Seeking a Little Truth

2012-01-31T07:28:00.000Z

2012-01-30T22:15:00.000Z

My Favourite Movies: Black Hawk Down

This is a little more up to date than my last fave but still old enough to have some perspective on it. Along with my love of Westerns I’m a big fan of decent thoughtful War Stories. War can, despite all the questionable aspects surrounding it, bring out the best (though more often the worst) in people. BHD – based on the excellent account of the battle by Mark Bowden – is an example of what happens when young men, who are singularly unprepared for what happened to them, are put through the meat grinder. Inevitably the movie is a very much cut-down version of real events. Several actual people are often moulded into a single actor and incidents are told in the wrong order, enhanced for dramatic effect or missed out all together. It often needs to be remembered that we are watching a Hollywood movie here and not a documentary about contemporary events. What we see on the screen is, first and foremost, for our entertainment. All war movies come in for criticism. No matter how realistic they try to be they can never truly show both the horror and the banality of war. No matter the sentiment they will, inevitably it seems, be accused of either glorifying conflict, promoting imperialism (either political or cultural) or of being – as this movie was – racist. Sometimes it would seem you just can’t win.

But I guess Ridley Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer (yes, him again) must have been doing something right as this film won a pair of Oscars for Best Film Editing and Best Sound (now I can see why the DVD just said “Winner of 2 Oscars”) though it was at least nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Director. But what about the actual story? It takes place in Somalia in 1993 where a crushing civil war is tearing the country apart. The US decides (along with the UN) that enough is enough and sends in Delta Force and The Rangers to sort things out. The mission featured in the movie – and in far more detail in the book – is an attempt to capture senior members of the controlling militia. To that end helicopter forces drop in and start doing just that – but as everyone knows, no plan survives contact with the enemy. When a Black Hawk helicopter is shot down everything changes and the snatch becomes a rescue in hostile territory against incredible odds – with limited food, water and ammunition. Told that they would be away from their base for no more than a few hours many of the young soldiers didn’t take much of anything with them. Now trapped and running out of just about everything needed to survive they need to rely on each other to get through the night.

There are many outstanding performances in this film and I’ll highlight just a few. Josh Hartnett plays Sgt Eversmann who’s just been given his first command. Dedicated to keeping his men alive he finds the realities of combat almost too much to bear. Tom Sizemore played I think my favourite character Danny McKnight who walked across ever battlefield as if he was walking across a quiet beach or going for a stroll in his hometown. He seemed completely impervious to gunfire even when one bullet clipped his neck. Then there was Eric Banner as Hoot, a laconic member of Delta force who tries to teach Eversmann that no matter how hard he tries he can’t control events once the shooting starts.

Despite finding the last few minutes a little too ‘arty’ for my liking this was both an exciting and thoughtful modern war movie for the Call of Duty generation used to seeing US troops fighting and dying in 3^rd World countries. The combat was visceral, brutal and bloody. It certainly felt real – though I hope that I never find out just how accurately it was portrayed. Watching some of the mini-documentaries on the DVD I was amazed to discover just how much of the film was CGI. Things have certainly come a long way in putting the audience on the front line. If you’ve been put off watching this movie by some of the bad press it received on release in 2001 then don’t be. See it and make up your own mind. It certainly doesn’t glorify war and it most certainly isn’t racist.

2012-01-29T14:26:00.003Z

2012-01-29T13:32:00.002Z

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra

2012-01-29T10:12:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2012-01-28T21:42:00.001Z

Bunnies....!

2012-01-28T21:39:00.002Z

NASA'S KEPLER MISSION DISCOVERS TWO PLANETS TRANSITING SAME STAR

From NASA

Aug. 26, 2010

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet crossing in front of, or transiting, the same star. The transit signatures of two distinct planets were seen in the data for the sun-like star designated Kepler-9. The planets were named Kepler-9b and 9c. The discovery incorporates seven months of observations of more than 156,000 stars as part of an ongoing search for Earth-sized planets outside our solar system. The findings will be published in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.

Kepler's ultra-precise camera measures tiny decreases in the stars' brightness that occur when a planet transits them. The size of the planet can be derived from these temporary dips. The distance of the planet from the star can be calculated by measuring the time between successive dips as the planet orbits the star. Small variations in the regularity of these dips can be used to determine the masses of planets and detect other non-transiting planets in the system.

In June, mission scientists submitted findings for peer review that identified more than 700 planet candidates in the first 43 days of Kepler data. The data included five additional candidate systems that appear to exhibit more than one transiting planet. The Kepler team recently identified a sixth target exhibiting multiple transits and accumulated enough follow-up data to confirm this multi-planet system.

"Kepler's high quality data and round-the-clock coverage of transiting objects enable a whole host of unique measurements to be made of the parent stars and their planetary systems," said Doug Hudgins, the Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Scientists refined the estimates of the masses of the planets using observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The observations show Kepler-9b is the larger of the two planets, and both have masses similar to but less than Saturn. Kepler-9b lies closest to the star with an orbit of about 19 days, while Kepler-9c has an orbit of about 38 days. By observing several transits by each planet over the seven months of data, the time between successive transits could be analyzed.

"This discovery is the first clear detection of significant changes in the intervals from one planetary transit to the next, what we call transit timing variations," said Matthew Holman, a Kepler mission scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "This is evidence of the gravitational interaction between the two planets as seen by the Kepler spacecraft."

In addition to the two confirmed giant planets, Kepler scientists also have identified what appears to be a third, much smaller transit signature in the observations of Kepler-9. That signature is consistent with the transits of a super-Earth-sized planet about 1.5 times the radius of Earth in a scorching, near-sun 1.6 day-orbit. Additional observations are required to determine whether this signal is indeed a planet or an astronomical phenomenon that mimics the appearance of a transit.

[Finding more planets is always good news. The more planets out there, the more environments there are for life to emerge and evolve which increases the odds that one day either we’ll find them or they’ll find us. So, pretty cool…..]

2012-01-27T21:04:00.001Z

2012-01-27T07:33:00.002Z

2012-01-26T21:45:00.002Z

Just Finished Reading: Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy – New Life for the Undead edited by Richard Greene and K Silem Mohammad

Although I have had a long fascination with Vampires I have never really understood the interest with the walking dead (or these days the running dead). Obviously I understand that they can be seen – though the eyes of the survivors of any zombie attack - as a metaphorical triumph over death itself, I can’t see where you go after you realise this. Then again I have never been a huge fan of any of the general horror genres so my lack of interest (or maybe understanding) in watching animating corpses shuffle after the tasty living.

So it should come as no surprise that I was hoping that the majority of this book dealt with the various philosophical and culture aspects of vampirism. Not so unfortunately – or at least I thought this to begin with. Rather surprisingly I actually enjoyed the sections on zombies and ended up thinking that the subset of articles on vampires were rather dull. The zombies in question were, almost exclusively, those created by George Romero – the ‘Dead’ series of movies (none of which I’ve actually seen all the way through. Probably my favourite article in the whole book discussed the philosophical idea of zombies – rather than its cinematic variant. This is the problem of other minds – that being that because we have direct access to the thoughts of others there’s no actual way to confirm that other people have minds like you (or actually like me – because I don’t know if you actually exist as people!). You can see the problem. Other ‘people’ might respond in an appropriate manner but how can you tell if that’s just a conditioned response rather anything driven by another consciousness? Dale Jacquette discussed this in an intriguing way – by thinking about zombie gladiators. What if we could train zombies (the philosophical type not the rotting corpse type) to fight in gladiatorial contests for our entertainment? What if they looked just like us, shouted in pain just like us and bled to death just like us? But what if they only acting these things out because they never actually had minds – and we could tell that because of a tattoo on their skin ‘inked on’ as soon as their lack of consciousness was discovered. Would such contests be OK and if not why not? Probably the second interesting argument – put forward by several authors – was the socio-economic view of what zombies mean (beyond the critique of consumerism so blatant in the second (?) ‘Dead’ film with its now classic Mall scenes). Typically the vampire related articles explored the question of whether vampires are inherently evil or if good vampires (with or without a soul) can actually exist outside of the Buffy universe.

