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05 Jan 2009
Today was my first day back at work after the holiday, and I wasn’t looking forward to it with any great enthusiasm. As I got up, the news on the radio was full of doom and gloom (death and destruction in Gaza, economic collapse etc.) and reported that today is supposedly one of the most depressing days of the year. It was also snowing and icy, which meant that I had to get the train to work—another prospect that I didn’t relish given the propensity of our rail network to seize up at the first hint on inclement weather.
As I walked to the station, I put on my headphones and set the iPhone to shuffle to try to cheer myself up with a bit of music.
iPhone: Chris Thomas King: Hard Time Killing Floor Blues…
Me: Et tu, iPhone?
They’ve all got it in for me, I tell you…
03 Jan 2009
I’ve really enjoyed this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lecture series — ‘Hi-tech Trek: The Quest for the Ultimate Computer’, given by Prof. Chris Bishop. For readers outside the UK, this is an annual lecture series on some aspect of science, primarily intended for children. I’ve watched some of the lectures in other years, and they are sometimes a bit patchy. However, I thought that Chris Bishop did a fantastic job of explaining quite difficult concepts, accompanied by the requisite number of explosions, feats of dare-devilry and maths problems disguised as magic tricks, and yet he avoided the trap of patronising the audience.
As a lecturer myself (though at nothing like such an exalted level), I find it interesting watching other people give lectures, and I often hope to pick up some tips and tricks. The basis of every good lecture — regardless of subject or the academic level of the audience — is telling a compelling story. A true story of course, but if you don’t engage the audience, you might as well be talking to yourself. I often think that what you’re trying to do is to gently guide your audience so that they just about get to each point just before you do. If — as an audience member — you’re not trying to answer the questions posed by the lecturer before they tell you what the answer is, they’ve lost you.
I think that this lecture series succeeded so well because Chris Bishop told a great story, and there was something for everything. Mr. Bsag has less knowledge of Computer Science than me (and less interest in it), but we both learned some new and interesting things. For example, I was astonished that the chip in a chip-and-PIN credit card has roughly 30 times the processing power and 100 times the memory of the landing guidance computer on board the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. What I find surprising is not how powerful chip-and-PIN chips are, but that they actually managed to land the module on the moon with such meagre computing resources. I know that it’s a factoid, but it does bring home to you just how quickly computing power has increased.
I do wish that my undergraduates were as keen to participate, though: a great forest of arms went up each time he asked for a volunteer, and the helpers looked really chuffed with their role of pouring small yellow balls into a tank, or standing in front of a 3D camera. In one of the lectures, each audience member had a gift-wrapped pair of transparent polarising films. Bishop demonstrated how the light was alternately blocked and transmitted by the films as they were overlaid and one rotated 90#176; relative to the other. Judging by the gasps of delighted astonishment coming from the kids (and the fact that you could see them still playing with the films for the rest of the lecture), I think that their parents had probably wasted their money on Playstations and Wiis for Christmas.
01 Jan 2009
I’ve been meaning to update the style of the site (again) for a long time, because it had got rather hard to maintain. After spending a lot of time this Christmas migrating the site, the last thing I really wanted was to spend more time tinkering with the style, but it was the best time to do it, so I gritted my teeth and tackled it.
There’s not a huge visual difference, but it’s much more organised behind the scenes, and uses the Blueprint CSS framework, which is much neater. I think that there’s also a bit less markup now.
It’s not totally finished, as I’ve got to polish a few things, and I haven’t checked whether it validates, but it’s good enough to leave for now.
Oh, and Happy New Year everyone! I’m about to go and show my face downstairs and remind my husband who I am!
24 Dec 2008
I probably won’t be posting for a little while. I’ve got various family visits to make, and I’ve got to move all my various web sites to a new server. The latter will be lovely when it’s done, but is currently causing me some headaches. At some point during the move, I’ll put a temporary message up on this site while I’m shifting the virtual furniture around, but you should be directed to the new site automatically when it’s all done.
Have a very peaceful and relaxing Christmas, everyone!
24 Dec 2008
There’s nothing I like quite so much as a ghost story at Christmas. I hate horror films, but when the nights are dark and cosy I love settling down with the fairy lights and candles on, a glass of malt whisky in my hand, to watch a classic ghost story. M. R. James was the master of the genre, and I love his chilling tales (filmed for the BBC over many years), which let your imagination (rather than special effects) do all the work.
This year, we have Mark Gatiss’ The Crooked House — a three part ghost story in the classic mould of M. R. James. I think Gatiss is a bit of a polymath: an excellent actor, and a great writer for radio and TV. We’ve been recording the programmes, and watched the first last night (candles and fairy lights on, glass of whisky in hand, naturally). I was very impressed, and I’m really looking forward to the next two parts. He managed to make some wainscotting deeply scary, which — considering that it involved very minimal special effects — said a lot for the quality of writing and acting involved.
