James Cridland’s off to the BBC. Commercial radio has just lost its brightest spark.
Category Archives: Asides
Darwiinian evolution
My colleague Tony Hirst gave a terrific workshop on Web 2.0 today. I noticed he had a strange-looking controller on the podium as he talked and afterwards asked about it. The conversation went something like this:
Me: “What is it?”
Tony: “A WiiRemote.”
Me: “Eh?”
Tony: “It’s a bluetooth device.”
Me: (striking head in manner of man who realises he is as thick as two short planks laid end-to-end) “Ye Gods! So it is.”
At this point, Tony opens up his MacBook.
He’s got a neat app called DarwiinRemote running.
He makes sweeping circular gestures with the Wii controller. This is what appears on the screen:
And all of a sudden I remember from my schooldays how difficult it was for beginners to see the connection between rotation and periodicity. Which leads to the thought that this might make an excellent teaching tool for physics and maths.
Obvious, really. Wish I been smart enough to think of it myself. Sigh.
Sport?
Here’s an interesting thing. The Guardian makes a distinction between football and sport. Mind you, having seen what goes on, I’m not entirely surprised.
Full house!
James Cridland addresses a packed audience of my colleagues at the OU’s CTSS Conference. Luckily, nobody shouted “Fire!”
Did you know…
A day in the life of Edward VII
Sunday Times restaurant critic Giles Coren decided to go on the Edward VII diet for a week. Here’s Day 1 from his report
Breakfast: Porridge, sardines, curried eggs, grilled cutlets, coffee, hot chocolate, bread, butter, honey.
The meal is served at the Edwardian house in Barnes in which I am residing with my co-presenter Sue Perkins, and is cooked, as all our meals here will be, by the great Sophie Grigson from a weekly menu taken from an Edwardian housekeeping book.
I go at it full tilt, using the age-old technique of “surprising my stomach” by getting as much as possible down before it realises I am full. I do myself proud and end by wiping my fifth cutlet in the remaining curry sauce from my eggs. Sue, a demi-semi-vegetarian, has not fared so well, going green halfway through her first sardine. We discuss briefly how income tax at the preposterously low rate of 5 per cent freed up plenty of cash for eating, but are interrupted by Sophie ringing the bell to announce lunch.
Lunch: Sauté of kidneys on toast, mashed potatoes, macaroni au gratin, rolled ox tongue.
Good stuff, this. Toast all mulched with kidney fat and blood, macaroni good and rich, tongue gigantic and purple. It is exactly what Dr Petty wants me to avoid.
Afternoon tea: Fruit cake, Madeira cake, hot potato cakes, coconut rocks, bread, toast, butter.
High tea was invented by the Edwardians to stave off hunger during the endless minutes between lunch and dinner. Everything is very brown.
Dinner: Oyster patties, sirloin steak, braised celery, roast goose, potato scallops, vanilla soufflé.
Oysters, the gouty man’s nemesis. I swallow eight in my patties. I carve the goose, as the man of the house always did, and find that it is not easy in the stiff-fronted shirt I am wearing with my white tie, nor can I properly incline my neck to observe my work, what with the 3in-high stiff separate collar I am wearing, and thus very nearly lose a thumb. Sue says that I can shut up until I have worn a corset. Apparently her spleen and kidneys have already been forced up into her ribcage (a recognised problem of the Edwardian lady) and her stomach, contained in a waist now narrowed to the width of a toddler’s thigh, is no longer allowing ingress of food.
And so to bed. But up again an hour later for a midnight snack of roast chicken and Madeira. King Edward always took a roast chicken to bed with him, so it seems only right. Alas, after my chicken, I do not get back to sleep. I have consumed 5,000 calories in a single day, well over Dr Petty’s recommendation of 1,800, and toss and turn and rumble until dawn.
Er, from what I remember from the various biographies of Eddie, roast chickens weren’t the only things he took to bed with him.
Don’t drink the water — even if it has been blessed
Galway’s newest resident.
The raging prosperity of my homeland has to be seen to be believed. Some of its manifestations are horrible — for example the despoilation of what were once lovely seaside towns by build-to-rent development. Some are comical — as in the practice of renting stretch limos to deliver 7-year-old girls to their First Communion. And some are beyond satire.
