Seems the fairground is now a London fixture. Walking back across Waterloo Bridge at the end of our last holiday break of the summer, we saw that the London Eye has been joined by a sort of “London Needle” that provides a high-level thrill-ride on flying swing-seats over London. We didn’t have time to try it out but it looks exciting!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqFrRTE83Gg]Filed under: Travel | Tagged: London | Comments Off on London Thrill Ride
These were the ones over the Dales – on the way into Wensleydale, in fact – rather than anything to do with computing.
[youtube http://youtu.be/YkiN6RonRdU]
Filed under: Travel | Comments Off on Clouds
Have you ever attended an open source conference? In my article for ComputerWorldUK today, I briefly review four good choices that you can attend over the next few months.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Events, Travel | Comments Off on Call For Participation
Portland Submarine tour, a set on Flickr.
One enjoyable perk of being a speaker at OSCON and a new author at O’Reilly Media was an invitation to their “Friends” reception at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. It featured a tour of the decommissioned US Navy submarine USS Blueback, which you can see here.
Filed under: Links, Travel | Tagged: OSCON, Portland | 1 Comment »
What is a Higgs Boson? I think this animation from PHD Comics is brilliant.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/41038445]If you like this, support the people who made it (I didn’t!) by buying their latest book, “Adventures in Thesisland: The Fifth Piled Higher and Deeper Comic Strip Collection” on Amazon.Com
Filed under: Science | Tagged: CERN, Higgs Boson | Comments Off on Bosonics
The Google Plus team turned on a new feature today while it was being announced at Google IO in San Francisco. Google+ Events is a new feature that integrates Google+, Calendar, image slideshows and Hangouts to create a flexible invitation system for event organisers of all sizes. It looks like an interesting and exciting capability.
Except for one thing. It allows anyone to invite anyone to anything. That means anyone in your circles, or who you can identify on Google+, can be added to your invitation and they will receive it via e-mail, on their calendar and on their Google+ timeline. While there are ways to change the default settings to stop the e-mails and the calendar updates, the postings to the timeline are mandatory.
Sounds great, right? Not if you’re someone like Linus Torvalds. From the moment the capability was turned on, well-known figures on Google+ were deluged with event invitations from people trying out the new capability. With no way to control which invitations are actually displayed on the timeline, users like Torvalds found the Event invitations became the dominant form of communication on Google+. His solution? Quit Google+.
It seems that this is the way you get technical support from Google. I was also affected, and after using the new feature to contact Google+ boss Vic Gundotra for comment got a reply saying “I’m already working on it. Team is all over this.” That was reinforced a few moments later by a message from a press spokesman saying “We’re aware of the issue, and we hope to roll out a fix very shortly. We appreciate all the feedback we’re receiving from users and we’re listening closely.” I know they are looking at this unexpected problem behind the scenes; there’s still no fix, though.
This has happened before. When Google+ was introduced, many people discovered it became impossibly noisy if you added a high-volume user like Robert Scoble to a circle. Eventually Google added a “volume control” to fix that, but the service was significantly the worse for the fact no-one had considered the high-volume corner-cases in advance. Sadly, it seems the lesson wasn’t learned.
It’s great that Google are trying new ideas and creating these new services, and I’m looking forward to using this Events capability when they have it fixed. But I do wonder how many times they will make this mistake of forgetting about the high-volume users – the very people who make Google+ initially attractive to new users.
Update: It seems Wil Wheaton and Robert Scoble were both stung by this badly as well. And it seems Vic Gundotra has apologised to Wheaton and got it fixed.
Filed under: Zeitgeist | Tagged: Google | 1 Comment »
This story from Antarctica, where I fully anticipate every visitor is well educated on the need for biological isolation of the place they are visiting, leaves me bemused and struggling to understand. Read it and weep.
To summarise for those who’d prefer to avoid both: Two religious nutjobs, claiming to be from a “gospel group”, were caught intentionally spreading seeds of an invasive non-native species while visiting Antarctica. Having entered places like Australia and New Zealand myself and seen the strict, clearly explained controls over biological contamination, this wilful and calculated act in an even more sensitive environment is inexcusable.
