• 09:00 My workplace has no bathrooms and no running water. Yay. #
• 09:08 Oh, and my cell phone sat in a wet spot on the kitchen counter overnight, so now it's not working properly. I hope it works after it dries. #
• 10:14 @biggerhamster Prince Charles and Mrs. Prince Charles were visiting. #
• 10:15 @FatCatAnna We can go across to the main building to use the bathroom, but it takes ten minutes for a trip, long time out of production. #
• 10:58 Yay, the plumbing has been fixed. We now have toilets and running water. #
• 13:21 One more hour to go at work. I could leave early if I wanted, but I really need the money. Unfortunately, I feel really horrid & need a nap. #
• 13:56 Apparently they don't turn on the heat on the weekends here because no one normally works weekends. I'm freezing. Another half hour to go. #
• 22:04 Domino's Cinnastix probably not best treatment for hypoglycemia, but they are certainly tasty. Going to need bolus for them though #diabetes #
• 22:19 I'm following @big_ben_clock just because it is awesome. :-) its most recent tweet is BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG. #
• 22:24 @sreno7 What is intense -- Big Ben? #
• 22:29 @sreno7 I haven't heard the Dr. Pepper song in years. #
• 22:29 @sreno7 Big Ben tweets every hour on the hour. If you ever want to know what time it is in the UK, just check his latest tweet! #
• 22:53 I want to go to bed, but boyfriend is sprawled diagonally across the bed, fully clothed, fast asleep. Now what do I do? #

Have been provoked to think by something to which the question is somewhat tangential, how well do you have to know a person to describe the feelings you have towards them as liking? To oneself or to other people who may ask what you think of X, not as something actually expressed to X.

I don't think you have to know them particularly well at all. I may have met someone pretty much in passing, or once or twice, and have thought that they're a nice/interesting/etc person, and that I might like to meet them again, and perhaps get to know them better. And I would call that liking. A general sense of positivity in one's emotions towards a person.

(I am sure I have used the formula when talking about people I know slightly to other people who know them or have heard of them that I don't know X well/only met X once/haven't seen X for many years but I like/liked them.)

Just as there are some people to whom one develops an immediate, and not necessarily explicable or justifiable, antipathy.

In neither case is there necessarily any reciprocity or expectation that it might exist but merely it's merely way of describing one's own positive or negative feelings evoked by X.

And initial liking may not endure if one does get to know the person better, just as initial antipathies sometimes dissolve.

I'm also beginning to wonder if 'like' is one of those words which can encompass altogether too many meanings and nuances, but that may just be the lateness of the hour.

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Alpha Centauri is on a collision course for Earth [...]

When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men - so why have we never heard of them?. Reasonable point that women were being shunted into less prestigious fields of production like weaving and ceramics, but don't we also suspect that a lot of them ended up being a combination of muse and all-round support system to the male students?

Eeeeeuuuwww, creepiness - In sleepy Sussex is a group of dedicated cryonicists who believe they hold the secret to eternal life. I must confess I didn't read this attentively end-to-end, but feel that this is part of the great British trad of DIY and the building of scale models of the Taj Mahal in the back garden out of used matchsticks. And nerdy people with strange political views... Also, feel that the invocation of John Hunter

Read the book The Knife Man, about John Hunter, one of the greatest men in your country. The greatest surgeon in London, and they wouldn't even let him lecture in the official facilities. He had to build his own building in his home to teach his students." Darwin feels he has much in common with Hunter, a prophet without honour.

Matthew Norman is not impressed by Apsleys: while I love the description of the decor, I am not enticed to go see it:

[A] room of such hideously overbearing opulence to inspire a parasexual fantasy featuring gelignite. God knows what the designer intended, but the grandiose chandeliers, plushest of multicoloured carpets, striped chairs and wallpaper, art deco fripperies and general festival of creams and beiges link assonantly with a Roman myth mural to suggest an asylum for obscenely wealthy inmates driven mad by the inability to decide whether they are Regency dandies or Eurotrash swankers.

Oliver Burkeman on backlogs.

Luisa Dillner, Friends can be good for your physical as well as your emotional wellbeing - and what's interesting is that apparently they don't need to be exceptionally close and intimate friends for the effect to work.

A S Byatt praises Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar:

atar begins with a wry analysis of how stories have the opposite effect from the desired one of making children drowsy and ready for sleep. She is splendidly contemptuous of books such as Disney's three-minute Bedtime Stories, Condensed Fairy Tales and even One-Minute Greek Myths. Good stories excite, delight and frighten. They are, as Tatar puts it, a solitary addiction, not necessarily teaching sociability or virtuous behaviour. Those of us who as children read late into the night under the bedclothes with torches know exactly what she means.

