Want to earn £100 [$160] for a few minutes work? Join the British police

How would you like to earn a quick £100 [$160]? You could spend it on a good night out with the boys.

It is easy if you are a British policeman [or woman]. Just arrange for a mate to call you from the station whilst you are off duty.  If they ask you a work related question you will immediately qualify for four hours overtime at the rate of time plus one third. The call only needs to last  a few minutes to earn you £100 in overtime payments.  Link

"The BBC's home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw says that police who take a "short phone call requiring a decision" while they are off duty can claim their hourly pay rate plus one third. The minimum pay rate is for four hours."  Link

Of course, when your mate fancies a few quid for a night out  you can return the favour and ring him from the station.

A nice little earner for the boys in blue. Apparently it is not only Members of Parliament who have been robbing us.

The police are Britain's last home of "Spanish Practices".  How long before a government gets the guts to tackle these uniformed scammers?

Trickle down economics

Weans are greeting over Apple iPad

Oh dear, there are lots of tearful faces over the new iPad. It doesn't do Flash, it doesn't multitask, it doesn't have a camera, it doesn't work miracles, and it won't fetch pizza or wipe their botties.

On the other hand, it is half the price that most people were forecasting, it starts fast and it runs fast, and it does so much more than a Kindle but only costs $10 more.  Also, it does spreadsheets [quite important to grown-ups].

I plan to get one and I think the whinny little kids who are complaining because it is not what they dreamt it should be  will suddenly be  silent when it sells like hot cakes.

Translation of the title [from Scots to Sassenach]  - Weans [children] are greeting [crying].

Is Obama America's Neville Chamberlain?

Neville Chamberlain was the British Prime Minister who tried to appease Hitler prior to the outbreak of World War II.  He became known as 'The Great Appeaser'.

After a meeting with Hitler he returned to Britain and said, 'My good friends, this is the second time there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Now I recommend you go home, and sleep quietly in your beds.'

Shortly afterwards he had to declare war on Germany.

He was a weak fool because he failed to realise that appeasement does not work with Nazis. The only thing they understand is a brick in a sock.

He was replaced as Prime Minister by Churchill, who was a firm believer in the brick in a sock approach.

Obama also looks weak and foolish because he has tried to appease the American right wing, the Republicans and wingnuts who regard his attempts at conciliation and consensus as an invitation to walk all over him.

He needs to forget about appeasing people who despise him. They are never going to like him unless he changes his politics and his skin colour. These people only understand the brick in a sock approach. He should ignore their howls and do what he needs to do. Niccolo Machiavelli had it right, 'It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.'

The lesson of Massachusetts is that his Neville Chamberlain approach to politics has failed to appease his enemies and succeeded in disappointing his supporters. They looked to him to close Guantanamo, end the CIA's secret prison and rendition policy, and restore civil liberties. They wanted people held to account for what they did during the Bush years. They wanted to replace a President who was  stupid and incompetent, but not with one who is weak and wants to be best mates with everybody.

He has done none of the things that attracted voters to him  Unless he changes he will go the same as as the other 'Great Appeaser'. History has shown that Americans are willing to accept idiots, incompetents and sociopaths as Presidents. What they not willing to do is re-elect a weak President.

A visit to the saltworks at Salins-Les-Bains

In 2009 I visited the historic salt works at Salins-Les-Bains in eastern France. The salt works have recently been added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites [UNESCO citation]. They are closely associated with another World Heritage site, the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans [Wikipedia article]. We did not visit Arc-et-Senans, this post is just about Salins-Les-Bains.

This is just a trip report. I am not going to go into any great detail about salt production or the long history of the site.

Salins-Les-Bains is a small and undistinguished French town. The salt works are the only reason a tourist would visit the town. We found it easy to find free parking near the salt works museum.

After a short wait for lunch to end we joined a party of about 40 people for a tour of the site. The tours are given in French, but we were given a well written four page handout in English. There are also lots of maps and models, so it is easy to work out most of what happened in the works.

Brine was pumped up from large salt deposits 246 metres below the town and the water was then evaporated in wood fired open baths.

The salt works were first mentioned in the eighth century and continued in operation until the mid twentieth century, so there is a range of technology on display. We started in some underground works with primitive pumps and then moved on to some more recent surface works. These mainly consisted of a series of very large open evaporation baths which were heated by wood.

