The moving finger

Banking: stuck in the 19th century

2011-09-09T11:53:00.004+02:00

For a very long time I've had a Co-operative Bank Visa card which has been paid off for years by direct debit from a bank account. Recently I asked the Co-operative Bank people to change the direct debit to a different bank.

I was first surprised that it took them several months to perform this simple operation, for which I had to fill in a form that they sent me by snail mail (in the 21st century!).

I then discovered after the event (they didn't warn me) that during the operation they first delete the old bank details, then weeks later they add the new bank details, so in the interim they have no bank details on file, and the card doesn't get paid off. This they regard as my fault. "You could have sent a manual payment." Well, yes, I could, if I'd had any reason to think it was necessary.

The whole thing is so incredibly slow and incompetent. They've got the old bank details and the new bank details, why should it take them more than a minute or two to replace the former with the latter? And, even if they insist on moving in slow motion, why remove the old bank details before they're ready to put in the new bank details?

Annie get your gun

2011-02-21T22:56:00.000+01:00

Quite a lot of people in the USA, and some in other countries, seem keen on the idea of carrying a gun for self-defence.

In principle, the idea that we should all have the means to defend ourselves is a good one. Unfortunately, a gun is inherently an offensive weapon that has no defensive capability. The only way of using it for defence is to “hit back first”, which is likely to work well only against an incompetent opponent; and tends to yield cases of innocent people being shot by mistake. A truly defensive weapon, such as Isaac Asimov's force shield, would be much better if available.

There are two situations in which you might consider carrying a gun (assuming that it's legal to do so).

Violent crime is common in your area. In this case, a gun may be useful in some cases, although it will be either useless or worse than useless in other cases (someone holding a gun becomes a high-priority target for armed opponents). It should be up to you to decide whether carrying a gun improves your chances or not. However, my personal preference would be to try to move out of the violent-crime area and settle down somewhere more peaceful.
Violent crime is uncommon in your area. In this case, a gun may be useful only in a low-probability event. If you decide to carry a gun, for consistency you should probably guard yourself against other low-probability events. For instance, you should wear a helmet in the street in case something falls on you; you should carry a lightning conductor in case of thunderstorms. You should ensure that your home has an air-raid shelter, and stock up with food and survival gear in case civilization collapses. If you live in the USA, you should move out, because the Yellowstone Supervolcano could blow at any time and devastate the country.

As a good libertarian myself, I believe it should be legal to carry a gun for your own defence, if you really think it's useful. However, in a peaceful country I wouldn't expect many people to think it useful. There may be a small minority who have some particular reason to fear attack.

Any innocent person who gets shot (or his next of kin) should be entitled to heavy compensation from the gun user or owner; even if the shooting is by accident or mistake. Gun owners, like car owners, should insure themselves so that they can pay up if required.

Beware of natural food

2010-11-27T23:23:00.000+01:00

While recently rereading Reay Tannahill's awesomely informative Food in history, I came across the following paragraphs in Chapter 21, which I thought rather striking although not really surprising.

In view ... of the extravagant publicity given to artificial additives, this is perhaps the place for a reminder that quite a number of natural, healthy, real foods would not be on the market today if they were subjected to the kind of tests that have to be undergone by the additives of commerce.

Caffeine, the natural stimulant in coffee, is fatal to humans at a dose of about one-third of an ounce. Nutmeg is hallucinogenic. Two pounds of onions a day are enough to cause anaemia. Rhubarb and spinach contain oxalic acid, which builds kidney stones. Carotene, which puts the colour in egg yolks, sweet potatoes, mangoes and carrots, can result in jaundice. Cabbage in excess can help to cause goitre. Bran, promoted in the high-fibre diet thought to help prevent coronary and colon diseases, can in excess prevent absorption of iron and calcium. Red kidney beans, inadequately boiled, can be toxic. Watermelon seeds are claimed to damage the liver and kidneys. People have been poisoned by the solanin in green potatoes, the prussic acid in bitter almonds, the cynanide in lima beans.

Dynamic range in digital photography

2010-06-25T18:53:00.003+02:00

In photography, dynamic range is the difference in brightness between the darkest and the brightest part of a scene. There are two problems with dynamic range: capturing it in the camera's sensor, and reproducing it on screen for people to see.

It's useful to distinguish between three levels of dynamic range.

Low dynamic range: the scene can easily be captured in one exposure, saved as an image with 8 bits per colour, and reproduced on a good monitor without any loss of dynamic range. A photo of such a scene doesn't need any special treatment. However, tone-mapping can still be useful to "improve the lighting".
Medium dynamic range: the scene can be captured in one exposure and saved in a camera raw file with 12 or 14 bits per colour; but reducing it to 8 bits per colour would clip the dynamic range. In this case you can save the raw file as several different files with different exposure corrections, and then combine them using tone-mapping or exposure fusion. These techniques compress the original dynamic range in different ways to give a result that looks pleasing.
High dynamic range (HDR): the scene can't be captured in one exposure without clipping the dynamic range. In this case, you can take multiple exposures with different shutter speeds, and then combine the exposures using tone-mapping, in order to compress the original dynamic range in a pleasing way.

A problem with the use of multiple exposures for HDR photography is that there are often moving objects in the scene (people, cars, leaves, waves) that cause blurring or ghosting when the exposures are combined. Photomatix tone-mapping offers some degree of automatic correction for this problem, but Photomatix exposure fusion does not; so I wouldn't use exposure fusion for true HDR photos, because there are so many things in a scene that may move. Unless you take photos inside a building with no moving objects in sight.

Yes, you can use laborious manual methods to deal with ghosting in your HDR photos. If you want to spend that much time on each photo.

Most normal scenes have either low or medium dynamic range. Anyone who often takes photos of high-dynamic-range scenes is probably going out of his way to look for them. They might be scenes with bright sunshine and deep shadow (perhaps looking into the sun), or night scenes with bright artificial lighting.

Small white hunter

2010-06-17T21:01:00.000+02:00

A memory fragment from my mother, early 1940s:

Hate to remember it now but on holidays in Wiltshire (aged around 9 to 11) I used to go out with my aunt Rhoda's husband Ted and shoot rabbits. Meat rations were stingy and my grandmother (she and Rhoda were staying in Wiltshire for the war) welcomed succulent rabbit to stew and feed us all.

She adds later:

... it's a good job my rabbit-shooting days were so long ago because, never mind it being illegal now, it was illegal then. We were trespassing on someone's land for starters and at my age I should never have been allowed to handle a gun, let alone use it. I don't know whether one needed a licence for a gun then but I'd bet my bottom dollar that Ted didn't have one.

I understand from Wikipedia that a gun licence has been required in the UK since 1870; originally anyone could have a licence who paid for one, but from 1920 it became necessary to get approval from the police.

A libertarian view of the British political parties

2010-05-07T07:50:00.000+02:00

I'll keep this brief.

The Labour Party is fundamentally opposed to liberty.
The Conservative Party doesn't believe in liberty, or anything else.
The Liberal Democrats should believe in liberty, but their policies fail to confirm this. A confused party.
The Libertarian Party is the only one worth supporting, but it's very young and very small.

The least bad result of the election currently in progress might be a Con-LibDem coalition. Ideally, they might veto each other's sillier ideas. Though things seldom work out ideally in politics.

Cliology

2010-04-17T16:10:00.000+02:00

Cliology may be defined as the science that seeks to understand and predict the course of history—from Clio, the Greek muse of history. As far as I know, no such science is currently practised, but it was named and interestingly discussed in Michael Flynn's novel In the country of the blind (1990).

Such a science was already imagined in the 1940s by Isaac Asimov under the name of psychohistory, but I have a feeling that Flynn's name may triumph in the long run, because by now we already have the genuine scientific fields of cliometrics and cliodynamics, both of which could perhaps be seen as early precursors of cliology.

It is, of course, impossible to predict the course of history with accuracy, but statistical analysis and a general understanding of historical forces may eventually enable people to predict history well enough to be of some use: just as a weather forecast may be of some use even if it's sometimes wrong.

In the fiction of both Asimov and Flynn, cliology is more or less a secret science, used to predict the history of a population that's unaware of cliology. Asimov, at least, felt that the predictive ability of the science would be spoiled if the whole population under study was aware of cliology and of its specific predictions.

This awareness would make prediction more difficult, but I think not necessarily impossible, for two reasons.

People have always attempted to predict future history, and there are some future historical developments that can be predicted fairly well without advanced science. Sometimes, people aware of such predictions can change their behaviour to avoid the predicted event; sometimes, even knowing the prediction, they can't avoid it. I don't think this will change in any fundamental way if the predictions become more accurate.
Predicting the future of people who are aware of the prediction is a kind of recursive problem, and I think science in general is not helpless in the face of recursive problems. Computer programs, for instance, routinely include recursive functions.

Even if recursive prediction doesn't work, a non-recursive prediction would be far from useless. It could be seen more as a warning: if you carry on the way you're going, this is what will happen.

Al Stewart rides again

2010-01-25T18:42:00.002+01:00

Although I have a good collection of Al Stewart albums already, in November I acquired two more, A piece of yesterday (double-CD compilation, 2006) and Sparks of ancient light (new material, 2008).

I'm pleased with both. I had most of the songs on the compilation already, but it's the best result of remastering I've heard so far: the improvement in sound quality is really worthwhile, even through iTunes and mid-fi loudspeakers.

I now discover belatedly that there's a five-CD compilation called Just yesterday that maybe I should have chosen, had I known about it.