Children, she observes, do not "identify" with characters in stories. They inhabit the world of the tale, as lookers-on, learning brilliance and danger and horror in another world.

Two books on the legacy of the First World War: one on the immediate aftermath (okay, I have some qualms about the accounts of sex and drugs and to what extent this is reviewer or author) and one on the longer view framed round Harry Patch, the final surviving veteran.

A L Kennedy on Tove Jansson and a newly translated novel of hers.

Sam Leith on a DVD that teaches men how to be fathers:

It's marketed at women.

"The amusing and educational DVD," it says on the front, "that will make him the perfect pregnancy and birth partner!" The insensitive old silly needs reprogramming, and he's hardly going to do it himself, is he?

Make him watch this film, and maybe something about what's actually going to happen will sift into his football-filled, beer-drinking noggin. Then, cross fingers, he won't be as much of a spare dick at the birth as he was when he got drunk (again!) at your birthday party.

The opening sequences are designed to reassure men that fatherhood won't turn you into a big blubbering girly-boy. We see men. Talking to other men. In pubs. There are pints of beer, and plates of rolls, and cutaways to cricket. The box warns, or promises: "This DVD contains male behaviour and occasional coarse language." Meet Troy, our hero. Troy is so much of a man's man that he is actually Australian. More than that, until recently he was living "the haphazard lifestyle of extreme sports holidays and kerr-azy nights out with the boys" – yet now he's a dad.
....
The archetype of masculinity the film relies on is one of the man as overgrown boy: the centre of his own universe.

That's the shift. You were in a Ptolemaic universe: everything orbited round you. But when – like Troy in the end of the film – you are presented for the first time with an angry, purple, bloody, vernix-covered, shit-smeared, breathing human being, everything changes.

You are now in the Copernican universe: you are the one in orbit, and everything is suddenly in motion. It leaves you, well – unmanned.

Sex, drugs, music and a pension: why 1948 was the luckiest year to be born: a point missed here:
Obviously for the first few years you had rationing, but that wouldn't have worried you because you were so young.
Well, a) there were special allowances for mothers and babies and b) rationing probably provided a sounder nutritional basis for future health than before or since.

Renationalising the railways - go for it!

Awww, bless, break out the homemade jam and let's all join in for a rousing sing of 'Jerusalem': university students sign up to Women's Institute • Calls to set up college branches inundate HQ • Women find alternative to drinking and sport. Okay, we do wonder a bit whether there is a certain degree of ironic retro-ness going on, but given that the WI actually emerged from the suffrage movement, it's not just all about flower-arranging, so maybe this is a bit more than that.

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http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/11/07/saturday-reading-material/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=9013

I’m out and about again today, so no more from me today here. I know, it’s so unfair. But to keep you occupied all day long, allow me to point you in the direction of “Bone Shop,” a short novel by T.A. Pratt, (who in his other incarnation is the Hugo Award-winning author Tim Pratt) featuring his magic-wielding heroine Marla Mason in an early adventure, which is to say it’s a prequel story, which means you do not need to have read previous works in the series. It’s fun, fast and it’s free to read — but if you like it, T.A. Pratt is accepting donations for the work. So if you read it and like it, which I expect you might, think of sending some love (and a few bucks) in the direction of the author.

Having thus pointed you in the direction of a full day of reading pleasure, I now tip my hat in your direction and bid you adieu for the day.

http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2009/11/06/hey-nerds/

http://mightygodking.com/?p=2257

Okay, so I enjoy RPGs from time to time, but “sandbox” style play has limited appeal for me: I hated Oblivion, for example, because I kept getting lost and could never figure out where the story goals were. (Fallout 3 was much better in this regard.) For the same reason, I didn’t really enjoy Mass Effect that much; it was a lot more widespread than most of BioWare’s RPG games (which I usually like) and my gaming time is limited so I don’t want to spend it running my character all over the damn place.

I’m asking because I want to know how big the sandbox factor is for Dragon Age. Will I grow old and die before I advance my character halfway through the frigging game? These are important questions if I am gonna play the game. Otherwise I’ll just go buy Left 4 Dead 2 and shoot zombies. Actually, why don’t I just go buy Left 4 Dead 2 and shoot zombies?

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/friday_squid_bl_206.html

Weird.

http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2009/11/06/friday-louis-ck/

http://mightygodking.com/?p=2255

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/interview_with_14.html

On CNet.com.

