New Coins, Redux
Monday, 16.10
A while back I wrote about the new coin designs unveiled by the Royal Mint. I finally got one of the new coins (a penny) in my change from the QM shop today. Exciting stuff. Bring on the photographs, say I.
The obverse is the same as ever: it bears an effigy of the Queen with the text, "ELIZABETH II D G REG F D 2008", short for the Latin, "Elizabeth Secunda, Dei Gratia Regina, Fidei Defensor", meaning, "Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen, Defender of the Faith". Also the date, but you didn’t need to be told that.
The reverse is the new bit, with a portion of the royal arms and the text, "ONE PENNY", indicating that the coin is worth one penny. What bothers me slightly is that, unlike the reverse of the old-style coins, the new issue don’t seem to carry the value of the coin in figures; this makes the coins hard for non-English-speaking tourists to use.
This is the most interesting thing that has happened to me all week.
Tagged in: cool stuff; 2 comments
Obligatory Festival Review: Brampton Live 2008
Sunday, 20th July, 00.49
I spent today at Brampton Live folk festival in Brampton, near Carlisle, Cumbria. Thus, fresh from the computer of the Josy come the following words, punctuation no extra charge.
The Maerlock
A little unusual with its strong jazz/funk influence, this five-piece played many things, including a version of Bide, Lady, Bide, one of my favourite songs ever.
Chris Millington
A singer-songwriter from Exmoor. He was enjoyable to listen to, but didn’t amaze me I’m sorry to say.
Cloudstreet
An amazing band from the land of the Australians, this three-piece was one of the most tight and polished acts I saw all day. Favourites of mine include Thousands or More and Dance Up the Sun.
Maddy Prior: Back to the Tradition
Good stuff here, some traditional, some contemporary. Very much what we’ve come to expect from her. This act finished the afternoon session.
Dragonsfly
Opening the evening session, Dragonsfly were no less than astounding. Incorporating a wide variety of styles, and using such unusual instruments as the hurdygurdy, they sang songs from as far afield as France and Armenia. Awesome.
Thea Gilmore
A stunning voice coupled with some very good songs. Not entirely the kind of style I would listen to on my own initiative, but enjoyable nonetheless. Included a guest performance on the fiddle by Phil Beer, more notable for being one half of the duo who were the entire reason I came down to England in the first place, the simply-breathtaking
Show of Hands (with guest Miranda Sykes)
Amazing harmonies, amazing songs, virtuosity on a staggering array of instruments. These are the hallmarks of a band to which more than any other I know recordings fail spectacularly to do any kind of justice. Tonight’s performance literally sent shivers up my spine in places. I cannot put this strongly enough: go to see them.
Tagged in: music; 2 comments
False dichotomies (trichotomies, tetrachotomies, et cetera)
Saturday, 5th July, 19.59
In an almost unprecedented turn of events, I have enough Important Thoughts (at least, I think they’re important) for another blog post already. Also, I don’t want to do the washing up. Therefore, I’m going to talk about labels.
This arises in part from thoughts I’ve been having about polyamory, the practice of having multiple partners in an open way. To me, it seems like a nice idea, but not one to which I feel especially committed; neither, however, do I particularly have any expectation that a relationship should necessarily be monogamous. Am I truly monogamous or am I poly? The only appropriate answer seems to be, “Neither.”
Much the same thing goes for sexual orientation. ‘Bisexual’ is a label which fits me for the most part. One thing that does trouble me, though, is the implication that being bisexual makes me in some way separate from someone who is not. I’m just attracted to whom I’m attracted to, just like anyone else. Am I really bisexual? I’m not sure the question even makes sense.
At the same time, labels provide a convenient way to talk about ourselves. “I am bisexual,” is much less verbose than, “My sexual attraction is oblivious to gender,” or some other such phrase. More crucially, and more perniciously in my opinion, society expects us to define ourselves thus, and I think this is what bothers me the most about the whole thing. And thus this rambling mini-essay-whatever comes to a less-than-coherent end.
Tagged in: relationships, gayage; 2 comments
We're all doomed. DOOMED!
Friday, 4th July, 14.17
So it looks like the global economy is going to hell in a handbasket. Being neither an economist, a political scientist nor God, I can’t give a particularly well-informed opinion about it, but it looks like it has something to do with oil. It usually does, these days. The global oil production supposedly peaked in 2005, has stayed on an ‘undulating plateau’ since then, and is apparently set to tail off quite sharply in the years to come.
