied Reader, of course, but UKish meeja outlets looking for a Yoorpean sn�kaos correspondent are invited to contact the management of this bladet to discuss terms.)

Also, we have news of Denmark getting in on the act: "Sneen gav trafik-kaos". (If I tell you that sneen is the definite form of sne ("sn�") you can surely handle the translation yourself, isn't it?)

In fact, the von Bladet principle of sn�kaos, which I have just invented, holds that countries prepare for "typical" amounts of sn� (it would clearly be wasteful to have too high a margin on this) and are thus promptly, and regularly, overwhelmed by not very much more.

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2004-01-29 apr�s-samwidge (utc)

Slightly Sm�rg�spost

Det bliver en dansk Mary, der f�r vielsesringen p� fingeren 14. maj. Hun har allerede ans�gt om at blive l�st fra sine statsborgerretslige forhold til Australien og Storbritannien.

It'll be a Danish Mary who gets a weddingring on her finger on the 14th of May. She has already applied to be relieved of her citizenships of Australia and the UK.

(A very posh church, somewhere in Denmark. A very priestly priest, up to and possibly including a silly hat, is addressing a young wimmin, accompanied by a young man, whose faces look oddly familiar to bladeteers across Denmark, despite being entirely fictional and bearing no resemblence whatever to anyone who could possibly sue us.)

Priest
Do you, Knudella "Mary" Donaldson, take this Denmark to be your lawful nation, to live in and have expensive holidays at the expense of, for richer and much richer, forsaking all other nationalities, for as long as you can get away with it?
Knudella
Amen!
Kronprinsfred
prompting I do.
Knudella
Do you, Kronprinsfred? But - Oh, strewth! Yes, I do, of course I do. As I said to Kronprinsfred - if I have to marry the whole country to marry you, then I will, I said, although I said, I draw the line at Conjugal Duties because that wouldn't be very regal, would it? What did I say Kronprinsfred?
Kronprinsfred
It wouldn't be very regal.
Knudella
Quite right! And I may be just a simple Australian girl -
Kronprinsfred
Coughs discretely
Knudella
Strewth! I may be just a simple ex-Australian girl, but I've been learning how to be all regal and that, haven't I Kronprinsfred?
Kronprinsfred
Yes, dear.
Knudella
conspiratorially, to the priest Did you know, that if a prinsess farts, she's not supposed to say "excuse me", she's just supposed to pretend it never happened? Takes a sight of pretending after a Friday night special from the kebab van I can tell you, but that's part and parcel of the regal - what's it called Kronprinsessfred?
Kronprinsfred
Ambience.
Knudella
Ambience, yes. Anyway, I do do whatever it was you said, which I have and I just did, so whenever you're ready.
Priest
And the prophet turned to the Bruce and said, "She's a good Sheila, Bruce, and not at all stuck up."
Amen
All
in unison Fair dinkum!
The priest glares at them, and there is a collective "um"ing and "er"ing and clearing of throats, and then
All
Amen!

[Knudellalinkage from Birgitte, tak!]

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2004-01-29 samwidge (utc)

Also, bodyclockkaos

Oh dear. Having spent the whole of Tuesday in bed, on Wednesday night I of course couldn't sleep. My mind is largely disenfevered, now, but the tiredness instead makes me write code like:

def getcell(a,*inds): 
    return a[tuple([slice(i, i+2) for i in inds])]

def usgn(a):
    return (-1*(a<0)) + (a>0) # Precedence fubarity defusion

For which it would be simpler to hate myself now, by way of getting ahead of the curve. (Note that usgn, as its name may perhaps not suggest, is an array operator, and in fact probably the only sensible way to write that one.)

On the plus side, I shall soon have coughed, fevered and fasted my way to a most beach-worthy abdomen, which is a thing I have lacked for a good eighteen months. Maybe I should write an exercise book ("How to look good but feel like death warmed up!") to complement my forthcoming semi-autobiographical self-help classic-to-be "Stopping smoking is going to hurt, and there's no point whining about it, OK?", and the timeless motivatinal tract "You think you've got problems? You don't know what problems are, OK? I'll tell you about problems!"

Tough love, easy on the love - it's the self-enablement paradigm of the future, I'm telling you.

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2004-01-29 delayed by sn� (utc)

Des von Bladet: "My Sn�kaos Hell!"

My head, that awesome and spacious atelier or studio solemnly consecrated to the construction and assembly of thoughts and insights of unutterably lofty profundity and indeed depth, having felt throughout yesterday as though its sancity had been breached by no less than a colony of nesting transdimensional fluffbirds wedging fluff into not only every nook but also every cranny, and not a few other places besides, I decided to head for home early, before the sn� hit Bristol, despite not actually believing in the imminence of any such sn�.

Which will teach me, 'cos sn� is exactly on me what it promptly did. But it was, h�las, the UKish sort of sn�, which comes in large slobbery wet flakes of no lasting duration or persistence, whose greatest delight is to withdraw from you and your clothings the modest, but moistening, quantities of latent heat they require to transform themselves into agents of sogginess.

No particular chaoses have been reported here on a grander scale, although Bristol International Airport has dutifully succumbed.

Nationally, the BBC is of course stoutly rounding up the situation:

Icy conditions will make the journey to work a difficult one for many people, forecasters have warned.

What, I implore of you, Varied Reader, to consider for just one brief moment of your undoubtedly busy life, would we do without the indefatigable expertise of such forecasters?

Meanwhile, and a propos of nothing whatever, Simon the ex-bloggeur formerly known as the fake Lintott has unearthed, also from the BBC, what is surely the finest deadpan opening to any news story in history:

A dead sperm whale has exploded while being delivered to a research centre near the southwestern city of Tainan.

Can you imagine the joy of being the plummy-voiced BBC announceur who got to intone that over the airwaves on Radio 4 and/or the World Service?

"And finally; a dead sperm whale has exploded while being delivered to a research centre near the southwestern city of Tainan."

I bet there were fist-fights...

"Passers-by and cars were soaked in blood and body parts were sprayed over a road after the bursting of the whale, which was being carried on a trailer."

There's a picture of the whale, in all its preexploded glory, but sadly not the before/after shot that would have made all future journalisme a penance performed in the knowledge that the Kingdom of Heaven had once arrived, fleetingly, and had then departed again.

"A Tainan resident has described the 'blood and other stuff' that blew out on the road as 'disgusting,' and added that the smell was 'really awful.'"

No word, however, on the fate of the bowl of petunias.

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2004-01-28 still light! (utc)

Spoilsports in Scotland, kaos in the Oosh

Bah, humbug!

The Highways Agency has 700 gritters and snow-blowers ready to ensure there is no repeat of last year's winter roads chaos, when much of the country ground to a halt in icy weather.

Ooshloo, meanwhile, is giving a masterclass:

Det kraftige sn�fallet i natt f�rte til store problemer for folk i morgentimene: S� � si alle T-banelinjene sto, togene var kraftig forsinket, og biltrafikken sneglet seg av g�rde.

The powerful sn�fall last night led to big problems for persons in the morning hours: all the T-bana [subway/tube/metro] lines where at a standstill, trains were greatly delayed, and car traffic was moving at a snail's pace.

Well done!

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2004-01-28 soup (utc)

Monday review, slightly Wednesday

When we are not down with the contrapuntal intricacies of the baroque, the ch�teau von Bladet often resounds by way of insteadness to the sound of swing.

But since this is the International Year of Yoorp, we are attempting to survey such swingitude as may have been perpetrated in the continent of our own back yard, and all that yats ("jazz").

Swing Tanzen Verboten, a modestly-priced box set that saw us coming a mile off in Borders, covers the Yoorpean scene in the era of Nazism, with CDs devoted to the indigenous German scene (from 1937 on); the sound of the Danish and Dutch occupation, in which swing became an act of resistance, as well as its natural soundtrack, hurrah!; swing in France and Belgium; and the propaganda swing targetted at ze Engleesh via short-wave radio.

