Tim Hardy

The AUT action short of a strike continues. Exams start in eight days and we still don’t know if some or all are going to be cancelled. If they do go ahead, they may be missing questions by lecturers who are on strike even though we have told the university we do not want to sit partial exams. Revision is difficult to say the least.

The unions have taken us hostage and the university seems happy to regard our education as collateral damage. They acknowledge that exams may have to be delayed but they refuse to make that decision, reserving the right to let us know 24 hours before they are due in spite of repeated demands to give us more notice.

This is even worse for the part-time students who are taking time off work to sit exams that may not happen.

Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it’s my privilege to celebrate this president. We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say “I did look it up, and that’s not true.” That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book.

Mocking Bush is like shooting fish in a barrel, but to do it to his face takes a certain nerve. This Transcript of Stephen Colbert’s monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner is hilarious. (Thanks Christian.)

Drama school can be a little odd. Just watch Fame. Last year, during a particularly abstracted movement class, my wonderful teacher took us through the various colours of the rainbow. She’d shout one out and we would move accordingly, embodying the shade in whatever motions we saw fit. Blue, red, green, slowly we began to lose ourselves in the exercise, stretching like cats or undulating like charmed snakes; it’s amazing what a group of usually self-respecting twenty somethings will do when trapped in an unlit rehearsal studio. We come to yellow, incidentally my favourite colour, and as I’m in the middle of this particular hue, stretching my arms up to the sun and imploding like a daffodil, I hear a voice shout ‘No John! Yellow!!’

I Wanna Live Forever

An amusing post from an interesting blog I just stumbled across by writer, actor and magician John Vanderput.

At last, portable batteries are beginning to evolve. Lack of adequate power is holding back portable computing. The M1, while designed for heavy-duty equipment, is a much needed sign of progress.

The M1, based on the same lithium-ion technology used in your cell phone and laptop, is the first product from MIT spinoff A123 Systems. Cofounder Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials science professor, succeeded in shrinking to nanoscale the particles that coat the battery’s electrodes and store and discharge energy. The results are electrifying: Power density doubles, peak energy jumps fivefold (the cells pack more punch than a standard 110-volt wall outlet), and recharging time plummets.

Super Battery | Wired

I believe that while there are many reasons for the growth of individualism in the UK, the extreme libertarianism now beginning to take hold here begins on the road. When you drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law: all become a nuisance to be wished away. The more you drive, the more bloody-minded and individualistic you become. The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation that recognises only the freedom to act, and not the freedom from the consequences of other people’s actions. We drive on the left in Britain, but we are being driven to the right.

They call themselves libertarians; I think they’re antisocial bastards

George Monbiot turns his attention to the road rage lobby in a brilliantly argued and articulate piece that I will remember the next time some idiot jumps the lights when I am crossing the road, smug in the knowledge that he will not be hurt if his vehicle hits me.

I’ve been trying out amazon’s dvd rental by post system for the last couple of months and while their selection process could do with some improvement and their charging per dvd for two-disk sets is annoying, I am nonetheless impressed by their response to lost rentals.

Of the 12 films we’ve been sent, two never arrived and one vanished in the post when we returned it. In each case, amazon has just taken us at our word when we reported them missing, no questions asked.

The post in London is notoriously bad but I’m still a little shocked to see quite how unreliable it. I can’t really imagine why it would be worth risking your job to steal a random dvd with almost no resale value - and nor can I imagine how amazon will be able to continue with rentals if our figure of 25% stolen in the post is typical.

Freephone (from within the UK): 0800 279 6620

Sometimes it’s helpful to talk to a real person. Amazon are normally very good but when something goes wrong it’s a pain in the rear to wade through pages of unhelpful faqs and email contact forms before you can actually begin to resolve the issue.

OK, so I’m about a month late on this but I’ve been too busy with my studies to keep abreast of news and my toread pile is overflowing.

New Scientist are running a nine-week pilot of podcasts: details here. I’m downloading the last six weeks of shows as I post but I’m sure I won’t be disappointed. Another otherwise wasted 15-mins a week is now filled. Funny how much less stressful having to queue is when you’ve got something intelligent to listen to on your mp3 player.

At a demented research institute named for William Morris, eager eyes gaze at a computer that can handle UHL, or “Unit Headline Language”. A survey is conducted, in which people are shown the random headlines:
ROW HOPE MOVE FLOP
LEAK DASH SHOCK
HATE BAN BID PROBE
A total of 86.4 % of those responding say that they understand the headlines, though of this total a depressing number cannot quite say why.

(Michael Frayn, The Tin Men.)

Christopher Hitchens’s : Fleet Street’s finest is a hilarious round-up of the portrayals of journalists by novelists.

The above extract reminds me of the newspaper headlines and advertising catchlines in Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit, a great comic novel that deserves to be better known.

You can help bring about greater public awareness of the dangers of software patents by voting on the following two sites:

[Pasted from a ffii.org newsletter]

Today we would like to bring two more online polls to your awareness:

- Corporate Europe Observatory, an organization that keeps an eye on
questionable lobbying tactics, has nominated the so-called Campaign for
Creativity, a Microsoft/SAP pro-patent lobbying entity, for the “Worst EU
Lobbying Award”: http://www.corporateeurope.org/worstlobby/?showcontender=1
“Nominated as a fake NGO brilliantly disguising corporate demands as
grassroots concerns”

Please vote “for” the so-called Campaign for Creativity:
http://www.corporateeurope.org/worstlobby/?vote=1 If they “win”, i.e. if that
campaign is chosen as the worst lobbying initiative in the EU in 2005, then
there will be some additional attention to the methods employed by the
pro-patent lobby.

- IT website Silicon.com, which belongs to the CNET network of IT websites
(ZDNet, News.com, Builder.com etc.), recently named Florian Mueller, the
founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com, among the 50 “Silicon Agenda Setters”. As
always, Florian himself has pointed out that he owes such nominations to our
entire movement.

There is an online poll in which Silicon lets its readers determine their
own ranking among the top 50 people in the IT industry:
http://www.siliconagendasetters.com/vote.htm

Florian is #43 on the ballot, or the 8th from the bottom of the list.

Visit The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) if you’d like to know more.