Skip introduction & navigation

Web Design | Views & Rants | Reviews | Contact | Links | About

Welcome to the weblog, which gets updated whenever I have time to do it.

Wednesday 3rd April

Tony Blair has said what he thinks was “best about Britain” — that would be living off the state, gambling, amassing millions of pounds of debt, and drinking lots of gin, then?

Suicidal Lies is the title of a New York Times article on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The starting point for this piece is clearly this statement:

“The Spanish Civil War was the place where the major powers all tested out their new weapons before World War II,” said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. “Well, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today is the Spanish Civil War for the 21st century. A big test is taking place of whether suicide terrorism can succeed as a strategy for liberation. It must be defeated…”

The problem is that the writer, Thomas L. Friedman, has a completely unrealistic view of the situation. The Palestinians, he insists, have not chosen the tactic of suicide bombings out of desperation:

That is a huge lie. Why? To begin with, a lot of other people in the world are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves.

I find it somewhat depressing that there is someone writing for The New York Times thinks that “a lot of desperate people aren’t suicide bombers, therefore suicide bombers are not desperate people” is in any way logical. Friedman goes on:

More important, President Clinton offered the Palestinians a peace plan that could have ended their “desperate” occupation, and Yasir Arafat walked away.

Yes, Arafat was wrong and foolish. It isn’t the first time he has made a major misjudgement, and it probably won’t be the last — provided the Israelis don’t kill him. It is, though, completely irrelevant to whether or not the Palestinians are desperate now. A reasonable person might think, for example, that a country where a leading Israeli proponent of the peace process is assassinated by an Israeli hardliner might not be an environment where Palestinians are likely to feel safe and secure.

Still more important, the Palestinians have long had a tactical alternative to suicide: nonviolent resistance, à la Gandhi. A nonviolent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state 30 years ago, but they have rejected that strategy, too.

This is so wrong-headed it’s offensive. It’s offensive because a writer who is living in comfort in one of the richest cities of the richest country on the planet is telling the Palestinians — who are without a country, without a government, without a political voice, and who are cowering indoors without food or water as Israeli tanks come down their streets — that they should not fight, they should resist nonviolently. The idea that this would have delivered them a Palestinian state 30 years ago is laughable. Yes, Gandhi achieved great things with nonviolent resistance. He achieved great things because he was facing the British. If he had been up against other opponents, he might not have fared so well. Consider the fate of the nonviolent protesters in Tienanmen Square, for example.

Friedman, one suspects, is not an impartial observer of the Middle East crisis. He insists that the Palestinians want to kill their way to independance:

All they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy, not what they want to build. Have you ever heard Mr. Arafat talk about what sort of education system or economy he would prefer, what sort of constitution he wants? No, because Mr. Arafat is not interested in the content of a Palestinian state, only the contours.

Oh, yes, I can see that: every move towards getting a Palestinian state is blocked by the Israelis, Israeli troops are crashing through the supposedly Palestinian territories — and the Palestinians are going to spend their time discussing the economic and educational structure of the independant Palestinian state? Give me a break.

It is, though, when Friedman starts making recommendations that the reality quotient disappears completely.

First, Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay.

Well, that is going to work, isn’t it? Can you think of anything more likely to convince every last Palestinian, including those who at the moment would never even consider becoming suicide bombers, that the only way they will ever be free in what was, after all, their land before the Israelis displaced them is to kill every last Israeli?

Yes, terrorism must be stopped. That includes the terrorism of the Israeli state against the Palestinians. The aggressive military posture of the Israeli government will do nothing but convince Palestinians that the hardliners and hotheads among them were right, and the only way forward is to fight to the death. You can’t get peace from the barrel of a gun.

Lest you think I’m being too harsh on the Israelis and wonder if maybe nonviolent resistance would be a better option for the Palestinians, consider what does happen to nonviolent protests in Israel:

Seven foreign peace activists and a Palestinian television cameraman were wounded Monday when an Israeli soldier fired at the ground in front of them, officials and witnesses said.

