The Mortal Wombat

Oh dear, now that I can post links so easily, I no longer have much incentive to keep you, dear reader, up to speed with the heady whirlwind of adventure that I try so hard to avoid.

So, in no particular order:

• virgin.com still haven't sorted out the bloody car, despite repeated assurances that it'll arrive 'any moment now'...
• I feel ill, but have to head straight from work for an OU tutorial, from which I probably shan't get home till gone 10. Bah. It's my first maths one, so I'm bringing my calculator in case we have to do hard sums. Computing tutorial on Wednesday too.

Had a good weekend during which I:

• Did more work on my new website (including a nice php style generator which outputs standards-compliant stuff which sensible browsers interpret properly, but which Internet Explorer manages to mangle horribly—more work needed there, since I'm unlikely to persuade all of my readership to ditch IE)
• Finished tweaking my family tree stuff into a suitable text format, created a mySQL DB, and uploaded all 172 records
• Went to see White Noise at the new cinema—scariest film I've seen since [The ]Ring (original or American remake). The new cinema mings somewhat, though
• Played a fair bit of TheSims2, and grew little Belle up from a baby to a toddler—she very cute. Still no alien abduction...

L bought me The Killers' album Hot Fuss. It's very good. To me they sound most like '80s The Cure, with occasional bits of Simple Minds. My mate Rob recommended them to me a while back, and he reckoned they reminded him most of early New Order. Formidable.

• Protecting Castle Mound
  Cambridgeshire County Council has begun work to preserve and protect Castle Mound
  (categories: news cambridge history castle_mound)
• Iraq reconstruction funds missing
  The US government's own auditors have criticised the 'Coalition Provisional Authority' for allowing $9bn of Iraqi oil revenue to go missing
  (categories: news iraq oil fraud)
• Multiple genes involved in determination of sexuality
  A new study seems to show that there is a definite genetic component to homosexuality, and that the genes involved are not just those of the sex chromosomes
  (categories: genetics humans homosexuality)
• US 'founding father' buried in Suffolk?
  DNA tests are to be carried out on corpses in Suffolk to determine the final resing place of Bartholomew Gosnold, who founded the first lasting English-speaking colony in North America
  (categories: genetics history usa)

• Turin Shroud dating
  Another attempt at dating the Turin Shroud comes up with 'between 1300 and 3000' years BP
  (categories: forteana turin_shroud)
• Bat evolution linked to Eocene warming
  The first bat (the Bat-father) originated in the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 52-50 million years BP
  (categories: evolution bats)
• Lock Busters
  Report from the World Lock-Picking Championship -- scary stuff!
  (categories: locks crime security)

• Roland Humphries, 1980-2003
  A memorial page to my little brother
  (categories: roland)

• Other primates have a sense of fair play
  Studies of capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees show that a sense of fair play might have a long evolutionary history
  (categories: social_behaviour evolution primates)
• The Microsoft Memo
  Linus Torvalds writes to Bill Clinton (Hallowe'en 2008)
  (categories: open_source linux windows bill_gates linus_torvalds)

• Identical twins get identical driving-test result
  17 year old identical twins from Sawston both passed their driving lesson first time with the same minor error each
  (categories: forteana twins driving cambridge)
• How to speed up Firefox
  Get Firefox to pipeline requests (also has a link to something on mouse button navigation)
  (categories: firefox)

• Theo Jansen's wind-powered critters
  Theo Jansen has created wind-powered, walking machines, which he hopes can be made to evolve
  (categories: inorganic_life wind_power art)

• US Vice-President 'Dick' Cheney blames Saddam Hussein for current shit in Iraq
  Yes, really, it's all his fault. If the Iraqi people hadn't been so brutalised under Saddam Hussein, they'd now all be happily munching McDonald's and giving their oil away to Cheney Corp.
  (categories: news usa iraq errorism)
• The Arctic Ocean is being diluted
  More freshwater is being pumped by rivers into the Arctic Ocean. This dilution could disrupt the cycle that gives us the Gulf Stream. While Global Warming will make the world hotter on average, it could actually make Europe a lot colder.
  (categories: news environment gulf_stream arctic)

• Most people hate Bush
  In a worldwide opinion poll 58% (and the majority in 16 out of 21 countries) believed the world was more dangerous with Bush as US president.
  (categories: news usa errorism bush polls)
• Rice names 'outposts of tyranny'
  Condoleezza Rice has said that the US must help bring freedom to the people of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma and Belarus. How nice of them...
  (categories: news usa errorism)

• GEDCOM 101
  Introduction to the GEDCOM file format (used by genealogists to share data)
  (categories: GEDCOM)
• Bill Gates gives me the horn
  Bill Gates working the camera for a teen magazine photoshoot (is this for real?!)
  (categories: bill_gates comedy)
• The Language Log
  A multi-author (American) blog on language issues (etc.)
  (categories: linguistics language philology blogs)

Was rather a nice weekend. Woke up a little hungover on Saturday morning, having spent longer in the pub than I'd been expecting (started drinking at an 'I'll only be here for two hours' rate, and ended up staying for five...). Hangover was quickly cleared by timely application of AlkaSeltzer XS [do you think I could get them to sponsor my blog?], and by the arrival of my great-grandparents' marriage certificate through the post. I'd ordered it over Christmas, and needed it to find my great-great-grandfather's name, and to be able to clarify a few details to find my great-grandfather in the 1901 census. This part of my family tree (the part responsible for my surname, annoyingly) had eluded my attempts at investigation ever since I started 14 years ago, so I was very excited!