Sparks of ancient light is a minor album that won't convert anyone into an Al Stewart fan, but if you like him already this is superior to some of his other later albums (Down in the cellar is also worth trying). It's a pleasant and lively album on which he sounds younger than 62. As usual, the songs mostly have historical themes; there's even one about Hanno the Navigator.

Death of a dupe

2010-01-17T13:08:00.000+01:00

Akmal Shaikh was executed in China in December after being caught entering the country with 4 kg of heroin in 2007. It seems that he was tricked into carrying the heroin and may not even have known it was in his luggage.

Drug smuggling (even if intentional) isn't a violent crime and I don't support the death penalty for it. But the interesting thing to me about this case is that most of the outcry about it from other countries (the UK in particular) was that Shaikh should have been let off on grounds of mental illness.

Eh? Surely the rationale for executing someone is that he's a danger to other people, and you can permanently nullify the danger by executing him.

Does mental illness make a dangerous person less dangerous? I don't think so. Why, then, is it relevant? Surely, any court considering execution should be trying to determine how dangerous is the accused, not how sane he is.

In this case, Shaikh seems to have been stupid, but probably not sufficiently dangerous to be worth executing. (I've read that he had a previous conviction for sexual harassment, so he wasn't harmless.)

Pirates ahoy! Care for some tea?

2009-10-08T13:44:00.000+02:00

A group of Somali pirates has been captured after attacking a French navy ship by mistake, apparently thinking it was a harmless cargo vessel. (BBC)

Captured? Wouldn't it have been simpler to blow them out of the water and leave no survivors? I don't know what modern navies are coming to...

I mean, those people actually opened fire on a naval ship. They could hardly claim to be anything but pirates; and the penalty for piracy was always death. But these days it seems that taxpayers must pay for the feeding and guarding of these people, and probably for lawyers to prosecute and defend them; and they will probably go free in the end to attempt more piracy. It's a mad world.

What is a liberal?

2009-10-02T08:20:00.000+02:00

Noticing on Facebook that a number of my friends classify themselves as politically liberal, I tried to look up what this is supposed to mean.

My 1983 Chambers Dictionary offers only vague generalities: “befitting a freeman or a gentleman, directed towards the cultivation of the mind for its own sake, disinterested, generous, noble-minded, broad-minded, ...”

The Oxford English Dictionary says, “Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy.”

Wikipedia describes liberalism as “the belief in the importance of individual freedom.”

The American Heritage Dictionary is the most specific, giving two politically relevant definitions:

“A political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.”
“An economic theory in favor of laissez-faire, the free market, and the gold standard.”

Taking all this into consideration, it seems to me that a lot of people these days could describe themselves as liberal in at least some senses, including me. I have doubts mainly about the natural goodness of humans and the gold standard; but in other respects I'm probably more liberal than most of the people who describe themselves as such.

Cider

2009-08-25T19:52:00.003+02:00

Having gone to school in the West Country, I encountered cider fairly early on, and I've often been willing to drink it over the years, though I haven't specialized in it. The problem is that the available ciders tend not to be good.

Over in England for a short time recently, I stayed at the Coach & Horses pub/hotel in Kew (which I can recommend, incidentally), and tried the draught Blackthorn cider they had at the bar. I liked it, and went on drinking it while I was there.

Now I look on the Web and find that apparently it's not a real cider made in the approved way, so I shouldn't really like it. Hm. Nevertheless, I found it preferable to the other ciders in the shops—which I suppose aren't real ciders either, by the same criteria.

Back home, I can find two Spanish ciders on sale within walking distance: El Gaitero, which looks like cheap champagne and is soft and bland and a bit sweet; and Zapiain, a Basque cider that tastes like apple vinegar. Neither is really what I'm after. In a spirit of experiment, I tried mixing the two. The mixture is perhaps an improvement on either one by itself, but still leaves something to be desired.

Is it really difficult to produce a cider that's neither sweet nor vinegary?

Windows Vista and old fonts

2009-06-09T13:04:00.001+02:00

I've come rather late to Windows Vista, but I'm now using it at last. One of the problems I find is that its font installer doesn't recognize my old Type 1 PostScript fonts, which was rather a shock. I paid good money for these fonts once upon a time, and see no reason why I shouldn't go on using them.

I discovered a solution that doesn't involve spending any money. The Vista font installer recognizes Type 1 fonts if you supply them in the form of PFM files. These were not originally supplied with the fonts, but are created automatically by the Windows XP font installer.

So, while I still have a functioning Windows XP system, I'll have to install all my old Type 1 fonts on it, and save all the PFM files for use under Windows Vista. A bit of a hassle, but things could be worse.

I wait to find out whether the Windows 7 font installer will accept PFM files...

Health care: still in the Dark Ages

2009-04-27T09:38:00.000+02:00

I was struck by the following extract from The Economist's special report on health care and technology:

A report by the Institute of Medicine estimated that up to 100,000 Americans are killed each year by preventable mishaps such as wrong-side surgery, medication errors and hospital-acquired infections—a larger number than die from breast cancer or AIDS.

Sometimes such errors can be prevented without fancy technology. It helps to write “not this leg” on a patient's left leg before surgery on his right leg.

What a sad comment on the state of modern health care. And in the country that spends the most money on it, too.

Bigger and better tax havens

2009-04-02T10:08:00.000+02:00

An article in The Economist (see original article) describes how an Australian researcher named Jason Sharman tried to register anonymous companies and open bank accounts for them in 45 places around the world. He was successful in 17 cases, 13 of which were OECD countries, including the USA and the UK.

In these cases, the bank can't reveal the owner of an account to any inquisitive government, because the bank doesn't know. So these accounts are safer from investigation than those in a traditional tax haven, where personal identification is normally required.

The USA is particularly attractive in this respect because there you can apparently get tax-free interest on your untraceable riches.

I pass on this useful tip to any of you who may be wealthy enough to consider taking advantage of it. However, bear in mind that you shouldn't believe everything you read, even in The Economist. There may be hidden snags.

Read it again, Sam

2009-04-01T14:08:00.000+02:00

I'm a habitual rereader of fiction. Now that I have a reasonable stock of books in the house, I'm frankly more likely to reread an old book than to pick up a new one. I have some books that I've reread dozens of times in the course of my life.

For me, it's the same as replaying recorded music. Everyone replays favourite music, but some people seem to read novels only once. Apparently the attitude is that they want to be surprised by the story, and after the first time they're not surprised any more.

I read fiction to enjoy the images, the scenes, the characters. On the whole, I feel more comfortable not being surprised by the story; though in any case I'm unlikely to remember all the details of the plot from one reading to another.

The memory of a book that I've read soon fades. My memory of it is like listening to someone whistling a tune, compared with playing the record; or watching a blurred image of disjointed parts of a film dubbed into another language, compared with watching the DVD in English. Every now and then I want to re-experience the original in high fidelity.

When I think of reading a book, I don't usually want to read just any book; more commonly, I want to reread a particular book, because that's what I'm in the mood for. If I pick up some book I haven't read before, I'm unlikely to be in the mood for it; I may not even like it at all.

Nevertheless, I do read new books every now and then, when I feel willing to experiment. It helps if I've read other books by the same author, because then I know roughly what to expect.

If I feel doubtful about reading a new book, I find a good way to evaluate it is to read the beginning, read the end, and dip into the middle—though I've noticed when doing this that it tends to horrify other people.

Um, don't read anything into the date of this post: it's not intended as April foolery.

What is liberty?

2009-02-14T05:36:00.002+01:00

I've been calling myself a libertarian since the early 1980s, but you may not know what that means. Of course you can read about it elsewhere, but here's my personal take on it in case you're interested.

It means, of course, that I'm in favour of liberty; but what is liberty? To me, liberty is what you have when no-one else is using force on you. So I'm in favour of a society in which people don't use force on each other. This is a theoretical ideal: I recognize that such a perfect society doesn't exist and isn't going to exist.

From a moral point of view, I believe it's wrong to use force on inoffensive people (people who don't use force themselves). However, I'm not a pacifist: if someone goes around murdering people, he's an offensive person, he's forfeited his right to liberty, and it's OK to use force on him.

From a political point of view, both left-wing and right-wing politicians believe in using force on inoffensive people to achieve their objectives, so I don't support either wing. In fact, using force on inoffensive people is basically what politicians do, so I'm not a supporter of politicians in general.

I see libertarianism as a moral position, with political implications.

Has science fiction lost its way?

2009-01-30T11:30:00.002+01:00

There seems to be a feeling in some quarters that modern sf is not what it was; indeed, I suppose I feel it myself to some extent, although there are still good books being written in the field.

I reckon the main problem is a general loss of optimism about the future. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, the future was seen as a fairly simple place, in which humanity was destined to go out and dominate the galaxy as it had already dominated the Earth. Eric Frank Russell wrote stories in which lone human scouts baffled and outwitted hordes of aliens unfortunate enough to lack human intelligence. These stories were a bit childish, but fun to read; people enjoyed reading them and came back for more.

These days, most people seem to suspect that the future will be complex and threatening, and sf authors struggle diligently to give a convincing sense of just how complex and threatening it will be. This is a worthy effort, but I wonder how many casual readers want to spend their spare time reading about a future that's even more complex and threatening than the present. Some readers doubtless appreciate it, but will sf retain a mass audience this way?

I'm not sure what the solution is to this problem, but in the meantime I see authors and readers (myself included) increasingly turning to alternate-history stories, in which we can read about societies other than our own without needing to venture into the unappealing future.

