Sat, 16 Dec, 2006
I must learn how to do this properly with codes
The RSS feed for this site has moved to
http://www.insidecolinshead.com/?feed=rss2
, so if you could repoint your feed reader there, that would be best.
posted at: 16:26 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
Fri, 01 Dec, 2006
Russians
The popular press has never really been able to paint the small collection of academics, minor aristocracy and football-obsessed billionaires who are how the general public sees the Russian community in Britain into an identifiable enemy, such as they have been attempting to do with Muslims, Sikhs in the 1960s, Czech Roma a few years ago, Poles last year and Romanians and Bulgarians at the moment.
What if the people suspected with poisoning Litvinenko had been Muslims? I don't mean here the government in Chechnya, of course. I imagine the tabloids would very quickly start to look even more like Der Stürmer or Jyllands Posten than they do at the moment.
posted at: 10:51 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
Sat, 14 Oct, 2006
Managing growth
As motorists get wealthier, they spend their money on ever bigger cars. This makes it harder and harder for people on bicycles to see where they're going.
Therefore, I have followed David Miliband's example and set myself a target. A target of growing four inches by 2050. This overrides my 1986 commitment to be six foot tall by 1994, which I have not yet, admittedly, achieved.
I have not yet worked out what sort of width commitments I need to be making to cope with the increasing thickness of car door frames.
posted at: 18:04 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
Climate careless
You can offset the cost of a flight from the south of England to the north of Germany for the cost of 200 ml of red wine in a Jena pub. There's something missing here, and I think it might be that you're only paying for your share of the emissions. Since almost nobody else on the flight will be offsetting, mightn't it be more sensible to just pay the amount you've paid Michael Ryan instead?
If you had to offset the entire flight yourself, it might make the train look rather cheaper.
posted at: 14:32 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
Mon, 25 Sep, 2006
Pay and Display
I've got it. We can make people realize how expensive carbon is by making them pay for it through parking meters. People who think nothing of paying GBP 1.50 for a cup of coffee will have fits of the vapours if Muckborough charges them the same for an hour's parking, and probably spend a fiver on fuel driving to Sharnley where you can park for nothing.
Fuel is still amazingly cheap, though. You can get nearly half a gallon of the dearest non-renewable petrol for the same as a pint of renewable beer. How is that fair?
posted at: 20:23 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
Wed, 06 Sep, 2006
It's just common sense
There's an amusing bit of yesterday's Times on the floor over there. It says "TARGETING ASIANS: Is it common sense or racist?" for all the world as if 'common sense' didn't consist of prejudice, ignorance and misplaced certainty. I have no confidence in anyone who plans security on the basis of common sense.
posted at: 21:18 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
Tue, 22 Aug, 2006
Minicabs
"Incentives to coordination" it said, talking about something in commerce. Of course I misread it at first, thinking that the main incentives are easy-to-use coordinating conjunctions with no IP attached to them.
If the word for "and" was a hundred syllables long and you had to pay T S Eliot's estate every time you used it you'd be forced to use parataxis. And that's probably not safe for women late at night.
posted at: 21:55 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
Sun, 20 Aug, 2006
Psychogenetics strides ahead.
DNA tests to decide if JonBenet murder suspect is fantasist says The Guardian. I see genetics has made tremendous progress since I went home on Friday. I wonder what the GO terms are for being a fantasist?
Up until this point, the GO has had a very shallow representation of processes pertaining to the nervous system
said the GO consortium this week.
posted at: 18:56 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
Thu, 20 Jul, 2006
Up the garden path
I hope you hear these postings in your head in the voice of Simon Callow. The next sentence, however, will probably sound a bit more like Brian Blessed, or Tom Baker.
THE HORSE RACED PAST THE BARN FELL.
The all-caps is deliberate, there. I've only tried out this famous sentence on one other native British English speaker so far, but we both interpret "THE BARN FELL" as being some geographical feature.
A Canadian, I notice, has already spotted this, but I'm a native speaker, and the garden-path interpretations never occurred to me.
posted at: 22:07 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
Stakhanovite productivity
Once, when someone complained about Americans, it's always Americans, "turning nouns into verbs", I would grit_VB my teeth and bite_VB my tongue_NN, or launch_VB into a volley_NN of sentences_NNS about how people_NN have turned nouns into verbs_NNS since time_NN immemorial.
Now I can just say "Ha ha, the Euphoric State part-of-speech tagger does that all the time!".
I don't know which is more insufferable.
posted at: 21:54 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry
