Yesterday, NASA published a logarithmically scaled map, below, of the solar system and surroundings, to accompany the news that Voyager 1 has left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space.
Solar System, in Perspective by NASA/JPL-Caltech
I’ve always been opposed to brand “loyalty” card schemes, like Nectar and Tesco’s Clubcard, and I’ve never signed up for any. We all know that they’re used to track customer shopping behaviour, and I don’t want to be tracked in that way. But it was only recently that I was struck by the fundamental dishonesty involved.
The story promoted by companies running the schemes is something like this: each time you shop with us, we’ll give you a tiny discount, but it’s only redeemable in discreet chunks, and we think this will give you an incentive to continue shopping with us instead of our competitors. In other words: we’ll trade you a non-binding increase in the probability that you’ll choose us for future shopping, which we think is worth two or three pence in every pound, in exchange for rewards equivalent to, say, one pence per pound.
The flaw in this story is that carrying a “loyalty” card doesn’t increase a customer’s chance of using the same shop on any future occasion. As far as I can tell, there are two types of people: those who don’t use any “loyalty” schemes (like me), and those who use every “loyalty” scheme going, and carry around a purse stuffed with cards so that they can get points and discounts wherever they happen to shop.
Ever since I accidentally bought a book about British folk traditions on Amazon a few years ago, I’ve been making an effort to attend a few of the more interesting ones. In the past two years I’ve been to the Haxey Hood Game, the Burning of Old Bartle in West Witton, Preston Guild Fair, and the York Mystery Plays.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, in and around the Staffordshire village of Abbots Bromley.
Today’s Richard Dawkins-centred Twitter row is about child marriage and Islam. It was sparked by his circulation of a Huffington Post article on the tragic case of an 8 year old girl in Yemen who died of internal injuries caused by the wedding night sex with her new 40 year old husband. A 2009 law to set the minimum age of marriage in Yemen at 17 was repealed by conservatives as “un-Islamic”.
Many of the religious apologist responses pointed out that poverty, not Islam (or any other religion), is the key factor in the prevalence of child marriages. Indeed a recent report by World Vision UK, linked from the Huffington Post article circulated by Dawkins, identifies the girls most at risk of child marriage as tending to be “poor, under-educated and … rural” and living in areas with high death rates, civil conflict and “lower overall levels of development including schooling and healthcare”. “Poverty, weak legislative frameworks and enforcement, harmful traditional practices, gender discrimination and lack of alternative opportunities for girls (especially education) are all major drivers of early marriage,” the report summarises.
2024 note: I compiled this list of everything I could find on the internet about The Room in 2013, around the same time that Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell published their book The Disaster Artist. Interest in The Room exploded after that, and this list immediately became incomplete and obsolete. However, I’ve decided to leave it here as it is, as a snapshot of the state of the fandom in the last moment when The Room was still a cult phenomenon. I haven’t checked whether the links still work.
The Room. The greatest worst film ever made. Ten years on from its release, it continues to grow in cult popularity, and there are more and more articles, interviews and tributes appearing all the time. This is an attempt to list all of the resources currently available online for The Room. I’m sure it’s not comprehensive so please use the comments to suggest additions.
NB. My personal recommendations are marked in bold.
I’ve noticed that when people are asked what kind of music they like, the usual answer is something along the lines of, “oh, I like all kinds of music.”
You’ve probably said it at some point. Maybe it was just because you couldn’t be bothered at the time to get into an in-depth discussion of what you actually like and why. Maybe you were being merciful and didn’t want to bore the questioner with your fanatical passion for death metal. Or maybe, and I think this is usually the case, you like to think of yourself, and want others to think of you too, as someone who has a broad knowledge of music, and open-minded, liberal tastes. I’ve been guilty of it myself, many times. But I’ve realised it’s bullshit.
Last weekend, my girlfriend and I went for a wander down Wilmslow Road, aka the Curry Mile, in Rusholme, Manchester. We passed a vegetable market and decided to buy a few things for dinner. We got some onions, aubergines and okra, and then spotted something that looked like this:
From Wikimedia Commons, by FlyingToaster
It looked amazing, like the sort of vegetable you’d expect to encounter just after landing on an alien world. Continue reading
The Campaign for Real Education is a pressure group which aims to raise standards in state education in the UK. It is not politically affiliated, although its proposed changes to education policy – grammar schools, a return to a ‘traditional’ teaching philosophy and increased parental choice – are more typical of right wing or conservative agendas.
The chair of the CRE is Chris McGovern. The organisation’s bio notes list his experience as including 35 years as a state school history teacher, independent school headmaster and Ofsted inspector.
McGovern appeared on BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme this morning, to discuss an academic paper published in the Economic Journal. The study analysed primary school performance data to show that, contrary to what some might expect, having a high proportion of pupils from non-English-speaking backgrounds in a school class does not reduce its performance.
I’m not going to discuss the paper, nor the CRE’s policies. I would just like to quote some of McGovern’s responses to the paper, and leave open the question of his credibility as an educational advocate.
What I hate most about the opponents of equal marriage – aside from their closeted homophobia and blocking of decent egalitarian legislation, obviously – is when they claim to object to “changing the meaning of the word ‘marriage'”.
Last week it was reported in the press that the Oxford English Dictionary had updated its entry for the word ‘literally’, including a second definition, “informal, used for emphasis while not being literally true”, thereby legitimizing its longstanding misuse.
Now, obviously this enrages me to the point of bloodlust. However, I don’t see any of those people who suddenly appeared from nowhere, claiming to be linguistic purists when ‘marriage’ was at stake, protesting over this.
A story is currently doing the rounds that the Globe, a pub in Leicester, has banned all British soldiers out of respect for the local Islamic community.
I first saw it shared on Facebook via a post [no link, I don’t want to support it] on a blog called the Daily Bale.
That the story is completely spurious should be obvious with half a second’s thought: how many teetotal Muslim customers is the Globe likely to have, causing tensions with others?
It takes less than 10 seconds of investigation to confirm that it’s complete rubbish, via an announcement on the Globe’s Twitter feed.