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Not a moment too soon, Celebrity Big Brother ends today. My views on the current obsession with celebrity will be well known to those of you who have visited my “About” page. All I can say is that I have accidentally alighted on CBB once or twice this week while channel hopping, and my brain has nearly imploded with the sheer vacuousness of it. I know some people say that putting down shows like Big Brother is in some way snobbish and elitist. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be shown - if people genuinely want to watch it, that’s fine. It’s just that I don’t even begin to see the point or the attraction. If you want to watch people doing nothing, why not do it on the bus? At least you get to go somewhere at the same time.

I want to go to bed, but I think I’ve finally got full comment functionality back, and I’ve restored the previous comments. I had to add them manually myself, so I’m afraid that the posting dates are all wrong. Anyway, at least your words of wisdom are preserved…

There are two morals of this story:

1) BACK THE FRELLING THING UP, YOU IDIOT! 2) Maybe think about switching hosts. I think part of this problem might be host-related, and anyway, I’ll be running out of space before too long.

My Moveabletype database got seriously frelled somehow. I’ve managed to trash the old entries and reimport them, but now the entry ID’s are all wrong. Sigh. Anyway, this post is partly for me to check if comments now work.

Something has gone a bit pear-shaped with the comments. The comment count has updated correctly, but the comments themselves don’t appear on the page. I’ve posted a question on the Moveabletype support forum, and hopefully some kind soul will help me fix it. If all else fails, I’ll reconstruct the comments from the notification emails I received for them.

Normal service will hopefully be resumed in the near future.

I’ve just watched this week’s “The Life of Mammals”. It’s just not fair. I can lecture about animal behaviour until I’m blue in the face, and the students won’t remember it. But I’ll bet you a million pounds that they’ll all remember the shrew train for the rest of their lives. To be fair, the quality of the filming is superb, and there’s nothing like David emerging from the undergrowth somewhere to catch your attention (note to Mr. Attenborough - those bats are pretty much frozen solid, you know - you don’t need to whisper). Of course, they occasionally gloss over the complexity, but they still manage to get across a lot of valuable information. The segment with the heat sensitive camera in the bat roost was particularly enlightening. Apart from anything else, it tells us that David should wear warmer trousers, or he’ll catch his death of cold.

Cute animal award of the day: the shrew train elicited a lot of aahs, but the award goes to the elephant shrew (a Formula 1 rodent). I thought that the adult elephant shrew was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen until the baby turned up. I may be a scientist, but I’m not immune to the charms of cute fluffy things.

For the first time ever, I took a look at the “Your Store” tab on Amazon. Here are Amazon’s picks for me.

• Dreamweaver MX Magic by Al Sparber, Gerry Jackson
• Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development (Tools of the Trade) by Bruno Mairlot, et al
• Python Essential Reference (Essential Reference) by David Beazley
• Python Standard Library by Frederik Lundh
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [Extended Version] - Four Disc Set [2001]
• DVD Gosford Park [2001] ~ Robert Altman (Director), et al
• DVD Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones [2002]
• DVD 24 [2001]

The first four are fairly obvious as I’d ordered other books from them on Dreamweaver MX and Python. But the others are just plain spooky. I’d already asked my brother for the LOTR box set for Christmas, I watched Gosford Park and was glued to 24 when it was on TV. Even the Star Wars is something I would like if it wasn’t so crap. But as far as I remember, I haven’t ordered anything related to these, or even looked at them on the site.

Deeply worrying. There seem to be two possible explanations: either I’m so predictable that my likes and dislikes can be summed up by a simple algorithm (or one word - dork), or they’ve been peeking through my curtains and following me to the cinema. Spooky. Still, being told what I like is so much less bother than having to form my own opinions.

So, Winston Churchill won the Greatest Britons poll in the end. A fairly worthy winner I suppose, but frankly, I don’t see the point. For one thing, I don’t really see how you can compare such a varied bunch of people at all and come out with a single measure of “greatness”. Are we judging people in the context of their time, or ours? Elizabeth I was certainly a strong and intelligent woman, and it’s nothing short of miraculous that she even managed to survive for 45 years, let alone keep power for that length of time. But today, that feat would be much less remarkable.

In the end, it seemed to come down to who appealed most to the public (which can surely be the only explanation for the appearance of Princess Diana in the top ten). In other words, just another popularity contest.