I hope this is merely a cyclical phenomenon, and that people will become cheerful about the future again in due course.

Nikon's photo editing program

2008-12-30T17:32:00.003+01:00

As I have a Nikon camera, it seemed a good idea to check out Nikon's photo editing program, Nikon Capture NX 2, so I downloaded the free 60 days' trial and played around with it a bit.

It seems a decent, competent program at a modest price, though relatively early in its development, compared with programs that have been around for years.

However, if you buy it as your only photo editing program, bear in mind that it concentrates on photographic functions and misses out a lot of more general image editing functions that you would get with Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro. As someone pointed out elsewhere on the Web, what if you want to write some text on top of the photo?

If you have Photoshop already, I see little point in buying Capture NX 2 as well. As far as I could tell by experiment, Photoshop imports Nikon's NEF files as well as Nikon's own program does, and provides more editing functionality.

The Nikon program offers the unique functionality of U Points, otherwise known as control points, which are a cute way of making local changes to parts of a photo. This could well be of interest to some people, but it's not my style. I feel happy manipulating a photo as a whole, but I don't want to get into messing around with parts of it.

Adobe software and prices

2008-12-30T15:58:00.003+01:00

I started buying Adobe fonts in 1990 (I was keen on fonts in those days), but took much longer to buy Adobe programs, because my software at work was provided by the company, and at home I had other software that I was happy with.

However, in 2005 I started working from home and paying for all my own stuff, and at that time I splashed out £940 for the Adobe Creative Suite, reasoning that I needed Acrobat and Photoshop for work, and those two programs would cost about as much as the whole Suite if bought separately.

Shortly afterwards, the Creative Suite 2 was released, and Adobe allowed me a free upgrade to it. (Gold star to Adobe on this point.)

I skipped Creative Suite 3, because I didn't feel a need of it, and Adobe's upgrades are expensive enough to make you stop and think.

When Creative Suite 4 was released, I decided that I still didn't need it, but that I would rather like to have the latest Photoshop, which I use for my photography hobby as well as for work. So I ordered the Photoshop CS4 upgrade, first checking with Adobe's Web site that I was eligible for the upgrade price. It said, if you have Photoshop CS2 (which I had), you are eligible.

I got my Photoshop CS4 upgrade and it refused to install. Enquiries revealed that it will install only as an upgrade to Photoshop bought as a separate product, not to Photoshop bought as part of the Creative Suite; although this is not explained at all on Adobe's Web site.

I tried to send the upgrade back to Amazon UK, from which I'd bought it. Amazon wouldn't accept it because the box had been opened. Of course the box had been opened: I had to open the box to find out that it wouldn't work.

After long and exhausting arguments with two different Adobe customer support people, Adobe eventually agreed to unlock my upgrade (by a special secret procedure) so that I could use it.

Although Adobe as a company seems to mean well in some ways, and its software is competent, I give it demerits on several grounds.

The software is alarmingly expensive, unless you happen to live in North America, where it's a good deal cheaper. As I don't live in North America, I naturally resent this.
The documentation is not as good as it should be at that price level.
If you have the Creative Suite but you want to upgrade only one component of it, Adobe apparently expects you to pay full price for that component, as though you had no previous version. That's crazy. When you upgrade, all you're getting for your money is the difference between the new version and the old. At full price? No thanks, I'd stick with the old version.
Adobe has this crazy internal policy but doesn't explain it in public. When I pointed that out, did I get any apology? No. Did I get any assurance that the Adobe Web site would be changed to give correct information? No. I was treated as though the situation was my own fault. To give Adobe support minimal credit, however, in the end it caved in and gave me what I paid for. Possibly out of exhaustion and to get rid of me.

There is a lesson here. If you're tempted to buy the Adobe Creative Suite, bear in mind that you'll be locked into upgrading the whole suite for evermore: or else you'll have to pay full price for the latest versions of any individual components. This makes the Creative Suite much less of a bargain than it looks, unless you're confident that you'll always want to upgrade multiple components of it simultaneously. The cost of a Creative Suite upgrade is not small change; check it out in advance.

So far, the only advantages of Photoshop CS4 that I've noticed, compared with Photoshop CS2, are that it seems to start up more quickly and it has a new Vibrance control, which is similar to Saturation but more subtle in effect. I'm sure there are other novelties, but they're things I don't use. So, it was apparently for these small things that I paid £184 and wore myself out arguing with Adobe support. I should have stayed with Photoshop CS2...

Jesus versus Santa

2008-12-24T08:19:00.003+01:00

According to a BBC report, a Catholic priest in Novara, Italy, has caused a stir by telling children that Father Christmas doesn't exist.

The priest said he had never intended to hurt anyone, but it was his duty to distinguish the reality of Jesus from the story of Father Christmas which was a fable just like Cinderella or Snow White.

I don't know about you, but I find this really funny. All we need to complete the picture is a department-store Father Christmas teaching children to distinguish his own reality from the story of Jesus Christ, which is a fable just like Cinderella or Snow White.

In a reality contest with no holds barred, I think Father Christmas would have a distinct advantage: "Children, think about it: when did you last get a present from Jesus?"

Sid Meier's Somalia

2008-11-25T23:04:00.003+01:00

I was reading a news article about Somalian pirates today when it occurred to me that Somalia, from everyone else's point of view, rather resembles a barbarian settlement in Sid Meier's Civilization game.

However, the barbarians in the game make a nuisance of themselves on land and I haven't noticed them taking to the sea; the Somalians are much more aquatic.

In the game, there's only one way to deal with barbarians: as soon as possible, you march in and wipe them out, with superior technology or superior numbers, or both. Real life tends to be less simple.

President Obama

2008-11-14T09:11:00.002+01:00

I've been a bit surprised by all the hullabaloo over the election of a new US president. Let's try to make some sense of it.

Q: Will President Obama make everyone's lives much better?

A: Probably not. He's a politician, not a magician. He'll do the sorts of things that US presidents normally do.

Q: Will he at least be a better-than-average president?

A: Maybe, but we'll have to wait and see. No-one actually knows; not even the man himself.

Q: Will he do good things for black people in particular?

A: Probably, but to a very limited extent. He'll want to make some kind of gesture to his black supporters, but without antagonizing his non-black supporters, who are more numerous.

Q: Is the election of a half-black president a sign of US moral superiority over other countries?

A: No. The USA has a much larger black minority than most other predominantly white countries. According to Wikipedia, the USA is 80% white, 12.8% black, and 1.6% "multiracial" (I omit other categories). The UK, for example, is 92.1% white, 2% black, and 1.2% multiracial. Other European countries probably have even smaller black minorities. If it takes the USA this long to elect even a half-black leader, it's not surprising that it takes other countries even longer. However, if a politician similar to Obama appeared in the UK, I think he could attract plenty of votes. Obama himself seems popular in most countries, at least at the moment.

Wikipedia as a translation aid

2008-09-10T14:27:00.003+02:00

Recently one of my correspondents asked me the Spanish word for paragliding. Probably I'd heard it before, but I couldn't think of it, and my big Collins dictionary didn't have it. So I looked up 'paragliding' in Wikipedia, and when the English page came up I then switched over to the Spanish version of the same page. Bingo, there was my translation: 'el parapente'.

As there are Wikipedia pages in many languages, this is a rather general-purpose method, although it's mainly useful for nouns and for the more popular languages. There are Wikipedia pages in, say, Punjabi and Tibetan, but not very many pages.

South Ossetia

2008-08-12T10:41:00.002+02:00

I have a generally very low opinion of the Russian government, but I'm disconcerted to see that it appears to be in the right (and the Georgian government in the wrong) in the conflict over South Ossetia.

As far as I can tell from reading up quickly about the situation, South Ossetians are historically distinct from Georgians and have for years been operating unofficially as a separate country, with a large majority in favour of independence from Georgia.

Recently Georgia attempted to assert its claim to South Ossetia by military force: which was not only morally wrong (in my opinion) but also pretty stupid, given that many people in South Ossetia hold Russian passports, that Russia has previously shown interest in the place, and that Russia's army is many times bigger than Georgia's.

That Georgia is now suffering in the conflict seems entirely the fault of its own foolish government.

It's geographically unfortunate that South Ossetia takes a sizeable and inconvenient bite out of central Georgia: Georgia without South Ossetia is a rather odd shape. However, if the South Ossetians don't want to be part of Georgia, I don't see why they should be.

It seems hypocritical for the US government to complain about Russian aggression, when Russia can claim to be supporting the right to self-determination in South Ossetia just as most Western countries are doing in Kosovo.

Intellectual property and theft

2008-07-31T17:15:00.003+02:00

It rather irritates me to see frequent aggressive allegations by interested parties that copying files of 'intellectual property' is theft.

Theft means taking an item belonging to someone else. After the theft, the thief has the property and can use it; the original owner no longer has it and can't use it.

When a file is copied, no-one is deprived of the copied item. The author and any other rightful owners still retain their original copies.

The author may be deprived of a payment to which he feels entitled, but this is not a matter of theft. You can't be robbed of money you've never had.

Whether copying files is immoral is something for people to argue about. Whether it's illegal is something for politicians to argue about. I won't try to argue those larger issues here. I merely point out that 'theft' is the wrong name for it.

In practice, a large proportion of people make unauthorized copies of files, and therefore seem to believe that it's a moral thing to do, or at least not very immoral. If the propaganda floating around convinces them that 'theft' is an appropriate description of what they're doing, there is a danger that they'll come to regard other kinds of theft too as moral — or at least not very immoral. I think it would be better not to use words so inaccurately.