The evaporation process was very wasteful of energy and by 1791 the works had just about deforested the area about the town. The solution was to build a new saltworks near the immense Chaux Forest.

Salt was very important for food preserving and was sometimes referred to as ‘white gold’ because of its value. Some idea of its value can be seen by the fact that they were willing to pipe the salt water from Salin-Les-Bains to the new Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans through a 21 kilometre long wooden pipeline. I find it astonishing that a wooden pipe of that length could be built and maintained.

Is it worth visiting Salins-Les-Bains? As Samuel Johnson said [of the Giant's-Causeway],  "Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see."

At least not yet and not just the one site.

The tour was well done and the museum interesting enough, but the main problem is that the industrial process of salt extraction is a very simple one. Brine is pumped to the surface and the salt extracted by evaporation. That is it.

I think Salins-Les-Bains is only worth visiting if you happen to be nearby and you have the time to visit both the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans [see image above on left] and Salins-Les-Bains [below]. The museum could be improved by more information on the importance of salt and its uses. It would also be interesting to see something on the forestry works that must have been needed to fuel the saltpans.

EU's Viviane Reding to protect our civil rights

"Reinforcing citizens' rights will be a top priority in the coming years, said Viviane Reding, the EU's commissioner-designate for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship...

The new portfolio will encompass policy areas such as the free movement of citizens, family law, penal law, consumer rights, EU communication policy, gender equality and anti-discrimination legislation.

Reding, who is vying for a third term as EU commissioner and will be promoted to vice-president if approved, gave a relaxed and assured performance before MEPs from the European Parliament's legal affairs, justice and home affairs and gender equality committees.

The new justice portfolio is the first of its kind in EU history and was created at the behest of European liberals to reflect the increased emphasis on citizens' rights in the 27-member bloc under the Lisbon Treaty.

Indeed, Reding, who is well regarded in Brussels after a dynamic spell as the EU's telecommunications commissioner, told MEPs she would waste no time in making her mark in the new job, vowing to "strengthen the privacy" and rights of EU citizens. "  Link

This is good news. Reding did an excellent job as the EU's Telecommunications Commissioner. She forced telecommunications to cut the costs of mobile phone calls; against the opposition of the UK's Labour government, who, as usual, was more intrested in protecting the profits of companies than the wallets of UK citizens.

I like the idea that this new portofolio has been created, and that it will be held by a senior figure such as Reding.

The UK's Labour government has spent the past twelve years turning Britain into a surveillance state. It has become obvious that we have to look to European institutions for the protection of our civil rights. For example, the European Court of Human Rights's rejection of the police misuse of the Section 44 stop and search powers.  Link

Celebrity Scanner - the new hit show

Since it emerged that the full body scanners now being used in airports can store and transmit images  I have been thinking about trying to break into TV with an idea for a new reality show.

I am going to call it 'Celebrity Scanner".

It would show the nude scans of prominent figures [e.g.  film and TV stars, female politicians, wives of prominent figures  etc].  As the scans are being broadcast a panel of smartarses would make cruel and witty remarks about the bodies displayed. Audiences would vote on who had the biggest bums, or the most cellulite.

Who has the fattest thighs, Sarah Brown or Harriet Harmon? Text Fatbum to 81400 to vote.

The fun would be enormous.

There should be plenty of  juicy material available.

This article from somebody who has seen the big screen images makes my mouth water -

"The images leave little to the imagination, exposing passengers' bodies in sufficient detail for screeners to count the change in our pockets and see beads of sweat on our backs—not to mention intimate, gender-specific details."

As soon as these scanners come into widespread use there will be a big black market in celebrity scans. It will be easy to Bit Torrent stuff or buy bootleg DVDs.

There might be a bit of resistance to the idea from celebrities, but I will argue that the public has the right to see these images. Why should drooling airport security guards and their customers have all the fun.

There is also scope for programmes on special themes.  'Guess who shaves' is in pre-production planning as I write.

Truth by Peter Temple

Truth by Peter Temple

Peter Temple is an Australian author whose ninth book has just been published in the UK. I have all of his books and have enjoyed most of them, particularly the four Jack Irish books about a Melbourne solicitor.

I had been looking forward to reading Truth, but now that I have, I am disappointed. This is not Temple at anywhere near his best.

