Symbolic Forest

And on the subject of procrastination, I’ve finally got around to making sure this site is running on the latest version of WordPress. Hurrah! I’m normally slightly reluctant to upgrade, on the grounds that the upgrade procedure is very long and detailed, and involves deleting most of the site to reinstall the new one. So you have to take the site down,^* and if anything goes wrong it might stay down. I know that doesn’t really matter for a frivolous site like this, but it makes me wary.

I’m thinking of introducing Guest Contributions to the site, partly to make sure I can keep to one post per day whilst still having time off occasionally. So, if you’d like to write maybe one blog post per month that would fit in with the style of this place, get in touch.

In other news, I’ve discovered^** that classic 80s popular-science TV series The Secret Life Of Machines can now be found on Google Video. Written and presented by engineer and cartoonist Tim Hunkin, it really was a very good show that inspired an awful lot of modern “let’s see if we can make one in our garden shed” science telly. I’ve you’ve never heard of it before, go and find it.

* The latest press release from the Symbolic Forest Militant Invective Laboratories says: “Stop taking your site down – take it out for a drink instead! CaitlinMIL tests prove that 87% of .php files prefer to be taken to a quiet bar for a drink, rather than be taken offline in the ordinary way. Most .php files prefer to drink rum and coke, although plain .html will generally choose gin and tonic as its tipple.”

** Thanks to boingboing

Update, August 27^th 2020: Who remembers Google Video? The Secret Life Of Machines, nowadays, has all been put onto YouTube by Mr Hunkin, with links from his website, here

Keyword noise: blogging, The Secret Life Of Machines, Tim Hunkin, upgrade, Wordpress.

I was intrigued by yesterday’s news story on Sense About Science, the public information charity who has produced a leaflet aimed specifically about celebrities, in the hope of persuading them not to talk rubbish in public. They’re distributing it around celebrity-infested places, but if you’re not a celebrity yourself you can download it from their website.

It’s an admirable attempt by an admirable charity, to reach people who could potentially have a lot of influence but who probably don’t read Bad Science regularly. I can’t help thinking that they would have had more effect distributing it to celebrities’ agents, rather than the celebrities themselves. Moreover, I think that a lot of media organisations overestimate the level of influence that celebrities in particular (and the media in general) have on your average person.

Furthermore, are any celebrities who read the leaflet going to believe it? Apart from being recognisable, they’re generally fairly average people. Not particularly clever, not particularly smart, maybe more charismatic than the average,^* but on the whole fairly ordinary at heart.^** They’re not scientists, and they’re not going to realise how little they know about science, because, as a general rule, the less you know on a subject, the less you realise just how little you know. The less you know about scientific ideas, the worse things you’re likely to say along the lines of “natural things are chemical-free”, or “green plants are healthy because chlorophyll will oxygenate your blood”,^*** and the less likely you are to believe the truth on the topic.

* this is starting to sound like an RPG statsfest, I know

** despite what some of them may think.

*** the first is a common trope; the second is a Gillian McKeith piece of wrongness.

Keyword noise: celebrities, charity, Gillian McKeith, pseudoscience, science, Sense About Science.

A follow-up’s due on this post from June: “JCB Maniac Demolishes House”. Said JCB maniac has now been sent down for six years. It turns out, too, that he was previously responsible for driving someone off the road (using a tractor – there’s nothing like overkill) and threatening people with a pickaxe. If you ask me, he has issues.

Keyword noise: Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex, JCB, Robert Taylor.

Today’s big news item: the National Wildlife Crime Unit has been launched. Based in North Berwick, a small village on the coast east of Edinburgh, it’s the first specialist police unit devoted solely to wildlife crime. I can’t wait until the police dramas start…

“What’s on the menu today, Sarge?”

“It’s a bad one today, chief. A dead goose in Clarence Gardens. All the signs are, a couple of squirrels ganged up on it, then got away up the Haxby Road. There’s something a bit suspicious about it, though, can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“Don’t trust the signs, Sarge. Remember the Pocklington case – all the signs pointed to sheep, but it turned out to be wolves all along. Round up a few of the local squirrels, just for show, but bring some rats down to the station too – they’ll know what’s going on. What’s next?”