The domestic German stuff is slightly bland, but quite listenable: I am especially partial to the opener, Erhard Tausche und sein Orchester's "Nachtexpress nach Warschau" because I am a sucker for good drummers doing good train impersonations. Hardness of swing is somewhat lacking throughout, and one can only speculate at the extent of the censors' involvement in that. (Alternatively one could read the authoritative-looking 60-page booklet by Joop Visser, which I have only skimmed.) I've certainly heard stuff equally as tepid by British bands of the era.

The Occupied Yoorp disc is the highlight by far - the Danes appear to have decided that if swinging hard was an insult to the values of the Aryan masterrace, then that was exactly how they were going to swing, which they do. Svend Asmussen and his orchestra turn in a bunch of good cuts, for sure, and an especial highlight is trumpet-player/singer Miss Valaida og Matadorne's take on "Carry me back to old Virginny." Miss Valaida, an American, had been banged up on a narcotics rap when the tanks rolled in, and was killing time until she could get herself deported which didn't take long, presumably partly on the strength of recordings like this, which is considerable.

The France and Belgium stuff is frankly rubbish, despite featuring Django Reinhard with some fairly assorted ensembles. Somebody has caused the rhythm sections to be mixed sub-audible, and the effect is predictably pointless.

I don't have much to say about the propaganda disc - after the first time through the head of the first number the vocalist promptly went off on a rant about Winston Churchill and his Jewish friends, and I suddenly remembered an urgent appointment with the off-switch. The music hadn't been anything to write home about before that, anyway.

Lili Marlene: the best of Marlene Dietrich. As a vocaliste, Dietrich makes a great pin-up, and shorn of visuals an albums' worth palls more than somewhat. It'd work fine if I had a CD multichanger, so that this was interleaved with vocalistes who had some idea where the beat was (great vocalistes, and especially great jazz vocalistes, play with the beat. Dietrich simply has no idea where it is), which I don't.

Le Quintette du Hot Club de France: The quintessential Django Reinhard and St�phane Grappelli. The quintessential Yoorpean swing, and the only thing reviewed here that can be unequivocally filed under "Music, listening to for the use of". The Quintette swings like a monster, without even troubling to employ the services of a drummer. Django's guitar is as jaw-dropping as everyone says it is, but for me Grappelli's ravishingly urbane violin effortlessly steals the show.

And then Yoorp, as previously discussed, imploded. Sigh.

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2004-01-28 lalala (utc)

"Havoc," indeed!

The BBC exploits the luxuriant lexical diversity of ze Engleesh to thwart our entirely reasonable expectations, curse them:

More warnings after snow [sn�] havoc

Severe weather warnings have again been issued across many parts of England after overnight snow brought disruption for many rush-hour commuters.

People living in parts of Lincolnshire woke on Wednesday morning to five inches (13cm) of snow [sn�].

In years gone by, this would have seemed a perfect opportunity to deride the Engleesh for being havocked by the merest dusting of sn�, but that's not really tenable given that our exhaustive studies have established beyond any doubt that that happens everywhere (with the possible exception of Siberia).

Bonus fotocoverage: Erlanger in the sn� by Margaret Marks. The boothless fonebooth looks a trifle exposed to me, but what do I know?

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2004-01-28 convalescent (utc)

Ugh.

Was off sick yesterday, originally as a precaution after spending all of Monday sneezing, but in fact I don't think I could have got up if I wanted to, so I used PF's patented convalescence strategy: "lie down, don't move except for to the bathroom and back, don't wash, don't read, don't do anything."

But now I'm back, at least in body. My mind is just about functional enough to be bored, but not really up to doing anything, so we'll see.

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2004-01-26 peevish och f�rkyld (utc)

Why not skip tragedy and go straight to farce?

Has any one seen my weapons?
Those weapons of mass destruction?
Or even a plausible mass production
Facility?

There's got to be some weapons,
Some weapons of mass destruction;
The media's in ructions
And they've got it in for me.

["WMD" by Tony Baloney and the Dudes of Delusion]

His pants aren't on fire, he's simply developing - quite effectively, actually - a nethergarment flammability management strategy:

He would not state whether he thought actual weapons would be found, saying it was a matter for the Iraqi Survey Group.

However he insisted: "I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the intelligence was genuine.