Overall, despite my initial disappointment in the lower than hoped for number of vampire related articles, I found this book to be nicely diverting. I certainly learnt quite a lot about the zombie mystique – not that it is going to encourage me to watch any of Romero’s movies anytime soon. I can look at the whole zombie genre in a different way though – be it political, economic or philosophic. Books like these are great ways of ‘doing’ philosophy without appearing to do so. If you’re either a zombie or vampire fan you’ll find something in here that will interest you – and you might just pick up the odd (and sometimes very odd) philosophical concept along the way. Recommended.

2012-01-25T21:24:00.002Z

2012-01-25T07:50:00.000Z

Cartoon Time.

2012-01-24T21:09:00.002Z

2012-01-24T07:22:00.002Z

2012-01-23T21:39:00.000Z

My Favourite Movies: Adventures in Babysitting

I’m on a bit of a nostalgia kick at the moment. One of the results is that I’ve been recently re-watching some of my favourite 80’s movies. Adventures in Babysitting is a creditable example of its type. Coming late to the party (1987) it had all of the elements of the teen movie that many of us grew up with. The plot, whilst basically rather silly, is a simple one. Chris Parker (played by the lovely Elisabeth Shue) has been dumped by her boyfriend and is depressed enough to accept a babysitting job despite feeling too old to do so – she’s 17. During what is expected to be a very dull evening she gets a call from her best friend who has run away from home – only to have also run out of money at the cities bus station. Feeling threatened she calls Chris to come pick her up. Torn between her duty to her friend and her responsibility to the kids she’s sitting, she decides to take them into the city with her. But after a blow-out on the freeway and the discovery of a purse left in the suburbs they become caught up in a series of increasingly bizarre events as they are chased by criminals across town in search of a very special Playboy magazine.

This to me was 98 minutes of fun. Shue was delightfully cute and quirky and even had a reasonable voice during her Blues number (which honestly has to be seen to be believed). The three kids are hardly ever annoying with the 10 year old Maia Brewton in particular giving a notable performance as a Thor obsessed pre-teen. The baddies were suitably 2 dimensional cut-outs complete with bad Italian accents and there was the obligatory romance bit between the High school senior Shue and the College student (played by George Newbern) whose party they crashed to use the bathroom. Then of course there were the clothes, those haircuts and the music all of which dripped 80’s so-called ‘style’. All in all it was often unintentionally funny and just as unintentionally evocative of a simpler and much more innocent age. Although it will never be hailed as a work of art or even as the best of its genre this is still a good example of a particular type of teen movie. It managed to push quite a few of my buttons when I first saw it 25 years ago and it still managed to do so – somewhat more gently – a few days ago.

2012-01-22T14:13:00.002Z

2012-01-22T10:46:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2012-01-21T22:11:00.002Z

2012-01-21T22:09:00.000Z

Iran's Nuclear Scientists Are Not Being Assassinated. They Are Being Murdered

by Mehdi Hasan for The Guardian

January 17, 2012

On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of

Iran

's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He wasn't armed, or anywhere near a battlefield. Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee.

On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear programme in Iran turn up dead," bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum in October. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly." On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced on Facebook: "I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear" – a sentiment echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the Daily Telegraph: "I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes." These "men on motorbikes" have been described as "assassins". But assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: not just assassinations but terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes. Their purpose is to inure us to such state-sponsored violence against foreigners. In his acclaimed book On Killing, the retired US army officer Dave Grossman examines mechanisms that enable us not just to ignore but even cheer such killings: cultural distance ("such as racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to dehumanise the victim"); moral distance ("the kind of intense belief in moral superiority"); and mechanical distance ("the sterile, Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim").

Thus western liberals who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers – who have, incidentally, had the benefit of lawyers, trials and appeals – as state-sponsored murder fall quiet as their states kill, with impunity, nuclear scientists, terror suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands. Yet a "targeted killing", human-rights lawyer and anti-drone activist Clive Stafford Smith tells me, "is just the death penalty without due process". Cognitive dissonance abounds. To torture a terror suspect, for example, is always morally wrong; to kill him, video game style, with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone, is morally justified. Crippled by fear and insecurity, we have sleepwalked into a situation where governments have arrogated to themselves the right to murder their enemies abroad. Nor are we only talking about foreigners here. Take Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist preacher, al-Qaida supporter – and US citizen. On 30 September 2011, a CIA drone killed Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another CIA-led drone attack killed Awlaki's 21-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman. Neither father nor son were ever indicted, let alone tried or convicted, for committing a crime. Both US citizens were assassinated by the US government in violation of the Fifth Amendment ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law").

An investigation by Reuters last October noted how, under the Obama administration, US citizens accused of involvement in terrorism can now be "placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions … There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate." Should "secret panels" and "kill lists" be tolerated in a liberal democracy, governed by the rule of law? Did the founders of the United States intend for its president to be judge, jury and executioner? Whatever happened to checks and balances? Or due process? Imagine the response of our politicians and pundits to a campaign of assassinations against western scientists conducted by, say, Iran or North Korea. When it comes to state-sponsored killings, the double standard is brazen. "Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them," George Orwell observed, "and there is almost no kind of outrage … which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side". But how many more of our values will we shred in the name of security? Once we have allowed our governments to order the killing of fellow citizens, fellow human beings, in secret, without oversight or accountability, what other powers will we dare deny them?

This isn't complicated; there are no shades of grey here. Do we disapprove of car bombings and drive-by shootings, or not? Do we consistently condemn state-sponsored, extrajudicial killings as acts of pure terror, no matter where in the world, or on whose orders, they occur? Or do we shrug our shoulders, turn a blind eye and continue our descent into lawless barbarism?

[If this is true – and I’m cynical enough to believe that it is – then what a bloody awful indictment of our so-called democracies, when we can, apparently with a clear conscience, reach out and kill those who might be a danger to us anywhere in the world. Do we have any right to do this? Can it be justified in any other way than by saying we can do it so we will do it? Can you imagine the furore if Iranian agents killed a nuclear scientist in London or New York? In the past such things have resulted in wars or retaliatory bombings. Do we authorise such things because we know we can, at least for now, get away with them without the fear of retaliation? Can we, in all honesty, be surprised at all when a car bomb goes off in a European or even an American city to say “Look, we can do this too”? Do we REALLY want to live in a world where nations assassinate each others brightest and best in order to degrade their future ability to do us harm? If the scientists become too hard to target shall we move on to targeting top University students or the brightest kids in High school? Where do we stop in the name of security? Just how far are we willing to stoop?]

2012-01-20T16:48:00.001Z

2012-01-20T07:25:00.002Z

2012-01-19T21:49:00.002Z

Just Finished Reading: The Secret Life of Bletchley Park – The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the Men and Women who worked there by Sinclair McKay

What happened in Bletchley Park during WWII was one of Britain’s best kept secrets. Indeed the work carried out there remained a secret until the late 1970’s. For decades after the war friends and even partners of people who worked there, including rather surprisingly partners who actually met there, never knew the full story of its groundbreaking efforts in combating first the Germans and then the Japanese. It is widely believed that the famous breaking of the German military Enigma Code shortened the war by at least two years. Some authorities believe that the figure could be as high as five years. The significance of this result cannot be overstated. The codes broken in this most secret of places allowed Allied shipping to avoid U-boat attacks thereby allowing vital food and supplies to get to England to sustain her war effort. Without it the possibility exists that we may have lost the Battle of the Atlantic and have had to capitulate, leaving the US to fight alone.

What is almost as remarkable is the way the Park was set-up and operated and the kind of people who worked there. Initially it was a very British affair – when some very bright people managed to convince the military authorities that a modern code breaking service was needed. When the government turned out to be reluctant to provide the money it is rumoured that a wealthy senior naval officer bought the house himself and gave it to the Admiralty department staffed by many of his friends. The first recruits were largely made up of friends of friends and came from the higher echelons of society – in other words the ‘right set’ who were assumed to be loyal merely because of their social position. It was, in many ways, a very different world back then. Of course they needed academics too and these were recruited, again by word of mouth and private recommendations, from the great Universities of the land. Amongst them was the great Alan Turing who was instrumental in laying the foundations of the modern computer age.