I like to that we as a species still have some future beyond the current century, and that civilisation isn’t set to collapse, but recently things like avian flu and global warming have been getting me extremely worried. Certainly neither of those have the potential to wipe us out in the same way a nuclear war does, but a bird flu pandemic or climate change being significantly worse than we’ve been led to expect would have a crippling effect on us, and could still be the death of Homo sapiens in the years to come.
It seems to me that Mother Nature is dropping us some rather strong hints that She doesn’t want us around any more, and we can either vacate the premises on our own initiative or be wiped out by natural causes. Or wipe ourselves out, of course. Earth is pretty much unique in that it is a stable ecosystem. Even if we get very good at terraforming, the ecosystems which we would create can never be better than metastable. Over centuries or millenia of neglect, they would decay. Even if we do find a few bacteria on Mars or Europa, there is still nowhere remotely like Earth. What if Earth turns out to be the only place within a megaparsec capable of producing intelligent life? Don’t we owe it to those potential future species to leave the planet alone so that they can emerge? Within the next century, if we are still here, we will no longer need this planet in order to survive, and then the responsible thing to do is to leave it behind. This planet does not belong to us. We just happen to live here.
Of course this depends on human beings being responsible, which is something we don’t exactly have a tremendous history of. How proud I am of my species.
Tagged in: ray of sunshine, politics; 7 comments
In which Josy is very uncultured
Saturday, 31st May, 13.24
The following is a list of books which I have not read but ought to:
DICKENS, Charles: A Tale of Two Cities
DICKENS, Charles: Great Expectations
HOMER: Iliad
HOMER: Odyssey
MACHIAVELLI, Niccolò: The Prince
MARX, Karl and ENGELS, Friedrich: Das Kapital
PLATO: The Apology of Socrates
SARTRE, Jean Paul: Nausea
TOLSTOY, Lev Nikolayevich: Anna Karenina
TOLSTOY, Lev Nikolayevich: War and Peace
Any I’ve missed?
Tagged in: books; 6 comments
Sumer is y-cumen in
Tuesday, 6th May, 17.03
It can hardly have escaped your notice if you are in British climes, but it has been rather warm of late. This had somehow escaped my notice, probably by a combination of my tendency to shut myself in my room at Murano and the fact that my mind is still somewhere back in mid-February. How I wish I could use that as an excuse to get out of exams.
I spent most of yesterday in Kelvingrove park, and discovered that summer had happened, and about time.
This post is more of an I’m-still-alive kind of a thing than anything else. To that end, I’m still alive, and so, to all the Josy-assassins of this world, I extend a hearty nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh.
I leave you with the following limerick, harvested from Wikipedia:
A mathematician named Klein
Thought the Möbius strip was divine.
Said he: “If you glue
The edges of two,
You’ll get a weird bottle like mine.”
Tagged in: times and seasons; 7 comments
Indie Television
Friday, 25th April, 03.47
Raj, Ewan, Not Gary and I went to a lecture by science-fiction author Ken MacLeod earlier this evening. Mr MacLeod is an entertaining speaker, and I enjoyed the lecture greatly. He made several interesting points, one of which set off some ideas in my head. I wondered vaguely what to do with these ideas, until a voice (not a literal voice you understand; it’s a narrative device) said, “Dude, that’s what blogs are for.” Et ici nous sommes, as they say dans la belle France.
One of the things Ken MacLeod did during the lecture was to draw what is popularly known as a Venn diagram, but which is more properly called an Euler diagram, on the blackboard, representing types of consumers of SF, and made the point that ‘media SF’, i.e. films and television, was much bigger than literary SF, overlapped with it only slightly, and, most importantly for what I’m about to talk about, was much less ‘hard’ (yes, let’s get the giggling over please) than literary SF, having a tendency to pull new ideas out of a hat to save the day, rather than working forward from a straightforward premise. He didn’t say this, but the impression I got was that he thought that literary SF was in some way more authentically ‘SFesque’ than media SF. Anyway, enough of rehashing what Ken MacLeod said. My question is this: why?
Not a very original question, I will freely admit. It has been asked countless times before, by many different people, from many different walks of life, and a worthy and valid question it is too. Indeed, one could say that it is the fundamental question, from which all others spring.
Shut up, Josy.
As I was saying, why is it that media SF is so much less SF-y than literary SF? There is nothing fundamental about being made in a screen-based format rather than a written format that means that the rigour that defines hard SF should disappear. Where is hard-SF television? What has happened to it?