I also think that people who think they can stop unauthorized copying, or reduce it to a minor problem, are trying to hold back the tide. Like it or not, this is something that is not going to go away.

Personally, I still make a habit of paying for books, music, etc. Maybe that's just because I'm not young enough to be accustomed to the new way of doing things. I feel that the moral position of intellectual property owners is arguable either way, and not as clearcut as they mostly think it is. Certainly, the continuation of copyright restrictions for decades after the author's death seems to me absurd, and I don't understand how it can be justified.

Tibet

2008-07-31T10:46:00.004+02:00

There seems a lot of heated argument these days for and against the idea of self-determination in Tibet; I can agree in part with both sides.

Some people say that China is denying self-determination to Tibet, oppressing Tibetans, and trying to settle Tibet with Chinese people in order to outnumber the Tibetans.
Other people (mostly Chinese) say that Tibet has been part of China for a long time, that Chinese rule in Tibet is improving the living standards of Tibetans, and that foreigners have no right to criticize because their own countries have denied self-determination to other peoples in the past.

All of these claims by both sides may be true simultaneously. But both sides seem to have blind spots:

The Free Tibet crowd seem to be forgetting that the issue of self-determination is world-wide. I support the right to self-determination myself, but I support it for all peoples everywhere, not just for Tibetans. The Chechens and the Palestinians and various peoples of ex-Yugoslavia, for instance, have surely suffered worse than the Tibetans. The Basques are not suffering (except from the excesses of their own extremists), but their position is in principle similar to that of the Tibetans. Spain doesn't accept self-determination for Gibraltar either. Argentina doesn't accept self-determination for the Falkland Islands.
The Chinese nationalist crowd seem to rely on the argument that self-determination is a modern right that was never observed in the past. If what we're doing in Tibet is bad, they say, then what your countries have done in the past was even worse. This is true, but irrelevant. By the same argument, China could practise slavery and point out that other countries have done it too. If you're a good person, you act in a good way. If you act in a bad way and try to justify yourself by saying that other people have done it too, the fact remains that you're still a bad person.

The nine billion faces of God

2008-07-18T08:11:00.000+02:00

A kindergarden teacher was going round her class, looking at the paintings they were doing.

Little Carol was very intent on her work, although it didn't make much sense to the teacher.

"What's that going to be, dear?" she asked.

"It's a picture of God," explained Carol.

"But nobody knows what God looks like."

"Well, they will in a minute," said the artist.

My mother heard this on television and passed it on. I rather like it: I don't read any particular moral into it, but I think it makes a good short-short story.

Warm at last!

2008-06-19T16:35:00.000+02:00

Now the temperature is hitting 27°C, I feel at last in my element, the air is warm and supportive instead of cold and hostile. I don't need clothes for warmth, not even in the night. These are human, welcoming temperatures.

True, it can be uncomfortably hot in the car, or if I go for a long walk in the sun, but I accept this with good humour.

My skin is too dry in winter; it's happy in the summer. I can open windows. Nature is not at war with me. Rejoice!

Free speech and the law

2008-06-19T16:32:00.003+02:00

It's come to my attention that France, England, and probably other countries have laws against “inciting racial hatred”. Recently, Brigitte Bardot (elderly film star and animal rights activist) was fined 15,000 euros under the French law for complaining about Muslim ways of slaughtering animals—and ranting about Muslims destroying her country while she was on the subject.

We already have laws against slander, libel, inciting violence, copyright infringement, and probably others that all limit free speech to some extent. Do we really need laws against inciting racial hatred (whatever that means) as well? I think not.

As far as I can see, “inciting racial hatred” basically means expressing any negative opinion about a particular group of people (in French law not necessarily a race).

I'm afraid that some groups really are not nice people and deserve to have negative opinions expressed about them. To take a few examples: the Nazis of the 20th century; the Mongols who invaded eastern Europe in the 13th century; the Christian crusaders and members of various Catholic inquisitions. If you have negative opinions about a particular group of people, you may or may not be right (in any case it's a subjective judgment), but I think you're entitled to your opinion and you should be entitled to express it. Of course they should have the same right to express their opinion of you.

As for the people in the 20th century (not just Nazis) who had negative opinions about Jews, I'm not in sympathy with them but I think they were entitled to that opinion and entitled to express it. What they weren't morally entitled to do was to kill Jews and steal their property, both of which were of course grossly immoral and should have been illegal.

The increasing legal restrictions on free speech seem to mean that you should consult a lawyer before expressing any opinion in public. I think this regrettable, and it suggests to me that the law has gone too far.

S.M. Stirling

2008-03-11T18:28:00.000+01:00

I'm much obliged to Richard Guha for recommending S.M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers to me in 2006: it's become one of my favourite books, being a good adventure story with a fascinating alternate-history scenario.

I naturally investigated Stirling's other books, of which he's written quite a few. He generously provides the first few chapters of each book at his own Web site, so you can sample them without paying a cent.

I've bought and read The sky people and Conquistador; both have good scenarios but are merely OK as fiction. He's written several different series of linked novels, but I feel doubtful about them and probably won't buy them.

Stirling is six months older than me and a fluent and competent writer, who researches his stories thoroughly and populates them with some quite likeable characters. He evidently likes and respects women, and creates some strong female characters.

Unfortunately he seems to have a preference for authoritarian politics and a fascination with hand-to-hand combat, neither of which are to my taste, although I can tolerate them up to a point as part of a good story. The Peshawar Lancers provides a natural setting for monarchy, aristocracy, and old-fashioned swordplay, and these things are acceptable in that context. However, in Conquistador he had a free hand to choose almost any political arrangement he fancied, so what he came up with is disappointing. Furthermore, while his female characters are somewhat varied, his male characters all have a certain basic similarity.

I continue to recommend The Peshawar Lancers to anyone who likes alternate history, but so far I wouldn't give the same recommendation to any of his other books, though they're readable enough.

Innocents abroad

2008-03-11T17:09:00.003+01:00

BBC News:

Two Japanese sisters have been arrested for allegedly trying to evade paying a fortune in inheritance tax. Tax officials say the sisters hid almost 6bn yen ($58m) in cardboard boxes and paper bags at their home in the city of Osaka. They are accused of failing to declare most of the money they inherited from their wealthy father, who died almost four years ago.

I always feel sad when someone gets caught by the taxman, although I don't feel strongly about inheritance taxes. Those sisters didn't earn the money themselves, so their moral claim to it is relatively weak. However, the government's moral claim to it seems to me non-existent.

I'd feel more sympathy for the sisters if they'd shown more intelligence. I'm not sure what's the best way to hide a large inheritance, never having had to deal with the problem myself, but stashing banknotes around the house in cardboard boxes and paper bags seems somewhat lacking in sophistication. And they had four years to find some better solution.

Hell's bells, even burying the banknotes in the garden would probably have been an improvement. But it would have been better to get the money out of the country somehow.

Independence for Kosovo?

2008-02-17T22:37:00.001+01:00

Today Kosovo declares its independence from Serbia. It has of course already been independent from Serbia in practice since 1999, but it remains to be seen whether it will remain independent in the long term, and what other effects this will have.

I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I believe in self-determination for all peoples, including the people of Kosovo, so I wish them luck.

On the other hand, it seems that various other countries will be spending money propping up Kosovo for many years into the future, and this is not good, for at least three reasons.

What have the Kosovans ever done to deserve this generosity? I wish them luck, but I don't feel that I owe them money.
Interference in the affairs of other countries may or not be justified in principle, but in practice it often seems to turn out unhappily.
As Kosovo becomes accustomed to being propped up by other countries, it may become permanently incapable of looking after itself.

The world could do with some kind of international law and some kind of international organization(s) to enforce it. It's neither satisfactory in principle nor successful in practice for powerful countries to send their armies all over the world trying to enforce whatever they happen to think is right at the time.

Various people have already pointed out that, if Kosovo's independence holds, this will encourage separatist movements in other countries. Indeed, I suppose it will, and I wish the best of luck to all such movements that have majority support within their regions.

I'm amused to see that, also today, residents of Berwick-upon-Tweed, the northernmost town in England, have voted in an unofficial poll to leave England and become part of Scotland.

Software obsolescence

2008-02-10T22:15:00.000+01:00

Three months ago we got a new computer for our son Marc, and of course it came with Windows Vista, although Ana and I are still using Windows XP on our own computers.

From Marc's point of view, a computer is a games machine, and I was apprehensive about how many of his old games would work under Vista. I reassured myself that Vista seems not very different from XP; and at first I was pleased to find that some old games worked without trouble.

However, by now we realize that a number of his old games don't seem to work under Vista, although they work under XP.

This is a nuisance, and it's just an example of a wider problem with software: that it has a short lifespan. When I buy a book, I expect it to last for decades; it may well outlast me. But software can become unusable after only a few years, generally because of changes to the operating system.

Of course, if you maintain a museum full of computers running old operating systems, then you can go on running your old programs. But that's inconvenient and ultimately not very feasible. After a while, the old computers will break down and the old operating systems may not work with a new computer.

Some programs last longer than others. I'm still using Lotus Magellan, a file browser and search program, which hasn't been updated since 1990. It was an excellent program ahead of its time; it's somewhat less useful now because it's operating in a very different environment from what it was designed for. However, amazingly, it still works, and it's still useful for some purposes. I suppose this is because it was written for DOS, and so most of the changes to Windows in the last 18 years haven't affected it.