The ultimate triumph of the breaking of the various Enigma Codes, despite its ramifications, is told here on a very human scale. Before the invention of the earliest computers it was human brain power exercised over long hours that chipped away at the German secrets. But as the war progressed and the numbers at Bletchley Park ballooned it became necessary to industrialise the process of cracking codes. This is where the technical genius of groundbreaking engineering ideas came to the fore which led, through necessity, to the invention of the world’s first computers. This in itself is a fascinating story. What the author brings home to the reader, through interviews with many of the people who worked there, is the human side of things. How they coped with the pressures when they knew that delays in code breaking cost lives and how many of them coped with being away from home for the very first time without the safety valve of talking about their work to anyone else. It reminded both myself and the author of going away to University – helped along by the fact that many of the senior code breakers where well known academics in their own fields – with the added elements of secrecy and inner knowledge of doing vital war work. It is, in many ways, a fascinating story of hardworking people doing incredible things in very difficult times. Recommended.

2012-01-18T21:08:00.002Z

2012-01-18T07:28:00.003Z

Cartoon Time.

2012-01-17T21:38:00.002Z

What a brilliant idea....!

2012-01-17T07:26:00.002Z

2012-01-16T21:39:00.000Z

The Best Books of 2011

I reviewed 71 books in 2011. These below are the best of the bunch.

Non-Fiction:

Bluestockings – The remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education by Jane Robinson

Jane’s Fame – How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman

The Resistance – The French Fight against the Nazis by Matthew Cobb

The Planet in a Pebble – A Journey into Earth’s Deep History by Jan Zalasiewicz

The Buried Soul – How Humans Invented Death by Timothy Taylor

Fiction:

Heart of the Comet by David Brin and Gregory Benford

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Ship of Rome by John Stack

A Gentle Axe by R N Morris

Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir

Sharpe’s Trafalger by Bernard Cornwell

Emma by Jane Austen

Captain of Rome by John Stack

Destroyermen - Maelstrom by Taylor Anderson

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

The Sword of Albion by Mark Chadbourn

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Honourable Mentions: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Blood and Ice by Robert Masello, Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

2012-01-15T15:23:00.002Z

2012-01-15T11:18:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2012-01-14T21:26:00.002Z

2012-01-14T17:28:00.000Z

The Perils of 2012: When Austerity Bites Back

by Joseph Stiglitz

Friday, January 13, 2012

The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F. Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see not only that those with taller masts had been lifted far higher, but also that many of the smaller boats had been dashed to pieces in their wake. In that brief moment when the rising tide was indeed rising, millions of people believed that they might have a fair chance of realizing the “American Dream.” Now those dreams, too, are receding. By 2011, the savings of those who had lost their jobs in 2008 or 2009 had been spent. Unemployment checks had run out. Headlines announcing new hiring – still not enough to keep pace with the number of those who would normally have entered the labor force – meant little to the 50 year olds with little hope of ever holding a job again. Indeed, middle-aged people who thought that they would be unemployed for a few months have now realized that they were, in fact, forcibly retired. Young people

who graduated from college with tens of thousands of dollars of education debt cannot find any jobs at all. People who moved in with friends and relatives have become homeless. Houses bought during the property boom are still on the market or have been sold at a loss. More than seven million American families have lost their homes.

The dark underbelly of the previous decade’s financial boom has been fully exposed in Europe as well. Dithering over Greece and key national governments’ devotion to austerity began to exact a heavy toll last year. Contagion spread to Italy. Spain’s unemployment, which had been near 20% since the beginning of the recession, crept even higher. The unthinkable – the end of the euro – began to seem like a real possibility. This year is set to be even worse. It is possible, of course, that the United States will solve its political problems and finally adopt the stimulus measures that it needs to bring down unemployment to 6% or 7% (the pre-crisis level of 4% or 5% is too much to hope for). But this is as unlikely as it is that Europe will figure out that austerity alone will not solve its problems. On the contrary, austerity will only exacerbate the economic slowdown. Without growth, the debt crisis – and the euro crisis – will only worsen. And the long crisis that began with the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007 and the subsequent recession will continue. Moreover, the major emerging-market countries, which steered successfully through the storms of 2008 and 2009, may not cope as well with the problems looming on the horizon. Brazil’s growth has already stalled, fueling anxiety among its neighbors in Latin America.

Meanwhile, long-term problems – including climate change and other environmental threats, and increasing inequality in most countries around the world – have not gone away. Some have grown more severe. For example, high unemployment has depressed wages and increased poverty. The good news is that addressing these long-term problems would actually help to solve the short-term problems. Increased investment to retrofit the economy for global warming would help to stimulate economic activity, growth, and job creation. More progressive taxation, in effect redistributing income from the top to the middle and bottom, would simultaneously reduce inequality and increase employment by boosting total demand. Higher taxes at the top could generate revenues to finance needed public investment, and to provide some social protection for those at the bottom, including the unemployed. Even without widening the fiscal deficit, such “balanced budget” increases in taxes and spending would lower unemployment and increase output. The worry, however, is that politics and ideology on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in the US, will not allow any of this to occur. Fixation on the deficit will induce cutbacks in social spending, worsening inequality. Likewise, the enduring attraction of supply-side economics, despite all of the evidence against it (especially in a period in which there is high unemployment), will prevent raising taxes at the top.

Even before the crisis, there was a rebalancing of economic power – in fact, a correction of a 200-year historical anomaly, in which Asia’s share of global GDP fell from nearly 50% to, at one point, below 10%. The pragmatic commitment to growth that one sees in Asia and other emerging markets today stands in contrast to the West’s misguided policies, which, driven by a combination of ideology and vested interests, almost seem to reflect a commitment not to grow. As a result, global economic rebalancing is likely to accelerate, almost inevitably giving rise to political tensions. With all of the problems confronting the global economy, we will be lucky if these strains do not begin to manifest themselves within the next twelve months.

[It looks like we’ll be living through ‘interesting times’ for a little while longer. I do sometimes wonder if things will ever get back to normal or if this is the beginning of a substantial change in the ways of the world. I guess only time will tell.]

2012-01-13T18:08:00.002Z

2012-01-13T07:29:00.002Z

2012-01-12T21:55:00.000Z

Just Finished Reading: Fairyland by Paul J McAuley

Alex Sharkey is in trouble – deep trouble. Unable to pay his protection to the local Mob boss and being threatened by the police to provide evidence against him he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. But then the Mob boss offers him a way to pay off all of his debt in one go. Jumping at the deal Alex agrees to bio-engineer a synthetic hormone that turns sexless artificial dolls into fully functional fairies. This is the world of mid-21^st Century Europe where nano-technology and bio-engineering has allowed anyone with the necessary equipment to produce tailored viruses capable of just about anything. It is a world where a company enhanced child tricks Sharkey into producing the first of a new race capable of its own reproduction, a race just as smart as man in many ways but without moral scruple. Travelling across a barely recognisable Europe Alex tries to put the genie back in the bottle the he and Milena released. But she has other plans both for her co-creation and for Alex.

This is both a very good and seriously strange novel. It is also one of the best almost-cyberpunk novels I’ve read. Concentrating on the impact of biotechnology, rather that computer technology, it considers what would happen if tomorrow’s hackers could hack the genome of any creature they have access to – including humanity itself. Where hackers, rather than hiding in their bedrooms breaking into computers on the other side of the world, break into the double helix in their bathrooms and produce viruses who function are only limited by their imaginations. It is both a deeply disturbing and fascinating world picture and certainly one I would not like to live in – though I suspect people living 100+ years ago would find our present day reality equally horrifying!

I’ve read a few of McAuley’s works now and have been singularly impressed by his power to create fully realised believable characters living in deeply complex rich worlds. Not only did I recognise places mentioned both in London and Paris I was shocked by how different they had ‘become’ in the future and no matter how strange things got – and they got very strange from time to time – the incidents in the book were always believable. The only thing I would have to recommend you do with this book is approach it with a very open mind. I have been reading SF now for over 30 years and this still managed to really mess with my head. SF, even after all that time, is still by far my mind altering drug of choice and books like this one are the LSD of the SF world. One more thing: this book is not for the faint of heart or the easily disturbed. I think of myself as very open-minded about most things but I have to admit that this book did manage to raise a few eyebrows here and there. It’s often violent, contains some graphic sex and some definitely disturbing images. It is however very well written and very thought provoking. If you feel in the mood to really blow your mind then I can heartily recommend this book to do that for you.