This was a demonstration of about 100 people marching through the West Bank town of Beit Jala. The demonstrators included Palestinians and foreigners, all marching behind a banner proclaiming they wanted “peace not war”.

As they approached an Israeli armored personnel carrier, a soldier in the carrier fired several shots from a rifle into the street in front of them, sending up chips of concrete, television footage showed…

An Israeli soldier also kicked and pushed a Reuters cameraman and fired one shot over his head while covering the demonstration.

Not surprisingly, the view expressed by many at the OIC meeting in Malaysia is rather different from that of the New York Times article quoted above:

Opinion had been divided over Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s call Monday to classify as terrorism all attacks on civilians — including those by Palestinian suicide bombers. Palestinian and other Middle East delegates rejected the proposal, saying that the suicide bombers were driven by frustration stemming from Israeli terrorism in the occupied territories, where Israeli tanks and troops have invaded Palestinian towns and besieged leader Yasser Arafat. Mahathir noted that suicide bombers had strong grievances, but said that attacks targeting civilians could not be justified “irrespective of the nobility of the struggle.” With no consensus possible, the declaration presented Tuesday to delegates avoided defining terrorism and instead said what it was not — basically, anything linked to the Palestinian struggle.

This article, incidentally, is from the International Herald Tribune site, the design of which seems to have greatly improved, although this article could certainly have done with some paragraph divisions.

Also from The International Herald Tribune: Sharon’s aggressive action against the Palestinians and Bush’s support for the Israelis is causing problems outside Israel:

That anger spilled into the streets Monday and Tuesday as riot policemen fired tear gas and water cannons at large numbers of protesters trying to reach the Israeli Embassy, the first time the police had taken such strong action in years…

“In a way, Sharon is leading the United States into a psychological confrontation with the Arab world at the moment in time when the United States is considering a military attack on Iraq,” said Abdel Raouf Reedy, a close friend of Mubarak and Egypt’s former ambassador to Washington.

If Egypt were to fall prey to hardline Islamic militancy, that would hardly improve the situation in the Middle East. But will Bush do anything to restrain Sharon and get peace talks going?

I don’t think any bonkers theory about September 11th coming out of the Islamic world would surprise me now — but when a French writer insists that no plane hit the Pentagon, the attack was staged by the US government, I’m pretty much lost for words.

Yahoo — bastards or what? I don’t much like quoting myself, but it seems quite appropriate today. If you’ve explored the rest of this site you’ll know I occasionally write columns on matters relating to web design. In an article about the use of e-mail lists in publicising web sites I said that the best way to run a site’s mailing list was to use an opt-in scheme and that on no account should a site owner or designer attempt to trick people into being included on a mailing list.

A couple of days later I had to add a note to the article because eBay had done something staggeringly stupid. This is what I said:

Isn’t it interesting that, just two days after putting this together, one friend who read this came across news of a new technique which is so annoying, so stupid that the possibility of it had never even occurred to me. eBay’s users have to register, of course; it isn’t too surprising that when they do so they have the option to receive marketing e-mails from eBay—or not to receive them.

What eBay has decided is that the decision by many of its users not to receive these messages is a “problem”, and it is going to rectify the problem. eBay users whose notification preference settings are “no” rather than “yes” are having their settings returned to the default “yes” to put them “in line with the rest of the eBay community”. eBay treats the decision of these users not to receive the messages as an “error … during your registration process”.

…[H]owever the system is structured when a user chooses not to receive messages accept it!

Users of eBay were naturally furious at this — so it is surprising that Yahoo is being stupid enough to do much the same thing. To use Yahoo!’s email and mailing list services you need to register, of course, and one of the things you need to do is state whether you want marketing material sent to you or not. A lot of people pick not, of course.

Yahoo has decided it doesn’t like this, and has changed its “privacy policy”:

In e-mail messages that began going out last week, Yahoo advised its users that their account preferences had been changed, by Yahoo, to indicate that they wanted to receive advertising solicitations through spam, snail mail and telephone.

Yahoo has also added users’ home addresses and phone numbers to their “Yahoo ID” profiles.