Hot wine

2008-02-03T08:50:00.000+01:00

A traditional winter drink in many countries is hot wine, sweetened and with various spices or other additives.

Despite these widespread traditions, I've found that hot wine by itself makes a good winter drink without sweetening or spices. Just a minute in the microwave, and it's done. So far I've tried only hot red wine, but I've read that hot white wine works too. Hot sparkling wine doesn't seem like a good idea, but it may be worth trying out of curiosity...

If you want the wine to remain alcoholic, avoid boiling it.

Motorists versus cyclists

2008-01-30T16:42:00.000+01:00

Today Ana told me about a current Spanish news story: a motorist ran over a teenage cyclist some time ago, killing him, and recently took the boy's family to court for the cost of repairing his expensive car. It seems that the accident was entirely the cyclist's fault, no argument about that; but nevertheless the case has generated so much unfavourable attention that the man has now withdrawn it.

I can see both points of view on this. On the one hand, as a motorist I don't see why I should pay any costs of an accident that was someone else's fault. On the other hand, as a sometime cyclist I feel it should be recognized that the car is the lethal ingredient in this situation. If the boy had crashed into another cyclist, I suppose the cost of the accident would be relatively low in both human and cash terms. It's the use of the motor car in general that causes the risk of death and the risk of expensive repairs, so arguably motorists as a class should bear such costs even if the specific motorist is not at fault.

Books 2007

2007-12-31T10:38:00.000+01:00

I don't read as much these days as I used to, but in 2007 I read at least 42 books for the first time, and reread at least 47 books.

Books read for the first time included three autobiographies (Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Fry, C.S. Forester), fifteen novels by Elizabeth Peters, five by Terry Pratchett, two by Poul Anderson, two by Peter Tremayne, and further books by Rudyard Kipling, Michael Kurland, Alexander McCall Smith, Lindsey Davis, Thorne Smith, Christopher Anvil, Frank Muir, J.K. Rowling, L. Sprague de Camp, C.S. Forester, Margery Allingham, and Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner.

Reread books included eighteen by Terry Pratchett, three by Colin Kapp, three by Larry Niven, two by Douglas Adams, two by Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon, two by C.S. Forester, two by Elizabeth Peters, two by Clifford Simak, two by J.R.R. Tolkien, and further books by Jasper Fforde, S.M. Stirling, Michael Kurland, Randall Garrett, J.K. Rowling, Rick Cook, Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Jack Vance, and Keith Laumer.

Ballet Shoes?

2007-12-27T13:53:00.000+01:00

My mother's response to the recent TV version of Ballet Shoes, the 1936 book by Noel Streatfeild:

They'd crammed the whole book into less than 90 minutes and so the opening events, although reasonably authentic, were whizzed through bewilderingly quickly. From then on it got silly. For some reason they hadn't seen fit to engage a double cast of the 3 heroines, so we saw them arriving one by one as orphan babies and the next minute they're strapping teenagers, attending for the first time the theatrical academy which, in the book, was when they were small children. A ballet class was briefly shown, with a load of girls in ridiculous net skirts jumping up and down in the most unballetic fashion. The youngest heroine, Posy, who goes on to be a famous ballerina (ergo the book's title) had obviously never had a ballet lesson in her life and in this drama school there wasn't a single boy to be seen. I lasted till a non-heroine was giving a professional audition, with her teacher saying proudly in the background that she was the most talented girl in the school, and there she was singing excruciatingly and staggering about en pointe like a lame heron. I switched off and went to bed. Incidentally the comedienne Victoria Wood played the girls' nanny, rather well, but they'd given her an enveloping grey wig and one reviewer, who'd seen a preview, commented that she looked like Worzel Gummidge.

Teddy Muhammad

2007-12-06T21:01:00.000+01:00

As you probably know, an English teacher was recently arrested and imprisoned in the Sudan for allowing her schoolchildren to name a teddy bear Muhammad (it was the children's choice). Some Sudanese protesters called for her execution.

This sort of thing illustrates a simple fact that all travellers should bear in mind: some countries are relatively safe to live in and some are not. Considering the dismal history of the Sudan ever since independence, and how things are there now, why would any sane person decide to go and live there?

If you go and sit in a lion's cage, it may be horrific when you get eaten by the lion, but it shouldn't be surprising.

In this case the lady was allowed to escape without being eaten by the lion. She was lucky. Some reckless travellers have worse experiences.

Imagine

2007-12-06T09:44:00.000+01:00

John Lennon's song Imagine seems to have lasting popularity, and I heard it lovingly performed by someone else on Spanish television just recently. It has a nice tune. But, considering the lyrics, its popularity has always puzzled me.

He imagined a world without religions, without countries, and without possessions, and invited us to admire it. This is a highly revolutionary manifesto that I'd expect virtually everyone in the world to disagree with in one respect or another; and yet large numbers of people seem attracted by it. Are they actually listening to the words, I wonder?

Myself, I'd welcome a world without religions, but it obviously isn't going to happen any time soon. A world without countries is vaguely attractive in principle, though perhaps unworkable in practice. A world without possessions doesn't strike me as attractive even in principle; I'm a libertarian, not a communist.

Amazon's best music of the decade

2007-11-27T09:15:00.000+01:00

Amazon in the USA is offering its own choice of the best music of the decade so far: a top ten in each of 18 categories. This comes to fewer than 180 records, because some records are listed in more than one category.

I see that I own four of its chosen records:

Charlie Haden's Nocturne (jazz): excellent
Orchestra Baobab's Specialist in all styles (international): not bad, but I think their old albums are better
Bebel Gilberto's Tanto tempo (international, Latin, and dance): overrated, but a few pleasant tracks
Enya's A day without rain (new age): mediocre, but a few pleasant tracks

A place in the sun

2007-10-18T14:35:00.000+02:00

Today I drove the short distance to Sitges to look for birthday presents for my wife. As I often do, I parked at the far end of Sitges by the Terramar Hotel, and walked the full length of the promenade into town, to get some exercise and some sun.

It's a lovely day in mid-October: under the blue sky the waves wash gently over the golden sands, the palm branches move only slightly in the breeze, and the beaches are dotted here and there with little clusters of sunbathers — the summer crowds are no longer with us. All is bathed in sun and the shade temperature is 23°C. An idyllic scene. A few people are swimming; on a beach near the church, some people are playing volleyball.

Sadly, winter is almost upon us, and we can't really expect this temperature again until May; but there are fine days even in winter, albeit normally somewhat cooler. It's not a bad place to live.

Old boy

2007-09-08T09:14:00.001+02:00

I recently started a separate blog for ex-pupils of Stouts Hill School, which I attended between the ages of 9 and 13. Probably of interest only if you were there, or if you have a general interest in boarding schools.

HDR photography

2007-08-21T07:39:00.000+02:00

I feel a bit silly because I've had Adobe's Creative Suite 2 for more than two years, but I've only just discovered the HDR capabilities built into Photoshop CS2.

Most digital photos that we see use three bytes to store each pixel: one byte each for Red, Green, Blue. This is known as 8-bit colour because each colour is represented by 8 bits (one byte).

Many digital cameras and scanners are now capable of providing 16-bit colour: two bytes per colour, or six bytes per pixel.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) consists of 32-bit colour: four bytes per colour, twelve bytes per pixel. Furthermore, the four bytes are used to store a floating-point number, which means that an unlimited range of light intensities can be represented.

This is a nice idea, but cameras and scanners don't yet produce HDR, nor can monitors or printers display it adequately. However, human ingenuity has found ways to make use of it nevertheless.

An HDR image can be created by taking multiple exposures of the same scene using a range of different shutter speeds; Photoshop CS2 (or various other programs) can combine the different exposures into one HDR image.

Photoshop CS2 (or various other programs) can then take this HDR image and reduce it down to a normal 8-bit or 16-bit image, suitable for display or printing, using a clever algorithm to adjust the lighting optimally in each part of the image. This can produce pleasing and sometimes rather strange and uncanny results. To see examples, go to Flickr and search for "HDR". I suggest you then click Most interesting.

Taking multiple exposures is rather a nuisance: you need a good tripod, and if anything moves in the scene you will get blurring or ghosting. Fortunately, the clever algorithm used for HDR can also be applied (with somewhat inferior but still useful results) to a normal 16-bit image. In Photoshop CS2, just convert the image from 16-bit to 32-bit, and then convert it back to 16-bit again using the Local Adaptation option. You'll probably need to display the histogram and make some manual adjustment to get a good result.

Here's an example of a 14-bit scanned negative with Local Adaptation, which (as I understand it) tries to give all parts of the photo a similar level of brightness. I added 15% contrast afterwards to give a more natural effect.

Here, for comparison, is the scanned negative without modification:

You might think you could achieve the same effect just by fiddling with the brightness, contrast, etc., but I tried and I couldn't.

Living with Calvin

2007-08-16T15:41:00.000+02:00

Living with our six-year-old son Marc (the same age as Calvin of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strips) gives me a better appreciation of the realism underlying Watterson's art.

Our boy is not American, he doesn't go around with a stuffed tiger, and he's not prejudiced against girls. Nevertheless, the similarity to Calvin is occasionally striking, especially at mealtimes, when he's inclined to go off into flights of fantasy and comedy routines — anything rather than eat his food.

Reading Calvin and Hobbes is a good preparation for parenthood. Though you have to wait some years for your baby to grow into the role.

Microsoft Office

2007-08-15T10:53:00.000+02:00

Last week I received Microsoft Office Standard 2007 from Amazon UK, and installed Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I didn't install Outlook because I don't plan to use it: I'm happy with Mozilla Thunderbird.