"It is absurd to say in respect of any intelligence that it is infallible, but if you ask me what I believe, I believe the intelligence was correct, and I think in the end we will have an explanation."

On the day of the interview, US WMD search official David Kay resigned saying he did not believe Iraq possessed large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.

And at the weekend US Secretary of State Colin Powell conceded Iraq may not have possessed any WMD stocks before the war last year.

You can say what you like about Tony, but when he's made up his mind about something then no mere empirically-determined properties of the observable universe are going to change it, no sirree!

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2004-01-26 samwidge (utc)

Monday Review: Book

Fran�ois Varela, Invitation aux sciences cognitives.

This book, written by a Chilean neuroscientist with a PhD in biology from Harvard and exiled from his homeland to Paris, Yoorp by a spot of fascism, was initially comissioned (in English) by the Royal Dutch Shell Company and subsequently translated into the Frenchy-French (if an English edition was ever widely available, my amazonian friends haven't heard about it). So full marks for cosmopolitatisme, for sure.

Also, the author wins this bladet's very coveted approval by his unashamed advocacy of a Yoorpean approach to cognitive sciences, drawing specifically on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology founded by Husserl and continued by Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. We like that stuff. Having surveyed first the symboliciste approach, and then that of the connectionistes, whose heyday it was starting to become (in the late '80's when the book was written) he then sets out his own stall:

L'id�e fondamentale est doc que les facult�s cognitive sont inextricablement li�es � l'historique de ce qui est v�cu, de la m�me mani�re qu'un sentier au pr�able inexistant appara�t en marchant.

The fundamental idea is thus that the cognitive faculties are inextricably linked to the history of what is experienced, in the same way that an initially non-existent path emerges through being walked on.

I am very persuaded that selectional memory systems (see previous review of Edelman's book - Varela appreciates the importance of the cognitive behaviour of the immune system) are the way forward for cognitive science: the goal is (or should be) to build such systems in silico while trying to get a handle on how they are implemented in carno. The completely fantastic thing is that the infrastructure for the ontogeny of information (the title of a book Varela cites with approval, and who wouldn't?) is itself built by evolution, which is precisely a selective memory system itself.

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2004-01-26 10:19

Sn�kaossm�rg�spost

Stung, as who wouldn't be, by Greece's presumption, the response from Northerer Yoorp has been swift and devastating:

Flera halkolyckor efter sn�kaos
("Several slipaccidents after sn�kaos" - "after", Aftonbladet?)
Sn�kaos i V�stsverige
Even lahdidah DN wants in on the act!
Ett sn�ov�der drog in �ver V�stsverige under fredagseftermiddagen och med det kom halkan som bidrog till en rad olyckor och kaos i trafiken. Dessb�ttre rapporterades inga str�mavbrott trots inslag av bl�tsn�.

A sn�storm drew in over western Sweden during Friday afternoon and with it came slipperiness which contributed to a series of accidents and kaos in traffic. Fortunately no power cuts were reported, despite patches of wet sn�.

Aftonbladet had some great Yuletidesn�kaospowercut stories while I was in Finland, complete with glum families fotographed by candlelight.

Kaos p� glatta i morges
Kjedekollisjoner, utforkj�ringer og k�er. Tett sn�fall og glatte veier f�rte til kaos p� veiene i Oslo-omr�det i morges.

Pile-ups, diversions and queues [Oh my! - I'm guessing here, anyway, because it's Norwegish]. Heavy sn�fall and sleepery roads lead to kaos on the roads in the Ooshloo region this morning.

Schneechaos legt Verkehr lahm
The Germans, bizarrely, have decided to call sn� "Schnee", which is even sillier than the Danish "sne", but that story does have actual video. (NB: We have been alerted that the video commentary contains graphic descriptions of fatal carnages, which is apt to spoil the hilarity for the Germanophone viewer. Or not, according to taste.)
Mehr als 20 Zentimeter Neuschnee...
...sorgten in M�nchen f�r ein Verkehrs-Chaos.

Well, it would, wouldn't it?

UPDATE: A snekaos quizz in Danish, with an side-order of the sarcasm, I suspect.

[linkage via an All-Star cast of Guestbladeteers, hoorah and tack alla!]

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