When the prospects of a Liberal Democrat – Conservative coalition first began to become a practical possibility, rather than a theoretical one, I was initially horrified that the paint may have been flaking of my yellow vote to reveal the blue underneath. It was a popular sentiment. When I tweeted “If the Lib-Dems do team up with the Tories, it will be like a twist in a film when you realise one of the heroes is the bad-guy.” It was rapidly picked up and re-tweeted (forwarded) around the Twittersphere by over 160 people. Clearly many like me felt betrayed, and worried that all the talk of “A vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for the Tories” would turn out far more literally than they may have expected.

However, as time passed it became clear that options were few. While many of the left looked on at a prospect of a grand liberal coalition, the numbers would have been tight, and an already aggressive right wing press would have been attempting to destroy the coalition before parliament was even seated. It was also clear that several senior members of the Labour party were opposed to the proposition, raising the prospect that internal rebellion would seriously threaten the stability of an already precarious position.

The battle was enough to secure a key concession from the Conservatives though, matching Labours offer of AV. With that my most major opposition to the Lib-Con pact was abolished, although I hope the Liberals keep the pressure on to ensure that the changes go through. The situation wasn’t ideal, and I wasn’t about to pretend I was happy with it, but when the cards are dealt you have little choice but to play.

I still worry though. The Conservative party holds vastly more seats than its little pet bird, and I fear that they may get dragged into the fold. Sacrificing ideals for stability, for want of being heard, or for want of power. Furthermore, it is hard to deny the rightward drift of economic policy in the party over the past few years, and it seems possible that the shelter of the leafy boughs of the Conservatives will catalyse this further. Which leaves a problem, if yellow and blue become indistinguishable, either through incompetence or power-grabbing, where next?

Labour may seem an obvious choice, however their dubious record on civil liberties leaves me concerned. While a few back bench rebels still buck the authoritarian trend, the ability to vote for one of them will largely depend on which consistency I end up voting in.

The Greens are considerably to the left of most the mainstream parties, both socially and economically. However, the party occasionally allows its policies to be driven more by ideology than evidence, leaving a few dubious decisions in their science policy. Fortunately they do appear to be attempting to address these in response to criticism in response to their European Election manifesto. Additionally I can’t help but feel that some of their policies seem impractically naive, however this may just be a side effect of their considerable contrast from the mainstream parties. That said, after the election I discovered that my local Green candidate was following Ben Goldacre on twitter, something that had I realised before-hand would have likely persuaded to switch my vote to her.

So where does that leave me? If the AV vote system does get introduced, at least I will be able to vote for who I want, even if they are a minority party. I must admit I am unfamiliar with many of the other minority parties, although know I rejected the Scottish Socialist Party on the basis of their belief in an independent Scotland. (I rejected the SNP on similar principals) It also doesn’t help that most discussion of neo-liberal economics, Keynsian economics etc. just causes my brain to melt. To actually try and work out if it a) is ‘morally’ acceptable and b) will work, is sadly a bit beyond me.

And that’s that, an entry that tails of into navel gazing hand-wringing. How fucking Lib Dem of me. If you want to preach your party, you are welcome to do so in the comments. I’m genuinely interested.

(Note: First time comments will need to be approved manually. I’m not blocking, I’m just being slow.)

The news seemingly originated from a press-release form the ‘Microwave Association,’ working in association with Heinz. Unfortunately for fans of beans and fancy USB gadgets the story appears to be, well, a load of old beans¹.

Even a quick critical eye will spot some key flaws. The average modern microwave has an output of 850W, with even weaker models outputting at least 650W. By comparison, the USB 2.0 standard provides a maximum current of 500mA, at 5V; which works out as a maximum power output of just 2.5W². The former figures should be familiar to anyone who has cooked something in the microwave, as the output is printed on the front, and you are expected to adjust cooking times accordingly. The latter meanwhile should be obvious in part to anyone who has hooked up a printer. While simple devices like mice can obtain sufficient power from a USB socket, the same can’t be said for more power-hungry devices such as printers, which need their own power supplies. Indeed, the power supply units of most computers aren’t certified to deliver 850W of power, with possibly only high quality gaming rigs fitted with a hefty enough PSU; even then, powering a microwave would leave scant remainder for the processor and graphics card.