The main character in ‘Truth’ is Stephen Villani, who is head of the Melbourne Homicide Squad. He is a most unsympathetic character, a bully who is hardly able to speak to his subordinates without verbally abusing them, or a member of the public without threatening them.  Do Melbourne policemen routinely threaten suspects with murder if they don't cooperate? Yet, Temple asks us to believe that his men love Villani.  In real life such a prize bastard would probably be ‘accidentally’ shot by his men during a raid.

Villani is not the only problem. I have read the book through and I have no idea who did what to who, and why. Who were the villains? Were they ever caught?  I do not know and I care even less. Usually I read a Temple book from cover to cover in one sitting. Truth was only too easy to put down. Temple can do much better than this.

I hope that this is the last book he writes with Villani as the protagonist. I would like to see a fifth book in the Jack Irish series, or a second book about Mac Faraday from ‘An Iron Rose’.

The good thing about ‘Truth’ is that it only cost me £7.78 from Amazon [Amazon cut the price between my placing the order and receiving the book], and I see that somebody else on Amazon is offering it for £4.48. That is about the amount you would pay for a remaindered hardback and perhaps indicates a lack of confidence on the part of the UK publishers.


If you are a Peter Temple fan I suggest you give ‘Truth’ a miss. If you have never read any of his books I can highly recommend any of the Jack Irish series. I have read and reread my copies.

Perhaps if I read 'Truth' a few more times I will be able to work out what was happening. Or, perhaps I will not bother.

The man who walked around the horses

The famous alternate history story  [download as pdf], based upon a real incident.

German Beers

A relative bought me 24 assorted bottles of  German beer for Xmas [as well as some very nice coffee and cheeses from Borough Market in London].  He ordered them over the internet from Beers of Europe in Kings Lynn.

We soon finished them off and I ordered another 24 bottles from the Beers of Europe web site.  Despite the really bad weather  they arrived very quickly.

I thought it would be the same beers, but almost all were new to me. I am looking forward to working my way through them.

The beers are not cheap, but they are no more expensive [even including delivery charges] than they would be if bought in a local pub.  However, you could not buy them in a local pub.  British pubs usually serve a very limited range of drinks.

AT the same time I ordered online a selection of teas from Dilmah Teas.  Despite being a nation of tea drinkers most of the teas sold in supermarkets are little better than floor sweepings.

Thank goodness for the internet.

Links

A counter to media hysteria and political over reaction on airline terrorism.

And an article in the Wall Street Journal.

No need for full body scanners, or a new series of expensive and inconvenient security measures.

---------

A sad legacy of the triangular trade.  Link.

Deep under Iron Mountain  Link

The answer to the question "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"  Link

A KGB prison

Having fun with Google predictive search    Link

Finally, two images I liked.

British police are lame and lazy

Former Home Secretary Jack Straw has been reported as saying "I'm afraid I'm rather sceptical about the excuse that ... the police, is overworked and therefore can't change. With a given level of resources, some police forces, or some parts of police forces do very much better than others.

Some police officers, whatever they say, actually quite enjoy being in the police station in the warm. We are dealing with human beings, but we are also dealing with the kind of discipline and culture in the police service."

Usually, I do not have much time for Straw but in this case I think he is absolutely right.  The UK police force is the last home of 'Spanish Practices' and successive governments have failed to make them competent and accountable. Many forces are badly managed and provide a home for the lame and lazy.

For as long as I can remember the police have had two alibis for their poor performance.

The first is that they do not have enough powers. If they just had this new law, or that new law, they could solve so many crimes. Weak politicians often given them the new laws, but somehow police performance never improves.

Willie Whitelaw  was Home Secretary from 1979 to 1983.
"He boasted how after any security lapse, the police would come to beg for new and draconian powers. He laughed and sent them packing, saying only a bunch of softies would erode British liberty to give themselves an easier job. He said they laughed in return and remarked that 'it was worth a try'.  Now the try always works." Link

Of course, Whitelaw was a more formidable figure than some recent Home Secretaries. Wikipedia describes his war record "He commanded Churchill tanks during the heavy fighting in Normandy during the Second World War..his was the first Allied unit to encounter German Jagdpanther tank destroyers. The battalion second-in-command was killed when his tank was hit in front of Whitelaw's eyes, and Whitelaw succeeded to this position. He was awarded the Military Cross for his actions."

