... about programming, growing up in the 1970's and 80's, games, science fiction, working in a charity book shop, films, spending too much time watching television, living in Basildon and Essex, and whatever else emerges from my fevered imagination. If you're reading this, it's your fault you clicked on the link: I am not responsible for your actions.
Today, I've been up to Birbeck to see the lecture by the affable Anders Sandberg regarding existential risks to the human race i.e. what's going to be the most likely thing to make us go the way of the dinosaurs, and how can we prevent it.
Anders works for the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and the presentation was a very wide ranging talk on risk assessment for the human race.
In particular, he showed that most of the risks in the past have been self inflicted, or intrinsic, notably disease, war and totalitarian regimes. The best way of combating the last two is good, transparent and accountable government. Easy.
He also showed that when measuring the occurrence of disasters, such as tsunamis and earthquakes, there's something he called a "Large, Long Tail". If you look at a graph of the incidences of, say, meteorite impacts, there's a large number of small ones, and a small number of large ones, but that this "tailing off" of numbers is a lot larger and longer that people suppose.
He made a comment on one of his Oxford colleagues, a quantum physicist, who believes so strongly in parallel worlds that he always buys a lottery ticket because, even if he loses in this universe, in another he's won!
Overall, it was a fine and entertaining lecture on the fifth floor again, with a lively Q&A afterwards.
Perseus is forced out of retirement to rescue his father, Zeus, after he has been imprisoned by Hades, Lord of the Underworld, and Ares, God of War.
Although a good pizza film, it is inferior to the last one. Neeson and Fiennes seem to enjoy themselves as brothers Zeus and Hades (good casting getting Ralph Fiennes to play the morose God of the Dead), and the special effects are up to scratch, especially the Cyclops's and the amazing labyrinth. However, the film seems to be shorter and have less effort put in to it.
I did a morning shift at the shop and Anne had left John in charge, so much giggling ensued. I'd no sooner took my coat off than he was pointing out to me that last week his section, Literature, pulled in more money that Michelle's Fiction! "You're in trouble already", I said. "It's only by £3.50", he pointed out, to which I rejoinered, "About the price of a Booker Prize winner!" (the agreement he had with Michelle was to give her some Booker Prize winners that were popular, noteably Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel).
While in discussion with a fellow student, he pointed me in the direction of something called "Emmet". It's a plug-in for, well in my case Notepad++ (at college) and Brackets (at home). What it does is, at the touch of a shortcut key, transform something like this:
It's a nice pub! The group was upstairs and is unusual in that the games played have not yet been published.
Fiefdoms
This is the first of two games by Adam Taylor.
It's a little board game with dice dictating which row and column you can place either workers or armies (the little man figures borrowed from Carcassonne, called "meeples"). Armies can attack one-another and the game ends when someone runs out of armies to place. You win by the points you've scored placing your pieces on certain tiles. A nice little game and easy to play.
Orbiter
Another game from Adam, this was a card game with robots. The robot cards are arranged in a grid, with a planet card in the centre. An indicator circles the planet controlled by a 4-sided dice:
It was a really fast game, over in a few minutes, and fun to play. The point scoring was a little complicated, however (maybe a problem if it's aimed at kids), and one of the players couldn't make a move on his first turn, which seemed a little dissonant. These were minor quibbles, though, and it has real promise. Adam runs a small web site which publishes games for download.
The Last Council
After a small break, and a shuffle around, I played The Last Council designed by J.P. Treen.
It's based on a post-apocalyptic local council meeting (a certain amount of black humour is involved) with the players battling dwindling resources as well as each other.
J.P. said that each time he'd had it play tested he'd had to alter it and it is quite a complex game. It's quite a good game when you get going, but play was cut short by discussions about the game itself. Shame.
A while ago, there was a TV series called Life, starring Damien Lewis, who has gone on to do Homeland with more success. It was about a man who'd been jailed for a multiple murder and released on DNA evidence. In a similar vein is Rectify from the Sundance Channel.
Now, I'd never even heard of the Sundance Channel, but this looks quite good. A slow burner.