Users do have the option of going to Yahoo’s profile management page to resset their preferences, but Yahoo’s terms of service say that it reserves the right to adjust user preferences at any time (so in what sense are they user preferences?). Unsurprisingly, users are very much not happy. Others are also concerned about the impact on online trading in general.

“It’s a tragedy when the actions of an individual company force people to conclude that all e-marketers are a bunch of pushy, disrespectful scumbags,” said Jason Catlett, of Junkbusters, a direct marketing information site.

Also along the lines of “Why don’t you listen to the feckin’ user?”: Microsoft really, really wants XP users to have Windows Messenger installed. Even if they uninstall it.

I mentioned in an earlier entry the problems Michael Moore was facing getting his book, Stupid White Men, published. Well, it’s now a bestseller, much to the bemusement of the conservative establishment in the USA. But this sort of problem is not new:

The practice of criticizing authors for speaking their minds has been going on for centuries, said Dorothy Bryant, whose new book, Literary Lynching, will be distributed free, chapter by chapter, on [Pat] Holt’s online newsletter, Holt Uncensored.

Bryant, who is 72, couldn’t get a publisher for Literary Lynching even after September 11th when the subject matter was more relevant than ever. Hence the idea to give it away online. What exactly is “literary lynching”?

Literary lynching often begins with a furiously irresponsible attack by a reviewer. So far, situation normal — the attack should just sputter out or become a controversy — that is, a heated exchange of differing opinions. But it doesn’t. Instead, the reaction against the author spreads, sparking attacks that distort or reinvent the contents of the book and throw whatever nasty labels are current (“traitor,” “racist,” “pornographer”) at the author. These labels are then spread by people who have never read the book (and may even make statements vowing not to). Unofficial blacklisting by bookstores and libraries may follow. All these attacks are abetted by silence or even by half-hearted agreement from respected people who know the accusations are lies. Even worse can be the silent withdrawal of friends, acquaintances, and even family…

Why would a book trigger, not an argument, but a widespread, spontaneous effort to obliterate it, and sometimes even the author? Sometimes the author has written a truth that many people know but are unwilling to see revealed. But sometimes the book exposes nothing — it simply happens to come out at a moment in history when widespread fear and anger are seeking release, and the book becomes a target — a scapegoat in the most primitive sense of the word.

An article in Slate takes the piss out of Vogue’s “Shape” issue, and well-deserved the ridicule is, too:

The result is less offensive than unintentionally hilarious, highlighting Vogue’s version of a gorgeous panorama of womanhood—tall and skinny (6-foot model Eva Kubatova); short and skinny (5-foot-5-inch model Devon Aoki); pregnant and skinny (model Angela Marie Wilkerson); and good old-fashioned emaciated (a “lithe” 5-foot-11-inch, Size 4 Jacquetta Wheeler). Ah, diversity! For the fifth category, “curvy,” they snagged legendary “large size” model Sophie Dahl—who recently slimmed down to a whopping Size 8/10.

Really, there’s not much to say, Ms Nussbaum does a very good job of highlighting Vogue’s idiocy — I’ll limit myself to making a couple of quotes and let you read the article for yourself.

Vogue assigned profiles to writers the same “shape” as their subjects, and the result is like eavesdropping on the passive/aggressive chit-chat of an eating-disorder support group—complete with obsessive mentions of weights and measures and faux complaints about shopping in the children’s section…

[I]t gradually becomes clear that Vogue’s insane taxonomy magically defines fat people (hell, oddly proportioned people!) out of existence: If “tall” and “short” and “pregnant” are body types, and Minnie Driver is “curvy,” there’s no need to admit the existence of the bottom-heavy, let alone try to dress the poor bastards.

Tuesday 2nd April

The Washington Post reports that a wave of anti-Muslim feeling following the September 11th attacks is giving a boost to far-right parties in Europe:

The changing mood has found its fullest political expression here in Denmark, where an anti-immigrant party won 12 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections in November, nearly doubling its showing from the previous election. Its campaign posters featured a picture of a young blond girl and the slogan: “When she retires, Denmark will have a Muslim majority.”