2012-01-11T21:34:00.001Z

2012-01-11T07:31:00.000Z

Cartoon Time.

2012-01-10T21:15:00.003Z

2012-01-10T07:24:00.001Z

2012-01-09T22:29:00.000Z

My Favourite TV: Firefly

Those of you who read my Blog on a regular basis will know that I spent a pleasant New Years watching the 2002 SF series Firefly. I could do this in one day – actually in about 12 hours with a few breaks - because they only made 14 episodes. Oddly when I first saw it I couldn’t understand why it lasted that long.

A bit of background might help here. I was, and still am, a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I heard that its creator, Joss Whedon, was working on another show and that it was going to be SF I was already signed up to the area. When it finally arrived I was shocked. I mean… cowboys in space, dressed like cowboys, acting like cowboys, talking like cowboys…. In the future? What was that all about? But because I really liked the creator I gave it enough time to make an impact on me. At episode 4 or 5 I gave up and wrote it off as a turkey. By the sounds of it, as it was axed half way through the first series, I wasn’t alone in my assessment. It was just too damned strange and a little too different to work properly.

Then, as with Stargate: Atlantis, I caught the inevitable re-runs and then I watched the re-runs after that and fell in love with this quirky misunderstood gem of a TV show. It’s strange looking back on it that I loved the show later for what I disliked about it the first time around. I really started to love the mix of genres and realised that it really did work. Space, or at least that bit of space in the series, was the Wild West complete with frontier towns and Indians in the shape of Reavers (scary, scary stuff!) There are soldiers who lost a kind of Civil War despite being on the ‘right side’ – it didn’t take much of a leap to see them as the remnants of the Confederacy and the victorious Alliance as the Union who are technologically strong but morally weak. I’m sure that an expert on the Civil War period and just after could draw all kinds of parallels. Of course what really made this show so special in my mind was the cast and, more importantly, how they acted together as a group. From episode one it seemed that the crew of the spaceship Serenity had known each other for years. It felt right. The unspoken history was there, some of which we found out about later, the usually unspoken tensions were there too as they would be in any group.

Of course it did the show no harm in my eyes that it was packed with very attractive women. My favourite (difficult as it was to pick just one) had to be the brilliantly natural engineer Kaylee played by the beautiful Jewel Staite. I loved the way she talked as much as the way she looked. Then there was the captain’s love interest Inara played by the very sultry Morena Baccarin. Inara was a high class, high cost prostitute or, as the captain repeatedly called her, a whore. Plain speaking about such things was a central aspect of the show. They really didn’t beat about the bush on adult issues. Next in line was Zoe played by Gina Torres, wife of the pilot Alan Tudyk. She played the ships second in command and was in the captains unit during the war. Lastly was River Tam, a young girl hunted by top Alliance operatives because of what she knows and what she can do. River was played by the disturbingly excellent Summer Glau. Probably the character I identified with most was the captain himself – Malcolm Reynolds played by Nathan Fillion. He played a man of honour in a universe largely without any, a man on the raggedy edge with little to lose except his crew, his ship and his self respect. I liked him a lot.

With only 14 episodes to work with we didn’t really learn that much about the characters themselves or about the worlds they inhabited. What we did learn was enough to unfold in a half dozen series. Cut short (even with a later movie filling in some of the background detail) we never learnt what Shepherd Book was before he became a Shepherd. We never had closure with Mal and Inara. That will they won’t they thing could have lasted years! As could the maybe/maybe not relationship between the doctor (River’s older brother) and Kaylee. We could also have found out far more about the Alliance and just how those guys with the blue gloves fitted into things. So many questions we’ll never know the answers to now.

If you’re either a fan of SF, Buffy, Joss Whedon or Westerns this might be the thing for you – if you haven’t already seen it. It is weird so you might not ‘get it’ the first time. But its only 14 episodes so you’ll be able to watch it a few times in a month or so. After repeated exposure you will (probably) begin to love it as much as I do. It’s a real, real shame that it was canned so early and that the movie didn’t do very well at the box-office. It was, I suspect just a bit too quirky and different to be popular. I for one know how that feels which is probably why I’m such a fan.

2012-01-08T14:54:00.002Z

2012-01-08T09:23:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2012-01-07T17:37:00.000Z

Kids: Teach them to love books and give them a cat........

2012-01-07T17:31:00.000Z

US Had 'Frighteningly Simplistic' View of Afghanistan, says McChrystal

by Declan Walsh for The Guardian

Friday, October 7, 2011

One of America's most celebrated generals has issued a harsh indictment of his country's campaign in Afghanistan on the 10th anniversary of the invasion to topple the Taliban. Stanley McChrystal said the US and Nato were only 50% of the way to achieving their goals in Afghanistan. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP The US began the war with a "frighteningly simplistic" view of Afghanistan, the retired general Stanley McChrystal said, and even now the military lacks sufficient local knowledge to bring the conflict to an end.

The US and NATO are only "50% of the way" towards achieving their goals in

Afghanistan

, he told the Council on Foreign Relations. "We didn't know enough and we still don't know enough. Most of us, me included, had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years." McChrystal led the Obama administration's "surge" strategy that started in 2009 and sent US troop levels in Afghanistan to more than 100,000. Widely acknowledged as a gifted military commander, he was forced to resign last year amid controversy over remarks he made to Rolling Stone magazine. The 10th anniversary of the war, marked on Friday, has prompted sober reflection in the US about a conflict that has passed Vietnam as the military's longest war. Just over 2,750 foreign troops have been killed – 28% of them in Helmand – while between 14,000 and 18,000 civilians have died as a result of fighting, according to various estimates. Yet although the US entered Afghanistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden and topple the Taliban, its most prominent targets quickly slipped across the border into Pakistan. The al-Qaida leader was discovered in Abbottabad, north of Islamabad, last May, while the Taliban have used remote border bases in Pakistan's tribal areas to launched a stiff resurgence.

In his comments on Thursday night, McChrystal also indirectly criticized the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, saying it made success in Afghanistan more difficult to achieve. The invasion "changed the Muslim world's view of

America

's effort", he said. "When we went after the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, there was a certain understanding that we had the ability and the right to defend ourselves and the fact that al-Qaida had been harbored by the Taliban was legitimate. I think when we made the decision to go into

Iraq

that was less legitimate [in the eyes of the Muslim world]." The 10th anniversary has also been marked in downbeat fashion in Afghanistan where talk of US-driven "nation building" has largely evaporated. Despite $57bn in international aid since 2001, aid agencies say most people remain mired in deep poverty. "There has been some important progress, especially in urban areas," said Anne Garella of Acbar, an umbrella group of 111 foreign and local aid agencies. "But our research highlights the gap behind positive rhetoric and grim reality." An Acbar study found that 80% of Afghans now have access to health services compared with 9% in 2001. The number of children in school has rocketed from barely one million a decade ago, 5,000 of them girls, to seven million today, one third of whom are girls. But Afghanistan still has been some of the world's worst health indicators due to shoddy facilities, conflict and official corruption. Afghans have grown highly skeptical of western aid over the years, with a widespread perception – partly well founded – that much of the money finds its way back to western countries through security costs and inflated expatriate wages.

But the greatest worry for most Afghans now is the consequence of the US drawdown planned for the end of 2014, which will see the vast majority of 150,000 foreign troops leave the country. The American plan is to hand power to the shaky Karzai-led government, which is plagued by corruption and enjoys diminishing credibility. McChrystal said that building a legitimate government that ordinary Afghans believed in, and which could serve as a counterweight to the Taliban, was among the greatest challenges facing US forces. Efforts are under way to bolster the government's authority. NATO says it will have trained 325,000 Afghan soldiers by January 2015, and the US is likely to continue financial support, although exact levels have yet to be decided. But rising ethnic and political tensions could destabilize the country before then. And plans to bring the Taliban to peace talks were hit by the assassination of Karzai's main peace envoy, Burhanuddin Rabbani, last month.