“Three badgers held up an off-license in Netherthong, got away with the contents of the till and a few cartons of fags.”

“I don’t care about that, let the local cops sort it. Anything else?”

“One other thing, chief: a stoat holding three gerbils and a priest hostage in Wemyss Bay. Wants a week’s supply of rabbits, immunity from prosecution, a fast car and a ticket for the ferry.”

“Sarge, it’s a hard job we’ve got, and if there’s one thing these years on the force have taught me… Sarge? Are you listening? Stop daydreaming, man!”

“Sir!”

“If there’s one thing these years have taught me, Sarge, it’s never trust a stoat. They’ll weasel their way out of anything. Let’s get to work!”

Keyword noise: crime, drama, police, wildlife.

…is one of my favourite cosy, romantic songs. It’s by The Clientele, and it goes something like:

The taxi lights were in your eyes
So warm again, St Mary’s spires
The carnival was over in the rain
And on and on, through Vincent St
The evening hanging like a dream
I touched your faith^*
And saw the night again

When I lived in Edinburgh, I thought it was a song about the city. After all, the Clientele did record one song almost definitely set in Edinburgh,^** and it has both a St Mary’s Cathedral (with distinctive spires)^*** and a Saint Vincent St. Glasgow, though, has both too.

And in your arms, I watch the stars
Ascend, and sleep
The loneliness away for a while
Your fingers wide and locked in mine
I kiss your face, I kiss your eyes
Until they turn to me and softly smile

Edinburgh or Glasgow, I wish I was up in Scotland this weekend. I’m sure I will be again soon.

* Until writing this post, I thought it said “I touched your face”. Listening very carefully just now, for the first time I realised it’s actually “faith”.

** A B-side called “6am, Morningside”

*** Actually, it has two St Mary’s Cathedrals, just to confuse people. One of them, the Episcopalian one, has three distinctive spires that are a major city landmark, especially when you look down the length of Princes St. The Catholic one, on the other hand, is tucked away inconspicuously behind a shopping centre.

Keyword noise: Edinburgh, Glasgow, indie, lyrics, Morningside, music, romantic, Scotland, The Clientele.

Well, good morning. It’s the end of the week, and I’m glad. One more day to get through, though.

Things I haven’t managed to write this week: more Books I Haven’t Read; a Book I’ve Finally Finished Reading; any Photos Of The Week. I was even tempted, at one point, to do the first Symbolic Forest Restaurant Review,^* but, er, didn’t.

Also-ran news stories of the week: another stupid driver, whose excuse for speeding was that there was little risk of hitting a goat at the time. Unluckily, his bleatings^** were ignored by the police. Not quite as stupid, though, as the man from Thorne who decided to destroy a speed camera with Thermite, but drove his van right past the camera as he did so. Oops.

A few days ago, I was chatting to Taloollah on the phone, and she said she’d read my review of the little local gig we went to last week. Apparently, it read as if I didn’t enjoy myself, feeling much older than the rest of the crowd, and not really liking the music. Which is a bit unfair of me to put across, because I did have a good night out. I’m probably much grumpier in style, writing here, than I am in real life; it’s just that I find writing cynically to be easier, and often more fun too. In real life I can be annoyingly enthusiastic and bouncy about some things – puppyish, even – but I rarely express that here, because I find that sort of mood a lot harder to describe effectively. I take the easy option, and write like a curmudgeon instead.

Oh, well, I’m going to try to be cheerful today anyway. Time to get myself to the office and get some work done, and then time to switch off, forget about the office, and relax. See you next week.

* of a rather nice Indian on Haxby Road. It needed a bigger indoor pond.

** The Plain People Of The Internet: Groan!

Keyword noise: bad driving, books, Craig Moore, driving, food, grumpy, literature, reading, restaurant, Thermite, Yorkshire.

News story of the week: a chap has been arrested in the West Midlands for driving whilst blind.^* It wasn’t just that his sight was a bit fuzzy – to quote the police officer who stopped him:

I asked him if he could see me. He removed the dark-coloured sunglasses he was wearing and I could clearly see he was blind as he had no eyes.

To be fair, he did have a passenger telling him where to go. As he was on the wrong side of the road when stopped, though, the passenger can’t have been doing a particularly good job. On the other hand, as the driver was also partially deaf, maybe he just couldn’t hear what was going on.