So we’ve already seen that such a device would have to operate at a significantly lower power output than most modern microwaves. Such a device would be unlikely to be marketed as a novelty, and instead would be positioned to replace most standard microwaves. However is it possible that such improvements have been made, and we are in fact looking at vastly superior technology. In short, not likely, unless they have also managed to break the laws of thermodynamics in creating this miracle microwave.

In demonstrating how truly impossible their claims are we need to consider some physics.

The specific heat capacity of a substance is used to describe how much energy is required to raise its temperature; for water, this is given as approximately 4.2 joules per gram per kelvin. This means that for every gram of water, you must supply 4.2 joules of energy, to raise the temperature by 1 kelvin, or 1 degree Celcius³. Therefore, for a 200g tub of beans (which we shall approximate by assuming it is all water.) it takes 4.2 x 200 = 840 joules to raise the temperature by a single degree.

So how does this translate to our microwave? Well fortunately, the measurement watts tells us how many joules of energy are transferred each second. In other words 1 watt = 1 joule per second. So if we are to assume that our microwave is 100% efficient, that all energy it uses goes directly into heating the beans, we can discover how long it will take to deliver the required 840((And here is a good illustration of the inefficiency of standard microwaves. As by this calculation the beans should be ready in just under a second.)) joules to raise the temperature of the beans by a single degree. Simply divide 840 by 2.5 and… oh dear… 336 seconds. Five minutes, 36 seconds to warm the beans by a single degree. If you want them boiling hot⁴, then you are going to be waiting over 7 hours.

What bothers me most about this story isn’t the dubious nature of the original press-release. It was clearly constructed by marketing bods in an attempt to gain free column inches. In that respect it worked, and I’m only adding to the effect by writing this. What bothers me is the way the press regurgitated it, unthinkingly, unquestioningly, delivering advertisements as news. Not only this, but it is clear that in most cases, they didn’t even stop to pass a critical eye over it. This isn’t just churnalism, this is factually incorrect churnalism. When the media sacrifices its credibility in terms of fact checking, and ends up falling slave to marketing, what does it have left? And when we lose one of the key methods of fact distribution, of investigation and exposure, what do we have left? Blogs and citizen journalism go so far, but an effective and trustworthy media is is important for everyone; this story is only one of many that makes me wonder how much of one we have left.

I have already contacted the Microwave Association in the E-mail provided in the press-release, and have invited them to respond. I’ll update this entry as soon if I hear anything from them, and leave the comments open if they wish to contribute there. (Although I encourage you do do so via my E-mail, as that way I can be sure the response is genuine. Also, please bear in mind that comments from new users will be held for moderation, and may not get published immediately.)

1. See, you don’t have to be part of the tabloid press to make terrible puns
2. Power is the product of current and voltage
3. The scale of Celcius and kelvin is identical. Only the position of the zero position changes, with 0 kelvin being equal to -273.15 °C
4. Assuming room temperature 20 °C and a boiling temperature 100 °C

You’d think so anyway wouldn’t you? Except for some people, a change of one small detail, one which I have in fact neglected to even mention in full, would change the above situation from something which should be celebrated, to something which should be prevented.

Today the Californian Supreme court voted to uphold Proposition 8, a dark stain which had made Obama’s victory in November, somewhat bitter-sweet. For the 52% of Californian voters who gave their support to the legislation, gender is far more important than love when it comes to marriage. Seemingly “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” bears a footnote ensuring that it is somewhat tempered if you happen to love someone with the same genitals as you.

“The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
-Earl Warren 1891-1974
Governor of California 1943-1953,
Chief Justice of the United States 1953-1969

Of course, America has been through this all before, albeit in a slightly different guise. It has been 42 years since Earl Warren, a Californian, overturned Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, and ended race based restrictions on marriage throughout the US. I’ve borrowed a quote from him, which is as valid now as it was then, and I hope that he’d approve of its usage in this context, even if it would distance him from 52% of voters in his state, and countless members of his Republican party.

