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I finally bit the bullet and started the weblog. I can’t guarantee it will be updated every day, but I will update it as frequently as possible.

Saturday 15th December

Recently, Wired News ran a couple of articles about the technology of Star Trek — basically saying that a lot of it is not particularly advanced. One interesting thought, though, is that maybe the show got it right by not having seat belts:

"If you’re talking about engines warping space in the way described by Miguel Alcubierre, you wouldn’t need seatbelts because while a chunk of space around the craft is moving, you are essentially still. It’s like a moving sidewalk that lets you go forward because you’re expanding space-time behind you while you are compressing it in front of you," he explained.

Of course, that still doesn’t explain why they don’t have seat belts to cope with the times the ship is hit by photon torpedoes, or phasers, or meteors; or when it’s running on impulse power.…

A lot of the stuff, though, strikes me as being very typical of the sort of things techies would say: possibly true, but missing the point. For example:

A few glaring examples [of existing technologies which don’t show up in Trek] have become staples of snarking by Star Trek fans. Why does anyone still have crooked teeth? Why do so many captains and crewmen suffer hair loss?

Let’s see, we’re we’re talking about the 23rd and 24th Centuries. Isn’t it just possible that people don’t necessarily see male pattern baldness and natural, perfectly good teeth as not being a problem? (Note that the hologram doctor in ST: Voyager is balding.) In short, maybe the inhabitants of the future as Trek sees it aren’t as vacuous and image-obsessed as some early 21st Century Californians.

The second article isn’t happy with the computers used in the series:

The most glaring example is the computer technology on the show. The captain of the "Voyager" series works with hardware clearly inferior to that of many present-day college students.

"I have a laptop on my desk that’s thinner than Captain Janeway’s," said Rick Berman, executive producer of the television and movie franchise.

Interesting that thicker is automatically taken to mean "clearly inferior". In the real world, most people who think about such things at all are well aware that technology is not the only thing which determines the size of a product. It does affect it, of course — just in my lifetime I have seen the revolutions brought about by transistors and microprocessors, so I can hardly be unaware of it.

When I was a kid, our television was a fairly chunky box, and there was a lengthy gap between switching it on and getting any sort of picture. Similarly, the radio was a big lump of bakelite which took a moment or two to start working. No transistors, you see, and the valves had to warm up before they worked. Before I started primary school, valves were replaced by transistors. Televisions could now spring into life as soon as they were turned on; radios, freed from the size limitations imposed by having bulky valves inside them, could become smaller — small enough to fit in your pocket. (I’ve just remembered a word which was very common thirty years ago, but has pretty much vanished — I’m not even sure if my dictionary has an entry for it: tranny, which was for a while the generic term for any radio which used transistors rather than valves, particularly the small, pocket-sized ones.)

In the thirty-odd years since then component miniaturisation has advanced to a level which would have been astonishing to someone living in the 1950s. You can now buy televisions which are not much bigger than the hippest little trannies of the 1960s. You can buy a DVD player with integral screen which is only just too big to fit in the pocket. I’m not even going to talk about computers, except to recall that in 1961 a computer (sometimes "computor") meant something that occupied at least one large room, whereas in 2001.…

Yet, when I look at my equipment I note something interesting. OK, there’s a wee portable which is at least half the size of the first television we had — but our main TV, the one we actually use all the time, is enormous, easily dwarfing any of the ones we had during my childhood. (Interesting thing: it also doesn’t come on immediately; I suppose it’s running some sort of systems check.) As for the radio, I do have a couple of small ones, and one of them is easily tranny-size, but the one I use is about three times the size of that old bakelite set.

The point I’m making is that other factors may be more important than the technology in determining what size something is. Modern TVs are so big because they have a large 16:9 screen (the larger the screen, the better the viewing experience) and at least two speakers for stereo sound. Radios got bigger again because the tiny trannies produced really sucky sound. Maybe Janeway’s computer is thicker than Berman’s for a good reason — such as, it might be a bad idea for important equipment to be flimsy on a military vessel.

These carps aside, a lot of the points made in the two articles are well-made — in particular those about the lack of imagination as far as medical technology is concerned. But fundamentally, it’s just a TV show. Why should we expect it to be some sort of techie prophecy zone?