15 Dec 2008
14 Dec 2008
When the first series of The IT Crowd was shown, I thought it was funny, but bemoaned the way it stereotyped women as knowing nothing about computers and loving shoes. I still have a bit of a problem with that, but the second and now third series have got progressively better as the characters have settled in. A couple of weeks ago, the episode ‘Are We Not Men?’ really made me laugh, and also struck a whopping great big chord with me about the difficulty of fitting in when your interests are not gender-typical.
Moss and Roy (our IT Department geek heroes) are pottering about happily in their basement when the post guy starts up some football banter with Moss. Moss instantly shifts from his usual nasal, reedy voice, and picks up the banter in a deep voice with a Mockney accent. We cut to Roy, hands spread in wonder:
What was that? You were saying football things in a football voice, how do you know about football things?
We discover that like any self-respecting geek, Moss has turned to the Internet for a solution, specifically a site called bluffball.co.uk, which offers handy, stock Football Things to Say (with a pronunciation guide), to be deployed whenever you meet a Proper Man. The boys — infuriated by the ability of Proper Men to make women laugh and fawn all over them — decide to use their new-found, website-based banter skills to ingratiate themselves with some Big Normal Men. Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong when they get in out of their depth.
I loved the episode because it exactly mirrors the feeling I get when I try to talk to Proper Women. If there was a bluffball.co.uk type of site dedicated to allowing users to sound like they know about clothes and celebrities, I might be tempted. Or perhaps not.
12 Dec 2008
I’ve often thought that an easy way to measure the warmest point in any given room, when you don’t have a thermometer handy, is to allow a cat into the room and watch where it settles. As the weather has been getting colder, Cleo has taken to giving herself a little cat sauna when the heating comes on. She sits side-on to the radiator in the bedroom, her left flank touching the surface, then turns her head towards it, so that her nose is only a few millimetres from the hot metal, as you can see in this photo.
The radiator is really hot to the touch, but her fur seems to insulate her sufficiently, and she just sits there quietly, soaking up the heat with her eyes closed. Once she’s reached optimum temperature, she curls up on the bed and goes to sleep, thus adding to the tog rating of our duvet by donating a generous coating of her fluff. When the heating is on (morning and evening), our house stays at about 18-20°C, so it’s hardly cold. Even when it’s off, the insulation is good enough that it doesn’t drop much below 16°C. Still, I’m sure if Cleo could operate the thermostat, it would be closer to 35°C, and hang the consequences for the environment and our bank balance.
10 Dec 2008
An admin announcement: Feedburner has been bought by Google, so they are now administering the RSS feeds for this site. The feed should be redirected automatically to the new URL, but if it isn’t, then please update your RSS reader with the new URL for the feed: http://feedproxy.google.com/butshesagirl. I’ve changed the URLs on the page (such as the link in the sidebar to the right) to point to the new location.
Thanks!
08 Dec 2008
Ever since I saw a trailer for Wall-E early on, and the little robot reminded me of the strange parking meter/litter collecting machine on Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Day Out, I’ve been looking forward to seeing the film. It took a while to come around on our LOVEFiLM queue, but it was really worth the wait.
I don’t think I’ve seen such a perfect animated film in a long time (with the possible exception of Curse of the Were-Rabbit). The film is notorious for lacking dialogue for the first 40 minutes or so of the film, and yet it manages to convey the personality, hopes and fears of both of the main characters (Wall-E and Eve), and even makes a cockroach seem like a loveable pet. Wall-E’s movements, little beeps and squeaks and the care with which he tends his collection of ‘treasure’ and his cockroach friend tells you all you need to know about him. Eve is — by turns — tender and fierce and spiky.
It’s also quite a sharp satire on consumerism, showing the hapless passengers on the Axiom as fat, infantilized beings, suckling on “cup cakes in a cup” and staring zombie-like at the adverts and entertainment on their personal screens. Meanwhile, back on Scrapheap Earth, Wall-E gamely tootles about building skyscrapers out of their ancestors’ compacted junk. I think it’s a great shame and a missed opportunity that Pixar (or more likely, Disney) didn’t choose to forego a bit of income and make a point by not having any merchandise to accompany the film.
There are some great little jokes and references in the film, but they are timeless enough that Wall-E is likely to be a classic film in the years to come. I laughed out loud at Wall-E’s ‘fully charged’ chime sound, and his dithering about whether to put the plastic spork he had found with his plastic spoon or plastic fork collection, settling for placing it mid-way between the two. I also loved his groggy, uncoordinated early morning routine of trying to get the caterpillar tracks on his wheels before going out.
The soundtrack (including some wonderful ambient sounds produced by Ben Burtt - the DVD extra on the work he did is fascinating) is superb and subtle, with some very touching moments. I have to admit to getting a little moist-eyed when Louis Armstrong sang “La Vie en Rose”. Even the short feature — Burn-E — on the DVD packs more entertainment into under 8 minutes than most full-length films. I love Burn-E’s chirpy humming of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as he prepares to replace the damaged beacon, and his hang-dog posture when trying to get yet another beacon from the supply robot. The way the events of the main film are woven into his story, so that you see the unseen havoc unwittingly caused to Burn-E’s ordered little world by Wall-E and Eve, is really brilliant. All that, and they managed to get a subtle little reference to “2001: A Space Odyssey” in as well.