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -7.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.62

Now in practice of course I realise that asking everyone to march to my drum would be ineffective, impractical, and immoral. While I’m not prepared to indulge every contradictory philosophy, finding some abhorrent, and still others mutually exclusive, I realise that expecting everyone to become raging liberal-lefty is not going to work in political terms, or even practical terms. As a result were I ever to become a mainstream politician, I’d probably have to take a bit more moderate a position. This is probably why I’d never be a mainstream politician.

There are also many points raised on which my opinions are far more nuanced than a four point scale will allow. I don’t think this changes my idealism in my approach to them, but believing something is a good idea is still fundamentally separated from knowing how to implement it. I also realise that any ideas I may have will almost invariably need to work in our current social climate, and complete political upheaval required to achieve some ideals will cause more problems than it solves. While I may be less than enamoured by the pandering to popularism democracy results in, I’m far less keen on many of the alternatives which have been seen. I may very well love everyone to live governed by rules of sunshine and happiness, but unfortunately I fear that the rules of Kalashnikovs and power would find a way to take hold.

One question intrigue me, and I’m not sure I see it as a left-right argument.

There is now a worrying fusion of information and entertainment.

The question itself could be interpreted to apply to many facets of the modern entertainment and information industries. I’m currently a big fan of Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe, but should that push me more to agree or disagree? The program is entertainment undoubtedly, but also informative, but paradoxically one of its prime thesis is to attack the way in which the news has allowed the need to deliver facts to be hijacked by the need to entertain. Is there hypocrisy in this situation? Secondly, infotainment has been one of the primary driving forces of the web and internet, with sites like Wikipedia being both methods of entertainment and sources of information. While I think letting entertainment get in the way of your facts is a Bad Thing™ I don’t think I could say the same for the reverse, although perhaps the end result is inevitable.

The latest campaigns from the British Transport police continues this tradition. Below are two desgins that were rejected.³

Click for full size

1. Also, as I write this, BBC News 24 keeps mentioning that the police raids in several Northern English cities have revealed photographs of possible terrorist targets. No mention how these differer from tourist photos.
2. Of course, in some of these situations other ‘reasons’ were given. However I can’t help feel that none of these ‘reasons’ would have raised suspicion is the passengers were not of Middle Eastern appearance
3. Of course they are actually parodies. Although I realise that it can be difficult to tell when faced with some of the real posters.

Ch…Ch…Ch…Changes

So this leaves a bit of a stream of conciousness affair here instead. If anyone actually is reading this blog regularly, you’ll have noticed the ‘this weeks tweets’ post which appeared this Wednesday. As you may have gathered, this is an automated weekly affair and ties in with my use of Twitter. You might also have noticed the ‘lifestream’ tab, a page which summarises my activity across the web, perfect for all you stalker types.

Time and Tide

The title of this blog post refers to the weekend’s tendency to disappear. I had intended to get some food shopping done, but suddenly it was six and I hadn’t got to the supermarket. I was in the lab though, before ayone thinks I was in bed. Odly enough this is probably actually a good thing, as I had forgotten than I was heading home later this week for my Mum’s birthday. I had planned a whole week of food.

The Great Train Ticket Gamble¹

Oddly, talking of going home I had a great time playing the ‘find the cheapest train ticket’ game. It turns out that the answer was Megatrain from Edinburgh to Birmingham, and then a standard return from Birmingham to Kemble. I could have actually done it cheaper with an offpeak return, but that would have left 15 minutes to change trains in Birmingham, which is a bit tight if one of my connections suffers a delay. I’m still slightly confused at what happened to one of the tickets offered to me between Birmingham and Kemble, as it seemed to change price. This isn’t unusual for ‘advanced’ tickets, but only standard tickets were availible at that point.

And Now for Something Completely Different

This was originally going to go in On Art anf Games [Part3] but never really fitted. So I’ll stick it here instead, where is still doesn’t fit but at least its surroundings are similarly muddled.

And now, finally to football is over, sao I can start watching Being Human.

1. I almost went for the great train robbery, but the price was fairly reasonable in the end

I first heard about ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ a couple of months ago, certainly before the nationwide US release, and probably around the time it had first been seen in one of the film festivals. I thought it sounded interesting, but then only end up getting round to see it after its critical plaudits, and success at the box office. Sigh.

