A Soviet Poster A Day

http://sovietposter.blogspot.com/
I have a weakness for Soviet design, of almost all varieties, and this site of Alexander Zakharov's is awesome. The space posters are great, but the early constructivist stuff - like this work of genius - are my favourite.

A medical update

Realized today that I haven't really been keeping up the medical half of this journal recently, so y'all are due an update. In fact, the last post was in the middle of May, a hefty few months ago... so, let's see, what's happened since then?

Not much, really. I've been a bit hit-and-miss with the alendronic acid, but that seems okay. My colitis, however, does seem to be slowly gaining on me. After a very successful start with the 6MP, my blood tests over the last six months or so show a gradual increase in ESR (more inflammation, basically), to the point where Generic GP sent me a letter about it. As a result, GP consulted with Kindly Consultant, and I'm taking some very baby 'gastro-resistant' steroids for a bit. So we'll see what happens.

For myself, I just feel... well, pretty tired, basically. Very tired. I'm starting to get some stomach cramps again, too, and my poo is very runny and gaseous. For a while, it burned, too, like I'd spent the last year eating nothing but curry! So the prospects don't look so great right now. However, I take comfort from the fact that my stressful summer of weddings, etc., is now over, and I can relax a bit. It's cheering, too, to know  I'm being watched pretty closely by my NHS guardian angels.

Philosophic Friday

Here's a theory:

Technology is ultimately driven by anti-social tendencies.

I don't mean criminal tendencies - I just mean our reluctance to communicate with other human beings. Now, at a fundamental level, this is self-evidently true, because the inevitable alternative to using technology is to use more manpower (I use the term in a gender non-specific way, obviously). Ever since some guys sitting around a dusty river delta on the southern Mediterranean decided that what the skyline really needed was some really big triangles on it, the way to make things happen is either (a) use lots of people, or (b) invent some clever gizmo that means you need fewer people to do the job. If we were a species who genuinely and wholeheartedly revelled in each others' company, then why bother with technology? Every job would be a big party.


This tendency has become ever more obvious as time goes on. The Walkman, of couse, was perhaps the first technology which made the trend explicit, but it was going on for a long time before that. The invention of writing neatly circumvents all that tedious business of sitting around listening to old geezers sounding off about stuff (what overly-respectful anthropologists call the 'oral tradition'). Transport, in general, is devoted to getting you from where you are (where the people are dull) to where you want to go (where the people sound more interesting). Later on, the trend accelerates: the first web cam was invented because a bunch of geeks couldn't keep a coffee pot full - not in and of itself a technically demanding task, but one which required rather more communication than they were willing to partake in.


Now some might argue that certain technologies have enabled us to communicate over long distances - something which must surely be inherently social. I disagree. I would suggest that these technologies actually allow you to talk to people you already know but who are not within shouting distance, thus saving you from the terrible prospect of having to communicate and get along with strangers who happen to be within earshot. Thus you are mercifully spared the prospect of having to make new friends by being able to communicate with your few old ones wherever they may be. What's more, most of the so-called 'enabling technologies' that we're talking about here are ones which enable you to find and talk to people who share a similar view of life to yourself. That's great for making friends quickly; but it also requires considerably less social skill to talk to someone who basically agrees with you, than someone who doesn't. Someone once said, 'each generation is its own secret society'. Communication technologies seem to have the universal effect of exaggerating the barriers which set each group apart as different, simply by allowing us to indulge our anti-social tendency to ignore those with whom we might have differences.


I'm not saying technology is a universally bad thing. I just think we should be honest about our motivations.

Solar Decathlon hits Washington

Start:	Oct 12, '07
End:	Oct 20, '07

This looks really interesting - in October, the biannual Solar Decathlon competition hits Washington. From across the country - in fact, from across the world - teams of students will be converging on the city to erect houses - houses they have designed, and which run on entirely self-generated electricity. The 'solar' in the title implies that it's all electricity from the sun, but at least one of the entries in 2005 had a hydrogen fuel cell, so I dunno. Anyway, it looks utterly fascinating, and I wish it was coming to a city near me.

My li'l sister got married

My little sister got married at the weekend. Sorry Kev, but this is by far the best photo I have!

Resource: NASA measures up

I should say, this is one for the really hard-core geek - or design professional. I've long struggled to find a good resource with some figures for basic anthropometric data - average heights of people, grip strengths, etc. I finally stumbled on this a few weeks back: it's a NASA standard for man-machine interfaces, with a handy section of 'Human Capabilites'. Of course, it's strongly biased towards the sort of thing that might come in handy when designing spaceships, but it does have a lot of really useful stuff - plus a lot of random stuff about how bodies react to microgravity (they get bunged up noses, apparently - food should therefore be saltier. Remember that).


As a design tool, it has lots of flaws - essentially, it's based on young, fit American males, so using it to design, say, a playpen for toddlers would be a bit silly. Nonetheless, v interesting - in a dry, NASA-speak sort of way.

Black is the new Green (according to Google)

http://www.blackle.com/


It sounds like a wind-up - probably because the logic of it is so beguilingly simply and obvious. Some bright spark (or possibly some much more eco-friendly, less energy-consuming dim spark) at Google has pointed out that powering all those white pixels on Google's front end is more energy-intensive than leaving them all black. Hence, Blackle - Google's search, but in black. Individually, each screen won't save much... but there's an awful lot of people using Google. Cute.

BMW publishes 'The Secret Life of Cars'

Via dezeen:

BMW have just published a report entitled 'The Secret Life of Cars' (download the 3.3MB pdf
here). On one level, it's a long paean to BMW dressed up as research; and there are a few places where some juicy nugget of information has, one suspects, been deleted (I can spot at least one reference to a paragraph no longer there). But there's still some interesting stuff. I especially liked the guy describing how the seating arrangements in British cars varied according to class:


"My American friend sent me a description of where English couples sit in cars. It made me laugh because it's so true. It said with a working class couple the two men sit up front and the women behind. With a middle class couple one couple sit in the front with the man driving and the wife in the passenger seat. And if its an upper class couple the couples mix up so one man drives and the other man's wife sits in the front. Genius."

There are also some interesting observations about who we allow in front of us (small cars let other small cars in, women are more likely to let others in, etc) - although it seemed obvious to me that similar cars are more likely to be polite to each other. After all, the drivers have something in common already.


I do, however, harbour a secret suspicion that every driver quoted is a BMW driver.

Full emotional disclosure - in infomatic form.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/59770086/

One suspects that Hell might have no fury like a woman reduced to six symbols on a chart.

Like ships in the night (52º23'01''...)

http://platial.com/paiges/map/1535#hopeless_romantic_map
Ah, the romantic notions conjured forth... such sweet little messages!

Tour de France 2007 - Prologue

I had an unscheduled trip to London this weekend, where (as luck would have it) about a zillion other people had also decided to spend their time. Also, as luck would have it, it was the Tour de France. I suspect these two might have been related.

Anyway, I spent a considerable part of Saturday up a tree, with my camera, taking photos of the time trials which preceded the race proper. I'm afraid I got a little trigger-happy - I managed to take something like one hundred and fifty photos before the battery died. This is a selection of the best, from which you can infer the number of photos I shot which consisted entirely of some blurred pavement.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
I'm sure all you star-nuts (yeah I'm thinking of you, charl) will already be aware of this, but I only just found it. It's full of lovely images, and (if I read the jargon correctly), there's a little program which downloads a new one each day and makes it into your PC wallpaper.

A little bit of greetings-card philosophy

I've been rereading Andrew Smith's Moondust - an excellent book for anyone even vaguely interested in the Apollo moonlandings, by the way, when I accidentally misread the phrase " I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent beng unnecessairly less than that myself". I thought it said:

"I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent being unnecessarily less than myself"...

....and I would have gone on thinking that that was what it said, and nodding to myself at the profundity of it, if I hadn't checked the quote in order to post it here. Hah. Still, for some reason, the misquote chimes more deeply with me than the actual one.

Hello random people!

Over the last few months, I've noticed a distinct pick-up in the number of Multiply people who, despite being entirely unrelated (and generally being in some far-distant part of the world) have randomly found their way to my homepage. Hello you random people! Welcome!

Feel free to say hello back... I'm very curious as to how you ended up here.