[Maybe the 'Frighteningly Simplistic' or indeed dangerously simplistic view of Afghanistan has something to do with the apparently simplistic US view of the rest of the world? From what I’ve heard of the views of leading US politicians and military men this certainly seems to be the case. What is worse is that the people at the top don’t seem to be learning the reasons behind military and diplomatic failures. You cannot simply view your ‘enemies’ as rabid, evil men bent on your destruction for completely irrational reasons and prevail against them. To fight an enemy successfully you have first and foremost to understand them. Without such an understanding any conflict is doomed to last years longer than it should and probably end in failure. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are classic examples of this and should be held up as such.]

2012-01-06T16:28:00.002Z

2012-01-06T07:44:00.002Z

2012-01-05T22:00:00.002Z

Just Finished Reading: Full Circle – How the Classical World came back to us by Ferdinand Mount

I remember seeing this ages ago in hardback and thinking that it looked vaguely interesting. So when I recently had some money – actually some vouchers from work – to spend I treated myself to the paperback. The author had an remarkable premise – that we are returning to a world that our ancient Greek and Roman ancestors would understand. In many ways, at least according to the author, we are coming full circle, after a 2000 year detour, back to a pagan world. Why you may ask: Simply because of the decline of Christianity especially in Western Europe. Where Christianity declines, he proposes, the natural pagan virtues return as if the intervening millennia had not existed. We are, he seems to be saying, deeply pagan at heart.

It’s an interesting idea – even if not wholly convincing. He starts, rather oddly I thought, by discussing public baths. Big in the classical world they declined heavily after Christianity became the empire-wide religion of choice. Because, he maintains, the new Christians either denigrated the body or thought physical pleasure of any kind unseemly or irrelevant. But the baths never really went away (surviving in the Eastern Empire as Turkish baths) and where reintroduced by, of all people, the Victorians. Their numbers have been steadily growing ever since. Likewise Gym culture which was hugely popular in pre-Christian times. Today even the smallest of towns has at least one gym if not more. This re-engagement with the body beautiful (something again seen as almost unthinkable until fairly recently) has become pervasive as our culture surrounds itself with sexual imagery and is reflected in the belief that virtually ‘anything goes’ between consenting adults. Again these are, the author contends, pagan attitudes rather than Christian ones. Another part of the sensual spectrum is reflected in our obsession with the food we cook, eat and talk about. Foodies are no longer viewed with suspicion but given their own TV shows and best selling books (and the ear of governments).

But I’m not going to attempt to précis the entire book. The arguments the author makes and the evidence he uses to back them up has an impressive range although some links back to antiquity are a bit of a stretch. He is, for instance, too liberal with his interpretation of Greco-Roman science in comparison to today. The Greek idea of atoms, for example, was as far as I understand it not exactly analogous to our own ideas and hardly widely accepted at the time. They might have been groping towards an idea we might recognise but, like their ideas on Evolution, it was a speculation amongst many without any real evidence to back it up.

Overall though this was an interesting argument well presented which made me look at things I consider to be very modern with different eyes. It seems that we are not as forward looking as it first appears. It also underlies, at least theoretically, that our default mind-set (once Christianity has withdrawn enough) is a deeply pagan one. Maybe the Christianity out culture lived through was nothing more than a thin coat of paint applied to a pagan statue. As the paint flaked off over the centuries the pagan statue begins to emerge in all its sensual glory. It’s most certainly an entertaining thought. Recommended.

2012-01-04T21:40:00.000Z

2012-01-04T07:26:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2012-01-03T21:54:00.000Z

A Sign of the true Bibliophile

2012-01-03T07:12:00.000Z

2012-01-02T17:44:00.000Z

Christmas & New Years DVDs

2011 was the year when I almost stopped watching TV. Weekday mornings I have it on when I’m getting ready for work to catch up on news and current events. In the evening I watch the news (again) and some of whatever catches my eye for a half hour or so before gaming time. Weekends I don’t watch TV at all from when I get home on Friday afternoon till Monday morning when I get up for work. This Christmas and New Year break has been no exception with the TV being on only to watch DVDs at any point in the last 17 days. If I wasn’t such a movie fan I might even consider not having a TV at all. I really don’t think I’d miss it all that much. But with a stack of DVDs to watch and plenty of time to watch them I most certainly made serious inroads to the pile stacked in front of the TV. They where (in chronological order):

There Will be Blood

The Breakfast Club

Weird Science

Black Swan

Pale Rider

Déjà Vu

The Runaways

The Outlaw Josey Wales

Emma

Mr Nobody

Unforgiven

I also finished off Season 4 of Futurama, saw Puss in Boots at the cinema and watched the first episode of the ITV classic Inspector Morse detective series. I tried, and failed, to watch Blue Valentine only managing to sit through 50 minutes (after two attempts) before giving up. Oh, and I watched all 14 episodes of Firefly back-to-back on New Years Eve just because I could. So numbers wise it wasn’t not too bad though I couldn’t help but be disappointed with the overall quality. Maybe I’ll have better luck with new movies in 2012 – but I’m not exactly holding my breath here.

2012-01-01T15:41:00.003Z

2012-01-01T10:03:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2011-12-31T21:56:00.002Z

I have a feeling that this just won't catch on.......

2011-12-31T19:39:00.000Z

2011 is UK's second warmest year on record - Met Office

From The BBC

30 December 2011

This year was the second warmest on record for the

, the Met Office says. Provisional figures show that only 2006, with an average temperature of 9.73C (49.5F), was warmer than 2011's average temperature of 9.62C (49.3F). This year saw high temperatures for lengthy periods; including the warmest April and spring on record, the second warmest autumn and the warmest October day. Early figures suggest 2011 is ending with a "close to average" December. The Met Office said its figures were a mean temperature taken over day and night.

John Prior, national climate manager at the Met Office, said: "While it may have felt mild for many so far this December, temperatures overall have been close to what we would expect. It may be that the stark change from last year, which was the coldest December on record for the

, has led many to think it has been unseasonably warm." All bar one of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997 and all the UK's top seven warmest years happened in the past decade. The warmest temperature recorded this year was 33.1C (91.5F) on Monday 27 June at Gravesend in Kent. The Met Office said it was the warmest temperature recorded in the UK for five years. Apart from January, the other months that had below-average temperatures were June, July and August.

Gravesend was the location for the warmest October temperature ever, when 29.9C (85.8F) was recorded on 1 October, beating the previous record of 29.4C (84.9F) in the Cambridgeshire town of March on the same day in 1985. The coldest temperature was -13C (8.6F) at Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands on 8 January, while the strongest gust of wind was 165mph (265.5kph), recorded at the highest point of the Cairngorms mountain range on 8 December.

[This doesn’t stop Global Warming being a Myth of course…. [laughs]]

2011-12-30T18:17:00.002Z

2011-12-30T14:31:00.002Z

2011-12-30T11:29:00.001Z

Just Finished Reading: Valentine's Resolve by E E Knight

In 2075 Earth is under new management. For over 50 years the alien Kurians have ruled with an iron fist and an insatiable lust for blood. They are effectively immortal, living in high places around the world they send out their Reapers to gather the life force of their human subjects to enhance their own. But for years now a human resistance has been growing. Winning small victories here and there they finally seem to be turning the tide. With the aid of Lifeweavers, who have enhanced the innate capabilities of some humans such as Valentine himself, they have taken the fight to the hated enemy.

But now Valentine is on his own. Abandoned by Southern Command he pursues his own agenda striking at Quislings working for the Kurian Order. However, when he is apparently captured by a special unit he thinks his days are finally numbered. But it is not to be. The ‘unit’ is made of serving Southern Command soldiers who offer him reinstatement if he accepts a covert mission from them: Travel to Seattle where a new force is successfully pushing back the territorial ambitions of one of the worlds most feared Kurians. Valentine’s mission is to join this new army and to discover its secret and to confirm the existence of a Lifeweaver amongst them – possibly the last of its breed. But as usual in a world turned upside down not everything is exactly like it seems.

