All this sci-fi stuff seems to be having an odd effect on Caroline, first it was those orary earrings and now this:
All you foot fetishists, leave, now!
Tag: Bits
Super Moon?
Here’s a picture of the Makrigialos shoreline along from the beaches we frequent while in Crete. According to the photographer, Richard Graves, the sea level has been this low for two weeks. Seeing this I was reminded of when we were chatting to the owner of a bar we frequent called Revans, the owner, Yorgos, talked of how, twenty years ago, he used have a much larger stretch of beach next to his bar. Interestingly, it’s been twenty years since the moon was this close to Earth. Coincidence?
No Hoopers Live Here.
Here’s a picture Richard Ayling snapped while out and about, to which I just had to add the news story below. He snapped in darkness, hence the graininess. Shades of stumbling on a pub called The Slaughered Lamb in the night…
Police baffled by the gruesome murder of a merchant seaman. Forensics officers were seen entering property here, and an inside source informs us that numerous metallic ‘spiders’ were found in the cellar, along with an aquarium full of large ‘worms’. However, our source cannot explain why officers are consulting with a taxidermist, or why a purported witness to this crime now requires psychiatric counselling.
Why Cities Will Save Us, Or Not.
You know, I’m really getting sick of people who fail to understand the meaning of ‘correlation does not imply causation’. It’s right getting on my tits. Prime examples of this daftness are scattered through an article in the Radio Times by a guy called Doug Saunders titled ‘Why Cities Will Save Us.’
Apparently, after the shift of the peasant population to a livelihood based on large cities and commercial farms ‘the consequences were an end to starvation and large scale infant mortality … and a shift to smaller family sizes and small stable populations’. Maybe there’s some truth here concerning more efficient farming, but ‘commercial farms’ have been with us since money was invented. Anyway, to conflate better food production with ‘large cities’ and imply that both resulted in an end to the problems listed above is plain silly. But then the devil here is of course in the detail since this guy doesn’t want logic to get in the way of him singing the praises of the cities.
No, Doug, there was more money to be earned in the towns because of industrialization, less to be made on the land, for labourers, because of more efficient farming practices stemming from that industry and even less when the landlord started chucking them out because he wanted more wool to feed the looms. Those starving in ten-to-a-room hovels with shit running down the street outside carried on breeding and dying in large numbers. Industry drove the demographic changes that turned towns into the cities as we know them. Better technology (drugs and food production) cut down infant mortality and enabled smaller family sizes, and the populations were stable before the Industrial Revolution. The cities you love are an incidental result of industry and nothing more.
The next stinger is this one: ‘Village life is a major killer: according to the World Food Program, three quarters of the billion people living in hunger are peasant farmers.’ Did you spot the major confusion of correlation of with causation? Here, let me have a go with this kind of twisted logic: Fresh air is a major killer: three quarters of a billion people living in hunger live in the countryside. Apparently the positioning of a colon has a magical effect.
No, Doug, three-quarters of a billion people are living in hunger because they haven’t got enough food.
Then we get: ‘The move to the city, almost everywhere, results in a large improvement in rates of nutrition, longevity, infant mortality etc.’ No, Doug, that was the farming and the technology, remember? Oddly enough cities don’t spontaneously generate food or invent drugs.
Essentially the article continues in this vein. Apparently cities are the cure for the world’s ills, which would have come as a surprise to Alexander Fleming, Louis Pasteur, Jethro Tull, John Snow and others on a rather large list of names which should also include the inventors of the condom and the contraceptive pill.
Star Size Comparison HD AudioV2
Header Picture
You’ll see the header picture has changed (as has the link which will now take you through to my virgin website). However, the row of books there are my old covers. Does anyone fancies creating another header picture using my new covers? The advantage for me in someone doing it is that I don’t have to spend time playing about in paintbrush to do it. The advantage for any reader that does it is that I’ll spend more time writing the next book or post about writing…
BBC Biased.
Gosh, I’m so surprised about this article from Peter Sissons. There was me thinking the BBC was the home of unbiased reporting and excellence…
Peter Sissons tell us:
By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent. Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.
If you want to read one of the few copies of the Daily Mail that find their way into the BBC newsroom, they are difficult to track down, and you would be advised not to make too much of a show of reading them. Wrap them in brown paper or a copy of The Guardian, would be my advice.
…
Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good — it is heresy to question any of its activities. The EU is also a good thing, but not quite as good as the UN. Soaking the rich is good, despite well-founded economic arguments that the more you tax, the less you get. And Government spending is a good thing, although most BBC people prefer to call it investment, in line with New Labour’s terminology.
…
All green and environmental groups are very good things. Al Gore is a saint. George Bush was a bad thing, and thick into the bargain. Obama was not just the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, he was the BBC’s. Blair was good, Brown bad, but the BBC has now lost interest in both.
…
But whatever your talent, sex or ethnicity, there’s one sure-fire way at a BBC promotions board to ensure you don’t get the job, indeed to bring your career to a grinding halt. And that’s if, when asked which post-war politician you most admire, you reply: ‘Margaret Thatcher’.
You Gotta Laugh
Seems Ken Macleod is a lover of irony, and there’s plenty here:
If the Greenland ice sheet slides into the ocean …
… as the mystics and statistics say it will, I predict I’ll still be laughing at this picture, until I’ve paid my final power bill.
Samuel and the Scorpion
Bookmarks Competition Winners.
Righto, I’ve finally come to a decision on this. As I noted before, the winner was an easy choice, but second and third weren’t so easy. It’s also the case that I feel a bit miserable having to make the decision. This was why I mooted the idea of winners and runners-up being picked by poll – pure cowardice. My commiserations to those who put in a lot of work (probably, in some cases, making a dent in the profits of the companies they work for in the process) and thanks.
Here then are first, second and third:
Third prize goes to Mark Chitty basically because I like the look of these, the way the pictures were blended together in tune with the order of the books (two there for the Cormac series, one for the Spatterjay series and the one that blends The Technician with The Gabble, which works) and, to me, they just look right. The best of them I feel is the one with the Brass Man scene on it, because the blog address is clear.
Second prize goes to Rob Hartwell. It’s probably the most contentious because my name isn’t there, but it’s quirky and I like it, so there. It also works in the respect that POLITY is going to grab attention, maybe cause someone to investigate further.
First prize goes to K J Mulder. The bookmarks look great, my name is clear, my blog spot is clear – in fact ‘clarity’ is the best word to describe these – and he is the only one who thought to make each of his bookmarks book-specific, which is something that never occurred to me. After printing these were the ones that really stood out, simples.
Thanks again to everyone who took part in this!