Dr Fu

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seti_drd: Futurama vs. Doctor Who
Yay! Picspam again! Another example of how much two shows that have nothing to do with each other can still feel and look the same.  So, you ask how can you compare an animated show like Futurama with something like Doctor Who? Well, as I'll show you, there are some striking similarities. I sometimes wonder if the writers of both shows are smoking the same thing. It's time for the ultimate comparison!
Zoidberg vs. the Ood, or: "I took the liberty of fertilizing your caviar." vs. "Would you like sauce with that?" Futurama wins. Woopwoopwoop!






Bender vs. Cybermen. Both want to kill all the humans, if both drink large amounts of alcohol remains unsure. Both have a shiny metal ass. Tie.

Bin laden politics

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Plans to end weekly bin round hushed up

I am pleased to say I can float above all the controversy about rubbish collection because in this part of Aberdeen the frequency of collection is not an issue. There is NO household collection. We carry our bags to the large roadside rubbish containers which get emptied when they are full.

They are a couple of hundred yards from my front door and in a lay-by adjacent to a small park so they cause no nuisance to anyone in the street. Unfortunately they quickly fill with all sorts of strange stuff. Carpets, garden waste, bits of furniture, sinks - you name it. Builders stop off to unload bags of plaster and rubble and last week I found a large, executive-style office chair in one of the bins. At least it's better than fly-tipping.


D'ya want a bag with that dearie?

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Following on from yesterday's story of the hip, reusable, Anya Hindmarch shopping bag, (marked with the slogan "I'm not a plastic bag" and made from resuable cotton as part of a campaign to make us all aware of the perils of plastic bags) that had daft** women lining up from 3 in the morning to buy one, according to the editor of this morning's Today programme when the customers paid for the aforementioned  eco-friendly, non-plastic bag many of them walked out of the stores with it in a...plastic bag.

**On the other hand, the bags were selling on Ebay for £200 each, so maybe it wasn't such a daft idea getting up at an unearthly hour to get your hands on one.
I'm old enough to remember the days before plastic bags. Shoppers had their own carriers of various kinds. Big canvas bags were popular in our household. They were strong and sturdy enough to take the 10lbs of (loose) spuds plus all the other (unwrapped) veg needed to feed a family of nine. Meat was wrapped in paper. Cakes came in card boxes. No plastic.

Even today I only use the heavy duty reusable shopping bags, not for environmental reasons but because I can't stand ending up with twenty silly bags of shopping to sort out. One problem with the big bags is that when full they can get very heavy and my guess is that women shoppers prefer lots of light bags rather than fewer heavy ones. In my day you would see women trudging home with a heavy bag in each hand, stopping every now and then for a rest. That was before they all had huge cross-country vehicles to go shopping in, and when you still bought your food locally.

One supermarket where you will see people being 'environmentally responsible' is Lidl. The reason? Simple. Lidl charge for their bags and as the average Lidl shopper goes there to save money they usually bring a bag with them or reuse the available cardboard boxes. As long as bags are given away free, shoppers will go on using them, simple as.


Thumbs up

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Flawed fingerprint evidence led to a travesty of justice
The solitary fingerprint was found halfway up a bathroom door frame in the bungalow where a reclusive spinster named Marion Ross had been brutally stabbed to death. At first, detectives attached no importance to the slightly smudged print, for, over the years, dozens of people had been in the house. Indeed, the print was among 400 discovered when fingerprint officers dusted down the murder scene. Besides, the police had already arrested David Asbury, a young builder from the same town where 51-year-old Miss Ross lived, and were convinced he had killed her - with such savagery that she was found pinned to the blood-soaked carpet by a pair of scissors which had been driven through her throat and spinal column.

It was only when the supposedly 'insignificant' print on the door frame was examined by criminal records experts that events took a different turn. This was in the winter of 1997 and over the next decade the result of that one routine test would drive a dedicated young Scottish policewoman to the brink of suicide and destroy her promising career. It would also undermine the previously unassailable, century-old practice of fingerprinting - and spark one of the most damaging scandals in British judicial history.