However, although I enjoyed the film, I felt it fell short of what it could have been. Even allowing for the requirement for flashbacks, the film often felt slightly disjointed. At times I found myself left in confusion as to how Jamal knew something (and I don’t mean the answers to the questions), and although it was possible to deduce the reasons from later in the scene, it often meant the beginning of the scene was slightly confusing. (Although possibly thats just me being slow)

Similarly, I felt there was a lack of narrative cohesion between most of the questions, and the associated flashback. While there is no particular reason why the answer to the question needs to tie in with the story more intimately, I feel it may have been more satisfactory that the use the ideas which in some places felt slightly shoe-horned in. Ironically, had the story been more contrived in places, it would have felt less so.

Oh dear, I make it sound like the film was terrible, when it was anything but. (Not to mention I must sound hypocritical when I say it felt disjointed in places.) I enjoyed the film overall, and felt it was a pretty good example of the way in which the British film industry operates best. The film certainly wouldn’t have come out of Hollywood, and I seriously doubt it could even come out of the American independent films scene. I’m not familiar enough with the Indian film industry to know wether a similar film could have been developed there. Obviously the author of Q&A was Indian, and the film made use of a number of Indian actors (as well as British, Asian actors), however my knowedge of Indian film extends as far as Bollywood, and I don’t what the rest of their film industry is like.

Edit: Whoops, almost forgot my plan to rip-off Rock, Paper, Shotgun and link to a piece of music at the end of my weekly blog posts.

However, rather than complaining about the rail service (which would be rather unfair given the circumstances in this particular incident) I’m instead directing my eye at the governments proposed crime fighting Internet and phone database.

For those of you not in the know this will stop short of archiving the content of messages (Thank Cod!) “but would have details of sites visited, along with senders, times and recipients of e-mails and calls.” Which frankly, in many cases is enough. While the government clearly hopes to catch communications with osamabinladen@hotmail.com (yes, I realize that it will be somewhat more complex than that) they’ll also be building a database that will reveal a huge ammount of information about ordinary citizens.

But perhaps more worrying is that the government is even outsourcing this work. So not only will the govenment have access to this information, but also the random company to which they outsource it. And while the government promises harsh fines if the data is misused, that wont exactly help those who have had their data leaked. And all this before we even consider someone leaving a laptop in Starbucks.

I realise that the most of these records exist already, kept by ISPs and telecoms services. I realise that the police can already gain access to many of these records. But it strikes me that a central database only makes breaches of security more valuable to those who obtain the data, more wide reaching, and very possibly more likely.

bisexual
bisexuality
bisexuals
bi-sexual
bi-sexuals
…
gay
gays
…
homo
homos
homosexual
homosexuality
homosexuals
…
lesbian
lesbians
lesbo
lesbos

Along with several pejorative terms for describing non-straight people (except poof for some odd reason). What the list didn’t block is straight, heterosexual or any of its variants. This provides gay and bisexual people with little ability to discuss their sexuality, while placing no such restriction on straight folk.
This just continues to reinforce the idea that gay and bisexual people are an ‘other,’ and that there is something dirty or morally corrupt about their sexuality. If the list itself can’t be described as homophobic, it in the very least reveals the deeply rooted homophobia in our society.
Before someone raises the issue, I am well aware that gay and ‘homo’ are used as insults in the same was heterosexual isn’t. However the developer’s approach here is highly unsatisfactory, and I think creates a situation which is worse than the situation they were trying to prevent. By blocking the words, they merely end up re-enforcing the attitude that led to them being considered offensive in the first place.
I feel the developers (or more accurately the publishers, as there is an indication that the list was supplied by Disney) should have either allowed all non-pejorative terms to describe sexuality, or none of them.
If anyone is interested, the banned word lists can be found here.

This post was originally a message on the snopes messageboard.

CORRECTION: The post intended to refer to the game Pure, rather than P.U.R.E, as was mistakenly written in the initial post. I apologise to the creators of P.U.R.E for this mistake.