It’s always fun when the dimmer class of Christian makes a complete arse of themselves, and there are few pleasures to beat watching a politician demonstrating that their grasp of reality is at best tenuous (in that regard, let me say that any of you who only saw snippets of Mandelson’s victory speech in Hartlepool on election night really don’t know what you missed: an eye-rolling, mouth-frothing spectacular of paranoia, egomania and inner steel), so it is certainly fun to see a dim Christian politician displaying his lack of mental acuity.

Before I saw this item, I hadn’t even known that Australia had a Christian Democratic Party. Well, it does, and that party has an MP called Fred Nile (actually, Rev. Fred Nile — I sometimes wonder if the decent, sincere, and above all sane Christian ministers and priests get fed up with the less balanced faction giving the rest of the world the impression that "Rev." equals "Empty-skulled loony"). Nile’s been pontificating recently about — well, what else? — Harry Potter.

You’d think there were more important things to worry about than four well-written books of fantasy and one (going by word of mouth) well-made film, particularly since, despite all the magic, etc., the basic worldview is fairly Christian, with clearly defined good versus utter evil. Apparently not, given the amount of time spent by Christians recently attacking Potter.

To digress for a moment, one of the oddest things I’ve heard recently — and this is secondhand, I’d be grateful if anyone knows the actual source for this — is that some Christians have said that Harry Potter (about wizards, etc.) is bad while Lord of the Rings (about wizards, etc.) is good. Harry Potter is clearly based in the Christian-derived ethos of fin de siecle Britain, whereas Lord of the Rings has its basis in many old, and pre-Christian, legends. (It does also, of course, feature a battle between good and utter evil.) Perhaps the fact that The Lord of the Rings was written decades before Harry Potter means that it must be better; or maybe the Christians think male academic author = OK, female single mother author = bad.

Anyway, back to Fred Nile, who has been claiming that witches are seizing on the worldwide Harry Potter craze to lure new recruits:

Rev Nile foresaw the witchcraft craze culminating in a witchcraft festival in Brisbane.

He predicted that up to 4,000 people would attend the festival where visitors would be able to try out spells, potions, crystal balls, brooms, cauldrons and healing herbs.

"Thousands of witches, wizards, fairies and pagan devotees fly into Brisbane for Queensland’s first festival of witchcraft and magic," Rev Nile said in a statement.

These doom-laden warnings, by the way, were issued more than a week after the festival in question had taken place.…

Friday 14th December

Déja vu: Google — which seems to get better all the time — took over the Web-based Usenet archives from Deja some time ago. Initially the Google Groups service was a bit ropy (no search, very limited archive), but the service has been improved steadily, and now the past 20 years of Usenet archives is available.

Yes, 20 years. Despite what some people seem to believe, the Web and the Net are not the same thing. Usenet is one of the oldest parts of the Net, still going strong. Among the messages archived here are Tim Berners-Lee’s posting outlining the WorldWideWeb project (just over ten years ago, well worth reading to see the philosophy behind the Web) and Linus Torvald’s first posting about Linux.

The page announcing the integration of the archive into Google Groups has links to other notable postings, from the oldest article in the archive (a review of the Versatec V-80 electrostatic plotter — a snip at $8,500, plus $2,000 for the unibus interface, if you don’t mind an iffy power supply) right down to (of course) Google acquires Deja archive from February.

Not all of these notable posts are good things, of course: there’s the first mention of Microsoft, the Challenger disaster and the first mass spamming, to say nothing of the first posting from an AOL account:

I have read many postings about America Online and the Internet in this newsgroup. Since some of the information has been not quite right I figured I should make a posting to clear up any misconseptions [sic] that might exist.… To send mail to an America Online … user you need to know the user’s screen name. The only way to get a user’s screen name is to contact them by other means (ie there is no name server). Once you know a user’s screen name remove any spaces, make it lower case, and append @aol.com. For example to send to the screen name A User you would address your mail to auser@aol.com.

(I think there’s an "L" missing from that.)