* link via The Register.

Keyword noise: blindness, disability, driving.

Today’s top news story: Ian Gibson, a Norwich MP and former scientist has announced that a cluster of child diabetes cases in Norfolk may be caused by inbreeding. Cue, of course, all the usual jokes about Norfolk stereotypes: country yokels marrying their sister, and so on. Dr Gibson, interviewed on Today,^* seemed rather affronted by any suggestion that he was being insulting. His response: he was using “inbreeding” in a purely technical manner which us laughing yokels don’t understand. I see.

Much as Dr Gibson has been criticised for “not understanding genetics” and so on, he may well have a point. As I’ve mentioned before, people don’t move around very much. In years gone by, people moved around even less; migration is hard work. It’s not too surprising, in other words, to find that illnesses with a strong genetic factor may have strong regional variations too.^** It might be simplistic to say “diabetes may be regionally concentrated because of inbreeding,” because there are lots of other causative factors involved. You can’t pretend, though, that regional variations are unlikely to exist.

* only a few minutes ago! Damn, this blog can be up-to-the-minute occasionally.

** My psychotic aunt – clinically diagnosed, I’m not just being rude about her – is from Norfolk too. I wonder if anyone has looked to see if there are similar clusters of mental illnesses with a strong hereditary component.

Keyword noise: diabetes, genetics, hereditary illness, Ian Gibson, illness, inbreeding, migration, Norfolk.

Well, I’m glad I’m not going anywhere today. Not just in a plane, but anywhere that might involve driving past an airport, because no doubt the traffic around them will be awful too.

Today demonstrates the horror of 24-hour news. I’m just as bad as everyone else, refreshing the BBC News site every five minutes to get the latest on the Terror Alert. The news reports, meanwhile, are filled with hyperbolic phrases such as “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”.^* No it isn’t. People have imagined it. To quote The Princess Bride, “I do not think you know what that word means.”

The government seems to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, when it comes to statements. “We have arrested everyone involved, apart from the ones we haven’t”. “This is nothing to do with race, but we’re talking to Community Leaders about it.” How do you become a Community Leader, anyway? Are there elections?

No doubt bottled liquids will be confiscated on planes for the next few months, before everything goes back to normal, and the next terrorist attack comes along with something completely different. The ones that get through are never the ones you expect, after all.

* To be fair to the media, it was a police spokesman who came up with that exact phrase.

Keyword noise: airport, security, false alarms, flying, terrorism, travel.

Sorry to be whining so much about work, but that’s all my mind’s been full of this week. The pressure is so draining, my mind feels numb and empty by the time I get home, and I have nothing else to write about. My mind feels numb most of the daytime too; it’s at the stage where I just sit down at my desk and blank for a couple of minutes until I remember where I am and what the next task is.

At least I’m off away again this weekend, so I should be able to put work out of my mind for a couple of days. I’m going to Caption, a convention for alternative, small-press and zine-style comics. It’s not a scene I know much about, but I am hoping to be educated.

This week I have mostly been obsessed by: Last.fm,^* the website that tells you what bands people are listening to. I’ve been refreshing it regularly just to check that it is correctly identifying which tracks I’m playing – it does sometimes not seem to recognise some obscure stuff.^** I’ll post the link to my profile here, when my profile has more on it. Hopefully it will lead to finding more music I don’t know much about. I am hoping to be educated.

I’ve also been listening over and over to the first album by The Pipettes, a 60s girl-band in modern indie clothing. Review to come when I have time enough to write it.

That’s all for this week, then; one more day of stress stress stress, then at 5pm I can zoom off down to Oxfordshire. And then I’ll come back on Monday all refreshed, hopefully there will be news of the cat, and I’ll be all ready for another week of stress to grind me down. Just maybe, too, I’ll have been educated.

* also known as Audioscrobbler, which always makes me think of The Box of Delights by John Masefield, in which “scrobbling” means “kidnapping”.

** Usually things from Fluxblog, whose mp3s also confuse my mp3 playing software – it can’t read the track length properly, and usually tells me that the file is thousands of hours long.

Keyword noise: Caption, comics, holiday, indie, overwork, Oxford, pressure, small press, stress, zines.