I posted, briefly on this case here.
I bought the book 'Shirley McKie: The Price of Innocence' written by her indominable father Iain McKie and Michael Russell. If you have any interest in justice or the way the establishment in all its forms is prepared to sacrifice innocent people to protect itself I urge you to read this book.

Shirley was fortunate to have a father like Iain to tenaciously fight for her. Even so the real guilty people (and I'm not talking about the murderer - who is still at large) carry on their merry way through the system. It's a shocking story which deserves widespread publicity.

Synopsis: Her crime - to speak the truth and refuse to accept the mis-identification of her fingerprint, allegedly found at a murder scene she should not have entered. During those nine years, her case became an international cause celebre during which she gained the support of the world fingerprint experts community and much of the world's press whilst at home being persecuted by government ministers, smeared by senior police officers and having her integrity traduced by Scottish forensic experts and Scottish politicians. Now, for the first time the true and authorized story of the Shirley McKie case is told by her father Iain - her strongest champion - and former MSP Michael Russell who has worked alongside the McKie family for over seven years.


There is no Blairism

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Simon Jenkins - An 'ism' needs a coherent set of ideas
We are to be overwhelmed. A tidal wave of epitaphs, eulogies and obsequies of Tony Blair is upon us. His era will crave definition. The flesh must be made word, and the word is Blairism. Already it is creeping into the columns of this paper. It hangs on the lips of friend and foe alike.

Let us get one thing straight. Blairism does not exist and never has. It is all froth and miasma. It consists of throwing a packet of words such as change, community, renewal, partnership, social and reform into the air and watching them twinkle to the ground like blossom until the body politic is carpeted with sweet-smelling bloom. An -ism implies a coherent set of ideas, an ideology capable of driving a programme in a particular direction. In plumbing the shallows of Blair's ideas, even his guru, Raymond Plant, was reduced to taking refuge in Daniel Bell's End of Ideology.

Like most British prime ministers - whatever they proclaim - Blair in office has taken things as he found them, tootling along until the dying fall of his departure.

I blame my childhood friends

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Forget home and school. Look on the streets - Magnus Linklater
Both (Blair and Cameron) agree on one thing: all trouble starts with the family. The more children grow up in a stable environment, the more they are likely to turn into model citizens. Restore family life and you restore the well-adjusted child. But what if that theory is wrong? What if the family has nothing to do with the way the young turn out, and the influences, for bad or good, lie elsewhere? What, in short, if the nurture part of the nature/nurture debate has been looking in the wrong place all this time?That is the subversive argument that Judith Rich Harris, the American psychologist, has been pursuing for the past ten years or so, and which she has built into two books, The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike. The theory she advances is that what influences behaviour is not so much the home or the family, or even the genetic make-up of a child, but the peer group in which they grow up. The survival instinct, which teaches the young either to conform with their contemporaries or to become their leader, kicks in early on and can result in huge variations in behaviour. One child may turn into a model conformist, while another, brought up in the same household, becomes a tearaway. To explain why, you have to look outside the family not inside it.
Harris has an article in the latest Prospect:
JRH: The surprising result had to do with the environment. Since genetic effects account for only about half of the differences among us, the other half has to be the result of environmental effects, right? Well, that was the assumption. But researchers still haven't been able to pin down which aspects of the environment are important. All they've been able to determine is which aspects of the environment are not important. The aspects of the environment that don't seem to matter are all those that are shared by all the children who grow up in a given family—which includes most of the things the word "home" makes you think of. Whether the home is headed by one parent or two, whether the parents are happily married or constantly rowing, whether they believe in pushing their children to succeed or leaving them to find their own way in life, whether the home is filled with books or sports equipment, whether it is orderly or messy, a city flat or a farmhouse—the research shows, counterintuitively, that none of these things makes much difference. The child who grows up in the orderly, well-run home is, on average, no more conscientious as an adult than the one who grows up in the messy one. Or rather, he or she will be more conscientious only to the extent that this characteristic is inherited.
There was a short 'nature/nurture discussion in relation to adoption on Woman's Hour earlier this week where Professor Steve Jones was rather dismissive of some of the claims for genetic influence on behaviour. He clarified some of the confusion over genes versus environment with this telling observation:

'If everbody smoked, lung cancer would be a genetic disease'




What future for internet radio?