Such a man probably felt contempt for a group of men who had spent the war safe in the UK in a reserved occupation.

By comparison Labour Home Secretaries, such as David Blunkett [former clerk] and the pathetic Jacqui Smith [former teacher],  have been like rabbits facing stoats, and have failed to confront the police to bring about the reforms that are needed.

Standards are woefully low, accountability is minimal and much spending is wasted.

For example, a high percentage of the police budget is spent on pensions because of the force's absurdly generous pension arrangements.

 The other alibi for police incompetence is that they are over burdened by unnecessary paperwork. For example, the number of forms they have to complete when they stop and search someone.

Straw addresses this argument by pointing out that all police forces have to complete the same paperwork, but some are much better at doing it.  "And it is the ones who are the less efficient and who have the wrong approach to the public who fall back on this 'Oh, I'm overworked' [argument]. He said while some officers would claim it took four hours to fill in forms, good police officers will take an hour to fill in the same forms because they want to get out and catch criminals."

He could also have mentioned that the London Metropolitan Police used Section 44 powers to stop and search over 57,000 people, and all this effort produced an arrest rate of 0.6%.

Hampshire Police conducted 3,481 stop and searches under Section 44,  but arrested no one in connection with terror.

Evidence of overwork? I don't think so. Evidence of incompetence? That's more like it.

Finally, it was disappointing to see the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats rushing to the defence of the police. In this case Labour got it right and they got it wrong.

Who is the worlds leading economic power"

This is from a late 2009 Pew Research Institute study.

Apparently only 5% of Americans believe that the EU is the worlds leading economic power. Most of them think it is China. The reality is shown in the chart below [values from the CIA Factbook].

The EU has the worlds highest GDP.  It also exports more than China, India, Russia or the USA.  

They are right about the USA being the leading military power, though it is worth noting that the EU's combined spending on the military is equal to that of the USA. 

Is your information secure at Yahoo

Do you have a Yahoo account?

Check this page and the document Yahoo Lawful Spying Guide.


See this page for background information.

The Addiator

This is an Addiator; a German manufactured mechanical pocket calculator. They were made from 1920 to 1982. A Frenchman called Troncet produced a similar device and such calculators are sometimes known as Troncets.

 Users could add and subtract by moving metal sliders with a stylus. The simplest troncets only did denary arithmetic.

Some versions could add or subtract eighths of an inch, inches and feet. Others could handle pounds, shillings and pence. [Before Britain introduced decimal coinage in 1971 there were 20 shillings to the pound and 12 pence to the shilling. To add to the fun there were four farthings to the penny. The pound sterling was a character building currency when it came to mental arithmetic.]

A company in the USA produced a version for programmers which could do hexadecimal calculations. These are very rare.

The one shown is a pocket model. There were more substantial desktop models.

 The Addiator company advertised their machines as also being capable of multiplication and division. This was stretching the truth since they could only do multiplication by repeated addition and division by repeated subtraction.

To overcome this limitation Castell produced an Addiator with a slide rule on its other side. I bought one in an antique shop in Prague many years ago. This was before eBay made collecting such devices much easier [and cheaper].


Shopkeepers and tradesmen would not have used addiators. If they had to calculate the cost of seven items at £3/17/6d each they would have turned to a ready reckoner. I have one by me as I type. The calculations were done by a Mr. J Gall Inglis F.R.S.E. and the book was printed by Gall and Inglis of Edinburgh. I suspect they were not only a lot cheaper than Addiators, but also more useful.

Troncets and ready reckoners were gradually displaced by affordable electronic calculators from the mid 1970s onwards.

There must be many people who remember using such devices, but I have never seen them as a prop in an historical film or TV programme.

Links

A tour of some Italian food producers

Scientists get sick of bad science reporting and create a website to announce their discoveries.

The Matrix in Lego

Visualising the decline of empires

The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia

 What happens when you try to disappear

Links

Should you eat your dog?

Cloud of atlases

A good podcast on internet piracy

Cell size and scale

Polices  agent provocateurs exposed

Cycle routes, canyons and Tibetan bridges in the Dolomites

During a rare browsing session in a Borders bookstore I noticed that Lonely Planet has published a book on cycling in Italy [and one on cycling in France]. I picked it up and turned to the section on the Dolomites, not expecting to find very much.