I have little or no personal use for Excel or PowerPoint, but Excel is needed for work and PowerPoint may be occasionally handy, if only as a viewer for incoming files.

So far I've used Word 2007 a bit and it seems OK. The user interface has changed but it's not too hard to get used to. I'll be gradually migrating my OpenOffice Writer files to Word.

Although I haven't installed Outlook, Microsoft keeps pressing me to install Outlook updates. How can a company be so successful, so rich, and so stupid?

OpenOffice

2007-08-01T23:07:00.000+02:00

I don't have Microsoft Office on my current computer, and I've been using the free OpenOffice suite in its place. I don't use it heavily, but I maintain a number of small files using mainly OpenOffice Writer (the equivalent of MS Word). Until now, it's seemed to work well enough, though it's not 100% compatible with MS Word.

Today I was adding to one of these files, which consists of a multi-column table, when I suddenly realized that the last column was missing. I haven't deleted that column; it's just inexplicably disappeared.

I'm deeply shocked. A program that can lightly throw my data away isn't a program I can trust in future. I'll have to migrate my OpenOffice files to some other program and write it out of my future plans. What a nuisance. Especially as I strongly dislike Microsoft.

Cramp

2007-07-18T09:01:00.000+02:00

I've been suffering occasional painful leg cramps for years, and in more recent times I've often been disturbed in the night by less painful but annoying foot cramps. Finally, four days ago, I thought of reading Wikipedia on the subject of cramp, and found that cramp can be caused by a variety of things, one of them being not enough salt.

This was interesting, because I know that an excess of salt is harmful, and so for many years I've avoided adding salt to food. What I didn't know was that a salt deficiency can also be harmful.

Wikipedia tells me that the recommended daily intake of salt is less than a teaspoonful. So, for the last four nights I've been taking a small amount of salt dissolved in water before going to bed. So far, it seems to work: I haven't had any more cramps. Magic.

Logitech

2007-05-25T19:10:00.000+02:00

In July I bought a cordless keyboard and mouse from Logitech. Not long afterwards, some of the letters on the keytops started fading out, and by now a number of the keys are completely blank. I can manage, but it's rather annoying, so I finally called Logitech in Madrid to complain about it.

I was rather surprised to encounter a nice young lady who, without any argument, promised to send me a replacement keyboard (and mouse). Of course it would have been better if the original keyboard had been faultless, but customer support like this seems worth mentioning.

Flickr

2007-05-12T16:49:00.000+02:00

This past week I joined the photo-sharing site Flickr and began uploading a small selection of my photos to it. The site offers good facilities for organizing, displaying, and sharing photos. So far I'm rather impressed.

In search of the perfect playlist

2007-05-07T22:30:00.000+02:00

Here's my current idea for the perfect iTunes playlist.

Make a playlist of my 200 least recently played tracks.
Make another playlist of my 200 least often played tracks, excluding those played in the last two weeks.
Make a third playlist consisting of the above two playlists added together. This is the one I actually use.

The big over easy

2006-07-30T12:00:00.000+02:00

Finish reading Jasper Fforde's The big over easy (2005). Although I liked his Thursday Next novels, I took a while to get around to this one, because a detective story in which Jack Spratt and Mary Mary of the Nursery Crime Department (Reading Police) investigate the mysterious death of Humpty Dumpty sounds too silly for words. Amazingly, Jasper has pulled it off again, managing to make an amusing and engaging novel with some likeable characters out of the most unpromising material. You have to read this to believe it. I still prefer Thursday Next, though.

The consent of the governed

2006-05-25T12:00:00.000+02:00

Since the vote for the independence of Montenegro, I've seen several comments on the Web pointing out the hypocrisy of western Europeans and north Americans in happily accepting independence for Montenegro while reacting with shock and horror to any suggestion of regions seceding from their own countries.

This criticism seems entirely deserved to me. I see no reason why any region of any country that votes for independence shouldn't get it. Government should be by the consent of the governed. If the Basques or the Catalans decide they don't want to be part of Spain; if the Scots, the Welsh, or the Northern Irish decide they don't want to be part of Britain; then why should they be? I wonder why so many people in the world think they have a right to govern other people against their will.

Far from the madding crowd

2006-03-29T12:00:00.000+02:00

Recently I was reading what seemed a fairly routine article in The Economist about the very low birth rate in Germany, when the final paragraph caught my attention:

“As humans withdraw, wildlife is returning, notably near the eastern border. The lynx can be found again. The Lausitz, part of Saxony, is now home to two packs of wolves. Some even expect bears to come back one day. Their reappearance might be the ultimate sign that Germans really are a dying breed.”

It would be great if the low German birth rate could spread to all other countries. Then we could look forward in the end to a sensible world population much lower than it is now, in which mankind could live in harmony with itself and with nature, on a greener and more pleasant planet. I'm not exactly a tree-hugger, but I see no sense and no benefit in the vast number of people now overcrowding the Earth. We all just get on each other's nerves, creating traffic jams and pollution and noise and garbage, and pushing up the price of land and accommodation.

The horse that champed no more

2006-03-26T12:00:00.000+02:00

I looked on the Web for the text of the poem The Listeners, published by Walter de la Mare in 1912. Walter de la Mare was an Englishman who lived and died in England; his poem was written in good English. However, curiously, there are various versions of it on the Web evidently typed in by Americans who have seen fit to correct his spelling: ‘Traveller’ becomes ‘Traveler’ and ‘champed’ becomes ‘chomped’. The verb ‘to champ’ is a perfectly good English word that has been in use since the 16th century; but too many people have their own concept of the English language and won't use a dictionary to check.

Airport uninformation

2006-03-08T12:00:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I drove to Barcelona airport to pick up my mother, who's visiting for a week. Her flight was due in at 21:25 but arrived at 00:15. She was told the delay was due to a strike by French air traffic controllers. Those people seem to be permanently dissatisfied with their jobs. I wish whoever employs them would put them out of their misery—either by doing what they ask, or by firing them (as in the USA in 1981).

But my main complaint is about the inadequacy of airport information. At 21:25, when the plane was due to land, it still hadn't taken off from Heathrow; but Barcelona airport wasn't aware of any delay. Later on, it announced a series of delays, apparently calculated arbitrarily on the basis that the plane hadn't arrived yet, therefore there must be some delay. We are in the 21st century: the airport ought to know where each plane is at any time. To know that the plane hasn't taken off yet, it doesn't even need to be in touch with the plane; it just needs to be in touch with the other airport, which really isn't difficult.

High-resolution DVD

2006-02-27T12:00:00.000+01:00

I've been reading about the Blu-Ray and HD DVD discs that will start coming out this year, and the high-definition films that will be appearing on them, at a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels. You can get computer screens now that will accommodate that resolution, but they're expensive. I suppose prices will come down as more and more film fans feel the need to buy them. I rarely watch films, but I'll be glad to take advantage of the cheaper large screens and the higher storage capacity of the new discs.

The punishment from heaven

2006-02-24T12:00:00.000+01:00

BBC news:

“London's mayor has been suspended from office on full pay for four weeks for comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard.”

A four-week paid holiday as a punishment? Oh, punish me, please...

Perfect colour on screen

2006-02-13T12:00:00.000+01:00

Today I acquired an Eye-One Display 2 from GretagMacbeth: a little gadget that looks like a computer mouse but is in fact a kind of light meter, which I can use to generate an ICC colour profile of my computer's monitor. This enables other programs to adjust their colour output for the deficiencies of the monitor, thus displaying colours fairly accurately. If you edit colour images at all, it's useful to know that you're editing the real colours in the file, and not whatever distorted version your monitor happens to show.

Mozilla Thunderbird

2006-02-11T12:00:00.000+01:00

I've installed Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail program, in place of Eudora. Thunderbird imported my Eudora settings and messages automatically, and it seems to work. The main problem I find with it is that there's no proper help file, just a few tips here and there on the Web. So, if I want to find out how to do something, there's no single place where I can go and look.

Too easily offended

2006-02-04T12:00:00.000+01:00

There's an amazing fuss going on about a few quite mild cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. If a newspaper in a small Muslim country had published similar cartoons about Jesus Christ, they would simply have been ignored. The fact that some Muslims apparently lack the maturity to ignore such things is to their own discredit.

easyCruise

2006-02-03T12:00:00.000+01:00

I read that Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the easyJet guy, has now set up easyCruise, offering low-priced cruises in the Mediterranean in summer and in the Caribbean in winter. Quite a nice idea, except that it seems to be set up for young singles raving it up in discos ashore every night—and this wasn't my lifestyle even when I was young and single. On the other hand, the formal dinners and professional entertainers on conventional cruises aren't really designed for me either.

Al Stewart biography

2005-12-31T13:00:00.000+01:00

While we were in Madrid I managed to read Neville Judd's biography of Al Stewart, which arrived from Amazon not long ago. Judd isn't a brilliant writer, but he had Al Stewart's cooperation and access to his family, friends, and associates, and I think he's made a good job of the book, which even has a useful-looking index. A pity about the rather silly-looking late-1960s cover photo; the man doesn't photograph well, but I think some better photograph could have been found, perhaps from his peak period of around 1977.

I'm certainly not Al Stewart's greatest fan, but I have most of his albums and I've been listening to his music for about 35 years, so it's interesting to find out more about his private and professional lives, and more background information about the songs than I knew already.