Fear the wrath of Captain Potatoe! It’s a good job this story is datelined March 28th and not April 1st or I simply wouldn’t have believed it. In fact, it’s so mind-boggling I’m not going to describe it, just give the link and quote the first paragraph:

Former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange has claimed that ex-U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle threatened to have him “liquidated” over his country’s anti-nuclear policy in the 1980s.

A reminder that the supposed “Land of the Free” has those whose mindset is in some ways not so different from the Taleban:

I discovered that Taliban-style attitudes are not restricted to Afghanistan and Pakistan. They exist tenaciously in American towns like this one. Sometimes tolerance prevails in small towns; other times the dark fears and hatreds of the “American Taliban” — vicious fundamentalists — are resurgent.

Despite some of the guff coming out of the BBC at the moment, quite a lot of people are not devastated by grief at the loss of an old woman who lived pretty well at the expense of the taxpayer. See, for example here and here.

One of the things which has seriously pissed off some people is the needless disruption of television schedules (why, for example, was yesterday’s planned showing of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe cancelled in favour of a crappy juvenile American film of precisely the same duration in precisely the same time slot?) — as one friend has said, “She’s dead, we know, get over it. If she crawls out of the grave, that’s news!”

It was quite spooky having simultaneous broadcasts on every single BBC radio station and endless repeated summaries of HM the QM’s supposedly fascinating life story (my mind still boggles at the lack of perspective of someone who thinks a single bomb on Buckingham Palace equates to what the East End population suffered). But it wasn’t as bad as it might have been — for a start, the commercial stations settled down to sanity faster than might have been expected, and there weren’t the days of mournful music we might have feared. However, I can easily understand why BBC news producers would dread the possibility of her shuffling off this mortal coil during their shift, as this Guardian article from last August explains:

I recited a prayer familiar to many colleagues: “Please God. Don’t let it happen on my shift.” BBC editors all share the same certainty — whoever is the editor responsible for output when it happens will be deemed to have made a mistake of tone, content or timing. If the nation rebels in horror at the antediluvian nature of the broadcast, following the guidelines to the letter will be no excuse.

Some poor hack, probably someone who has covered wars, revolutions, general elections and natural disasters without putting a foot wrong and simply by following good journalistic instincts, will be declared an un-person. That blameless scapegoat will take lifelong responsibility for paper clip supplies to outlying local radio stations.

That these fears were not groundless is amply demonstrated by an article on the This Is London site — part of the truly piss-poor Net presence of Associated Newspapers, publishers of The Daily Mail and London’s Evening Standard — describing the predicted row:

The corporation was forced on to the back foot as the row over its coverage escalated. Prince Charles was said to be so incensed at the BBC’s “disrespectful” coverage that he asked ITN to film his moving tribute to his grandmother in a calculated snub.

Except that Buckingham Palace has insisted that it has no complaint with the way the death of the Queen Mother was reported, explaining that because the BBC handled the tribute for Princess Margaret, it was ITN’s turn to do the tribute for the QM. The BBC has said it received over 1,000 calls about its coverage of the story:

“The vast majority of calls received were from people angry about changes to the schedule to accommodate the coverage,” a spokesman told BBC News Online.

The most interesting piece of information in the This is London article, assuming it to be accurate, is that we have Osama bin Laden to thank for being spared days of dirges:

Until last year the project for covering the Queen Mother’s death, codenamed Operation Lion, included plans for blanket coverage and sombre music. But these plans were scrapped following a review after the events of 11 September. Ms Heggessey said then: “It is still a significant event and the Queen Mother is still a much-loved figure … but we need to be in tune with the times.”

Microsoft releases a security patch for Internet Explorer — but does it work? Er… No.

For some reason recently I was talking about Jules Verne to a friend, among other things noting that his book De la Terre à la Lune (1865) described a journey to the Moon which begin in Florida and ended in the Pacific Ocean, the spacecraft being called Columbia if I recall correctly. The Apollo missions, of course, began in Florida and ended in the Pacific — and Apollo 11’s Command Module was named Columbia.