This is a welcome return to form after the disappointing Valentine’s Exile. I suppose that after 6 books in a series it’s difficult to maintain the required focus and forward momentum. But the lacklustre Exile seems to have been a wobble (or quite possibly the fact that I wasn’t really in the mood at that time for another Vampire Earth novel). I found Resolve to be a more tightly scripted affair than its predecessor which certainly helped. The format (or formula) was a familiar one. We didn’t learn a whole lot more about the new world – except regarding Kurian death games and in-fighting and the rather surprising remnant of human government living deep undergrownd. We were presented with a few more mysteries regarding the apparent demise of the Lifeweavers (which I suspect are simply a different faction of Kurian) and interesting hints that the invasion of Earth was part of a much larger attack on other now Kurian occupied worlds – which of course opens up literally whole other worlds of possibilities. There are also hints of a reuniting of Valentine with his alien side-kick who apparently died in a previous novel. These things are never exactly great works of literature and should never be viewed as such. This was however an entertaining enough novel to keep me interesting in the next volume and, probably, the next 2-3 after that. Reasonable.

2011-12-28T21:59:00.002Z

2011-12-28T11:26:00.000Z

Cartoon Time.

2011-12-27T14:11:00.002Z

2011-12-27T09:19:00.002Z

2011-12-26T22:06:00.000Z

My Favourite Movies: Déjà vu

My regular readers will realise that I’m a big fan of films starring Denzil Washington and an equally big fan of clever well thought out movies. In Déjà vu we have an excellent example of both.

Seemingly we are, at first, presented with a by the numbers Jerry Bruckheimer visual spectacular. But the fact that the movie is directed by Tony Scott should hint that something more than explosions and clever camera effects will be forthcoming. In the opening sequences we see a New Orleans ferry filling with hundreds of Navy personnel and their families on the way to a celebration. Before they travel too far down the river there is a huge explosion and the ferry sinks with a large loss of life. It is very soon obvious that this was no accident and that terrorism is involved. Enter ATF officer Doug Carlin played by Denzil Washington. We see him investigate the crime scene before being pulled away on an apparently unconnected death of a young black woman identified as Claire Kuchever played by Paula Patton. While trying to understand how her death firs in with the unfolding tragedy he is approached by FBI Agent Paul Pryzwarra played by Val Kilmer. He is the head of a new Task Force set up to investigate such events and wants Carlin to join the team as a local expert. Carlin quickly discovers that the new Task Forces technology is not exactly as advertised. Let in on the secret he is told that scientists working on optics at NASA accidentally discovered a way to see back in time. Although though limited in range – both in distance terms and in time – this could be a valuable tool in the war on terror. But they need to know where to look. Carlin decides to look into the life of Claire Kuchever during the 4 day window prior to her death and the attack on the ferry. As he learns more about Clire’s life he realises two things – he is beginning to discover that she can sense them watching her and he is starting to fall in love with her. When he asks if any information could be sent back to notify the authorities of the upcoming attack he is given an ambiguous answer. But the more fundamental question remains completely unknown: Can you change the past and if you can what then happens to the present?

Even without the time-travel aspects this would have been a very creditable police thriller. With those aspects added in it knocked it out of the park for me. I’m a sucker for a good cinematic portrayal of time-travel (even if its just viewing the past as it happens) and this was a very good example of that. My favourite bit – without spoiling things too much – is a ‘car chase’ along a freeway where Carlin chases the suspects car ‘now’ but also 4 days in the past using a head-mounted unit to see where he was and what he did. That to me was very clever indeed and very dramatic. All in all this was a gripping police thriller, a race against time and with more that a little SF thrown in for good measure. Good acting throughout along with high drama and rather inventive camera work add spice as well as a host of other aspects to admire. If you missed this at the cinema back in 2006 I’d recommend you fix that oversight as soon as you can. I’ve watched it three times now and have enjoyed it just as much on each viewing. Enjoy.

2011-12-25T20:35:00.002Z

2011-12-25T17:10:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2011-12-25T09:58:00.002Z

Merry Christmas everyone! I do hope that you got something nice in your stockings this morning.....

2011-12-24T17:29:00.002Z

Is it Christmas yet....?

2011-12-24T14:12:00.002Z

NASA MARS ROVER FINDS MINERAL VEIN DEPOSITED BY WATER

From NASA

Dec. 7, 2011

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found bright veins of a mineral, apparently gypsum, deposited by water. Analysis of the vein will help improve understanding of the history of wet environments on Mars.

"This tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through underground fractures in the rock," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for Opportunity. "This stuff is a fairly pure chemical deposit that formed in place right where we see it. That can't be said for other gypsum seen on Mars or for other water-related minerals Opportunity has found. It's not uncommon on Earth, but on Mars, it's the kind of thing that makes geologists jump out of their chairs." The latest findings by Opportunity were presented Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union's conference in San Francisco.

The vein examined most closely by Opportunity is about the width of a human thumb (0.4 to 0.8 inch), 16 to 20 inches long, and protrudes slightly higher than the bedrock on either side of it. Observations by the durable rover reveal this vein and others like it within an apron surrounding a segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater. None like it were seen in the 20 miles (33 kilometers) of crater-pocked plains that Opportunity explored for 90 months before it reached Endeavour, nor in the higher ground of the rim. Last month, researchers used the Microscopic Imager and Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer on the rover's arm and multiple filters of the Panoramic Camera on the rover's mast to examine the vein, which is informally named "Homestake." The spectrometer identified plentiful calcium and sulfur, in a ratio pointing to relatively pure calcium sulfate.

Calcium sulfate can exist in many forms, varying by how much water is bound into the minerals' crystalline structure. The multi-filter data from the camera suggest gypsum, a hydrated calcium sulfate. On Earth, gypsum is used for making drywall and plaster of Paris. Observations from orbit have detected gypsum on Mars previously. A dune field of windblown gypsum on far northern Mars resembles the glistening gypsum dunes in White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.

"It is a mystery where the gypsum sand on northern Mars comes from," said Opportunity science-team member Benton Clark of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "At Homestake, we see the mineral right where it formed. It will be important to see if there are deposits like this in other areas of Mars." The Homestake deposit, whether gypsum or another form of calcium sulfate, likely formed from water dissolving calcium out of volcanic rocks. The minerals combined with sulfur either leached from the rocks or introduced as volcanic gas, and was deposited as calcium sulfate into an underground fracture that later became exposed at the surface.

Throughout Opportunity's long traverse across Mars' Meridiani plain, the rover has driven over bedrock composed of magnesium, iron and calcium sulfate minerals that also indicate a wet environment billions of years ago. The highly concentrated calcium sulfate at Homestake could have been produced in conditions more neutral than the harshly acidic conditions indicated by the other sulfate deposits observed by Opportunity. "It could have formed in a different type of water environment, one more hospitable for a larger variety of living organisms," Clark said.

Homestake and similar-looking veins appear in a zone where the sulfate-rich sedimentary bedrock of the plains meets older, volcanic bedrock exposed at the rim of Endeavour. That location may offer a clue about their origin. "We want to understand why these veins are in the apron but not out on the plains," said the mission's deputy principal investigator, Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis. "The answer may be that rising groundwater coming from the ancient crust moved through material adjacent to Cape York and deposited gypsum, because this material would be relatively insoluble compared with either magnesium or iron sulfates."

Opportunity and its rover twin, Spirit, completed their three-month prime missions on Mars in April 2004. Both rovers continued for years of extended missions and made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life. Spirit stopped communicating in 2010. Opportunity continues exploring, currently heading to a sun-facing slope on the northern end of the Endeavour rim fragment called "Cape York" to keep its solar panels at a favorable angle during the mission's fifth Martian winter. NASA launched the next-generation Mars rover, the car-sized Curiosity, on Nov. 26. It is slated for arrival at the planet's Gale Crater in August 2012.

[If water flowed on the surface of Mars for long enough it might, just might, have been around long enough for life to emerge within it…. And if that life was around for long enough to evolve diversity some of it might have survived the drying conditions by, possibly, living below the surface. Mars might not be as dead as it looks at first sight. As our probes become more numerous and more sophisticated maybe one day [soon?] they will stumble upon definitive proof of life. Here’s hoping!]

