"and so I appeal to your fatherly feelings to forgive me"

Hurrah, I'm incredibly proud of the awesome democracy we've created in Iraq.

Go sign this petition!

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Overseasstudent/
via
http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2008/12/sleepwalking-into-a-police-state/#more-383

Peter Simple is writing for the Press Association

Bad news from Stretchford, as Santa Punch-up Park is closed.

Was this a seasonal amenity of lovely, sex-maniac haunted Sadcake Park?

Coalitional signalling

There at the top, on the edge of the castle moat we found a group of Druzes, young men and boys, standing in a circle and singing a terrible song. They were all armed and most of them carried bare swords. "Oh Lord our God, upon them! upon them!" I too joined the circle with my guide. "Let the child leave his mother's side. Let the young man mount and be gone." Over and over again they repeated a single phrase. Then half a dozen or so stepped into the circle, each shaking his club or his drawn sword in the face of those standing round. "Are you a good man? are you a true man? are you valiant?" they shouted. "Ha! ha!" came the answer, and the swords glistened and quivered in the moonlight. Then several came up to me and saluted me. "Upon thee be peace" they said "the English and the Druze are one." I said: "Praise be to God! we too are a fighting race." And if you had listened to that song you would know that the finest thing in the world is to go out and kill your enemy.

Gertrude Bell, Letters

Tibetans Stay With Conciliatory Approach to China

Meme

Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.

For me: "Very probably the occupational, ethnic, and other subgroups that combined to form Sumerian (and other subsequent) cities and civilizations danced together among themselves on appropriate occasions" (a classic evolutionary Just So Story from Keeping Together In Time by William H. McNeill.)

A million?

UK's 'secure' child protection database will be open to one million

ContactPoint is now scheduled to launch in January. It will store and share data including every child's name, home address and school, and information about their legal guardians...

Quantum frigidum estne illud!

Wikipedia in Latin. Scilicet!

Nothing new under the sun, part II

At one point in the proceedings, Bishop Turner rose to the podium and thundered a diatribe against legalized U.S. racism, prompting the Constitution to report "He Prefers Hell To United States; Calls American Flag Dirty and Contemptible Rag." ... Turner wrote to the Constitution a letter accusing them of misquotation but reiterating, "there was more color babble in the United States than in hell itself."
-- Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta 1906

Dammit, even the Economist is against me.

When Obama wins, I'll probably feel kind of excited. But every time I read his election plans and McCain's, I think "McCain's are better".

As for Obama: well I'd call it 55-45. 55% he's a Clinton. 45% he's a Carter. What worries me about the guy is that he's got ideas. That's a terrible thing for a politician. Politicians should just have instincts.

Royal prerogative

Once a harmless and colourful anachronism. Now, AKA "we can do what we like".

Blame the banks not the markets

... my thoughts entirely. (Well, except these guys probably know what they are talking about.)

Why the ECB Can't Fix Europe

which could also be titled "why it is a good idea for monetary sovereignty to be aligned with fiscal sovereignty".

Quote

It is not enough to propose things that are good in the end, but suppose this model were an excellent model, and fit for England and the kingdom to receive, it is our duty as Christians and men to consider consequences, and to consider the way.

-- Oliver Cromwell, during the Putney Debates

Thank you, Gordon Brown...

... for keeping us out of the Euro.

Not words I often utter.

Reading on the financial crisis

Here's one via Martin Wolf in the FT: why Paulson is wrong. I've been reading FT alphaville - great fun - and various bloggers, articles etc. At least we are not short of opinions....

Me & Debbie were talking about this last night, like a pair of concerned amateur astrologers trying to understand a comet.... I think our conclusions were something along these lines:

1. Governments face inevitable pressures to protect voters' savings and houses; banks are therefore quite rational in lending irresponsibly.

2. If it goes ahead, the Paulson government bailout will create the conditions for another house price boom in the next economic cycle. This isn't sustainable. The banks are socializing their losses. (But, on a personal note - stay bullish on property in the long term!)

3. Larger banks are more likely to be "too big to fail" and therefore to lend irresponsibly. What is more, there is an incentive to grow so that one becomes too big to fail.

4. One solution might be to tilt the market towards smaller banks, to dampen the incentive towards inefficient growth. (I don't know how this could be done - maybe by offering them favourable interest rates?)