Should Michael Ignatieff cross the floor to join the Conservative Party of Canada?

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/11/06/away-with-me/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=9011

Events of the day conspire to keep me from conversing with you via transmission of electrical particles through this system known as “Teh IntarWeebs”! And what events are these? And do they involve tapioca pudding, a polka version of the hit song “Head Like a Hole,” and between two and six stoats and/or ferrets? I cannot say! What I can say is I’m likely to be out for most if not all of the day. Try to get along without me for as long as you possibly can. And when you can’t, well, maybe I’ll put something on my Twitter feed. Maybe. I make no promises. Stoat handling is hard work.

 

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Unexpected-Accessory.aspx

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/the_doghouse_ad.html

A divining rod to find explosives in Iraq:

ATSC’s promotional material claims that its device can find guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies and even contraband ivory at distances up to a kilometer, underground, through walls, underwater or even from airplanes three miles high. The device works on “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction,” ATSC says.

To detect materials, the operator puts an array of plastic-coated cardboard cards with bar codes into a holder connected to the wand by a cable. “It would be laughable,” Colonel Bidlack said, “except someone down the street from you is counting on this to keep bombs off the streets.”

Proponents of the wand often argue that errors stem from the human operator, who they say must be rested, with a steady pulse and body temperature, before using the device.

Then the operator must walk in place a few moments to “charge” the device, since it has no battery or other power source, and walk with the wand at right angles to the body. If there are explosives or drugs to the operator’s left, the wand is supposed to swivel to the operator’s left and point at them.

If, as often happens, no explosives or weapons are found, the police may blame a false positive on other things found in the car, like perfume, air fresheners or gold fillings in the driver’s teeth.

Complete quackery, sold by Cumberland Industries:

Still, the Iraqi government has purchased more than 1,500 of the devices, known as the ADE 651, at costs from $16,500 to $60,000 each. Nearly every police checkpoint, and many Iraqi military checkpoints, have one of the devices, which are now normally used in place of physical inspections of vehicles.

James Randi says:

This Foundation will give you our million-dollar prize upon the successful testing of the ADE651® device. Such test can be performed by anyone, anywhere, under your conditions, by you or by any appointed person or persons, in direct satisfaction of any or all of the provisions laid out above by you.

No one will respond to this, because the ADE651® is a useless, quack, device which cannot perform any other function than separating naïve persons from their money. It’s a fake, a scam, a swindle, and a blatant fraud. The manufacturers, distributors, vendors, advertisers, and retailers of the ADE651® device are criminals, liars, and thieves who will ignore this challenge because they know the device, the theory, the described principles of operation, and the technical descriptions given, are nonsense, lies, and fraudulent.

And he quotes from the Cumberland Industries literature (not online, unfortunately):

Ignores All Known Concealment Methods. By programming the detection cards to specifically target a particular substance, (through the proprietary process of electro-static matching of the ionic charge and structure of the substance), the ADE651® will “by-pass” all known attempts to conceal the target substance. It has been shown to penetrate Lead, other metals, concrete, and other matter (including hiding in the body) used in attempts to block the attraction.

No Consumables nor Maintenance Contracts Required. Unlike Trace Detectors that require the supply of sample traps, the ADE651® does not utilize any consumables (exceptions include: cotton-gloves and cleanser) thereby reducing the operational costs of the equipment. The equipment is Operator maintained and requires no ongoing maintenance service contracts. It comes with a hardware three year warranty. Since the equipment is powered electro statically, there are no batteries or conventional power supplies to change or maintain.

One interesting point is that the effectiveness of this device depends strongly on what the bad guys think about its effectiveness. If the bad guys think it works, they have to find someone who is 1) willing to kill himself, and 2) rational enough to keep his cool while being tested by one of these things. I'll bet that the ADE651 makes it harder to recruit suicide bombers.

But what happened to the days when you could buy a divining rod for $100?

Some months ago I posted about question in Guardian G2 Private Lives section about OMG MI SISTAH B FAT!!!

A v similar question this week, only this time it's the mother worried about the weight problem of her 20-year-old daughter whose 'life is great in every other area that I know about – she is happy in her studies and extremely popular'.

But reading the backstory and deducing that mother has been having Issues over daughter and weight since the latter was 2, do we not feel that it is time for her to step outside the equation?

Enquiring minds want to know, is daughter herself worried? It does sound as though any action she has taken has been rather under pressure from ma.

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http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/11/easy-living-to-edit.html