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Truthdig - Interviews - Closing the Box on Pandora?
On April 16, three men—a retired bankruptcy judge from Alabama, a former litigator with expertise in transportation industry economics and a career attorney for the Copyright Office—made a decision that has profound implications for the future of webcasting, and for the music and Internet industries in general.

Aram Sinnreich interviews Pandora founder Tim Westergren to find out whether the ruling will put an end to Internet radio as we know it.


Anthropowhat?

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The hero, the rogue - and the love triangle that caused feathers to fly
Faced with a flighty female and some serious doubts over paternity, the anger of the jealous male knows no bounds. How would a man feel if he had just returned home to Scotland from a long sojourn in Africa only to find that his wife had given birth to two offspring that were clearly not his own, given that he had been abroad for so long?
On a more serious note.

This happened to thousands of men, including my father, during the second world war. I've talked to many men of that generation who told similar stories of coming home to find pregnant wives or unexplained children.

Most of them accepted it as part of life, particularly in war time, and got on with bringing up the children as their own.

Some were ignorant of the true paternity of their offspring but that's nothing new, as repeated studies have shown.

Even Mary and Joseph had problems...

Beyond Bullshit

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Edward de Bono, father of lateral thinking

NO! He didn't invent 'lateral thinking' he just came up with a catchy name for a process that has been going on since men could think. (And living off it ever since). He also came up with 'po' a word 'beyond yes and no'. Yeah right. That really caught on didn't it?
Many of his critics dismiss his books and seminars as "psychobabble" or claim De Bono simply states the obvious. But the 73-year-old shrugs this off. "When people say this I ask, 'Do you understand these concepts?', and usually the answer is no. If you can see things differently, you can make a big difference. Furthermore, the practical research and results are there. You can't deny it." Arguing with him over this would be pointless since De Bono does not believe in arguments. "They are the most crude way of getting a solution,"

...Many prominent artists from the music world, such as the Eurythmics and Pet Shop Boys, have said their work has benefited from De Bono's thinking.
Well, say no more squire. Annie Lennox and the Pet Shop Boys? Boy oh boy. Send me my six thinking hats ( 73/8 ) by return of post, my cheque is enclosed.



 

Eye eye

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I've fallen behind with my Interwebbytechstuff page updates. There's new stuff cropping up all over and I really must knuckle down and list some of it. I'll get cracking tomorrow.

In the meantime check out Jeteye. This is a glorified bookmarking service that lets you 'drag and drop any content from anywhere on the web' to form collections called 'Jetpacks'. There are similar services out there such as Squidoo, Backpack, Trailfire and others but Jeteye does seem to be the simplest and quickest way to create a collection of varied content and make it publicly available either by email or at a unique url.

Although it has been around for a while it's still not a slick as it could be. I use the Firefox Jeteye extension which makes adding content to a new jetpack fairly easy, but it can still be a bit hit and miss. When it works well it's a great little tool. The best way to explain what it does is to check out a 'Jetpack'.

Take a look at  this simple Jetpack I put together a couple of days ago. It consists of the three posts from Tom Paine at The Last Ditch on 'What is the point of blogging?'  All nicely collected in a single page which can be bookmarked or emailed. The links and images are all kept intact  and the whole thing is formatted in a very readable style.

If, like me, you are an inveterate 'clipper and snipper' of interesting bits and pieces, Jeteye could be just the thing to help you scrapbook them into themes or categories. 

I have to say though that the new service I'm really looking forward to trying is Plum, which should come on stream in a few weeks. It looks very slick and it has been extensively beta tested so it should hit the ground running. I think it's the one to watch.
You can pre-signup now.