Well, here’s a Forbes article about Verne which discusses Verne’s prescience:

Before he died in 1905, Verne had depicted—in some 60 novels—a world eerily like ours: airplanes, movies, guided missiles, submarines, the electric chair, air conditioning and the fax machine. Even Islamic terrorists make their precocious debut in Invasion Of the Sea (1905), in which they face off against Western technocrats. The book, now translated into English for the first time (Wesleyan University Press, $25), is but one of five newly released Verne novels coming out over the next two years.

Ms Adams goes on to discuss the similarities between Verne’s books about journeying to the Moon and the Apollo programme, saying that Even where Verne was wrong, he may eventually be right. This refers to the fact that the one difference between the fiction and reality was that Verne’s spacecraft was launched from the barrel of an enormous gun. Bizarrely, she goes on to say:

As recently as 1990, though, British engineer Gerald Bull came close to building just such a gun for Saddam Hussein—so close that unknown agents snuffed him out before he could complete the job. We may yet live to see such space cannons.

This really makes one wonder about the journalistic standards at Forbes. The so-called Iraqi supergun was, or rather would have been, a weapon, not a means to send men into space — which would be impossible. The acceleration would kill, instantly, anyone foolish enough to try to use a vehicle.

That aside, this is an interesting if lightweight piece which, as we’ve seen, carries the welcome news that Verne’s work is being newly translated — some of the existing translations of his books are thoroughly execrable.

There is one very odd thing about this article, though. Under the Forbes logo is the article’s title and the author’s name, like so:

Eerily Prescient
Susan Adams, 04.15.02

I assume those numbers are supposed to be the date of publication. Unless Forbes (or Ms Adams) belongs to some strange sect with a 15-month year, that must be a date written in the strange American style (I keep getting confused, if only momentarily, by web pages talking about the terrible events of "9/11", wondering what the hell was so bad about the ninth of November before mentally switching the numbers round) — which can only mean that this article about Verne was published with the aid of a Wellsian time machine. Eerily prescient indeed.

(For anyone reading this passage sometime after the middle of April 2002 and wondering what I’m on about, I am writing this on April 2nd.)

On the other hand, the style of writing dates is far from the only weird thing about America. There’s this story, for example. It may be an April Fool joke — except that there is nothing unbelievable about it once you establish we’re talking about the USA. There is one thing that I am puzzled by, though: if this guy Boomer yelled “Fuck!” 75 times, who was doing the counting? If it was the five-year-old I’m impressed, I didn’t think American educational standards were so high.

And on the subject of April Fool pranks, some people really don’t like them — except that I suspect the article is itself an April Fool. How wittily postmodern…

I have a friend who knows a great deal about military hardware. The downside to this interest is that war films get criticised by him more for their accuracy as regards military equipment than their plot, characterisation, etc. (he was very impressed, incidentally, by the appearance of a Cromwell tank or very good facsimile thereof in Band of Brothers). We’re not necessarily talking particularly egregious errors either — certainly nothing comparable to the shite depiction of computers and the Internet in, say, The Net. (Not that that was all that was wrong with that tedious mess. Has Sandra Bullock ever made a good film? Can she even act?)

There are lots of people who have their own obsessions, and who dislike seeing movies totally screw up in their area of interest. Here’s a fascinating piece about Hollywood’s tendency to screw up in the area of typography.

I love this: the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business. Here’s a couple of tasters:

3. Banana Republic co-founders Mel and Patricia Ziegler start ZoZa, an “athletic formalwear”retailer, in late 2000. Mel says he expects sales to reach $1 billion within seven years. Gary Rieschel of Softbank Venture Capital invests $16.5 million, telling BusinessWeek, “If you have guts and you have capital, how can you not be optimistic about the consumer market?” Here’s how: ZoZa’s designers revamp its spring 2001 line, intentionally making their dresses two sizes smaller than labeled. Even the svelte are outraged, and ZoZa’s merchandise return rate soars to 80 percent. The company shuts down in May 2001, proving that, if the dress doesn’t fit, you must, uh, quit…

