As what as you like
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The Ancestor’s Tale
While I was on holiday recently I went on a bit of a reading marathon, which included The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins. I just can’t recommend this book enough - unless you are a wizened old Biology professor you aren’t going to know all of the cool and fascinating things in this book, but you should! Especially in these times of madness where Intelligent Design creeps insidiously through the minds of many. It is literally dripping with footnotes and references to Dawkins’s other works and those of other authors (including, obviously, The Origin of Species). The book starts out in the present day and traces back through time, examining each of the points where major groups of species join into our ancestry. This is an entirely arbitrary way to look at it, but avoiding going forward in time removes any problems with language suggesting that there is intent or purpose in Evolution; And it is more convenient to consider us as the main line because we are humans, but the early chapters make it abundantly clear that the structure is humanocentric because it has a human author and that there can be no suggestion that Evolution was leading towards us. One of the most fabulous concepts in the book is actually quite generalised and applies to many areas outside Evolution; It relates to how we view things as discrete objects/groups and dislike gradiated scales (e.g. we like to label people black or white when in reality there is a full range of skin tones and a “black” person can have lighter skin than a “white” person). Dawkins refers to this as The Tyrrany of The Discontinuous Mind and I think it’s a very interesting way of looking at things. Sadly this book is not for the faint-hearted, it’s a pretty weighty tome and isn’t shy about using Biological terminology (almost always with an excellent explanation though). Trust me that it’s worth wading through and buy a copy!
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Cascade of images
I’ve been up to things again and finally got around to putting the pictures up.
To kick things off we have a gallery of photos from the Jazz Cafe Picnic at Marble Hill in Twickenham (London). It can be found here.
On Tuesday I went to London to meet up with adie and we wandered around the Science Museum, saw a 3D IMAX movie and looked round an exhibition of costumes/props from the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie. The gallery is here.
Finally, as a bit of fun, I found myself in some TV footage from Glastonbury (click on the images for larger and fullsize versions):
On the left is the original TV image with us circled, on the right is the same shot, but with us magnified (or rather, the back of our heads magnified) -
Big Chill!
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Mark Thomas
I saw Mark Thomas doing a stand-up gig at Concorde 2 in Brighton this evening with Alex, Simon, and Simon and jolly good it was too. The man can certainly express some righteous anger!
It wasn’t all political ranting (which was still very funny), there was a good mix of humour, some of which went beyond the pale for some of the audience; Along with some excellent anecdotes from various anarchic protests he has taken part in.
Two thumbs up :) -
SonyEricsson k750i
I just upgraded to a k750i from a t610 and my initial impression after a few days is that it’s a very good phone overall. It’s not perfect, but it many of the weaknessesof the t610 are gone or minimised, and new features have been added and integrated extremely well. Visually the phone is quite simple, I have a mostly black one and half of the front is flat clear plastic for the screen, the rest is buttons, which are bigger than those on the t610, but seem like they are quite flimsy and may be easily encouraged to fall off. Time will have to tell on that. The phone has plenty of hardware, too much really. There’s a much more detailed display than on the t610, mp3 playback, fm radio, movie playback, movie recording, flash, autofocus… it’s all a bit much really. I already have two digital cameras for different occasions, I don’t really need a 2 MegaPixel camera in my phone; I do realise that these are “useful” to a lot of people though ;) The shortcut button between the two soft buttons is very nice, being able to quickly pull up the functions you most use can save a lot of menu diving. The thing has a MemoryStick Duo slot too, which is a genius plan really. If you don’t already have a little digital camera to keep in your pocket and a little mp3 player to keep in your other pocket, this phone can realistically do the job of both, and save you having a third pocket used by your phone. The Duo cards are pretty cheap and I have seen suggestion that it can support up to 2GB (mine shipped with a 64MB card pre-installed, in addition to the 30-somethingMB onboard). It also seems to have some kind of 3D graphics ability - my Orange branded unit shipped with a Sega tennis game that is in 3D and Alex’s one on O2 came with a 3D flight sim of some kind (I don’t mean crazy red and green specs, it is rendering a 3D engine ;) The biggest improvement over the t610 and probably the best thing about this phone is the software. It’s clearly based at least in concept on that of the t610 (which in turn in herits from the t68 and earlier), but it’s much, much faster. Speed has often been a problem for SonyEricsson, text message inputs regularly lag a long way behind even a moderate typer. I was often several menus ahead of mine in general use, which is a serious pain. No more, menus appear much quicker and are able to use the higher screen resolution to display more information, reducing the number of questions you have to answer to perform even the simple task of calling someone. The phonebook is wonderful now; if you start typing it jumps to the letters you press instead of waiting a second; instead of selecting a person and then getting a request to select the number, it now displays the default number and offers a direct call option, then offers horizontal scrolling to select alternate numbers/addresses. Very handy. Also nice is the text message recipient chooser keeping a list of recent contacts. The browser seems to work well, the menus/notices are often animated and pretty, you can have an animated background if you really want. The media player is quite an interesting idea, I am investigating transcoding movies and putting them on memory stick - it’ll be interesting to see how the battery stands up to such tests. The supplied USB cable charges the phone; very handy and it also presents the MemoryStick to the host computer as a USB storage device, so it will work with pretty much anything that works with USB memory sticks. It’s bloody fantastic to see mobile phone and camera companies adopting this more and more instead of proprietary communication protocols. It makes integration far easier for Operating Systems, as shown by the fact that I connect the phone to my PC running Ubuntu Hoary and it is able to mount the storage drive and notice there is digital camera data there, and offering to import the photos into my albums. Simple things like that make these devices much more rewarding in my opinion (and I’m pretty sure I’m right ;)