I often visit Italy, and particularly the Dolomites.  There are a lot of cyclists in the Dolomites. There are also a lot of very steep hills. I doubt I was ever fit or masochistic enough to want to cycle up mountains.

To my surprise the book mentioned a 40 mile off road route that ran between Bolzano and Trento. The path ran alongside the Adige River and was described as being almost completely flat. I later found that the Bolzano to Trento route is part of a longer path that starts further north and runs south all the way to Venice. I also found that there is a frequent train service between Bolzan and Trento so getting back to ones starting point would not be a problem.

A bit of Googling led me to Bob Lucky's Biking Page. This is a superb resource. Bob has a complete description of the route with lots of photographs.

His site also has descriptions of some other routes, including a section of the Danube Bike Path from Passau to Vienna.  That sound a superb journey.

A bit more Googling led me to this site and a mention of the Alto Adige canyon. This is an eight kilometre long walk through a deep canyon. The attraction is the geological formations that can be seen along the walk. This site has some photographs. The official site is here.

 
The same site mention the Tibetan Bridge at Claviere.  This is a 468 metre bridge that runs over the San Gervasio Gorge. You can get a flavour of it from the photograph, The official site is here and there is also an amateur video.

The final place I found from the DolceVita site was the town of Sabbioneta. DolceVita site describes it as 'Italy's perfect town'. From the photograph it looks as if it is in a star fort. I like visiting star forts so I have also added Sabbioneta to my geographical ToDo list. 

There are some more photographs here.

Though I have often visited the area I had never heard of any of the above. Now that I have I plan to visit them when I am next in Italy.

One final point. Though I found the Lonely Planet cycling books by searching in Borders I will be buying them from Amazon.  The reason is price. Amazon is 30%  cheaper.

The problem is, I would never have found the books by searching at Amazon. The serendipity that is common in bricks and mortar books shops is almost completely absent in Amazon. I have always found their recommendation system to be pretty useless.

What happens when the bookshops close down because of cheapskates like me? How will we find stuff then?

What marriage can be like

Video

Links

Becoming a pair of shoes

Sati handprints

Giants walk in Berlin

What's inside a cup of coffee

A dangerous trail in China

Which are the really dangerous drugs?

The Science and Technology Committee of the UK Parliament recently commissioned an assessment of legal and illegal stimulants using scientific evidence to determine which are the most harmful. In addition, they took evidence from expert witnesses. This was all done as part of a study of the use of scientific evidence in the UK government’s decision making. The Committee have published their findings.

In the UK class A drugs carry higher penalties than those in classes B and C. some drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, are unclassified and do not carry any legal penalties.



The scientific study assessed the drugs according to the following criteria.



They then produced this table.



I took this data and entered it in a spreadsheet to produce this chart. The higher the score the more harmful the drugs.



Red = a class A drug
Blue = a class B drug
Green = a class C drug
Yellow = an unclassified drug

If the study has classified the drugs correctly this suggest that both alcohol and tobacco should be class B drugs, LSD should be a class C drug rather than being in class A, and ecstasy should be unclassified. The current classification of ecstasy as a class A drug may seem strange given what is known of its effects. However, drug policy in the UK is largely made by the tabloid newspapers and the classification of ecstasy is largely a result of the tabloid frenzy over the Leah Betts case.

A chart based on such a reclassification might look like this -



That would be that the possession of alcohol or tobacco would carry a sentence of up to five years imprisonment [or a fine], and supply of either of these drugs would carry a sentence of up to fourteen years imprisonment [or a fine].

You could argue that drug policy should only concern itself with social harm since that represents the cost to society of drug use. The degree of physical harm or addiction inflicted by a drug might be considered solely a matter for the user, and no concern of society.

The next chart shows the reclassification of drugs based solely on social harm.



Alcohol has now become a class A drug, less harmful than heroin but more harmful than cocaine. Tobacco has become a class C drug [I suppose because of the secondary smoking effects].

Jupiter and lighthouse

Jupiter and the Milky Way over a Mediterranean lighthouse.

Links

Students fight for dissertation supervisors

Night battle

The politics of UK newspapers

Study philosophy at Harvard

Is Osama dead?

A trip to Castlefield

Castlefield is an inner city area of Manchester, England.  Until the 1980s it was badly run down, but it is being gentrified and has been designated a conservation area. Old buildings are being converted into flats and offices.