7. Last May, Citizens Against Government Waste, a group that received funding from Microsoft (MSFT), is caught simulating a “grassroots” campaign to get state attorneys general to drop their antitrust suit against the software giant. One detail that gives the scheme away: Some of the letters supporting Microsoft are from people who have long since died…

16. “No one will deny that Sony is a world-class hardware company, and no one would deny that Microsoft is a world-class software company. Nintendo aspires to be neither one of those things.” — Peter Main, a Nintendo marketing executive, to the San Francisco Chronicle

I seem to recall — but I could be wrong — that over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo were the words (in ancient Greek, of course) “Know Thyself”. This piece of self-knowledge from The Register brought a smile to my face:

The Register employs some of the world’s worst spellers, and even worse proof readers. So asking us our position on US v. UK spelling conventions seems a little redundant . But as you ask, here is our official position — our American-based writers and US-based content partners use American spelling; and our British-based writers and British-based content partners use English English spelling. There’s consistency for you, and no we’re not going to change.

And about time too: The Big Breakfast disappears forever. Only the company which made it is unhappy.

Sunday 31st March

Ariel Sharon says Israel is “at war” and is going to stamp out the terrorism run, he says, by Yasser Arafat. That’ll be the day. The Palestinians are in a position where they have no recourse but terrorism: they have no country, and no political structures which can help them get justice. This isn’t solely the Israelis’ fault, but the current Israeli government certainly is adept at pouring buckets of oil on the fire.

Slavery is evil, no doubt about that. And anyone alive now who was ever a slave should be entitled to (extortionate and punitive) damages. But, as far as I can tell, the current push for reparations in the USA is on behalf of the descendants of slaves — people who may have suffered discrimination (and if so deserve recompense for that) but have not been enslaved themselves. This seems to me insane — and the claim that the economic position of blacks in America is disadvantaged because of the history of slavery and racism is surely completely unprovable; it’s certainly no more provable than a counter claim (which I bet will be raised by some redneck at some point) would be that American blacks are better off than if their ancestors had been left in Africa.

Plenty of people and peoples have suffered horrendous wrongs at the hands of various parties throughout history — in this part of the world, one thinks of the Highland Clearances and the Irish potato famine — but attempting to cash in on the suffering of distant ancestors does nothing but besmirch their memory and cheapen their suffering. IMHO.

A third player in space travel gets closer to being a reality as China launches its Shenzou III capsule on an unmanned test flight. Shenzou (“divine vessel”) is an adaptation of a Soviet Soyuz capsule. The ultimate goal of the Chinese space programme is apparently to put a man on the Moon. Could Jiuquan one day be as famous as Cape Canaveral and Baikonur? And if the Chinese do put a man into orbit will he be an astronaut or a cosmonaut — or, perhaps, a taikonaut?

Cuba seems to have banned the sale of personal computers to the public.

Microsoft software for the Internet is notoriously as secure as a tissue-paper collander, but you’d think that if, while using Internet Explorer, Outlook or Outlook Express, you had active scripting and ActiveX disabled you’d be reasonably safe, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong.

There may be changes on the way to how American political campaigns get financed. Anyone who follows American politics at all will have at least heard of the term “soft money” and the bizarre 1976 legal ruling that equated money and free speech. Get a clearer understanding of these things and the changes that are being proposed — and opposed — in this useful New York Times article.

The cyborgs are coming, part I: Kevin Warwick, described by The Register as the nutty professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, has had a microchip implanted in his arm:

“If successful, the experiment … will show that it is possible to capture data signals such as movement commands and physical emotions including pain and pleasure and transmit them to other human beings.”

Given that pain and pleasure are sensations and not emotions, the muddy thinking here doesn’t bode well for this supposedly “ground-breaking” experiment. It gets better, because the plan seems to be to relay the signals from hand movements by Warwick to other volunteers who will then involuntarily replicate them. What this has to do with “emotions” or even sensations is a wee bit obscure. New Scientist consigns the “experiment” to the round file like this:

But experts in medical bioengineering dismiss the project as “a gimmick”. It’s good for the entertainment industry but it’s not going to contribute anything to neuroscience,” says Nick Donaldson at University College London.