Night train to Madrid

2005-12-31T12:00:00.000+01:00

After Christmas we spent four days in Madrid visiting Ana's friends and brother, who lives in Madrid and has just become a father for the first time.

We travelled to Madrid and back by the night train, in a sleeper carriage, which I've never tried before and don't plan to try ever again. We found ourselves trying to sleep in an ordinary railway compartment which had six rather narrow bunk beds (three on each side) in place of the usual seats. There wasn't enough headroom to sit up in bed, and the only bedding provided per bed was a sheet, a rather small blanket, and a tiny pillow. The bed was probably full of house mites as it gave me an allergic reaction.

We were travelling with Ana's sister's family, so we had the compartment to ourselves, but it was rather crowded with four adults and three children, and none of us slept well; the children seemed to survive the experience best.

We'd have been much more comfortable travelling by day, seated, in the normal way.

In praise of iTunes

2005-09-11T21:37:00.000+02:00

I suppose there are various programs that could do it, but I chose to use iTunes, and I find it more wonderful than I ever expected to have all my favourite music on tap and playable in random order at the press of a button.

Currently I have more than 1500 tracks in my iTunes library, and they're quite carefully selected: in most cases I don't include whole albums but weed out the tracks I'm not so keen on. If a track comes up that I'm just not in the mood for at the time, I can easily skip to another one, but I don't need to do it very often.

I've gone off the whole idea of playing music an album at a time in the old-fashioned way. I prefer my own private radio station, which gives me constant variety but never plays a duff track. It sounds great. I haven't enjoyed music so much for a long time.

Floods and tornadoes

2005-09-08T16:45:00.000+02:00

Yesterday afternoon we had a bout of heavy rain. It didn't cause us any trouble. But in nearby Sitges there was serious flooding; in some streets, parked cars were swept away and piled on top of each other. Underground garages and car parks were flooded, plus the estate agency in which Ana works, although it's not underground.

This sort of thing has happened to Sitges more than once before in the years I've been here. It seems exceptionally vulnerable to flooding and I wonder why nothing seems to have been done to correct that vulnerability.

The area was also visited by a number of tornadoes, which did some damage to buildings and vehicles, though we didn't see anything of them. Aircraft were damaged at Barcelona Airport.

Buy your sword here

2005-08-14T07:56:00.000+02:00

My brother-in-law Juan Carlos is a mediævalist in his spare time. He makes his own chain mail; and yesterday he showed me a brochure from Albion Swords, a company that makes swords designed to look and function like authentic period swords.

I was quite impressed. Before looking at the photos, I never fully appreciated what a terrible weapon a sword can be. It's limited by very short range, of course, but within that range it's a killer.

He told me that Americans can buy such things without restriction, but within Europe it's not that easy. He has his eye on one of the blunted sparring swords, designed to handle like a real sword but not to kill quite so easily. Apparently these can be bought without problems.

iTunes tip

2005-07-24T12:40:00.000+02:00

Although I still don't have an iPod, I use the free iTunes program quite a lot to play music while I work. But I've been a bit troubled by its apparent tendency to favour certain songs over others. I realize this is probably just the luck of the draw, but I'd prefer to avoid it, and now I can.

I found a tip somewhere on the Web that seems so obvious once it's pointed out. Just set up a smart playlist that excludes any songs played recently. I chose to exclude any songs played in the last month.

London bombers on video

2005-07-13T09:17:00.000+02:00

I read that the police reckon they've identified the London bombers as young men born in England to Pakistani families.

I don't think it makes much difference whether this was an attack by foreign enemies or by British enemy sympathizers. What interests me more is that the four bombers were apparently recorded on video as they assembled at King's Cross. I think this will happen more and more in the future: we'll be constantly watched and recorded everywhere, so that whenever any criminal incident occurs, police can just rewind the tape to see exactly what happened.

Initially the surveillance is mostly of urban public places and commercial premises, but already some security-conscious people are starting to monitor their own homes, and this will become routine in time. In the end I suppose even wild areas of countryside will be monitored somehow, perhaps by satellites.

It's believed that at least three of the bombers blew themselves up along with their victims — which seems remarkably unnecessary. All they had to do was to leave the explosives on a short fuse and jump out at a station as the doors were closing. Either they were very stupid, or they valued their own lives no more than they valued other people's.

London under attack

2005-07-08T13:09:00.000+02:00

So far only the perpetrators seem to know the reasoning behind the London bombings yesterday. But the main candidate explanation so far seems to be that this was intended as revenge for the war in Iraq.

If so, among the expressions of shock and accusations of barbarism, it might be well to reflect that various supposedly civilized countries have been guilty of such barbarism at times, as a matter of official policy. The indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians in the course of a conflict isn't nice; arguably it is indeed immoral and uncivilized. But, in the Second World War (for instance), the Germans did it when they bombed British cities; the British and Americans did it when they bombed German cities; and the Americans did it most memorably when they atom-bombed Japanese cities.

If Saddam Hussein had been able to mount an air strike on London, it would have counted as a normal act of war by modern standards. When a non-governmental organization such as Al Qaeda bombs cities, it's doing exactly the same thing but on a lower budget. An objective observer would condemn all such behaviour no matter who does it.

When the British government decided to go to war in Iraq, it exposed both its soldiers and its civilians to possible retaliation by the enemy. It hardly ever happens in war that all the casualties are suffered by the other side.

The most guilty person in Iraq was and is Saddam Hussein, a mass murderer and warmonger. It would have been a good result if the Americans could have eliminated him and perhaps some of his accomplices without harming anyone else and without setting foot in Iraq. Perhaps in future they'll be capable of such operations. They should have enough motivation to consider it: the Iraq operation has been a horrible mess, killing lots of innocent people, leaving the country in chaos, and spending vast amounts of money; and Saddam Hussein still sits in comfortable captivity while all this goes on.

Worlds apart

2005-06-28T19:15:00.000+02:00

I've just been rereading Worlds apart by Richard Cowper, a delightful book that sadly seems to have been out of print since it was first published in 1974. I managed to get hold of a second-hand copy in 2002, having read a library copy many years before.

It tells the story of George Herbert Cringe, "parent, breadwinner, and Junior Science teacher at Bagshot Road Comprehensive School", who cherishes two fantasies in his miserable life: one is relatively modest, realistic, and achievable; the other is totally fantastic but very charming. Both fantasies unexpectedly come true for him, though only rather briefly.

The book paints a vivid picture of how a certain type of downtrodden Englishman lived in the late twentieth century, and an equally vivid picture of life on the remarkable and wonderful planet of Chnas — which is a figment of George's imagination, but refuses to stay that way.

In a sense, this is a minor book; but it's a great minor book. I come out of it with much sympathy for poor George and a wistful regret that I'll see no more of Chnas and the Chnassians.

I also feel much sympathy for Richard Cowper, who wrote this lovely book and probably earned next to nothing from it.

The salmon of doubt

2005-06-18T15:15:00.000+02:00

I've rather belatedly got around to buying and reading The salmon of doubt (2002), an assortment of writings found on Douglas Adams's computer after his unfortunately early death in 2001. There are eleven chapters of an unfinished Dirk Gently novel and a considerable collection of short non-fiction articles on various subjects.

For anyone who likes Adams it's well worth reading. The extra fragments of Dirk Gently's life are sometimes funny, while the non-fiction articles are pleasantly readable and tell you more about Adams than you can get from his fiction.

I'm glad to have the book. But it's a pity he's dead. He wasn't very prolific, as authors go, but he was a memorable character and a nice guy. And only a couple of years older than me.

The world mostly thinks that his best work was The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. He thought his best work was Last chance to see, a non-fiction book about endangered species. I think his best work was Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency.

EU budget blues

2005-06-18T06:30:00.000+02:00

As a Spanish taxpayer, I have no personal interest in preserving the "British rebate", but I think the British government is right in principle to refuse to give it up until EU budget contributions are calculated using a fairer system.

I'm surprised that the German government doesn't agree with this: it seems to be the biggest net contributor, so it would have the most to gain from a fairer system.

Chirac's hypocritical posturings merely confirm that he's a cretin who represents France at its worst.

All subsidies are foolish and wasteful, and the Common Agricultural Policy in particular should have been terminated a long time ago. Any countries that want to subsidize their own farmers (or any other industry) should pay the cost themselves.

Drug bust in Bali

2005-06-10T09:54:00.000+02:00

Recently a young Australian woman (Schapelle Corby) entered Bali with marijuana in her luggage and was sentenced to 20 years in jail. She said it was planted there without her knowledge. Maybe, maybe not. Whether she's innocent or guilty isn't really the point as far as I'm concerned. Consider instead:

Even if her story isn't true, it could have been. Would you want to get 20 years in an Indonesian jail because someone planted stuff in your luggage?
A 20-year jail sentence is way over the top for an amateurish attempt to smuggle marijuana (and other drug smugglers have got death sentences!). I'm not a marijuana user, but as far as I know the stuff's no more harmful than alcohol or tobacco.

Seems to me it's quite rational to avoid taking holidays in places like Indonesia because of this kind of story. Sure, it probably won't happen to you; but if it does happen to you, you'll regret it powerfully.

Speaking as a libertarian, I don't believe that buying, selling, or using drugs should be illegal in any case. It's your life: what you do with it should be up to you. It should be illegal to force people to take addictive drugs, and it should be illegal to give them to children. That's all.

As The Economist has repeatedly pointed out, criminalizing the drugs trade has been a disaster, just as criminalizing alcohol was a disaster when it was tried in the USA. It just becomes a tremendous boost for organized crime.