This is just fantastic! And completely and utterly true, I suspect. [Via Boing Boing]

I had a great treat yesterday: I went to a performance of three of John Adams’ pieces, conducted by the composer with the LSO and featuring Joanna MacGregor.

The pieces were Lollapalooza, Century Rolls and Harmonielehre - all wonderful uplifting, joyful bits of music. Lollapalooza is a very jolly, rambunctious, almost jazz-like piece, with an incredibly complex rhythm. It’s quite short, but a lot of fun. Century Rolls features a solo piano, and was inspired by piano roll recordings of famous performers and composers from the last century. The first and last movements are fiendishly complex and fast, and it was fascinating watching Joanna MacGregor’s hands blurring over the keyboard at an unbelievable rate. She really is a superb performer, a million miles away from the stuffed shirts you normally associate with solo piano. Her braided hair flew around as she bopped and bounced along with the rhythms, smiling and almost laughing out loud at the pleasure of playing something so hard so well.

Harmonielehre was even more superb. It’s a huge feel-good piece, with an enormous ensemble, where brass and percussion (and two harps - how’s that for extravagance!) feature strongly. Apparently the first movement was inspired by a vision John had of a supertanker emerging out of the sea at great speed - like a Saturn space rocket. It starts and ends with enormous energy, and you find yourself holding your breath with excitement without realizing it. When it ends, you suddenly remember that your body does actually need oxygen, and gasp for air.

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This is one of John Adams’ earliest pieces, and one of my favourites. Harmonium is a three part choral piece, set to poems by John Donne (Negative Love) and Emily Dickinson (Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Wild Nights). Even if you think you don’t like classical music, or contemporary classical music, do give this a try.

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A thought struck me yesterday about the similarities between Apple and Victorian engineers. Unlikely, you might be thinking, but bear with me. The Business Design Centre used to be an agricultural hall - basically, a glorified barn for markets and shows, and was built in the 19th Century. But if you look at the roof from the inside, you can see that the engineers thought that there was nothing incongruous about a practical, functional building with humble origins also being beautiful. As you can see from the photo, the structural steel roof beams are studded with iron flowers, and some of the supporting brackets are very ornate.

It seems to me that Apple does something similar. Its products are very functional, and designed with ease-of-use in mind, but they realised with the original iMac that functional things can also be beautiful, and even have personality. I’ve always loved the attention to detail, like the coloured apple symbol on the back of the keyboard. You hardly ever see it, but the back of the keyboard is as pretty as the front - that’s a very Victorian sensibility.

Today I took the day off work and travelled to London to go to MacExpo at the Business Design Centre in Islington. Going up the escalator into the main hall was to enter MacGeek heaven, valhalla and nirvana, all at the same time. Choc full of geeky goodness.

There were many highlights of the day: getting my hands on one of the new 17″ iMacs was great fun, as was seeing rows of people in the mirrored drive door G4 games arcade blasting seven bells out of all manner of demons, aliens and Nazis. I must also thank the nice women at Crumpler Bags, who were very good about me repeatedly destroying their stand.

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So, in the end Gunther von Hagens didn’t get arrested at his little freakshow, I mean educational event.

Should he have been arrested? It’s true that the the average member of the public (if there is such a thing) has a shocking lack of knowledge about his or her own body. This must contribute to health problems and to exacerbate fear when something goes wrong. If a doctor tells you that your spleen is damaged and may have to be removed - and you don’t know what the hell your spleen is or whether you can live without it - it’s very frightening. So better knowledge of anatomy and medicine can only be a good thing.

But… It’s obvious to anyone with a brain (still in their skull and not removed with a hacksaw and a spoon) that von Hagens was in this for the publicity, whatever he says. The “Bodyworlds” logo on his gown was a bit of a give away, to be honest. And that can’t be right.

There seem to be some teething problems with comments. You may encounter a “500 Internal Server Error” if you click a comments link. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Who knows why. If you try again later, it will probably work. It’s a very general error (basically it means that something went wrong when a perl script was run), and is thus rather tricky to pin down.

The Microsoft Media Presence lab is developing something called MyLifeBits, a multimedia database to store everything that ever happens to you. The idea is that you can then easily find what you’re looking for.

“The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.”

Eeek. PCs, reliable? I can just imagine the lawsuits when someone’s whole life goes up in digital smoke. It would give a whole new meaning to Blue Screen of Death. Not the mention the total spookiness of Microsoft having even more control over your life.

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