Fuddland
We interrupt the tales from (九华山) to bring you this annoying piece of news from Flickr:
Users in China can’t see images
Since around 12:30pm ( time) on June 7th, users in China have been unable to view images on flickr.com.
Our technical staff have looked into this and determined that it’s not a technical issue from our end. Evidence suggests that our image servers are being blocked for many users in China.
Fingers crossed it’s just a temporary measure. Coincidentally — or perhaps not — Blogger-hosted weblogs have also just become unavailable again.
In: WWW & World News
2007 / 06 / 08 – 21:50 | Comment [4] | Top
Okay, I know they don’t really want people to access certain websites, but really: causing an undersea-earthquake to sever fibre-optic cables that deliver non-China-based sites is a bit much.
Internet access has been mind-crushingly slow — think pre-28.8bps-modem days, if you can imagine such speeds. It’d have been quicker for someone abroad to print out the pages and then hand-deliver them by bicycle. Thankfully, because so many big businesses were affected, repairs have been given the utmost urgency, and things are getting back to normal after initial worries that repairs “could take months”.
Interestingly, I’ve searched a few news sources from the UK and haven’t found much fuss being made about it from abroad. Did it make the front pages anywhere?
In: WWW & World News
2006 / 12 / 31 – 09:23 | Comment [3] | Top
The sad news of Linda Smith’s passing has reached me. If you can catch it before Friday, have a listen to the News Quiz tribute for a reminder of her fantastic comedy insights.
In: World News
2006 / 03 / 06 – 22:38 | Top
The first night at Crisis was fantastic: lovely volunteer people, and genuinely grateful [for the most part] guests. I was really nervous to begin with, and for extra fun my first task [with my fun new pal Sarah — you’re always with at least one other volunteer on any given duty] was to shut down the TV area nearest the sleeping tents, pulling the plug on the telly and asking people if they wouldn’t mind awfully moving to the other side of the arena. As you might expect, and they had my sympathies entirely, this was met with a few protests, but eventually everyone complied.
Other duties throughout the night: being a “runner” for the toilet/shower areas, fetching supplies from the store cupboard [nice and relaxed: they hardly needed anything, so I spent most of the time folding clean towels into bags with the lovely Kelly]; guarding the volunteers’ entrance/exit [a bit cold but kept warm with foot-stamping and chatting to a very sweet girl called Gemma who was very pleased to have finally turned eighteen and been allowed to volunteer]; and finally, a general clean-up of the sleeping area: folding blankets, stacking beds etc.
Everyone was really friendly and, as we were told at the debriefing, the night passed without any major incidents — a few of the guests’ tempers got a bit frayed but I’m hoping that was just first-night jitters. I didn’t feel as tired as I thought I might do — plenty of tea at every given opportunity certainly helped that. In fact, the only low point was when I bit into a small pie thinking it was going to be a mince pie, only to discover it was apple. Very disappointing!
If I was ever in any doubt that the efforts of Crisis are futile, those were surely blown away by the guest who strolled up to me and two other volunteers, took our hands in turn and thanked us all for giving up our Christmases for him. Warm fuzzy feelings aplenty!
[Aside: plural of Christmas, anyone? Christmases? Christmasses? Christmi?]
I’ve had a bit of a sleep today, and am feeling okay for another night, but I’ve a feeling this one may be a bit longer than the first. And there’s the added of fun of no public transport tomorrow morning!
Merry Christmas everybody.
In: Local News / Crisis Open Christmas 2005 & Indexed & World News
2005 / 12 / 24 – 17:26 | Comment [5] | Trackback [1] | Top
It’s been quite a week for Really Quite Interesting Discoveries About Animals. In case you’ve missed them:
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Bees cook invading wasps to death by surrounding them in a heat-generating ball.
To see what margin of safety the bees have, Tan and his research colleagues presented tethered wasps to six colonies each of native Asian bees and European bees. At each nest, worker bees engulfed the wasp immediately. Within 5 minutes, the center of a typical bee ball had reached 45°C.