Bye-bye Norton Antivirus

2005-06-09T11:06:00.000+02:00

When I bought a new computer last year it came with Symantec's Norton Antivirus, which I've continued to use since then. However, as it's now coming up for renewal, and as reviews suggest that I could do better, I decided to try the ZoneAlarm Security Suite, which CNET is quite enthusiastic about.

So far ZoneAlarm seems to be working fine, and I suppose I'll pay for it when the 15-day free trial runs out.

As with Norton Antivirus, it offers the (recommended) option of scanning files whenever they're run or opened, but this seems excessive to me and I always turn it off. I scan incoming e-mail and every now and then I scan the whole hard disk. That should be enough, and so far it has been enough.

ZoneAlarm's junk mail filter works only with Outlook or Outlook Express, but I use Eudora and it has its own junk mail filter, so that's OK.

The crucifix fetish

2005-06-07T13:34:00.000+02:00

Not long ago I attended a wedding, in a nice little white-painted church on a wooded hilltop. The sun shone from a clear sky, and far below, sailing boats moved slowly over the blue sea. A perfect day for a wedding, and all went well.

Inside, the church was cosy, but as I looked around I saw one thing that didn't seem right for the occasion. Here we were celebrating a happy event, and all around the walls were paintings and carvings of someone being tortured to death.

Doesn't it seem odd to you that Christians are so obsessed with The Crucifixion that they need to remind themselves (and the rest of us) of it constantly? There was nothing unusual about it in that time and place: many other people must have died in the same way.

If Jesus returned today, wouldn't he be disconcerted that his modern-day followers remain fixated on the manner of his execution? "Hey, folks, there was nothing special about it, really. Why don't you focus on the positive things I did and said during life? Why surround yourselves with images of pain and death?"

Fortunately I don't often have occasion to go into a church. When I do, I must say that the decoration strikes me as bizarre. What would you think if you went into someone's house and found it all clean and neat but decorated with paintings of people dying in pain?

The computer that won't wake up

2005-06-01T10:23:00.000+02:00

Recently I've been having trouble with my computer's on button. I started having to press it about six times to get a reaction. This increased to more than twenty times.

The computer is in warranty. I called Dell, and yesterday someone came to fix it. He replaced the power supply unit. All seems well now.

So, just in case it happens to you: it's the power supply.

Plan B for the EU Constitution

2005-05-30T11:24:00.000+02:00

Although I'm not keen on the EU Constitution in its present form, I agree that the EU should have a constitution.

The next step should be to recognize that every paragraph added to the Constitution makes more people fail to read it, fail to understand it, or fail to agree with it.

Therefore, whoever is responsible for the document in future should look at every paragraph in it and ask, "Is this paragraph vital for the future of the EU?" If not, take it out.

The resulting minimal document can then be resubmitted to the people of Europe with more hope of success.

It's perhaps unlikely that any conceivable Constitution would be approved by every EU country. Therefore, it's necessary to plan ahead and stipulate how to proceed with a Constitution without unanimous agreement. The obvious method is to say in advance that, if a large majority of Europeans approve the Constitution, any dissenting countries will be required to accept it or leave the EU.

If this seems too drastic, perhaps dissenting countries could be offered some kind of associate membership of the EU. But this status would be awkward to define, and would presumably have to be defined in the Constitution itself (an unwelcome complication).

The French say no

2005-05-29T23:06:00.000+02:00

It seems the French have, as forecast, rejected the EU Constitution; and I'm rather pleased about that, for several reasons.

A constitution of more than 300 pages full of messy compromises never deserved to succeed. Give us something clear and concise next time.
The EU strategy was to create this unappealing document and then demand that we vote for it or face some unspecified disaster. "There is no Plan B." There should have been a Plan B. Now the idiots who failed to prepare a Plan B will have to create one anyway.
It was never likely that all countries would vote Yes. In particular, Britain would probably vote No. However, speaking as a Brit, I'm pleased that fans of the Constitution (there are some) will now have to blame the French for its demise.
It's particularly amusing that the French voted against it because it seems too British, while the British will probably vote against it (if given the chance) because it seems too French. So much for compromise.

As for me: when Spain voted, I wasn't offered the opportunity to take part. I don't know whether this was a mistake or a matter of policy.

No taxation without representation

2005-05-25T16:59:00.000+02:00

I'm British, but I didn't vote in the recent British general election, for the very good reason that I'm not allowed to. Anyone who lives outside the UK for more than 15 years loses the right to vote, and I've been away for 19 years.

I live in Spain, but I'm not Spanish, so I don't have a vote in Spanish national elections either. I do, in fact, have a right to vote in local and European elections here, but these are not very important, and they sometimes forget to send me an invitation even though I have a right to take part.

If there were no taxation without representation, I'd be delighted. Like any sane person, I'd gladly trade my vote for a tax exemption. One person's vote makes no difference at all to any election result: I'm sure you're more likely to be struck by lightning on your way to vote than you are to have any effect on the composition of the government. However, to pay no taxes would have a very significant and tangible effect on my financial situation.

The dismayed invaders

2005-05-25T16:32:00.000+02:00

The BBC reports from the Gaza Strip:

The settlers are appalled by the possibility that their homes may be taken over by Palestinian militants who have been attacking Gush Katif for years. To prevent that happening, the Israelis may demolish all their property before they leave.

"You don't want to destroy what you built," says Debbie Rosen, who raised her six children in Gush Katif. "It's home with all the memories that you grew up with... It's my kids, it's my garden, my flowers that I just planted. It's home."

"On the other hand, it is too hard to think that they are going to give it to terrorists. Terrorists that killed my best friends — and they are going to celebrate in my home. It's too hard."

Well, I'm sorry, Mrs Rosen, but if you try to steal another people's country, they will try to kill you and your friends. Two wrongs don't make a right, and terrorism is always wrong; but people always defend their own country violently, it's a fact of life. You knew in advance what you were getting into; if you don't like it, you shouldn't have decided to live in a place where you definitely weren't welcome.

I myself live far from where I was born, but my situation is entirely different from Mrs Rosen's. I live at peace with the Spanish people and obey their laws. I even pay their taxes, albeit reluctantly. I don't have British troops here protecting me, bulldozing Spanish homes, and killing Spanish men, women, and children. If I needed that sort of protection to live here, I would never have come here.

Starting point

2005-05-23T22:18:00.000+02:00

Today I registered with Blogger in order to produce this thing, which I call an interactive diary ('blog' is an ugly word). Whatever it's called, it seems worth trying.

In order to fill it up with something quickly, I'll start copying in chunks of my existing non-interactive Web diary (below).

A small step for a Web site

2005-05-22T08:00:00.000+02:00

This weekend I've been moving my Web site from Burlee's servers to Interland's. Burlee was taken over by Interland two years ago, so this should have been a simple internal matter, but my Web site and e-mail have been down for 48 hours during the transition.

Last night I finally put a query on Interland's support site, and someone has now fixed the problem. But I still don't know what the problem was. I'm on Interland's cheapest hosting plan, and the company doesn't seem to think I'm paying enough to deserve explanations.

Els castellers

2005-05-21T23:02:00.000+02:00

This evening we wandered over to the town square for a children's party and a castles exhibition from two teams from Vilanova (a nearby larger town).

This is a Catalan team sport in which people try to get as high as possible by climbing onto each other's shoulders. It seems to be non-competitive, and quite often a display is given by only one team. Unfortunately we forgot to take a camera on this occasion.

It provides a role for most family members: the heaviest at the bottom, the lightest at the top. Typically, the first level is taken by older men, the second by younger men, the third by boys or girls in their late teens, and subsequent levels by boys or girls in their early teens or pre-teens.

Often the display is accompanied by the shrilling of the gralla, a traditional Catalan wind instrument.

A simple display features just one person at each level: an older man supporting a younger man supporting a teenage girl supporting a pre-teenage girl (who stands up straight and waves at the crowd before descending).

The most ambitious we saw today featured three people at most levels and reached a total of six levels, a height attained rather precariously by a girl perhaps eight or nine years old, who waved very briefly from a crouching position before descending.

The whole team is quite numerous and not all of them form part of the castle: some just cluster around closely to act as human cushions in case the castle collapses.

World at War (2)

2005-05-15T12:00:00.000+02:00

This morning I managed to finish my first game of Gary Grigsby's World at War, having started yesterday.

Playing as the Western Allies at Easy level, I scored a marginal defeat: when the game ended at the end of 1946, Germany was on the verge of complete defeat (mostly overrun by the Soviet Union) but Japan was still flourishing in the Far East, because I never really figured out how to attack it. My only achievements were to liberate North Africa, France, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Although the game is simpler and quicker than most games set in this period, it's still not as quick nor as easy to play as I'd like. The manual runs to 115 pages. As with most computer games, you can see only a small portion of the map at a time, and you can't see the disposition of forces at a glance: you have to mouse over a particular area to see in detail what units are in that area. The units are shown only as pictures, not all of which are easy to distinguish (a heavy fleet is shown as a ship just slightly bigger than a light fleet).

But my main problem with this game is that I don't really enjoy playing it, and this is a subjective matter that may defy analysis. I think the Second World War probably just doesn't suit me as a subject: for game purposes, I prefer the wars of earlier centuries.

It's Blair again

2005-05-06T09:00:00.000+02:00

The British general election has come and gone. As I like none of the parties, I'm reasonably content to see that one of them has lost 47 seats and the others have failed to gain power. Not a good result, but perhaps the least bad result available.