As we all already know, the first signs of snow are the little piles of flour at the feet of lampposts. There used to be one on Mansfield Road in Oxford by the old car park, and in Cambridge there's a seeding site on the bridge by the Green Dragon.

I saw a man seeding snow by the First Public Drain. He had a handful of flour and an orange t-shirt. This was a few weeks ago. It hasn't worked yet.

posted at: 23:02 | path: /naturenotes | permanent link to this entry

We have an Allington Pippin in the back garden. Every so often I twist a few rosy-looking low-hanging fruit to see if they're ready yet. What if I'm strengthening the stalks? I could end up with a garden covered in the apples from further up, and the assiduously exercised ones at the bottom holding fast for the frost to eat them.

posted at: 22:54 | path: /naturenotes | permanent link to this entry

Alex Carlile, who is the ethical beard on the UK government's terrorism legislation, mentioned a variation of the famous ticking-bomb scenario todau when talking about evidence obtained by torture. What if, he asked, on July the 6th, we had obtained information that four young men were going to blow themselves up on public transport in London, and this information had been obtained by a foreign regime through torture? I paraphrase.

We can only answer this from the perspective of the day before a bombing, call it Martober the 31st. On Martober the 31st we hear from Colonel Thumbscrew's regime in Milgramistan that the Harrogate Martyrs' Brigade is planning something tomorrow. So what? People will confess to anything you like given enough help, but the thought experiment here relies on the HMB being incompetent enough to share detailed plans with someone who, whether by going on holiday or rendition, ends up in Milgramistan, and then not change them when he or she fails to get in touch.

I'm not having them in my jihad.

posted at: 22:29 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

If I knew more Turkish than a few dozen words and how to form the infinitive and the inessive, I might be able to say something sensible about how people in Turkey see the negotiations about EU accession negotiations.

If I were one of those newspaper columnists who compare increases in National Insurance to Stalin's liquidization of the kulaks, I could compare the national--Catholic flavour of the Austrian administration to the national--Catholic aspirations of the war crime suspects who are holding up Croatia's accession negotiations.

As things stand, I'll have to make do with wondering about the BBC asserting that memories of the Ottoman siege of Vienna are an important factor in this. Does this mean that I have memories of the Jacobite rebellions, or do I have to be Ursula Plassnik's age?

posted at: 21:02 | path: /OE | permanent link to this entry