I remember the main feeling induced by living under Thatcher was shame. It was shaming to live in a country that could be so proudly, gloatingly unkind, so vulgar, shabby and ungracious in its attitudes to the outsider, the weak and the destitute. Goodness knows the Labour administration has been very, very far from perfect, but I think we will only appreciate the unheralded and uncelebrated good it did when the props it built up for the poor, the disabled and the disadvantaged have been kicked away.You can read the whole piece here
the moving finger
writes and having written moves on
Writer. Student. Knitter. Technophile.
And a bunch of other things
TwitterFacebookLinkedInFlickrmetaweblogConservative Government in the UK?
As usual Stephen Fry says it best
Science - it works bitches!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWmivumLLL]
Made me laugh
And here's the link in case the movie doesn't load
Like OMG!
I can't tell if this is actually satire - in which case it's brilliant. Or a really sad indictment of our times - in which case it is also brilliant...
My mother emailed me last week to tell me she had joined Facebook. We don't chat on the phone; we email. Soon I expect she will want to poke me, write on my wall and, worse still, tag me in photographs of my wedding last May. Well, not if I can help it, mama. I love you too much to expose you to my online self.
You see, she doesn't yet know that I, her 24-year-old daughter, am about to divorce. She can't see my Facebook status, so why would she? Mummy, how do I tell you I'm a Facebook divorcee? That the son-in-law you try so hard to like cheated on your only daughter using the social networking site you so adore? That your daughter learnt of her imminent divorce via Google Mail's free chatting facility, Gchat?Look - read the article yourself, but given the throw away line about getting the husband to "move back to his home country" and that they'd only been married 6 months I wonder if she might have not been a wife as much as visa... But like I've said before and will no doubt say again... I couldn't make this stuff up.
Not only does Daylight savings put the hens off the lay
It apparently also causes drought
[caption id="attachment_141" align="alignnone" width="482" caption="Drought trigger clear as day"]
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from Albury-Wodonga's Border Mail
I've said it before - and no doubt I'll say it again - I couldn't make this stuff up.
Programming and Communications - it's all language.
I was thinking last night about my tinkering with programming, back in my youth.
(Seriously, I remember writing a really involved Zork-like game entirely in BASIC - I obviously had way too much time on my hands!)
For a number of reasons, now lost in the mists of time, I didn't do IT at uni opting instead for journalism. But I realised last night my playing with programming had probably actually really improved my communication skills.
When you're interacting with a computer it will do *exactly* what you ask it to do. It won't second guess what you really meant, and if you don't phrase your request in exactly the right way it won't do anything,
Essentially the burden of communication is entirely on you. You have to figure how to phrase what you want to say in a way that is meaningful to the machine. You have to use a language it will understand. You have to make sure it has all the background knowledge it needs to understand your request.
This is largely true when communicating to a large group. You have to phrase things in ways that are meaningful to the audience. You have to make sure you use language they willunderstand. You can't assume they have the background knowledge they may need to understand what you are telling them.
Which probably explains why nearly all the really good communicators I know are also good with technology, and why the truly great programmers I know are also pretty reasonable communicators.
I couldn't make this stuff up
e-MANcipate! is a project to accelerate the acceptance of male pantyhose as a regular clothing item...
It's a weird world..
You couldn't make this stuff up
[caption id="attachment_108" align="alignnone" width="300" caption=""It don't gitmo better" - photo from Reuters"]
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truth really is stranger than fiction - but that's a post for another day
Researchers find the dim more likely to believe in God
Belief in God is much lower among academics than among the general population because scholars have higher IQs, a controversial academic claimed this week.From the Times Higher Ed Supplement My favourite bit of the article is this comment
David Hardman, principal lecturer in learning development at London Metropolitan University, said: "It is very difficult to conduct true experiments that would explicate a causal relationship between IQ and religious belief. Nonetheless, there is evidence from other domains that higher levels of intelligence are associated with a greater ability - or perhaps willingness - to question and overturn strongly felt intuitions."As the Reg says
Next week: exclusive Reg research reveals the link between obesity and love of cake.Now let's just wait for the Theists to come out shouting...
Is the internet changing the way we think?
There's a very interesting article over at the Atlantic Online, Is Google Making Us Stupid? which raises some questions about how our interaction with, and use of technology can not only change the way we work with information, but also how we process it - in essence changing the way we think.
This isn't actually a new phenomenon - When we began to use written texts much more heavily for information transference, over the spoken word - it freed the audience to begin to use the information in non-linear ways. In essence it became much easier to see that B did not have to follow A.
The article rang a bell with me for two reasons, firstly, like the author and many of the people he interviewed I was a voracious reader who quite happily devoured long, complicated books, or articles in a single totally absorbed session.
The difference is - despite spending at least as much time online enmeshed in the internet as any of the people in the article - I still read that way. So *I* haven't experienced the sense of losing that ability to concentrate he describes.
The second reason is to do with that fact that - as a professional writer - I know how much the internet has changed my work, and to some extent my life - I don't have to remember the pithy quote, the fun fact, or the relevant statistic - I can look it up, anywhere, anytime. That means I have much more time for actually constructing an interesting and well written piece... But - I no longer rely on my own ability to remember things - and how can I tell if the information I find is right?
What do you think - is the internet changing the way you think? Is it better or worse?
Is Google making us stupid?