Take the current situation in Galway, the lovely town near where my father’s family live. A stop-frame video made from satellite images of Galway over the last 15 years would show a municipality growing like a tumour, as field after field and hill after hill is covered by speculatively-built housing estates created without the infrastructure to support such explosive growth.
Now we discover the consequences: the public water supply in Galway is no longer safe to drink. On March 28, RTE News reported that:
It has emerged that the city and county water supply in Galway has been contaminated by both human and animal waste.
Tests carried out in laboratories in Wales have also established that the strain of cryptosporidium parasite which has been found in water reservoirs and treatment plants can be transmitted from human to human.
The Health Service Executive says the situation remains a very serious one and it is of the utmost importance that all water is boiled before use.
Experts have told RTÉ News it could be up to six months before tap water is safe to drink in parts of Galway affected by pollution.
Up to 90,000 householders and businesses are affected, and today the number of cases of the cryptosporidium illness in the country rose to 125.
Since then, everyone in Galway has had to use bottled water. Newspapers are full of photographs of families trudging back from supermarkets laden down with huge plastic bottles. Nobody has any idea when — or how — the problem is going to be resolved. It’s got to the state where ‘GalwayWaterCrisis’ even has its own MySpace Profile — surely an innovative use of social networking.
It’s not entirely clear yet what the source of the pollution is, but the Guardian reports that:
Suspicions have focused on a sewage treatment plant at Oughterard, north of Galway, which pumps effluent into Lough Corrib. The Green party mayor of Galway, Niall Ó Brolcháin, claims the plant, built 60 years ago to cater for 250 houses, is unable to cope with the sewage from the now 800 homes in Oughterard that have spread out over the land. “Water services are at capacity and have been for some time,” Mr Ó Brolcháin said. “Yet we are still continuing to develop more houses. That’s wrong. That’s why we are in this mess.”
The Mayor and local politicians blame the government; Environment Minister Dick Roche, however, will have none of it: he retorts that the government had already made 21m euros available for water treatment projects in Galway, but the local council had failed to make use of the money. For once, I agree with the government: this looks like a product of local greed, corruption of the planning system and incompetence. Meanwhile the local business community — which is a major holiday and tourist destination — is beginning to sweat. Will the usual hordes of holidaymakers throng to a resort where you can’t drink the water? Stay tuned.
The delicious irony, of course, is that tainted water used to be a hazard of poor countries like India. In searching for a phrase to describe modern Ireland, a slogan first devised by John Kenneth Galbraith comes to mind. “Private affluence and public squalor”.
The crisis has also, I understand, affected supplies of ‘Holy Water’, which now has to be imported from heathen but uncontaminated localities.
On this day..
… in 1992, rioting that claimed 54 lives and caused $1 billion in damage erupted in Los Angeles after a jury in Simi Valley acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of almost all state charges in the videotaped beating of Rodney King. You could say it was the beginning of user-generated content, though the video in question wasn’t circulated on the Net. (The Web was just over a year old at that point.)
How to get into er, out of, MIT
From the New York Times
Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became well known for urging stressed-out students competing for elite colleges to calm down and stop trying to be perfect. Yesterday she admitted that she had fabricated her own educational credentials, and resigned after nearly three decades at M.I.T. Officials of the institute said she did not have even an undergraduate degree.
“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to M.I.T. 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my résumé when I applied for my current job or at any time since,” Ms. Jones said in a statement posted on the institute’s Web site. “I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the M.I.T. community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”
The funny thing is that, by all accounts, she was absolutely brilliant at her job. As one of her academic friends, Leslie Perelman, director of the M.I.T. program in writing and humanistic studies, says: “It’s like a Thomas Hardy tragedy, because she did so much good, but something she did long ago came back and trumped it”.
‘$100 laptop’ now costs $175 & will run Windows
Hmmm… GMSV report…
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.
Apparently, Microsoft is planning to dump XP on the world’s poor for $3 a copy. And the OLPC folks are in discussion with Redmond.
Windows XP eh? Haven’t the poor kids at which the laptop is aimed suffered enough? Or, as GMSV puts it, “that’s $176 for the laptop, $3 for Windows and $500 for the remote tech support”. And who’s going to pay for the anti-virus subscription?