Amongst the post this morning was the house insurance details, renewed every year. Normally, I pay it no heed, but I just happened to glance at the booklet enclosed with it that details changes to the policy.
...the exclusion relating to War has been amended to add mutiny and military rising...
I haven't been to any of the Skills Matter meetings for a while, not since last year at least, so I thought I'd go along to a user group meeting that I'd not attended before. I've used Python a bit for automating tasks, but nothing too heavy duty.
The first talk was just a warm up. Paul Brian tried to talk about... well, nothing in particular, really. "Relying on frameworks too much is a bad thing", "Learn to be better coders"... Platitudes, essentially. He threw in some comparisons with the advent of the printing press, which was poorly thought out and seemed meaningless. It put me in mind of an old expression: better to stay silent and let people think you are a fool that open your mouth and remove all doubt.
The next was a bit more entertaining. Kris Saxton talked about using the Salt framework to manage automation across multiple servers. He demonstrated simple tasks and, in particular, rollout of code automatically across multiple servers. Nice.
I departed towards the end of his talk as I had a long way back home and it was a pretty full day, anyway, so I missed the talk by Emil Vaughn on Cython, an enhanced version of standard Python.
With no shift at the shop, and trying to take a break from college work, I went to see the new Tom Cruise movie, Oblivion, at the Empire on the Bas-Vegas Strip i.e. Festival Park.
After an alien invasion of Earth, and war, two people monitor and maintain drones in preparation for leaving the planet, but all is not as it seems.
Kind of a disaster aftermath movie, the special effects are very good and I especially liked the design, which was all minimalist: the "bubble" aircraft and the drones impressed, but the cool house in the clouds appealed the most. Cruise does a good enough job, but Morgan Freeman acts him off the set easily enough and it's the ladies, especially Andrea Riseborough as his partner (although Olga Kurylenko is pretty good as well), who really shine, as well as being good eye-candy.
The plot is serviceable enough, although a machine intelligence who can't do basic airport security seems a bit implausible, and the depiction of a devastated Earth sends the odd shiver. That's the thing I came away with: the coldness of the movie. From the minimalist architecture and design to the barren wastes of the planet. Worth seeing, though.
Sort-of a prequel to Alien, an expedition ship, The Prometheus, lands on a alien planet looking for the origins of life.
It's been so long since there was an Aliens film (I don't count the AVP films as they were crap), that just the existence of the film, and that it's Ridley Scott directing it, is enough to get my attention. It's all a bit grisly, as you'd expect, but it does have great special effects, with all the Giger touches, and a few answers as to who the big aliens were in the original film. You won't want to eat any calamari for a while, though.
There were drinks and dim-sum (nice) and it was generally urbane and hi-tech. One firm, Quick2Wire, had a set of small boards that they used to daisy-chain sensor boards together:
The board at the top, an interface board, is attached to a Raspberry Pi (very popular at the moment). Off this is a kind of "booster" board called a Port Extender, which also does some signal processing, then the next board (an A-D converter) has a light sensor. When you covered the sensor, the light bar on the interface board at the top decreased. The second extender at the bottom interfaces directly with another display, worked from the PC attached to the Pi. The advantage of using the Raspberry Pi, as the chap doing the demonstration told me, was that it could multi-thread these two tasks as it was running Linux.
Another display was from the Open University. This showed the contents of their My Digital Life course, which looks pretty cool.
Students are provided the hardware and download a version of MIT's Scratch, which I mentioned in a previous entry, to program. All-in-all, quite impressive.
I had a quick walk around and had a brief look at the other displays, but they were very much of a muchness. It was all a little bit mundane; middle class and domestic, I thought (more than a few projects were for energy saving). I had thought that the future would be a little grander than this. Maybe when the technology got smaller, the ideas did too?
As for whether these things will result in a resurgent U.K. economy, it's worth remembering that the bulk of these (all the above, for example) are made in China. Only Arduino boards are made elsewhere (Italy). Again, as so often in our history, we may have the ideas, but others will take them and build on them. In the past that was America, now it's the Far East.