That message was the last in a thread called "Is America Online connected to the Internet or not?" One of the earlier messages contains this gem:

However, if you send Internet mail to someone on America Online using the following format [i.e. screenname@aol.com], they SHOULD receive it (they won’t know how it got there and they won’t know how to respond to you, but it will probably get there)

Plus ça change.…

Sunday 9th December

It’s hardly news that there are some fairly dim and cranky people in the Christian churches — but this year I’m beginning to wonder if someone’s spiked the communion wine. We’ve already seen Falwell blaming lesbians, gays, pagans and liberals for the WTC attack; we’ve noted the bizarre response by a clutch of Christian types to the Harry Potter books and film. But there’s a lot else been going on too.

For one thing, there’s the new visitor attraction in Edinburgh for Christmas. This is in the Edinburgh Dungeon, and in fitting with the environment it’s called "Satan’s Grotto".

The Christmas display at the Edinburgh Dungeon opens to the public on 15 December and features "elves impaled on spikes and robins roasting on an open fire while Santa gently boils in a witch’s cauldron".

Now, everyone I know who has heard of this has laughed and said something along the lines of, "What a hoot! Must go and see that!" Well, of course, because most people know when something is lighthearted and intended to be fun.

Lighthearted and fun, though, are not words which seem to have anything to do with the Church:

But the site, which shows Satan sitting on a throne surrounded by books on Devil worship, has been branded "blasphemous" and "dangerous".…

Colin Hart, director of the Christian Institute, called for Edinburgh City Council to ban the grotto.

He said: "This is bizarre and blasphemous. Glorifying and promoting the occult as a Christmas attraction is not only very tasteless but sad and very dangerous."

Peter Kearney, spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church, said that Christmas should be about celebrating the birth of Christ.

Remember, this is an attraction featuring Santa and some christmas card imagery, there is no use of actual Christian imagery. I’m not sure where you get blasphemy from that. It’s only a few weeks since one clergyman was proclaiming that Christmas should be banned since it wasn’t Christian any more:

[The Rev Martin Swan] has called for Christmas to be cancelled because commercialism has "hijacked" the spiritual meaning.…

He called on people to stop using Christmas as an excuse for a party.…

He added: "The Father Christmas aspect of Christmas has nothing to do with Christians.

"Christmas Day was borrowed by the Christians from the pagan festival to celebrate the birth of Christ. But we can give it back."

He has a point. The Winter Solstice, Yule, Saturnalia — these were ancient festivals — or I should say are since they are still celebrated — at this time of year, and the Church hijacked them for Christmas. But all the paraphenalia we associate with Christmas, the tree, the log, mistletoe, the robin, holly, many carols, and so on, all of this is derived from the older traditions. The only things at Christmas which are actually Christian are nativity plays/displays and church services. For most people, these are marginal.

He is also missing a point. The partying, the gift-giving, all of these do have a spiritual meaning, if you choose to look at it that way. It isn’t obvious to Christians, because Christianity is a religion rooted in the Middle Eastern desert. Here, in Northern Europe, the old traditions are all about celebrating the continuation of life through the darkest, coldest time of year.

Yes, there is too much commercialism; am I the only person, though, who thinks there is something cockeyed about saying Christmas is too commercialised — and then spending £200,000 on reclaiming Christmas from beer manufacturers, Slade, and the jolly man in red?

Having said that, think what this time of year would be like without the sparkling lights, the (admittedly mostly irritating) music coming out of shops and pubs, the parties and the determined celebration. The whole stretch from the end of October to the end of March, at least, would be like January and February: dark, wet, windy and bleak; grey streets, grey skies, and people huddled to go about their daily business with hardly a sight of the Sun.

It might not be Christian, and perhaps it would be better to be honest about that, but Christmas helps to keep us sane through the dark months, even those of us who loathe some aspects of the season.

Last year, I recall, I was in the city centre late on the Friday before Christmas with JT. We were surrounded by brilliantly lit shops and pubs, and the streets were heaving with young people dressed for partying, singing, laughing, swearing, having a good time. As we paused in one street, JT looked around and said, "This is pure Saturnalia!" Yep. A time for fun. Maybe the rest of us shouldn’t let the Christians hijack that!