That would be bad enough, but it seems it’s happened before. The previous nutjob to attempt this eco-vandalism even attempted to justify her sociopathy:
A similar act nine years ago on the same island was described by an American evangelist, Mary Craig. ”We scattered and released the seeds of the harvest of souls to be saved”, she wrote on her website. ”We understood that we were planting seeds that would sprout as others came to water and plant the church of Christ.”
Despite having a pretty good understanding of Christianity, I really struggle to understand the behaviour here. How can someone who’s clearly well-educated and wealthy enough to take one of these trips have such a weak grasp of the difference between metaphor and reality that they engage in an action so profoundly and clearly wrong? It’s even wrong within their own worldview; Craig herself says:
“It is said that Antarctica changes you; it is so pristine. Hopefully, people won’t ruin it while they take its beauty into their souls.”
Is there a (polite) name for the inability to distinguish metaphor and reality? One friend suggested that the right word is “psychosis“, but I ‘m not sure that’s correct. I think the people involved here are fully-functioning in all areas of their lives and neither generally delusional nor dangerously detached from general reality. The condition on display is more subtle and at the same time potentially more dangerous. Another friend suggested “fundamentalist”, and while that is likely to be a decent label for the people involved in both incidents, I don’t think the term fits perfectly. The terms “fundamentalist” and “creationist” (also suggested) describe other expressions of the same thought patterns.
This does dovetail into a book I’ve recently read and enjoyed enough to recommend – Marcus Borg‘s “Speaking Christian” [Amazon UK | US]. He suggests that the problem is with an overall interpretive framework – he calls it “Heaven & Hell Christianity” – which provides a strong tool for interpreting metaphor and leads to cognitive failures by encouraging “force-fitting with the framework” rather than subjecting an action to wider critical analysis. I think that’s what’s happening here, and I fear it can’t be prevented all the time that dominant interpretive framework is so strongly reinforced by Christian teachers.
Filed under: Spirituality | Tagged: Antarctica, Christianity | 5 Comments »
Shane was very moved by the aftermath of the big earthquake in Japan last year. He decided practical action was needed, and with others founded the OpenRelief project. They quickly created a prototype autonomous robotic data-gathering drone design and have just started experiments with it. I had the chance to interview him today – hope you found the video informative.
Update: I’ve written more in ComputerWorldUK, take a look.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, MinkCast, Zeitgeist | Tagged: Japan, OpenRelief | Comments Off on Introducing OpenRelief
It’s not just Heathrow – Eurostar is a mess too. I had a meeting in Paris on Monday and was transiting London so took Eurostar instead of flying from Southampton. The outbound journey was no trouble at all, with barely a glimpse at my passport by the French border staff. But the return journey today was another matter.
I queued for the entire hour prior to the train departure, and boarded the train at the time it was supposed to depart (it was 12 minutes late, presumably because of delayed passengers). There was absolutely no reason for the queue, except for the passport check by the UK Border Force.
Their process it slow at the best of times – every passport has to be scanned and electronically checked, presumably the visual check all other European border staff use isn’t enough. But it was especially slow for two reasons. First, there weren’t enough staff on duty – only one of the three cubicles I could see was occupied. Second, the extra checks on people with non-EU passports were done in a way that blocked the lines of EU-passport-holders. The French border guy told me this had all started 4 or 5 days ago – what’s the betting staff from Eurostar have been drafted in to Heathrow to paper over the cracks?
Of course, the reason this is happening is because of political grandstanding by the UK government. None of them has to put up with any of this inconvenience as they have their own rich-and-special lanes, so they are happy to leave the public to be hugely inconvenienced while their political infighting over staffing levels, accountability and “being tough on immigration” plays out.
You may have thought it was just Heathrow that was messed up, but Eurostar in Paris and Brussels is just as bad. I took this video while I was waiting today to help you see the mess Theresa May is overseeing:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lvxRv1DMB0]By the way, if you’re a TV editor looking for content, go right ahead and use this, it’s CC-BY licensed so you don’t need to ask me.
Filed under: Travel | 3 Comments »
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