Market forces blah blah blah, you may say, and you’d be right. Hitherto, Hollywood has dominated the TV and film industries, and if there is one thing on which Hollywood thrives, it’s mass appeal. Hard SF, sad to say, is very much a niche thing. Here is the important point though: this is, lest you hadn’t noticed, the twenty-first century. We have, or else I wouldn’t be writing this, the Internet. The time has come for indie television to take off. It has existed for some time of course. Glasgow University has GUST, a student television station, which Craig hadn’t heard of when I told him about it, which demonstrates that it has yet to realise its full potential. Alas, connection speeds are not quite up to the task of streaming DVD-quality video, and won’t be for some time, but we still have three options.
First, bittorrent; download each episode first, and then watch it. This might take a day or so, maybe a little more on a slow connection, and thanks to big-business attacks on bittorrent, it remains poorly understood to many people. Of course, mass appeal isn’t what we’re looking for; if we were, we’d be Hollywood. (See above.)
Second, sacrifice some resolution in return for streamability. This is okay, but if other people are anything like me, which they are to a first-degree approximation, this might put them off.
Third, wait. Compressed DVD-quality video, including audio, is about eight megabits per second. The connection being used would require a good bit more than this, since often the connection would be being used for other things simultaneously. Assuming that half a machines bandwidth can be devoted to the stream, this would require a sixteen-megabit connection. I’m not quite sure what the state of the art is, but if this doesn’t already exist, it can’t be far off.
In practice, sites offering (illegal) downloads of mainstream television use a mixture of the first two options, and these two options could be used until high-quality streaming becomes feasible.
Indie television: an idea whose time has come?
Tagged in: media, science-fiction, cool stuff; 7 comments
New Coins
Friday, 4th April, 16.18
The Royal Mint has revealed its new designs for the 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p and £1 coins. This is all very exciting and stuff, but I want to know when I will actually start getting them in my change. This is important, damnit.
What I really want to know is why they even bothered with the 1p, 2p and 5p coins. Many countries have taken their equivalently-valued coins out of circulation. Personally, I just find they accumulate, and I more or less never actually spend them. I have a big jar of them on my desk right now. There must be at least a pound or two’s worth in there.
One thing that this major redesign does indicate is that the current government has no plans to adopt the euro any time soon. This goes with a rather depressing trend in general: people have just stopped talking or thinking about the euro, and neither Tony Blair’s nor Gordon Brown’s government has been anxious to remind them. This is a shame, but from a purely aesthetic point of view, perhaps it’s no bad thing; compared to the new sterling issue, the euro coins (or at least the common side of them) are horribly bland.
Tagged in: cool stuff; 7 comments
Arthur Charles Clarke, 1917-2008
Tuesday, 18th March, 23.53
I am saddened to learn of the death of science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke at the age of ninety. He was one of the founders of modern SF, author of such well-known works as Rendezvous with Rama and (based on the screenplay he cowrote with director Stanley Kubrick) 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The book of his that I most remember is Childhood’s End, the story of a human race which finds itself at the mercy of a benign species known as the Overlords, and how humans respond to being treated essentially as caged birds. Another of his works that I remember well is The Light of Other Days, cowritten with Stephen Baxter, exploring the consequences of the ability to view any point on Earth at any past time, on a whim.
Arthur C Clarke was one of the writers responsible for demonstrating that science-fiction could be more than just pulp entertainment, that it could explore things that really matter, and he will be missed.
Tagged in: deaths, science-fiction; 0 comments
Mawwage! Twue wuv!
Tuesday, 18th March, 03.07
This is an idea I’ve subscribed to for sometime, and talking to Sam about it last night has got me thinking about it again.
Civil partnerships (aka civil unions, aka domestic partnerships; I haven’t heard of a domestic union for some reason) are here, and indeed have been around for over two years now. What seems odd to me is that in Britain, not only can same-sex couples not get married, but opposite-sex couples can’t get a civil partnership. In New Zealand, the situation is less weird in that civil unions are available to all couples, but there is still a bizarre dichotomy between the civil union/partnership and marriage, even though in legal terms the two are practically identical.
The main impediment to same-sex marriage, and the reason why civil partnerships exist in the first place, is of course religious objection to homosexuality. Religions care about marriage, because marriage was a religious thing first, and only became a civil matter later. It seems to me that the whole fuss has arisen because of the conflation of a religious matter with a civil one.
Here is the solution, which Sam and I, and probably many others, appear to have come up with independently: why have marriage be a civil matter at all? The principle of secularism should require that religion be kept entirely separate from the state. Let religious groups define marriage as they please, and simply open up civil partnerships (though change the name, please; ‘civil union’ has a much less businessy sound to it) to opposite sex couples as well.
(Apologies to Jeph Jacques.)
Tagged in: relationships, politics, religion, gayage; 4 comments
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