[via Gordon]
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Images of a live adult giant squid have been recorded for the first time at its natural hunting depth.
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Gorillas use sticks to test the depth of the water in a pool before crossing it.
In the first case, we had a female crossing a pool; and this female has crossed this pool by using a detached stick and testing the water depth, and trying to use it as a walking stick.
The second case saw another female gorilla pick up the trunk of a dead shrub and use it to lean on while dredging for food in a swamp. She then placed the trunk down on the swampy ground and used it as a bridge.
Kind of puts that whole us-going-to-the-moon thing into perspective, eh fellow humans?
In: World News
2005 / 10 / 01 – 10:55 | Comment [4] | Top
An out-of-the-ordinary message was forwarded to the members of the maths department today; rather than being the usual notice about some seminar or other, this was from a London-based PR company, with a proposal.
Apparently, this Christmas Amazon want to run a marketing campaign based around a “formula for how to wrap the perfect Christmas present”. Since I would think it’d be much more newsworthy them having knowledge of what the perfect Christmas present is — the one gift that no-one has but everybody wants — I’m sure they don’t mean what they’ve said, but in fact want a formula for the best way of wrapping a Christmas present [most efficient use of paper, or something]. So they want to pay a mathematician, or mathematicians, to come up with a plausible equation — that is, something that actually works.
In the message the company admit that they’re not after serious research, but just want to use it as a marketing device, and already a couple of members of the department have voiced their opinions on what a waste of time this type of thing generally is. Every time the media report on things like the equation for happiness or solving the formula to find the most stressful Christmas shopping day [last year’s Amazon-commissioned project], there’s a collective shrug of indifference from the vast majority of people, as yet another attempt to demonstrate how amazing maths can be at solving real-world problems gets lost because the reports always have to put the equation front and centre — the obscure; complex-looking; impenetrable equation — rather than make a decent attempt to explain the concept without resorting to symbols.
Maths seems to be the exception that proves the rule of the wider problem of how the media generally fails to report scientific stories in any kind of sensible way; they focus on what they think will grab the reader’s attention, but refuse to go any deeper.
Why? Because papers think you won’t understand the “science bit”, all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word “biophoton” on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.
But maths stories are dumbed-down by making things appear more complicated than they truly are, by starting with the equation and working backwards to explain what each part means, turning off the reader from the very beginning. If anyone does end up taking on the challenge, this will be another one of these cases: everyone will look at the equation, writ large in the headline if Amazon’s plan has gone ahead, and think, “How the hell does that tell me how to wrap a pot plant?”
[To which the answer is, obviously, p - α/γ ≤ W(p) ≤ γp2 - α.]
In: World News
2005 / 09 / 21 – 19:20 | Comment [4] | Top
It’s the city in which I was born, I grew up, and where I still regularly visit a large number of my friends and family, but I never knew how proud I was of being a Londoner until I saw the way people dealt with Thursday’s events.
I can’t possibly add to the thousands of reactions that have already been written, and I refuse to waste time speculating on the motives of whoever was responsible, and whether we brought this on ourselves or not.
By coincidence I watched an early 1990s Eddie Izzard video that evening, in which he talked about how Londoners were dealing with bomb threats — what seemed at the time like an almost everyday occurrance.
“What, this station’s closed? Right, let’s see, so I can go up the Piccadilly Line and cut across on the Metropolitan, no problem.”
“Oh, this whole street is closed off is it? Okay … now there’s another Boots the Chemist on Tottenham Court Rd…”
I think it’s fantastic that everything goes to buggery as soon as we get a reasonably heavy snowful, but set off four bombs in an attempt to cripple our transport system and induce panic, and we just get on with it. We might be rubbish, but we’re also stubborn. As noted by Tom Coates, the response of The London News Review says it best.
We’re better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we’re going to go about our lives. We’re going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we’re going to work. And we’re going down the pub.
