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2004-01-30 tiddly-pom (utc)
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.
[Permalink]
2004-01-30 apr�s-samwidge (utc)
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.)
[Permalink]
2004-01-30 mornin' (utc)
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.
[Permalink]
2004-01-29 apr�s-samwidge (utc)
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!]
[Permalink]
2004-01-29 samwidge (utc)
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.
[Permalink]
2004-01-29 delayed by sn� (utc)
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.
[Permalink]
2004-01-28 still light! (utc)
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!
[Permalink]
2004-01-28 soup (utc)
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.
[Permalink]
2004-01-28 lalala (utc)
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?
[Permalink]
2004-01-28 convalescent (utc)
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.
[Permalink]
2004-01-26 peevish och f�rkyld (utc)
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!
[Permalink]
2004-01-26 samwidge (utc)
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.
[Permalink]
2004-01-26 10:19
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!]
[Permalink]
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