It is the centre of the city's canal network and this adds to its attractiveness..

The big attraction in the area is the Museum of Science & Industry. It occupies a large site and it is clear that a lot of public money has been spent on it.

It is also one of the worse museums I have ever visited.  The displays are dull and lacked any coherent theme. Entry was free and that was just as well. I would hate to have paid to go in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bring back Creeping Jesus

Originally, a Creeping Jesus, was a Roman Catholic who made a public display of religiosity fervour in a manner which was  hypocritical and simply for show.

When I was young it was used scathingly to describe anybody who had made a hypocritical public display of some belief or emotion.

Calling somebody a Creeping Jesus was a serious insult, but public hypocrisy is a serious offence.


This term seems to have fallen into disuse.   I don't know why. There are still lots of the wretches running around, especially in the politics and media.

I think I am going to add it back to my vocabulary. Merely calling these people insincere  seems insufficiently caustic. They deserve a serious insult.

Al-Qaeda Colon Bombers

"It has emerged that an al-Qaeda bomber who died last month while trying to blow up a Saudi prince in Jeddah had hidden the explosives inside his body."

BBC

This recent story made me go back to the post below. I wrote this in March 2007.

Al-Qaeda announced today that it had trained a group of suicide colon bombers to destroy Western airliners. The terrorist’s plan is that the bombers will board aircraft with large quantities of semtex concealed in their colons. They will then detonate their bomb when the plane is airborne. The colon bombs cannot be detected by conventional airport scans or searches.


In response the British Government announced that it would be introducing compulsory rectal examinations at all UK airports as soon as adequate supplies of rubber gloves and lubricant are available. A Government representative admitted that this may cause some disruption, but said the measure was essential in the fight against terrorism.

The Colon Bomber idea is Cory Doctorow’s. It comes from the Boing Boing podcast of the 9th March 2007. Doctorow begins by speculating that perhaps Al-Qaeda is spreading false security threats to ‘mess with our heads’ and entertain themselves.

Doctorow notes that all Al-Qaeda have to do is float a rumour and the political and security jobsworthies in the USA and UK rush around trying to counter the imaginary threat. The recent liquid explosive farce that caused massive disruption at UK airports is a classic example. From there Doctorow goes off on a hilarious riff that produces the colon bomber idea, and a vision of airports full of slippery fingered security men.

Now it has come true.  Mass rectal screening here we come.

The ten most important drugs

A group at WebMD have compiled a list of what they consider the ten  drugs that they think have had the greatest effect on human society.

What struck me was the comment about penicillin.

'First antibiotic. Without it, 75% of the worlds population would not be alive today because of infections in earlier generations.'

That seems a remarkable claim and it would be interesting to see how the figure was calculated. Does it mean that if antibiotics had never existed the world's population would be much less than it is today? Penicillin would have had to have saved people's lives before they had children otherwise it would not have any effect on population levels. Did penicillin significantly reduce infant mortality?

I have always thought that improvements in public health, housing and diets had been responsible for most of the reduction in infant mortality and in extending lifespans.

Since overpopulation is responsible for much poverty and a significant proportion of environmental problems does that mean we should regard Alexander Fleming as a villain rather than a saviour?

Penicillin and birth control pills [also one of the ten] certainly had a remarkable effect upon female sexual activity. Particularly birth control pills. After they became available it turned out that female modesty had been based on a fear of disease and a even greater fear of pregnancy. When these fears were removed female sexual behaviour changed entirely.

Lunchbreath's infotoons

This is the latest infotoon from Lunchbreath.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed for his Flickr photostream with

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=31402866@N02&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Wiretap podcast

Wiretap now has a podcast. You can  subscribe on iTunes. 

Past episodes can be downloaded from here as mp3 files.

Culloden and the National Trust for Scotland.

In 1746 the French supported Jacobites fought the German infiltrated Hanoverian British Government  on Culloden Moor, east of Inverness. The Battle of Culloden was the final battle of 1745 Jacobite Rising and the last battle ever to be fought on British soil. You can read more about it here.

It was a bloody business, and the aftermath was even bloodier. Now it is seen [at least by some Scots] in a more romantic light, as a battle between the noble highlanders and the invading British. In fact, there were clans on both sides.   Some Scots still wish that the Jacobites had won and Scotland had remained an independent country.