In: World News
2005 / 07 / 09 – 09:59 | Comment [1] | Top
At the risk of making a fool of myself in front of the slowly-growing band of physicists that occasionally read this weblog [I think we’re up to four now], I’m going to pick a hole in this new theory about time travel. Or rather, in the way that the BBC has reported it.
The main headache [with usual notion of time travel] stems from the idea that if you went back in time you could, theoretically, do something to change the present; and that possibility messes up the whole theory of time travel.
Clearly, the present never is changed by mischievous time-travellers: people don’t suddenly fade into the ether because a rerun of events has prevented their births — that much is obvious.
I’m disputing this “obvious” claim. What’s happened to the idea of parallel universes? Has that been empirically disproved? I thought the theory was, if you do somehow go back in time, say precisely 10 years, and change an event that had occurred in your past, this instantaneously creates an alternative universe in which you now live. So if you go forward in time 10 years from this point, you don’t land back where you left, but instead are 10 years hence in this new universe. [Have these people never seen Back to the Future Part III?] It seems to me that, if parallel universes exist, they eliminate the possibility of people disappearing “into the ether”, because in one universe someone can live to a ripe old age, whereas in another the “same” person might die younger.
[This is all nonsense of course. I’m pretty sure that I believe in neither time travel nor parallel universes. If I get drunk enough I might write about my theory about how waiting for a bus disproves that time travel will never be discovered by humans…]
In: World News
2005 / 06 / 18 – 10:46 | Comment [2] | Top
From Bob Geldof’s outbursts, he is seemingly blind to the notion that some people might want to attend one of the Live8 concerts primarily because they will feature some fantastic bands, and not because they want to show their support for the cause. For all the good intentions behind it, and the emphasis on raising awareness rather than donations, it really is just a show. If he’s going to kick up a stink because those people are willing to pay over the odds for tickets, then he needs to quiz each and every person who comes through the gates on their reasons for being there. If he thinks that everyone is there solely to show a united front to the governments of the world, I think he’s mistaken.
A friend of mine was lucky enough to win two tickets. She’s excited about going, and not because she’s going to be taught all about how she can “make a difference”. The media attention surrounding the concerts and the G8 summit itself has been more than enough to raise awareness; a concert isn’t going to make much more of an impact in that respect. And whilst I’m sure she’d love to see all of the bands playing, she might also appreciate a bit of a personal windfall — a lot of us would, whether we’d admit to it or not. So if I offered my friend £1,000 for her ticket, would any of us judge her for accepting? If you had a ticket, is there no price you’d accept in place of attending the concert yourself? What’s the difference between that scenario and offering up tickets for auction on eBay? It was incredibly naive not to predict that possibility.
If somebody wanted to win tickets solely for the purpose of selling them on, and did so, would Sir Bob not prefer to have an attendee who was willing to pay [at an unarguably extortionate price] to come along and see the show, as they perhaps might be a little more receptive to the issues about which he is attempting to educate the world?
eBay were right with their initial stance to not block the auctioning of these tickets, and it is a failing of the concert organisers that they did not make any attempts to do this futile [e.g. print the name of the winner on the ticket?]. That eBay caved in and decided to block the auctions after all was disappointing. I’m also supportive of their decision to ban any vigilante user who, at Geldof’s urging, attempted to sabotage the auctions with excessive bids, and agree with Damon Albarn that it would have been a good idea to charge the bands themselves to take part. If Geldof is going to lash out at anyone, perhaps it should be his fellow organisers for not thinking things through as much as they could have done, and for not listening more closely to their critics.
In: World News
2005 / 06 / 16 – 15:58 | Comment [4] | Top
The news of the death of Bob Hunter, co-founder of Greenpeace, has gotten me thinking back to my days as a Greenpeace canvasser in Toronto, in the summer of 1996. If you’ve know me for more than ten minutes then chances are I’ve already told you all about this, so you can go and make a cup of tea or something whilst I tell the others.