(I've also noticed there must be a fair few non-Multiply people stopping by, too. Hello to you too! I'm sorry there's no way for you to leave comments - mind you, you're all probably related to me anyway so you can just jolly well use email, or pop over for a cup of tea)

Review: Happy Gilmore

I watched 'Happy Gilmore' at the weekend. It's a gentle comedy about a talentless but fixated hockey player who tries his hand at golf and turns out to be a genius - but stil treats it like an ice hockey match. It's perfectly watchable - Adam Sandler is, well, Adam Sandler, and the acting - what little there is of it - is perfectly passable. The script, similarly, is pretty much okay - par for the course (sorry) when it comes to this sort of comedy genre. Nothing wrong there, either. Sure, it's all a little lightweight, but hey, it's a lightweight movie.


And yet it was bad.

It took me a while to work out why. I mean, the performances are okay, the script is okay, the camera work seems fine - what else is there? And yet I came away unsatisfied. Only much later did I realize - this movie has been irretrievably mauled by its editor. The editing is not merely bad, it is execrable. People turn up in places with no explanation of how they got there, and no buildup to their arrival. The movie takes far too long to build to the showdown, which is then over all too quickly. Somewhere, I feel certain, there is enough footage on some cutting room floor to make good these shortcomings - but for some reason the editors decided to leave in unnecessarily long sequences of Granny Gilmore being terrorized in her old folks' home.


This was a new one on me. Whenever I've seen bad films before, it was because the acting was wooden, or the script dreadful (or the sets, or the continuity, or the effects...). For someone to have edited a film, retained a decent-sounding script, and yet have successfully avoided any dramatic tension or coherence, is not something I've come across before. It was an educational experience. Thanks to Happy Gilmore, I've discovered a whole different way in which a film can fail.

How to Soundproof an Apartment to Muffle Your Wife's Drumming

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/06/soundproofing
Um... that's what this article in Wired is about. V interesting. I'd never heard of Green Glue - sounds like cool stuff.

The future is going to be awfully expensive

I really need to start saving. There's not just the constant spiral of property prices in this stupid country - there's the upgrades on the kids' genetics, the kids' education (after all, the UK has the lowest social mobility of anywhere important, so I'll have to shell out for a good school for the little brats), plus any tricky drug treatments I may need in the future (the NHS does a good job, bless it, but it probably won't be able to afford my Alzheimers treatment by the time I get there).


And of course my death inoculation, which is going to need another mortgage.

Gecko-inspired tape sticks to Teflon

http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2007/06/19/gecko-inspired-tape-sticks-to-teflon
Worth it for the first comment alone. Pretty cool anyway.

Floaters

Have you ever had little floaty things move across your vision?

Matt, you really are a complete freak. What is this new medical weirdness?

 

 0

Oh yeah, I've always had these

 

 22

I had this happen to me once, just before my legs melted and I went bald overnight.

 

 2

This happened to me once, but I figured it was all that time staring at rats' asses.

 

 0

...no, not that sort of floater.

I've been having some trouble with my eyes today - feels like some sort of spasm, or clot, or something, which makes the world appear to move as if you're sitting on top of the washing machine during the spin cycle - most unpleasant and not a little alarming, especially when you're operating heavy machinery at the time. Anyway, I did a bit of research, and while I was bumbling around the internet I came across the following, unrelated bit of eye-wrongness trivia:

You may sometimes see small specks or clouds moving in your field of vision. They are called floaters. You can often see them when looking at a plain background, like a blank wall or blue sky. Floaters are actually tiny clumps of gel or cells inside the vitreous, the clear jelly-like fluid that fills the inside of your eye.

Floaters may look like specks, strands, webs or other shapes. Actually, what you are seeing are the shadows of floaters cast on the retina, the light-sensitive part of the eye.

Now, I know some people don't see them, but I know that most people in my family do, and I'd always assumed that most people did and the freaks were those who lacked them. But apparently not. Have you ever come across this? It appears that things can be done about them. Not sure if I consider it sufficient a problem to ask anyone to fix it - after all, I've lived with them for as long as I can remember and they seem harmless. To be honest, I've never regarded them as a problem - in fact, it can be kinda fun chasing these things around your eyeballs. I know, I need to get out more.

I also booked an appointment with the optician, before anyone asks.

Calton Consort Recordings

http://cc.konx.net/caltonconsort.html
Oooo! This is us! Recorded, from the back of the hall, via dubious means. And probably with attendant dubious sound quality, I have no idea. I don't dare listen, frankly.