January 2004 Archives

Sometimes you get what you ask for.

Update: There are now a couple of dozen photos up in a separate gallery. I wandered the neighbourhood for several hours this morning taking pictures, and these are the ones that came out okay.

Me: Hey, before I go rummaging through the freezer, is there anything in there that I should know about first? Like things in unmarked bags that I would rather not accidentally peer into? Parent: No, of course there's nothing like that. What do you mean?
Me: Well, I meant like dead mice in a plastic bag or something.
Parent: (as if stating the completely obvious) Oh yeah, there are some dead mice in a bag in there.

I swear this actually happened. Sometimes it's interesting living in a house where one of the pets is a snake.

I'm not even going to touch the State of the Union address. If I started to rant, I would likely not stop for several days. So let's just not go there, please.

Some unthemed links.

• Happy new year! In the Chinese calendar, it's now the year 4701. Wait a minute, doesn't that mean that this is the first day of the 48th century?
• Battlestar Galactica, recently remade as a surprisingly entertaining miniseries, is rumoured to have been commissioned for six more episodes. Yay!
• While Enterprise is rumoured to be on the verge of cancellation. Yay!
• A production design of Marvin from the upcoming Hitch-Hiker's Guide movie adaptation. Here's a video of Warwick Davis trying on a prototype of the costume, so it definitely looks legit.
• Mindbogglingly impressive photos of street anamorphoses.
• A difficult-to-describe Flash application that clusters and categorises musical artists graphically. Seems to use the Amazon API. Good for finding more music that suits your taste, perhaps?

The results of recent site fiddling operations:

• Several new links added to the sidebar.
• GeoURL updated, since my location has changed. Hidey ho, new neighbours!
• The weblog is now TrackBack-enabled! (What is TrackBack?)
• And after 2 years of operation, the site finally gets an About page.

The time has come to look beyond brief encounters. We must commit ourselves anew to a sustained program of manned exploration of the solar system and, yes, the permanent settlement of space. We must commit ourselves to a future where Americans and citizens of all nations will live and work in space... Our goal is nothing less than to establish the United States as the preeminent spacefaring nation... The Space Council will report back to me as soon as possible with concrete recommendations to chart a new and continuing course to the Moon and Mars and beyond.

George Bush, right? Yup... but not the one you're thinking of. The excerpts above are from a speech given by President George H. W. Bush at the National Air and Space Museum, on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing... in 1989. (transcript)

Today, the other George Bush is giving a similar speech, announcing an eerily similar commitment to an extended plan for space exploration. It will no doubt be a fine speech -- persuasive, uplifting, a work of great oratory if it were delivered by a better public speaker -- because there are surely few subjects as easily manipulable into an emotive and rousing speech as the exploration of the great unknown. Occasions like this make for excellent publicity, particularly during a re-election campaign, but that other Bush speech from 1989 should serve as a cautionary reminder that there's little value in words not backed up by actions.

In 1961, when President Kennedy addressed Congress and announced the Apollo programme, he affirmed his commitment with a hefty budget increase for NASA. The following year, Apollo's budget was doubled. In 1963 it was doubled again.

By contrast, here are the details of today's plan:

Mr Bush would ask for a 5% yearly increase in NASA's $15.4bn annual budget for the next three years, followed by rises of up to 1% in subsequent years. (source)

(Yes, it really does say 'up to 1%'.)

I'm probably one of the biggest armchair supporters of space exploration you're likely to meet. I think that scientific research should be a higher spending priority than military defence. So, while you can certainly call me fiscally clueless, I am in no way anti-progress. Being able to seriously explore and colonise the solar system is probably the greatest opportunity available to the human race today -- an opportunity that was open to no generation before us. Without question, our future as a species -- if we have one -- is in space.

That's why I don't like to see politicians using space exploration as a cover for popularity-building exercises. The milestones promised by Bush are seemingly completely disproportionate to the financial commitment made. It's not as if going to the Moon has gotten a great deal easier or cheaper since Apollo. And this plan calls not just for a manned Moon landing, but for a permanent lunar base and an eventual manned mission to Mars.

A small budget increase is, of course, better than no increase or a cut. For that, at least, we should be thankful. But unless I am wrong -- and I would love to be proved wrong -- a 5% budget increase isn't going to usher in any kind of new age of space exploration. That will take real money. All Bush has done here is to make big promises, while leaving his successors to pick up the bill when he's safely out of office.