I discovered that my great-grandfather in 1901 was a 16 year old Coal Putter (one who lugs coal trucks around the mine) in Edmondsley. Later on Sunday, L managed to track down her great-grandfather in the census, and found that he was a 14 year old Coal Chewer (or possibly 'Hewer'?) in Lumley—only 5 km away from Edmondsley. We also discovered that my great-grandparents were married in a church in Chester-le-Street, literally across the road from where her grandparents' pub was a generation later! Perhaps we're distant cousins...

Thinking of putting my genealogical stuff up on my new website. It'd be quite a big project, but would be a useful exercise for developing my skills, as well as being a convenient resource for any members of my family interested in their genealogy.

Thanks to Adrian for his little cgi thingummy, which posts my del.icio.us links to this 'ere blog. Should make it a bit less of a chore to blog links, and, as a by-product, means that all my links are catalogued in del.icio.us. (Thanks for sorting out the tag hrefs, Adrian. I've edited my CSS to stop the class 'post-title' from showing up.)

• snootysims
  Useful Sims2 resource with links to downloads, tutorials, and news
  (categories: Sims2)

• A description of the fabled Mongolian Death Worm
  (categories: Mongolia cryptozoology)

Hola! My brain is well and truly fried. Went to Brum on Saturday for Rob's birthday. We got disgracefully hammered, and didn't make it to bed till 5. I attempted, with only partial success, to sleep on the living-room floor. Fortunately I was just about well enough to traipse along the canal to Sainsbury's in search of Alka-Seltzer XS and Lucozade Sport (lemon flavour). [Alex introduced me to Alka-Seltzer XS, but Lucozade Sport is my own discovery.] That dealt with the hangover, but it's taken me days to get over the exhaustion... All that combined with some fairly intensive cramming of maths (first assessment due this week), and you'll understand why my brain is, in fact, not only fried, but bubble-and-squeaked.

Here's the usual collexion of links:

• On separating computer reality from real reality. This is so true. A few weeks ago I woke up in the night to go to the loo, and one of the cats ran past me. I was really confused, because I'd thought that I'd paused 'the game', so the cat shouldn't have been moving...
• A review of Jared Diamond's new book on societal collapse. "Diamond identifies five major causes of societal collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, loss of trade partners, and stupidity. Any one or two plus stupidity will do." Well, you can always depend on humans to be stupid, as a species we have no trade partners (or hostile neighbours, probably), and there's no sign of us stopping the environmental damage which is leading to climate change. So, if you take human society as a whole, then we're doomed to collapse. I suppose the only question is how far; whether we just go into a kind of global Dark Age from which we recover after a few centuries, or whether that collapse leads to our extinction. I know which way most of this planet's organisms would vote.
• MIT has a really cool-sounding course in genetic engineering. This was the kind of thing I thought I'd be doing by now when I was 16. Hmm...
• Iraq continues to be well and truly stuffed. This BBC report from a few days ago says that while the world's attention was focused on the tsunami, the situation in Iraq has escalated to near open warfare. And today the puppet regime in Baghdad has admitted that there will be no elections in parts of Iraq. Nice one George, nice one Tony. The same article also states that only 10% of Fallujah's residents have returned, and that 300 Syrian lorry drivers are being detained by US military. Jeez. Real hearts-and-minds job, that one.
• The new Mac Mini looks well cool. And here's the BBC report from MacWorld, which also discusses the iPod Shuffle.

Happy New Year, one and all!

2004 was a really good year—the good things that happened to me far outweighed the bad, and I learnt (or began to learn) a lot. I'm looking forward to 2005. It's divisible by 5 for one thing (my favourite number).

Christmas was lovely. My first one with L, and we did the whole thing (tree, baubles, lights, food, booze, etc.). The Dinner was one of the best I've ever had (I had sausages instead of chicken , but otherwise it was thoroughly traditional). My dad got me 15 bottles of fine wine (to be pronounced fayn wayn), and I'd bought myself a bottle of Talisker, so we were well sorted for booze.

My OU maths stuff arrived a week or so before Christmas, so I've been spending a fair bit of time on that. I'm enjoying it, but it's pretty tough for me (I've only got GCSE maths, so it's got to take me through A-level to 1st-year undergraduate standard in 9 months). It overlaps with the introductory computing module that I've been doing since October, and the overlap lasts until July—I'll be pretty busy for the first half of the year!

Tsunami stuff:

• A couple of links on defence systems; one on Japanese tsunami defences; and one on how tsunami warning systems work
• The earthquake that caused the tsunami may have speeded up earth's rotation and made it wobble
• I like this idea of using blogging and text messaging to mobilise disaster relief
• A woman who survived at sea for five days after being washed away is found to be pregnant—all sorts of clichés you could bring in here, but it is a wonderful story

Other randomness:

• Until only a few centuries ago New Zealand sported gigantic eagles, which evolved very rapidly from tiny, diddy eagles. Cool!
• For Sims2 addicts, this mind-control mirror hack could come in handy (among other things, it can show you if invisible NPCs have got stuck on the lot, causing the game to slow). Incidentally, I'm now onto my third generation of Sims: Seamus and Trixie both died (taken away by the Grim Reaper and his hula girls), Tallulah moved out, married a Norwegian hunk, and has a little boy named Ingvar, while Clydog stayed in the family home, married Cassandra Goth, and has a little boy named Owain. Tallulah and Anders are trying for a second baby. Clydog's hoping to be abducted and impregnated by aliens.
• Wired ran an interesting article yesterday on rapid opiate detox. I wonder whether this kind of treatment could ever make it onto the NHS?