Year: 2004

… of unhatched chicks. Counting the cost the morning after, Emma Brockes in the Grauniad. [via David Dolan at this Working Life].

Well, if we will insist on counting as our only measure of value, what do we expect ?

It’s quite a struggle to avoid religion, party politics and war in a public blog in today’s climate – but they do cloud points being made, despite their undoubted relevance to life, the universe and everything. I lost it with posters on the MoQ discussion board recently when the number of people starting from positions of “mystical faith in fairy stories” seemed to exceed the rest.

I do find the level of (overt / apparent / declared) Christian faith in the US quite terrifying from this side of the pond. I suspected it was just part of the game the democrats had to play to get air time, whereas the republicans actually seem to believe this crap. This visual joke below [ From GLWebb (Link Removed by request), also via Rivets] seems to support that view. Many a true word.

Alex has a link here to similar humour vs religion angle from The Register.

The real things here. [via Rivets]

[On a more serious note, notice these three F40’s amongst the 27 Ferraris, Maseratis and Lambourghinis desroyed in this Dutch car showroom fire.]

So totally conspiracy theory is this, that it is actually quite creative. [via Rivets]. Problem is these “mad” sequences of events (real or perceived) do look like conspiracy, whereas the cock-up is the fact that “they” (ie we) insist on using simple rationale to explain and justify or actions and decisions.

Plea from Matt Whyndham to remember to optimise a whole system, recognising its architecture, not just one component, such as your DB back-end. [Link from Interconnected]

The system IS the project as Matt puts it.

From Piers Young at Monkey Magic, Reading The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon.

Actually several good spots from Piers. Like this set of “shit ideas” from gapingvoid, also via Monkey Magic.

And this “relationship” is the message is the medium take on McLuhan, from this Harvard Business School paper – a variation on the earlier “What’s lurve got to do with it ?“.

A post from Seb, with good links and a discussion thread on the need to split weblog topics.

I was travelling outside the UK yesterday when I heard of John Peel’s death. Part of the furniture of British culture for my lifetime I was shocked to find a collegue who had never heard of him.

He will live on in those early Radio 1 Sounds of the 70’s broadcasts and recorded sessions, and the bands and tunes he introduced me to. Also in that even earlier image of him as a Liverpool Echo journalist who just happened to be in Dallas in 1963, captured on film in the footage of the Jack Ruby shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, right through to the regular habit of the past decade of lying in bed on a Saturday morning to catch Radio 4 Home Truths. Made it acceptable too, to have a passion for football, which included loyal support of one team, Liverpool, but equally transferrable to the team of his adopted Suffolk home, Ipswich. A true gent, one of very few.

Correction – actually JP was at one of the Lee Harvey Oswald press conferences in the same police station a day or so before the shooting by Jack Ruby, and appears in the background of some film / photos. He wasn’t actually there at the time time of the shooting. Memory playing tricks.

Caught an item on breakfast TV worth noting, “Lost Worlds: What have we lost and Where did it go?”, book by Michael Bywater. About tracing cultural change through listing the things we miss that are no more – a bit like John Major’s look back at things like old ladies cycling to mass on misty Sunday mornings, warm beer and cricket on the village green. In danger of being pure nostalgia, but the serious point being that the things we miss (however distorted by rose tinted spectacles and hindsight) must have had some significance, if we notice their passing. So far so good.

The bombshell was the author’s response to which single item did he see the passing of as most significant. “Judgement”, he said. “We’re no longer allowed to make value judgements about what is right or wrong, good or bad”, he clarified.

There we have it. Objectivity has all but destroyed quality, maybe even, dare I say, morality. It’s politically incorrect to be caught expressing value judgements, not corroborated by “scientific” evidence (or religious doctrine – same thing.)

Also from Long story, Short Pier. Don’t know anything about the references, but it rings so true, doesn’t it.

[Quote]
Favorite line from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, thus far [according to Long Story, Short Pier]:

?Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people,? said Wellington.

Doesn?t hurt, I suppose, that it?s Stephen Fry?s Wellington I?m seeing in my head.
[Unquote]

Don’t know about Sephen Fry, but “I am that man” – the (hopeful) magician that is.