It doesn't take much imagination to see what's probably going to happen here. The necessary big funding will never materialise because no future president will commit to it, Bush's speech will be essentially forgotten in a few years time, and people the world over will keep dreaming about space.

I had the urge to write this piece because the announcement is making world news right now -- it's the top story on every news site I look at. And that's good, in a way... it gets the public excited about space again, which is something which is sorely needed, and which really doesn't have any downside that I can see.

But I think it's also important to temper optimism with a pinch of reality. I hope that people will look deep enough to see the full story here. Now and in the future, when it comes to the commitment to space exploration, we must be careful to examine Bush's actions -- not just his words.

Any sufficiently advanced Tetris player is indistinguishable from magic (13Mb MPEG, realtime).

(via #nott)

It's at this time of the year -- a couple of weeks post-xmas -- that I always feel slightly betrayed by the weather.

Think thoughts of winter -- you'll probably think the same way I do. Everyone (well, everyone in this country at least) grows up surrounded by the same evocative cultural images of the winter season: fields, farms, villages, idyllic cottages, all covered in a pristine blanket of snow. Memories of snowball fights, snowmen, and long woollen scarves either persist from childhood or have been burned into the mind by movies and imagery to much the same effect. Snowy landscapes on the front of cards, fake snow in shop window displays, and "Walking in a Winter Wonderland". What could be more traditional? What could be more inviting?

And then there's winter weather in reality.

Real winter weather is nothing whatsoever like this. Winter in reality means that it's either raining heavily, treacherously icy and foggy, or comfortably mild. In the unlikely event that some snow actually falls, it might stay on the ground for up to 15 minutes before turning to slush or mud.

It's been years since we've had proper snow here in Notts, and I'm getting impatient with the weather. I want to look out of a window and see nothing but white as far as the horizon, dammit! But, of course, my annoyance is misdirected.

I've never seen a Xmas card with torrential rain on the front. I've never seen a December store display with a 'multiple vehicle pile-up on the M6' theme. Name one famous Xmas movie that doesn't have snow falling in at least one scene. We have a name for this. It's false advertising! C'mon, you know I'm right. White Xmas imagery might be traditional but it shares no likeness with reality. Someone should complain.

Yeah, I know... if I really want to look at snow, I should move somewhere it actually falls more than once a decade. Like, I don't know, Alaska, or Siberia. Or Leeds.

But I just want to see snow, here, in the house I grew up in, like my (possibly false) memories of winter as a kid. I don't want to build a snowman, or go sledging... I just want to look at it again, and I'm at a complete loss to explain why. Perhaps if I see the fields turn white just once more, then that small part of me can finally grow up.

Until then, I'll keep looking out of the window.

A proper entry later tonight, but for now, something that I've never had cause to say before:

There's a thriving, fascinating discussion going on in the comments of this old entry. If you're interested in scepticism and/or the paranormal, take a look, and weigh in on a surprisingly civil and truly interesting debate.

It's January 3rd and I'm only just getting around to making new years resolutions, which admittedly is not a positive indicator of my ability to adhere to them. Last year I made the lazy resolution to watch more TV. But this year everything is different, so I've made a whole list of the damn things, which -- only because it's necessary for the horrifically contrived title to work -- numbers six items. I think that declaring them publically will increase my level of commitment, so here they are:

This year I will:

• get more exercise. I'm in a different situation now: whereas a couple of months ago I would walk to or from the campus a couple of times a week on average, now (until I find work) I can theoretically spend days without ever having an excuse to leave the house. Obviously this is no good for body or mind, so I'll go for more random walks in random places.
• read more books. I have the awful but difficult-to-break habit of staying on the PC until I'm sleepy, so I never really give myself the chance to read before bed (or, indeed, at any other time).
• post more often on the weblog -- I'm not going to specify a frequency, because sitting around thinking 'what shall I blog today?' doesn't produce good results, but I want the site to be as active again as it has been in the past.
• complete the other website I've been developing off-and-on for months, and dedicate appropriate time to it. Ah hell, let's put a date on that. It'll 'go live' on 1st February.

By the end of this year I will:

• have finished one creative project in my own time -- anything from a Neverwinter Nights module to a novel.
• have discovered which profession I'd like to spend the rest of my life doing, and will have started along that road.

I'll add a seventh resolution for good measure:

• I will never again write a blog entry title as lame as this one.

Come with me on a journey this year, dear reader, as I give up on these resolutions one by one and end the year in exactly the same state as I started it!