corollary

The news this morning on the radio included a story about a six year old shooting a class-mate in Michigan, USA. Yet more evidence to my already suspicious mind that American gun laws are farcically bad.

I hoped to be able to find some sort of reaction on the NRA's web-site, but their news sub-page required plug-ins that I didn't have.

So, instead I’ll just sound off about how barbaric the US situation seems to be. The US has the world's largest prison population, it's happy to see people bearing lethal weapons, and it executes more people than any other nation apart from China. Grr, now you've got me onto the death penalty as well. I suspect I’m about to get all incoherent, so I’ll just leave it at that, except to point you at an Amnesty International web-site, where you can read more about this sort of thing to your heart’s content.

I don’t live in the US after all. Some proportion of those who do clearly manage to lead happy and satisfying lives. Many people would prefer to live in the US than elsewhere.

Went to see Topsy Turvy last night and greatly enjoyed it. Spent too long looking for an official web-site (clearly it’s too arty to descend to such tricks), and instead got sucked into a set of film reviews.

The author seems to share my sort of opinions on many things, so he'll definitely get on the bookmarks list. But now I really must do some work.

Our local super-market is closing down, meaning that shopping trips from home are going to become that much more tedious. Still, the cycle ride to the next nearest is good exercise. I guess I should say that life in Cambridge can be led quite easily without a car.

Perhaps we should just start using what is apparently Britain's biggest online grocery shop; Tesco’s. Recently, a representative from the trucking industry came onto the radio to say that the advent of the Internet was going to result in many more trucks patrolling suburban streets because of all the deliveries that Internet shopping was going to cause.

Today, I’ve been bad; I’ve gone back and editted some of my old entries for March to make them fit into a brave new world where I don’t have a link at the top of each entry.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the new nomic game that David Chess has begun on his web-site; it looks kinda neat, and makes me realise that I haven’t properly owned up to being a nomic-head in this forum so far.

Lest anyone have received the wrong impression, I am a long-standing member of the Agora nomic game. This is probably one of the longest running games around. In fact, its only obvious rival would be the Fantasy Rules Committee.

One of Agora’s long-time “rivals”, Ackanomic has recently been reported dead. This may be an exaggeration (such reports often are after all), but it would be confirmation of just how hard it is to keep an e-mail Nomic game running.

In other news, I am pleased to report that the project I mentioned a while back as being in the process of shifting to SourceForge has now made a big step towards actually getting there. Anyway, you can read all about it at the Cheth home-page.

One of my daily visits is to the Hunger Site. Being able to make a free donation of food for the benefit of the starving seems a good idea. Or at least, I thought so until today, when I was suddenly struck by the thought that maybe food aid isn’t really the best way of helping needy people. I’ve read that extensive food aid can really mess up local economies, because it can only serve to discourage local farmers. Equally, not having anyone to sell food to because they all died of starvation last year is also likely to be bad for local farmers. I guess I have to hope that the UN world food program knows what it’s doing.

Today is St. Patrick’s day. President Clinton will apparently be urging the politicians of Ireland to “give peace a chance” or some such. Who knows, maybe this will make a difference. Most people I’ve met from Northern Ireland are pretty cynical about the “peace process”, but you never know.

Had our oven fixed this morning. It meant a late start to the day, but HeatComplete (hate their web-site) did their bit, and I think it was probably worth it.

Elsewhere, Judith at Calamondin is becoming increasingly cryptic. I think the problem is that she has decided that she wants to talk about Important Stuff, just as if the web was a private diary. However, you have to protect the innocent, and keep some things private, and the result verges on the inscrutable.

This is the second time I've attempted to write this entry. While writing version one, I started to speculate about the degree to which Netscape had implemented the various Emacs editing commands. For example, Alt-D works fine to delete words. I wondered about Alt-Q to fill a paragraph, typed it in and promptly caused Netscape to exit. My immortal prose had only been in a text entry box, and it was lost forever. (So much for immortal!)

Got to test the oven last night; it works, hurrah!

Went to Hunger Site today and discovered that they've changed their original design. There's less text on the page; and now the site attempts to set a cookie when you connect to it. Hrumph!

The situation in Northern Ireland continues to develop. David Trimble now has a challenger for the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party. Heard all about it on the BBC Radio 4's great Today programme. The “informed opinion” certainly seemed to think that the challenge by Smyth would be bad if it succeeded, because Smyth is against the Good Friday agreement.

This web-log is a bad habit in many ways. It's just encouraging me to document my life in yet another way. I've already mentioned my “pen-and-paper” diary, but you didn't know about the lab logbook, nor the book-list, did you?

Trawling through Salon's pages the other day, I came across some interesting essays by Ellen Ullman. One of them is all about the struggle software engineers have to keep up with the cutting edge. I wondered if I could class myself a S/W engineer, and decided that computer scientist was probably more accurate.

Forgot to put my watch on this morning after my shower. I'm cut off from the universe!

The supermarket saga continues: it seems that we may be about to acquire an Asda in place of the Co-op. We had to walk into town on Saturday morning to do our shoppping at the central Sainsbury's. Central Cambridge is carnage on Saturday; I can't recommend it. We did stop off to do some other window shopping though.

The Computer Lab is moving to a new building next year. The building site has recently been officially blessed. The pictures of big-wigs in hard-hats are ridiculous. It's all so much posturing, a mutant machismo maybe. Here's an example.

Spam from Yale

I got an interesting “spam” from the Yale University Press yesterday. The writer asked me to advertise a recently published book on Brahms on my composers web-page, and offered a review copy.

I don’t know whether I should accept the offer or not. Being sent review copies of books by publishers is fairly standard practice, so I don’t have any qualms about being “bribed” into writing something positive. However, the big problem is really that I would have to read the thing. I have an enormous enough back-log of other books to read that I would feel guilty about promoting this freebie to the head of the queue. (I could hardly reply to the offer saying “Yes, I’d love the review copy, but I probably won’t get around to reading it for 18 months”, and yes, it is that much of a backlog; that’s why I have a list to keep track of it.)

In other news, it was revealed on the radio this morning that women in Britain are on average two inches shorter than women in the rest of Europe. This is apparently explained by the fact that there is a generally lower standard of living here, and poorer diets.