Dubious methodology and dubioser (sorry, I’ve been re-exposed to Lewis Carroll recently) conclusions are nothing new for the man The Register has dubbed Captain Cyborg. Here’s their description of him from an earlier article:

Just when you thought it was safe, out comes cybernetics crazyman Kevin Warwick with another book and another study that will prove to be an absolute load of twaddle but will get some useful newspaper inches in the meantime. We despair.

Kevin, for those of you fortunate enough not to know, is Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University. By dint of several chip-based experiments, completely dismissed by the academic community, he has extrapolated various science-fiction nightmare scenarios which, coincidentally, fit in with the main themes of whatever book he is promoting at the time.

The appalling extensions of failed experiments into paranoid fantasies about machines have driven academics working in the fields of Artifical Intelligence and Robotics nuts and also shown up the media as embarrassingly gullible.

Or you could simply take the assessment, as quoted in the same article, of another academic who dismisses every one of Warwick’s wild claims:

Dr Neil Gascgoine [sic] responded that he felt Kev has been “frightened by an episode of Star Trek” when he was younger.

The cyborgs are coming, part II: Another nutty professor, this time a Canadian (I can hear the Americans already saying, “Oh, well, a Canadian…”) called Steve Mann, was stripsearched and missed his flight:

Professor Steve Mann of the University of Toronto, who describes himself as a cyborg, attempted to board a flight at St. John’s, Newfoundland wearing “computerized glasses, headgear and electronic body suit”. He was stopped and “subjected to an extensive search”. So extensive that he missed his flight, and was unable to get another flight for two days.

Air Canada officials did not believe Mann when he said he needed the gear for medical reasons, and, he alleges, they made him bleed when they removed electrodes from his chest.

Mann (or should that be Macheenn?) is suing Air Canada for $1million as a result:

“Basically, we are going to argue Professor Mann was discriminated against because he is a cyborg,” [Mann’s lawyer] told Canada’s National Post.

“You can laugh at that, but I don’t see the difference between showing up at the airport in a wearable computer, and showing up in a wheelchair.”

Except, perhaps, that people tend not to choose to be in a wheelchair…

Eet ees poleeteecal correctness gone mad, señor: The Cartoon Network, now owner of the rights to Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, bans Speedy Gonzales. As one fan says, I think sometimes the censors are afraid of things that aren’t really there.

What do The Bride of Frankenstein, From Russia With Love and The Godfather Part II have in common?

They are examples — and the only ones I could readily think of — of sequels which are at least as good as the original film, and arguably even better their original.

There are, though, scores of sequels which are not really fit to be mentioned in the same sentence as the original — many which make anyone not solely concerned with how much money the studio rakes in think it a crass error to have made in the first place. In general, the better the original the worse we can expect the sequal to be. Think 2010 for an egregious example of an unnecessary and unwelcome sequel.

So it’s undoubtedly with some trepidation we learn of the preparations to make a sequel to a classic, not to say cult, film: The Wicker Man (which is, by the way, due for release on DVD in April).

The sequel is going to be called The Riding of the Laddie and is to be filmed by at least some of the original team using at least some of the original locations. Christopher Lee returns as does director Robin Hardy, so there is a chance the sequel will stand comparison with the original; let’s hope that doesn’t turn out to be in the sense of “nothing like as good”.

A very old woman has died. While it’s only right to convey condolences to those who have suffered the loss, i.e. the family, there is a truly staggering amount of utter bollocks being talked. Well to the fore, of course, is Fawning Lord St. John who says, At our darkest hour of all time in 1940 she helped to turn it into our finest.

Well, bugger me! I’m going to have to get a pen out and correct all those books I’ve got on World War II that seem to say that was something to do with RAF Fighter Command, Air Marshal Dowding, radar, the Observer Corps and possibly even Winston S. Churchill. The oversight in these history books is something awful, do you know that HM the QM isn’29/Mar/2003 12:44t even mentioned in most of them?