A few months ago I though this sounded quite snazzy, so signed myself up for the beta. Today I got access, so thought I’d give things a whirl. As a favour to their beta users, GOG are doing a buy one get one free offer on the first order, Sign-up was quick and easy, and didn’t seem to require too much in the way of information. Unfortunately it did decide to send my password and security question to my E-mail, a questionable security practise. I’ll E-mail them on this one.

I had a bit of trouble with establishing a secure connection, but that seemed to be due to OpenDNS. It seems to cause problems on secure sites if some of the page content is hosted at an invalid domain.

Payment allows visa or Mastercard only, which means those without a credit card are possibly out of luck. I’d try my debit card, but I’d prefer the added security of a credit card on an unfamiliar website. So can’t say if delta is also accepted. However they claim that they are adding more cards shortly, so I assume this limitation won’t last long.

On purchase of Sacrifice at the bargain price of $5.99 (About £3) the game was added to my account page for downloading when I saw fit. The account page also provides links to forums, articles and additional downloads.It also gives me the opportunity to rate the game and review it. The articles address technical issues with the game, such as the requirement to run the installer as administrator on Windows Vista.

The downloads for the game include the manual, reference card, desktops and avatars. The game itself downloads as a single exe, and the 562.6MB file is downloading hovered around 140kB/s-160kB/s, it looks like it will take about an hour.

While thats happening I’ll talk about the rest of the service. Much like Steam, GOG provides forums for all the games available on its service, as well as a General Discussion forum which currently contains mainly feedback and feature requests.

The website provides a nice console, listing games you own, providing download links as well as links to relevant support articles and forums. According to GOG purchased games will be available for download forever, which should sound like a no-brainier, but some download services fail to provide this. The website also encourages you to make backups to CD, something I’ll do as I don’t fancy re-downloading half a gig regularly.

Unlike something like Steam, the service doesn’t require any background tasks. This will please many people and hopefully means that games installs will be virtually identical to the CD versions, only without a CD requirement.

Interestingly the license covers any number of PCs/laptops in the same household. In practise of course many people will do this anyway, but its nice that they allow it implicitly.

Now onto the the most important aspect, the catalogue. GOG promises to add new releases each Tuesday, which should ensure a constant flow of games. Currently it just hosts titles from Codemasters’ and Interplay’s back catalogues. This includes among them classics such as Fallout 1 and 2, Sacrifice, Giants: Citizen Kabuto and MDK, all at $5.99. There are also a few $9.99 titles thrown into the mix. Currently they only have 34 titles listed, and a few of those are flagged as ‘coming soon.’ Notably key Interplay titles like Baldur’s gate aren’t present, I suppose Atari’s continued interest in the D&D license, or Bioware’s cavorting with EA, may be holding this one back. However the forums are full of requests so we’ll see what happens.

The developers currently seem to be fairly active on the forums, but this is may be just due to the beta period.

With the download done, we are on to installation. As suggested, I’ll install as administrator.

Hmm, bit of a slow start here, but its a huge file and the problem could be with Vista’s paranoid security. Still, we are in to a customised installer. Seems to be very easy to use, if you don’t want to charge the default installation directory it is installed and launched in three clicks.

Game works first time, and adds itself to the vista games manager, uhh, twice, once with a shiny icon, and another time with downloaded box art. The shiny icon has links to the manual etc, and the box-art icon appears to be the version Vista ads automatically. The game appears to be fully patched.

So overall the process was extraordinarily simple, and doesn’t have any unnecessary gubbins to get in the way. One downer is that they don’t provide an automatic update tool, but seeing as these games are pretty ancient I expect they are as patched as they are going to get.

Currently the selection is a touch limited, as are the payment options. However, it is still early days, and GOG already show intentions of addressing both these problems. I hope early sales will be sufficient to encourage other publishers to join the fray. The low prices means that I’ll certainly be using the service in future, to catch up on missed titles and to fill in gaps between modern releases. The benefit of not requiring the CD, of having everything patched up and easy to use, and having it all only a few clicks away, makes GOG an attractive alternative to scouring eBay and the pre-owned bins, and charity shops.

Good Old Games can be found at http://www.gog.com/ and is currently in beta phase.