The job of the canvasser is, as you might expect, to go door-to-door trying to rally up support for the organisation they represent. Now I know that, at least in the UK, in terms of how welcome a visitor to ones door they are, door-to-door solicitors for pressure groups are generally on a par with bailiffs and pitchfork-wielding lynch mobs, but in Canada I found it to be a different story. On the whole, people were receptive and those that didn’t want to support Greenpeace for whatever reason at least gave me either a friendly, “Not interested,” before I said much, or listened to what I had to say before nicely saying no. My task was not simply to ask for monetary donations to swell Greenpeace’s coffers, but to get people to become card-carrying members — a pressure group relies on the size of its membership to put the weight of public opinion behind its causes.
The canvassing staff are divided up into groups of five or six and given a part of town to work on; each team has a field manager who assigns sub-sections of the area to each canvasser. After a couple of days of shadowing more established canvassers, learning about the issues in general and the specifics of Greenpeace’s work, I was trusted with my own turf each afternoon in which to sign up as many members as I could.
I was rubbish.
In: Local News & Work Work & World News
2005 / 05 / 03 – 20:04 | Top
2005 / 03 / 11 – 23:23 | Comment [3] | Top
2005 / 03 / 11 – 08:25 | Comment [105] | Trackback [1] | Top
2005 / 02 / 13 – 13:01 | Comment [1] | Top
Read the rest of “Things that I care more about than the news of Charles and Camilla marrying”…
2005 / 02 / 11 – 11:35 | Comment [10] | Top
2005 / 01 / 20 – 21:34 | Top
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2005 / 01 / 03 – 13:48 | Top
2004 / 12 / 29 – 08:25 | Top
2004 / 11 / 08 – 16:29 | Comment [9] | Top
Read the rest of “No more inches/centimetres gaffs, no sir”…
2004 / 11 / 05 – 15:55 | Comment [2] | Trackback [1] | Top
2004 / 10 / 26 – 15:34 | Comment [4] | Top
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2004 / 06 / 20 – 20:56 | Comment [3] | Top
2004 / 06 / 17 – 08:47 | Comment [6] | Top
2004 / 06 / 06 – 14:20 | Comment [8] | Top
Read the rest of “I’d hate to see them order from the menu”…
2004 / 05 / 20 – 12:15 | Comment [4] | Top
2004 / 04 / 14 – 15:57 | Top
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Read the rest of “can i name the general? yes, his name is ‘general’”…
2003 / 12 / 05 – 10:47 | Comment [10] | Top
2003 / 11 / 27 – 14:14 | Comment [1] | Top
2003 / 10 / 29 – 16:54 | Comment [5] | Top
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2003 / 10 / 10 – 15:13 | Comment [2] | Top
2003 / 10 / 03 – 10:36 | Comment [4] | Top
2003 / 10 / 02 – 23:01 | Comment [3] | Top
2003 / 09 / 27 – 15:54 | Comment [3] | Top
2003 / 08 / 25 – 00:48 | Comment [2] | Top
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2003 / 08 / 12 – 16:50 | Top
2003 / 07 / 24 – 12:56 | Comment [5] | Top
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2003 / 07 / 05 – 00:44 | Comment [7] | Top
2003 / 07 / 04 – 16:46 | Top
2003 / 07 / 04 – 13:13 | Comment [1] | Top
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2003 / 06 / 06 – 13:39 | Comment [1] | Top
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2003 / 05 / 20 – 13:13 | Comment [11] | Top
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2003 / 04 / 19 – 22:24 | Comment [4] | Top
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2003 / 03 / 17 – 11:24 | Top
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2003 / 03 / 12 – 00:22 | Comment [8] | Top
2003 / 03 / 07 – 13:11 | Comment [3] | Top
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2003 / 03 / 03 – 22:41 | Comment [2] | Top
Read the rest of “bet he’ll have two from the top and pwoar from anywhere else”…
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2003 / 02 / 16 – 15:14 | Comment [5] | Top
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2003 / 02 / 12 – 17:46 | Top