I was heading back from Wales after visiting relatives and to get back to Bas-Vegas I travel down the A14/M11. Someone has put some graffiti on an old disused building which epitomised the news awaiting me when I landed:
I have often wondered when Mrs Thatcher would finally shuffle off and join her husband in that great golf club in the sky, assuming there is one and that's where she's gone. Although I'm not quite as acerbic as Pete Wylie, as an old socialist, I couldn't abide the woman. She tried to make this country live in the past, and that's always a mistake. The future may be a frightening and uncertain place, but you have to face it and either shape it or be prepared to be shaped by it.
There was a documentary by Adam Curtis about the subject called The Attic, part of the Living Dead series.
I quite like the bit at the end where she falls asleep half-way through one her own speeches.
As for her legacy, well I think we have a more self-centred, venal society. As Oscar Wilde once put it, we know "the price of everything and the value of nothing". Whether that would have happened anyway is debatable, and maybe she just happened to be in charge at the time, but she didn't do anything to prevent it. She divided this country, or reinforced the divisions that were already there, rather than trying to overcome them. The graph below, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies via The New Statesman website, shows inequality of incomes on year between 1979 and 2008.
As for her much vaunted popularity, you've got to remember that Churchill lost more elections than he won and was a terrible peacetime politician (one of the worst Chancellors of the Exchequer of the 20th Century). My grandmother, of that between-the-wars generation, said he was a war-monger (he was in charge of the Galippoli campaign, in which many men from my home town died). Tony Blair won three elections and look how he turned out.
Another thing that has occurred to me is that previously Prime Ministers and other politicians had looked upon their role as a duty that came with being one of an elite, either socially (with the Conservatives and Liberals) or intellectually (Labour). Mrs Thatcher was neither (a grocer's daughter with a Chemistry degree). She seemed to have one eye on her place in history, and this seems to have infected subsequent leaders, especially Tony Blair. This falls in with Churchill's view of history, that it is a history of Great Men (or Women), a simplistic, cardboard-cutout view. This is only one view of history and misses out, or minimises, the others which are just as valid if not more so. Plus when politicians do this they seem to forget why they are there: just run the damn country without screwing it up. That would be enough of an achievement.
Oh, go on then, Pete, if you MUST... (sorry for the language, but he's a scouser).
Coda: amidst all the comments from both right, left and middle is this fitting piece from Russell Brand, via Boing Boing, in the Guardian.
This is still series 9, so the odds have increased to 16 - 3 (just over 5 - 1) against me finding another one I haven't got. Not as good odds as the Grand National winner this year (66-1!). I also got some from series 8 as well the other day:
Many moons ago, I used to play Quake, one of the oldest FPS's. I wasn't particularly good at it, poor reflexes, but it was one of the first games which allowed "modding" (modifying). Mods are custom patches to the game which allow you to change it. Typically, these are extra maps to roam around in or "skins" allowing you to change the look of your character in the game, but there were some very clever mods, such as 'bots that created artifical opponents for you to play against, that were good enough to be included into the main game by the developers. I did one or two maps for Quake that were so-so before I gave up, as I'm prone to do.
Fast forward to today and I got a little message through Steam that there was a modding editor for Torchlight II available, called GUTS.
So if you've got the game and you fancy having a go, why not try to change it!
Open again on the Bank Holiday, I did a "full" double-shift (10:30AM - 3:30PM). I was upstairs to start with (yay!) and I hunted around for something different to play, or at least reliable. In doing so, I found one of those rare jewels of an album called "Son of Evil Reindeer", by The Reindeer Section, a kind of Scottish Indie supergroup formed from other bands around at the time as a kind of one-off. They did two albums, but this is the one I liked the best.
I also got to play some early Louis Armstrong. Obviously, I couldn't find film of any of the tracks, but I found this one which is rather good.
I ended the shift downstairs amongst the books and got engaged with two regulars who were talking about a debate one of them attended regarding socialism and the Labour Party. It was fascinating stuff, but the attendee said he felt that the debate had descended into a kind of "theological" discussion. He also told us of a debate he attended by C.L.R. James.