Getting your Creative Live! Webcam to work on Linux

This is for those of you with a Creative Live! Notebook Webcam - which IDs itself as 041e:4068 if you type "lsusb" on the command line - you'll get something like:

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 041e:4068 Creative Technology, Ltd

The issue with this baby is that it sends JPEG-compressed data, which your computer needs to decompress. For older kernels (2.6.24 and before) you can install the ov51x-jpeg driver. This contained JPEG decompression right in the kernel module. However this was only a part-time project (merci Romain) and not a permanent solution.

For newer kernels (2.6.27), there's a newer and less crazy trick - though obviously it would be nice to have things work out of the box so that Linuxhater won't laugh at us. In the meantime, go to this page to understand what's going on. Then download libv4l and untar it in your home directory.

You will now need the kernel headers for your latest kernel version. (That is, you need videodev2.h in /usr/include/linux.) This is probably best done by installing the package "linux-libc-dev" - at least, that works for me on Ubuntu. You can install the package from synaptic or with "sudo apt-get install linux-libc-dev". Make sure, of course, that it is the right one for your 2.6.27 kernel. (At the moment, I have to add the intrepid sources by hand.)

Now you are ready to go. In a terminal, go into the untarred directory "libv4l-0.1" and type "make". If this completes successfully, you should have some nice files ending in ".so" in a new subdirectory called "lib". Next, follow the instructions in the README file, by entering

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/lib
export LD_PRELOAD=`pwd`/lib/v4l1compat.so

on the command line. Finally - with your camera plugged in - type "camorama" (or start another webcam application if you prefer - for me, camorama works but "cheese" doesn't). You should now see yourself on screen.

Reasons to vote for McCain

Jonathan Freedland: Obama is "the fresh start the world is yearning for". " If the free world could choose its leader, it would be Barack Obama."

Chris Spurgeon: the Republicans held a rally - just like the fascists - and support strong leadership - just like the fascists. "Only a leader with McCain’s war record and paternal qualifications can help Americans muster and maintain the tenacity necessary to 'drill baby drill,' (even though this will have no influence on oil price or supply) and generate the requisite hate to 'kill baby, kill.'"

OMGWTF Neurotic animals!

From "Genes, Evolution and Personality", Bouchard and Loehlin 2001. Formatting slightly screwed up, sorry, but I know none of you can resist the news that octopuses are neurotic.


Octopus neurosis 1: you change colour, but you think a passing crab may be laughing at you.

Octopus neurosis 2: nervously tangling your tentacles together.

    Table I. Animal Personality Factors Based on Factor Analyses of Individual Animals Classified According to the Five-Factor Model
                                                        and Two Additional Factorsa
                                                  Five-factor model trait names                                       Additional dimensions
Species              Neuroticism     Agreeableness        Extraversion        Openness       Conscientiousness      Dominance        Activity
Chimpanzee                x                 x                    x               x                   x                   x              x
Gorilla                   x                 x                    x                                                       x
Rhesus monkey             x                 x                    x               x                                       x
Vervet monkey                               x                             x                                              x
Hyena                     x                 x                                    x                                       x
Dog                       x                 x                    x                       x                               x
Cat                       x                 x                    x                       x
Donkey                                      x                    x
Pig                                         x                    x               x
Rat                       x                 x
Guppy                     x                                      x
Octopus                   x                                      x                                                                      x
a

Adapted from Gosling and John (1999); an x indicates that the factor or a combination of two factors was found for that species.

Surrealism news

Nice article on Nicolas Bourbaki. This made me laugh out loud - kind of a funnier preview of the Derrida/Searle debate:

"In the 1950s, Ralph Boas of Northwestern University wrote an article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Bourbaki, explaining that it was the pseudonym for a consortium of French mathematicians. The editors of the encyclopedia soon received a scalding letter signed by Nicolas Bourbaki himself, declaring that he would not allow anyone to question his right to exist. In revenge, Bourbaki began spreading the rumor that Ralph Boas himself didn’t exist, and that B.O.A.S was an acronym of a group of American mathematicians."

In other news, Geoffrey Perkins is dead. Allegedly he was the inventor of the game Mornington Crescent - there's a lively round being played on Slashdot now, Duke of Edinburgh's rules.