2011-12-23T13:39:00.001Z

Because nothing says Christmas quite like handguns....... [rotflmao]

2011-12-23T10:12:00.002Z

2011-12-22T17:31:00.002Z

The Winter Solstice at last...... Longer days ahead.................................. [grin]

2011-12-22T17:27:00.000Z

Just Finished Reading: Bad Voltage by Jonathan Littell

In early 21^st Century Paris Lynx, founder of the Livewires street gang, is considering his future. Now in his 20’s he’s beginning to wonder if a life causing trouble, taking drugs and playing violent war games in the underground caverns beneath the city is enough. Things come to a head when his lover is killed by the police during a daring race through the crowded city streets. Falling under the spell of rich socialite Angelique he learns how the other half, the rich and decadent, live. They have moved beyond simple pleasures into the realms of the gothic where they literally feed on the poor. Horrified at what he has witnessed he runs back to the streets but not before his spurned new lover vows that she will use her considerable resources to hunt him down and watch him die in front of her. In order to survive Lynx must draw on all his street survival skills and convince the Livewires to go to war on his behalf. Lynx also discovers he has a most unexpected ally – Angelique’s dead brother who is out for revenge.

This is another of those books that has been sitting on my shelf for years. Written in 1989 it is a prime example of the art of Cyberpunk. Full of street-talk (which took a bit of getting used to but once you got the hang of it became very easy to follow), fast action, sex, drugs, violence and techno-babble it certainly gave anything that Gibson produced a run for its money. Rooted in the streets, where all Cyberpunk belongs, this even had its own soundtrack (helpfully fleshed out in the appendix – I kid you not) which was unique as far as I know. With strong characterisation throughout, nice bits of world political commentary, cool technology – some of which was believable – and more action that should be packed into a single volume this was a seriously fun and engaging read. In many ways this is very adult SF, not just for the violence, sex (both gay and straight) and repeated drug use but for the overall tone. It is certainly not for the faint hearted or easily shocked. But don’t let that put you off. This is a quality piece of Cyberpunk that should definitely be on the shelves of anyone interested in that ground breaking genre. Highly recommended.

2011-12-21T17:23:00.001Z

2011-12-21T14:08:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2011-12-20T14:25:00.001Z

2011-12-20T10:33:00.002Z

2011-12-19T14:50:00.000Z

Just Couldn’t Finish Reading: Catholicism – A Very Short Introduction by Gerald O’Collins

I have been accused (more than once) of simply not understanding religion which is the reason I laugh and poke fun at it as if it makes no sense. I have also been accused (more than once) of being an Atheist because of my ignorance. If only I made the effort to understand (I am told) rather being simply dismissive I would appreciate the religious viewpoint more and decide to join them. There is at lest some truth in these statements. I am largely ignorant of the religious viewpoint on things. I have never lived inside ‘the bubble’ (as I call it) that religious people seem to inhabit. I have tried, from outside the bubble, to understand exactly where they’re coming from. Even in Europe it’s hard not to come across religious people from time to time and just like rats you are never that far from a church of one denomination or another. So having a general understanding of religion in all its myriad forms can come in handy when you try to understand the world around you. After all the past at least has been deeply shaped by religious considerations and if we do not understand the past it makes understanding the present and the future much more difficult.

To finally arrive at the point I’m trying to make I’ve made another (unfortunately abortive) attempt to understand at least a small part of the religious spectrum by reading this book on Catholicism. As a nominal member of that particular faith (having been baptised into it at a very early age) I thought that after 50 or so years it was about time I learnt something about it. There is however no need to worry – the possibility of me becoming a practicing Catholic in the foreseeable future is rather more unlikely than the imminent discovery of the Higgs boson. So I tried to read a 126 page book on the basics of the Catholic faith that was part of a series of books I hold in high regard. I made it to page 72 before I realised that I couldn’t really go on with it. When I thought about reviewing it here I realised at that point that I had no clear idea what those 72 pages had said. Most of it was, at least to me, incomprehensible gibberish. It was clearly not aimed at the non-Christian reader as I found assumption piled on unvoiced definition which lost me at every turn. I thought that maybe if I read a bit further some sort of explanation would be presented and everything would fall into place. Maybe at some point after page 72 such an epiphany might indeed have taken place. I guess that I’ll never find out. This may be a useful, informative and even well written book for those with a Christian mindset but for someone who’s knowledge of the whole area is rather scanty at best it was basically a waste of paper. At least I tried, that’s something I suppose.

2011-12-18T16:25:00.002Z

2011-12-18T12:55:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2011-12-17T21:29:00.000Z

Ahhhh…. Guinness….. [smacks lips]

2011-12-17T16:21:00.002Z

Thinking About: Christmas

As some of you will remember last Christmas didn’t work out exactly as planned. Because of heavy snowfall around this time 12 months ago my journey north stopped at the half-way point after being informed that my family had been snowed in – leaving me snowed out. So I decided this year to have my Christmas trip home in September and my actual Christmas here rather than there. Rather typically, apart from a few hail showers and the occasional episode of sleet, we’ve seen no snow here and, as far as I’m aware, not a lot around where my family live. None is forecast until after the middle of next week at the earliest. But so it goes….

So here I am at the beginning of a 17 day break over Christmas and New Year. It’s a break I really needed and I have been looking forward to the time off work for several months now. My plans, such as they are, are simple ones. I’m looking forward to:

Getting up on 17 consecutive days in the daylight without the ‘aid’ of an alarm clock.

Watching around 10 movies on DVD – some of which I haven’t seen before.

Reading 6-8 books. It would’ve been many more (I think I read 12 last year) but as I’m here and not at my Mum’s I have both Internet access and my computer games to occupy my time.

Listening to lots and lots of music.

Having lots of computer game time.

Eating far too many snacks and other things that are generally bad for me. I also picked up some nice real ale and a few bottles of alcoholic ginger beer which I’m looking forward to.

It is, all in all, going to be a very relaxing 17 days. There is even a slim possibility that I might get bored. Fortunately over the years I have become quite adept at entertaining myself. I have also, though necessity, developed a pretty high boredom threshold. By the middle of next week I’ll be fairly humming along, coasting into the New Year and totally chilled by the time I’m back in office on the 3^rd Jan…… and relax…. [grin]

2011-12-16T14:02:00.002Z

2011-12-16T07:29:00.002Z

2011-12-15T22:11:00.000Z

Just Finished Reading: The Fly in the Cathedral – How a small group of Cambridge scientists won the race to split the atom by Brian Cathcart

The history of 20^th Century science – particularly that of physics – has long fascinated me. At the end of the previous century it was considered that just about everything about the physical universe was understood. Only a few niggling problems remained to be solved. One of these problems concerned the nature of light whilst another sought to understand the structure of the atom. As scientists throughout the world delved into these areas instead of answering questions they generated more and worse still produced mysteries that seemed to be beyond anyone’s understanding.

In Cambridge the great New Zealand eccentric Lord Rutherford determined that the only way any of this would be understood is by experiment after experiment until something shook free. But first his team needed to build sophisticated enough apparatus to produce the effects that generated enough results for the theoreticians to work with and that apparatus was at the very edge of existing technology. They were stuck in the classic chicken and egg scenario. But slowly throughout the 1920’s and into the early 1930’s they managed to push forward the underlying technology they needed to run experiments at high enough voltages to produce the effects they needed. On lab desks throughout Europe and the US scientists, technicians and engineers built the very first particle accelerators – atom smashers – that first chipped away at the atomic structure and later smashed it completely.