The NTS at Culloden 

I recently visit the battlefield and didn't like how the site was being administered by the National Trust for Scotland [NTS]. They have built a car park [£2 charge for cars] and a visitors centre. As visitors approach the visitor centre they have a choice, though the NTS does not make this clear. If the go to the right they have free access to the battlefield. If the go into the visitors centre they will see a line of tills where they will be sold a £10 ticket.  What the NTS does not make sufficiently clear is that the £10 ticket is just for access to the visitor centre. It is not needed for access to the battlefield.

I wonder how many British visitors, much less foregn tourists,  do not realise that and buy a ticket because they think they must pay to visit the battlefield

Take a look at the picture below. Do you see a sign that makes the choice clear? I think there should be one, and in several languages.

I am not accusing the NTS of obtaining money by deception. They do not make any false statements, and when I challenged one of their staff he readily admitted that a ticket was not needed to visit the battlefield.

What I would suggest is that they are opening themselves to accusations of behaving unethically. Accusations that they could easily avoid by putting in proper signs. I wonder how many foreign tourists unnecessarily buy tickets in the belief that they are required, and then have a sour taste in their mouths and a jaundiced view of Scotland when they learn the truth.

See below for some photographs of the battlefield.

Craigievar Castle

Craigievar Castle is an early 17th century castle. It is located west of Aberdeen in Scotland. Many consider it the most romantic of the Scottish castles.

It is certainly my favourite and high on my list of places I would like to live [other places would include La Juderia in Cordoba, Nelson in New Zealand and Le Marais in Paris].

The castle belongs to the National Trust for Scotland. In the 1970s the castle was covered with a cement harl. That turned out to be a bad idea because cement traps water between the harl and the building, leading to structural and internal damage.

When we visted in September 2009 the scaffolding was just being removed after all the cement had been removed and the castle given a plaster harl which will allow moisture to escape.

Craigievar should be a pink castle but the pigment in the cement harl had faded so that it appeared off white.

The correct colour has now been restored and the castle looks fabulous.

Links

Witty and clever.

New Blogger feature

Articles from Gladwell

Hollywood science

Trolleybuses and trolleytrucks

A Power Station in Your Basement

The attraction of authoritarianism

In a letter to an ordinary citizen President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote

... dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems — freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.

The authoritarian follower, Eisenhower suggested, desired nothing more than insulation from the pressures of a free society.



I suspect that that is very true.



Link  to NYT article.

A visit to Bletchley Park

The Daily Telegraph newspaper has an article on the British WW2 code breaking centre at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, fifty miles north of London. I recently visited BP. I will not repeat what appears in the DT article, but some of the photographs I took are below. Others are in an earlier post.

The 55 acre site consist of a mansion and its outbuildings, a small number of brick buildings like the one shown in the photograph below, and a large number of wooden huts, in varying states of dilapidation.

There is a very interesting museum in the building below, and other exhibitions in various huts.

 

Augmented reality in fiction

Currently there is a lot of interest in augmented reality, with applications for the iPhone and  Google Android phones. A number of technologies [large screen mobile phones, GPS, 3G wireless networks and electronic compasses] have become mature enough to make AR applications feasible.

It is still very much early days for the technology, though my feeling is that it is going to be very big in a few years time. The range of possible applications is enormous.

At the moment people are looking at augmented landscapes on the screens of their mobile phones. That is not very satisfactory. The breakthrough is going to come when we are able to view augmented landscapes through a pair of spectacles or contact lenses. There are early versions of both in use or development at the moment. Read this IEEE Spectrum article from a development team at the University of Washington.

If we want to think about what an augmented world might be like we can turn to science fiction. I would recommend two books.

Halting State by Charles Stross is set in a Scotland of 5-10 years hence where everybody is wearing AR googles.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge is set in a California of 10-20 years hence where the technology has advanced much further.

"Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it.  He has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if you know how to wear your wireless access-through nodes designed into smart clothes-and to see the digital context-through smart contact lenses."

The book is also about the emergence of the first artificial intelligence. You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Some technological changes are not very important. It was nice to move from typewriters to word processing, but hardly earth shaking.

AR will, I think, be on a different scale. The internet has given us much better access to information, but we are still, in most cases, tied to a computer screen. AR will give us access to information, in its broadest sense, wherever we are. That gives AR the potential to be as, if not more, disruptive and transforming than the internet.