07 Dec 2008
03 Dec 2008
02 Dec 2008
An interesting feature of my ride to work in recent weeks has been a series of chalked messages written on the wall by the South Gate of the University campus. The first one I saw (which happened to be on a Monday morning) was:
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH…
“Heh”, I thought while waiting for the traffic lights to change, “it’s funny because it’s true. It’s Monday morning and here I am, back at the ranch.” It made me smile, and wonder who was posting these messages and why. Students were the obvious culprits, given the location, but that didn’t answer the “why” (other than with “because they’re students”). In these advertising-saturated times, it also occurred to me that it might be some kind of particularly cryptic viral ad campaign.
Then I saw another message, again on a Monday:
DON’T BE AFRAID IT’S ONLY LOVE
For some reason, that immediately planted an earworm of Kate Bush’s ‘And So is Love’ from ‘The Red Shoes’. The words are different, but the sentiment is similar, and that was apparently enough for my brain to place the needle in the groove on my mental vinyl.
Anyway, I’m intrigued. If I see any more messages (I’ve been going in a different gate so far this week for one reason or another), I’ll report back via Twitter.
29 Nov 2008
24 Nov 2008
I’ve been meaning to write a full review of this book for ages, after posting a brief review on blippr. I read it while I was in Brazil, and was completely gripped. It’s one of those books which you don’t want to finish because you’re enjoying it so much. You’re also desperate to discuss it obsessively with everyone you meet, but at the same time, you don’t want to spoil it for them.
Henry (the time traveller) and his future wife Claire meet when Claire is six years old and Henry is in this thirties. They eventually marry in their twenties, with an age gap of only 8 years. That should give you some impression of the rather complex, non-linear time-line of the novel. In fact, because Henry doesn’t meet her until later in his life, but Henry-in-the-future has been visiting Claire throughout her childhood, when they meet in his present (his past from Claire’s perspective), he knows nothing about her, and she knows a lot about him. And he hasn’t experienced their shared past yet. When Claire was a child the situation was reversed, because he knew her intimately, and he was an enigmatic man who appeared in her parents’ field every now and again. Confused? You will be, but you gradually get used to the warped narrative, and let go of the idea that cause must precede effect.
There must have been thousands of books and films about time travel, but Niffenegger has the amazing ability to make you feel like you’ve never really known about time travel before. For a start, in most sci-fi books or films, the time traveller makes a deliberate choice to go to the future or the past: Henry has no choice. His ability is involuntary, and he jumps into the past or future without much warning, arriving naked and without any possessions. It’s something like eplilepsy, and he is more prone to ‘time attacks’ when stressed or upset. He never knows where or when he will end up, or how long he will stay there before suddenly appearing back in his proper timeline. Because he arrives naked, he becomes an expert in picking pockets and locks (so that he can feed and clothe himself), and running and self-defence (to stave off the inevitable violence that a suddenly-appearing naked man occasions).
As well as visiting Claire at various stages of her/their life, he also visits himself as a younger and older man. One of the most touching scenes in the book (and there are many that will make you blub like a baby) is when he gently guides his bewildered 7 year old self around a deserted museum at night on his first time travel experience. Later, he teaches himself the skills he’ll need in his future life. One of the layers of subtlety is the sense that he bypasses any of the normal mechanisms of nostalgia. When we think about our past, we remember it softened by time, conveniently forgetting things which don’t reflect well on us. Henry sees himself in sharp focus, exactly as he was at the time. This — as you can imagine — is a rather bittersweet experience. He also re-experiences traumatic events again and again, obsessively jumping back into the moment, without being able to influence events at all. It has its lighter moments too. At one point, Henry lands back in the marital bed, forehead bleeding and chuckling, and tells Claire that her child-self has just chucked a shoe at him because he wouldn’t sleep with her.
Along with everything else, it’s a wonderful love story, but it’s not in any way syrupy or a chick-lit novel. The characters and their relationships are so beautifully drawn that you care very deeply about them. Claire is a fascinating character. She’s very independent and intelligent, and yet the fact that she knows she will marry Henry from an early age means that she is constantly in a state of suspended animation, putting her life on hold to wait for what she knows will come. She’s met Henry later in his life and loved that version of him, so when he’s behaving like an immature jerk, she knows that it will get better, but she still has to wait. In fact, her story is all about waiting, while Henry’s is about holding on as tightly to the present as he can to prevent himself being dragged off to the future or the past.
It’s a terrific novel, and I recommend it highly. I want to read it again to pick up all the subtle clues the author gave to foreshadow various events in the book. It might look like chick-lit at first glance, but there’s a lot there for the kind of obsessive geek who watched Primer or Memento with a notebook open on their lap, trying to work out the timeline [raises hand slightly bashfully]…