All of this, painfully pieced together over decades by some of the greatest minds that ever lived, is one of the greatest stories ever told and one that is in the headlines again today as we edge closer to understanding where mass comes from with on-going search for the Higgs Boson. Needless to say the understanding of particle physics is fundamental to our understanding of the universe, everything that exists within it and probably why it exists in the first place. There is much within this field that I do not understand and probably never will. Yet I find the subject endlessly fascinating so keep trying to at least form an appreciation of what’s going on in the field and gain at least a partial understanding of how it all works. This book helped by filling in some of the historical background and a little of the actual science too. Being aimed at the lay reader it only assumes an interest in the subject and a very basic knowledge of atoms. Don’t be put off by the subject matter. The story of the very first atom smashers is a very human tale of men (and some women) that needed to know how everything fitted together. From there early discoveries to the present day we are finally approaching that very point – or at least so it seems. Maybe there is something just around the corner that will blow everything we think we know clean out of the water. That’s the real excitement of science.

2011-12-14T21:38:00.002Z

2011-12-14T07:29:00.000Z

Cartoon Time.

2011-12-13T21:20:00.000Z

2011-12-13T07:24:00.001Z

2011-12-12T22:01:00.000Z

My Favourite Movies: Streets of Fire

After posting a few very recent movies reviews we move back into one of my favourite eras – the 1980’s. Now the 80’s as decades go was shitty on several levels but it did manage to produce some great music and more than a few great films. Although this example can hardly be called great it is very typical of the age and did have some really good songs – so much so that I bought the soundtrack which remains one of my favourites.

Oddly this example of 80’s style is based in a very stylised 50’s New York (at least it seems like New York). As the movie opens the singing sensation Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) is about to go on stage in her home town. During the first song the concert is disrupted by a violent biker gang called The Bombers intent on kidnapping the singer. Raven, their leader (Willem Defoe), is obsessed with her and wants them to ‘fall in love’ for a few weeks. In desperation a local dinner owner Reva Cody (the lovely Deborah Van Valkenburgh) calls her brother – Ellen’s old flame – so save her. So enters the hero of the piece – Tom Cody (Michael Pare) – who proceeds to annoy just about everyone he meets in his quest to get Ellen back. Tagging along for the ride is McCoy (Amy Madigan) and Ellen’s manager/boyfriend Billy Fish (Rick Moranis). They need to travel deep into Bomber territory and make it back in one piece, something that Raven is not going to let them do easily.

This is one of those films where the style outshines the actual story which is fairly basic and the acting which honestly isn’t that great. But it is the look, the feel and most of all the sound of it that struck a cord with me when I first saw it over 25 years ago. Filmed in a mix of intense colour and shades of grey deepening to black it is visually arresting if not unique. In step with the rest of the film the 50’s look is oddly contrasted with a clearly 80’s soundtrack (some of which is lip-synched by Diane Lane in concert and – rather surprisingly in one scene – on a video juke box) from artists such as Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, Ry Cooder (who did the incidental music) and at least 3 songs by Jim Steinman which I’ve been humming bits of since watching this movie on Saturday.

As this flopped at the cinema there’s a good chance you’ve never seen or heard of this film. I only saw it way back when because my brother was experimenting and picked it up in the video store. It made a big impression on both of us and after watching it again just a few days ago it still got my foot tapping and Ellen Aim is still singing her heart out in my head. This is a classic little movie in more ways than one. If you’re an 80’s fan like me you’ll love it.

2011-12-11T14:23:00.002Z

2011-12-11T09:48:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2011-12-10T20:41:00.000Z

Jurassic Pork...?

2011-12-10T17:34:00.000Z

Kepler 22-b: Earth-like planet confirmed

From The BBC

5 December 2011

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the "habitable zone" around a star not unlike our own. The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light-years away and is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C. It is the closest confirmed planet yet to one like ours - an "Earth 2.0". However, the team does not yet know if Kepler 22-b is made mostly of rock, gas

or liquid.

During the conference at which the result was announced, the Kepler team also said that it had spotted some 1,094 new candidate planets - nearly doubling the telescope's haul of potential far-flung worlds. Kepler 22-b was one of 54 exoplanet candidates in habitable zones reported by the Kepler team in February, and is just the first to be formally confirmed using other telescopes. More of these "Earth 2.0" candidates are likely to be confirmed in the near future, though a redefinition of the habitable zone's boundaries has brought that number down to 48. Ten of those are Earth-sized.

The Kepler space telescope was designed to look at a fixed swathe of the night sky, staring intently at about 150,000 stars. The telescope is sensitive enough to see when a planet passes in front of its host star, dimming the star's light by a minuscule amount. Kepler identifies these slight changes in starlight as candidate planets, which are then confirmed by further observations by Kepler and other telescopes in orbit and on Earth. Kepler 22-b lies 15% closer to its sun than the Earth is to our Sun, and its year takes about 290 days. However, the planet's host star puts out about 25% less light, keeping the planet at its balmy temperature that would support the existence of liquid water. The Kepler team had to wait for three passes of the planet before upping its status from ‘candidate’ to ‘confirmed’.

"Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet," said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at Nasa's Ames Research Center. "The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season." The results were announced at the Kepler telescope's first science conference, alongside the staggering number of new candidate planets. The total number of candidates spotted by the telescope is now 2,326 - of which 207 are approximately Earth-sized. In total, the results suggest that planets ranging from Earth-sized to about four times Earth's size - so-called "super-Earths" - may be more common than previously thought. As candidates for planets similar to Earth are confirmed, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) has a narrower focus for its ongoing hunt. "This is a superb opportunity for Seti observations," said Jill Tarter, the director of the Center for Seti Research at the Seti Institute. "For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that those stars actually host planetary systems - including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analogue in the habitable zone around its host star.

[Brilliant news! Let’s hope that SETI is pointing their radio telescopes at that sucker right now…… Who knows what they pick up….?]

2011-12-09T17:15:00.001Z

2011-12-09T07:25:00.002Z

2011-12-08T21:57:00.002Z

Just Finished Reading: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

On the streets of a not too distant future Bangkok undercover company man Anderson Lake has made a startling discovery – a new kind of fruit seemingly completely immune to the host of bio-engineered plagues running rampant across the globe. Millions of people are already dead and billions more live on the edge of starvation or in constant fear that a cough or otherwise innocuous rise in body temperature might be the first stage in a frightening new disease. But the fruit holds out some hope that mankind can once again dominate the world’s ecosystems rather than constantly react to the every changing and ever more deadly environment. Meanwhile the Japanese are developing a different response to the bio-crisis. In their labs they are producing New People - ‘more Japanese than the Japanese’ - used as slaves, soldiers and sex toys. One such toy is Emiko – a Windup Girl designed to bring endless pleasure to bored Japanese executives working away from the Homeland. Abandoned on the teeming streets of Bangkok where her kind are outlawed she must face daily degradation to survive. When she meets Lake in a seedy nightclub he gives her hope for a better future by telling her of villages deep in the hills where the Windups live without masters. But Emiko has a different fate ahead of her, one that is deeply entwined with the future of the city itself.

This was another of those books I picked up in one of the ‘3 for 2’ offers at my local bookshop. It’s a great way to experiment with new authors or less read genres. Initially I thought this was either Cyberpunk or possibly future based Steampunk (if that isn’t an actual contradiction): I found to my surprise, and honest delight, that it was neither. I don’t know if this sub-genre has a name yet but I’m going to coin the term Genepunk. With luck I’ll be the first person to use the term and I’ll be remembered for decades because of it. Anyway, the future world brilliantly imagined by the author is one where the old oil-based economies have collapsed. At the time of this story the old Great Powers are at last resurgent thanks to genetic engineering and a world wide ruthless use of industrial espionage. Whole countries have fallen in the wake of agents from the various western agricultural conglomerates. Bangkok is determined not to be numbered amongst them. It is in the offices and on the streets of this incredibly detailed and totally believable city that the well drawn characters play out their parts in the great drama to come. You can smell the rotting decay, feel the crushing humidity and the constant jostling of the millions of refugees who will do anything to live just one more day. It is not a place I’d like to live in nor one I’d like very much to visit except in my imagination but I couldn’t help but be drawn into this detailed, well rendered and above all else heartbreakingly believable world. The memory of those few virtual days in future Bangkok will remain with me for many months. One of the best books I’ve read this year and in consequence highly recommended.

2011-12-07T21:30:00.002Z

2011-12-07T07:26:00.002Z

Cartoon Time.

2011-12-06T21:29:00.002Z

2011-12-06T07:25:00.003Z