• Reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" - Chapter X, which is mostly about the Goths
  
  
  Almost entirely about the barbarians - mainly the Goths - with the deadly succession of shortlived emperors mere background detail. And this seems right - the real story is not the politics of the Empire's leadership, but the story of how the empire catastrophically failed to maintain the physical security of its inhabitants, the first duty of any state, as the eastern defences crumbled both north and south. It seems to me almost as if the Roman Empire collapsed at this point, the middle of the third century.
  
  
  (tags: gibbon)

6am and I am not writing 1000 words before breakfast. Plus: iPhone means I can post from bed ( miss p permitting). Glory.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth_of_the_starship.html

(NB: As starships do not in fact exist, no starships were harmed in the production of this essay. Also, this is just words. If they upset you, go lie down in a dark room for half an hour then drink a glass of water; you'll feel better.)

Actually, I tell a lie. There are five starships that we know of; Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and New Horizons. But they're a far cry from the gleaming interstellar transports of science fiction. New Horizons is the most recent of them. Launched in late 2006, it is the fastest human-launched vehicle so far. It raced past Lunar orbit within nine hours of take-off: nevertheless, it will take around 10 years to reach Pluto (its proximate target — for a three-hour flyby). It weighs around 478 Kg, and is currently travelling outwards from the sun at around 17km/sec — about fifty times as fast as a rifle bullet.

We are 4.37 light years, or 140 million light-seconds, from Alpha Centauri, give or take. One light second is 300,000 km; it takes New Horizons about five hours to travel one light second. So: in very roughly 30 million days, or on the order of 300,000 years (if it was going in the right direction, which it isn't), New Horizons could reach Alpha Centauri.

And that's the best we've done to date, admittedly without really trying ...

• Got a roofer to look at our loft, which has a squirrel problem. We need our eave combs (i.e. the things that block the gap at the bottom of the tiles) replacing. Quote expected next week.
• Taught DisOrder how to use Secret Rabbit Code.
• Added drag and drop and playlist support to Disobedience.
• Wrote a new manual for Disobedience. It's also grown some help buttons which link into the appropriate bits of the manual.

http://ai731.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/first-egg/

http://ai731.wordpress.com/?p=828

This morning when I went out to let the chickens out of the coop into their run, like I do every morning around 10:30 or 11 am, I found our first egg sitting in the sawdust on the floor of the coop! It was all I could do not to race back to the house waving it in the air and shouting “Egg! Egg!” at the top of my lungs. As it was I did call t! quite loudly to show him our prize:

It’s small, which is normal. Young chickens start by laying smaller eggs, and “ramp up” to larger eggs. Here’s a comparison shot with an egg we bought from Hans at the market last week:

I’m hoping that the hens will start to lay in the nest boxes I made for them out of a couple of wicker baskets (I didn’t have enough spoons to build boxes out of spare plywood).

I need to try to find a couple of wood hen eggs to “seed” the nests with in hopes that they will figure out where they are supposed to be laying. Last time I went looking, I hit four different craft shops and the closest I could find were a couple of round wooden doll’s heads – since I know some people use golf balls as substitute eggs, the shape might not matter overly much.

Doesn’t that look like a cozy spot to settle down and lay an egg? The chickens didn’t seem to think so. They scattered the shredded paper all over the coop and knocked the wooden ball under the feed bin. Every morning I search for it and put it back into the nest box in hopes that they will eventually get the right idea.

So our little flock is doing well. Their diet of organic layer mash is supplemented by all our vegetable peelings and any other food scraps that they will eat and are safe to give them (pretty much everything except tea bags and leftover chicken):

And Chief, the head rooster, has been spotted doing his thing with the hens, which bodes well for some of the hens eventually raising their own chicks.

For now, I’m just thrilled that it looks like we’ll have our own fresh eggs all winter, and probably enough to pass on to family, friends and neighbors as well.

Underambitious fantasies. My back was itching in the pub last night, and I couldn't quite reach the right spot to scratch it. ‘If only,’ I heard myself think, ‘I had a slightly longer arm.’

Ridiculous! If I'm going to allow myself to fantasise counterfactually, why didn't I just fantasise ‘If only my back didn't itch in the first place’?

http://store.xkcd.com/

Hey! A note to anyone interested in buying Christmas gifts from the xkcd store: the deadline for Christmas delivery of domestic orders is December 14th. We'll continue to ship after that, but won't guarantee by-Christmas delivery. (If you haven't been to the xkcd store lately, you might want to check it out. I've got some some new stuff there!)

http://xkcd.com/668/

• The Irish Roman Catholic Priests Sex Scandal: Nothing will happen, really. Perhaps the end of the lies will help some people. But I can't imagine there being any prosecutions. I feel terribly sorry for my aunts the nuns, who knew even less about all this than my mother did all the while it was going on.


• Us being ill: We left the house today and went to Moondogs, which was an incredibly long walk for Emer. I think she's not wholly recovered but definitely getting there. Then I spent the evening being very very dizzy, so I had to eat salty food. That's been happening more and more; I need to speak to the doctor and meanwhile get more salt into my diet. Perhaps we'll start putting some in the cooking sometimes?


• What we're doing: This weekend is a big DIY weekend and then we're going to clean the house. Also, we have to sell two dressers, a chest-of-drawers/changing table/bookshelf unit, and Rob's Unseen University model. They have outlived their usefulness. Might wait until the New Year though, because I'm not looking forward to the whole clearing-and-photographing-and-so-on.


• Emer's bedtimes are going very well. We're all free by nine pm most nights, and she's waking less and less overnight too. Earlier in the mornings though, unsurprisingly.


• This is the hospital Rob refused to allow me in when I was pregnant with Linnea, and according to Rob it's the one we brought Linnea to when she was sick in the night once, when we were in Essex. We're not hugely surprised by what has been found. Though I'm not sure I'd be surprised if it had been found in our local hospital either (actually, I would - I've spent a lot of time there, after all).


• Linnea wants Rice Pops for breakfast sometime. We were never allowed Rice Krispies because they were a waste of money, so I'll definitely be getting some for her. She has started drinking all the milk left in her cereal bowl now so breakfasts are harmonious again.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/climategate.html

Various folks are getting upset for one reason or another about the hacking and redistribution of internal emails from the University of East Anglia's climate research unit.

Frankly, I can't be arsed commenting on it — because marine biologist and SF writer Peter Watts has already said it for me:

The fact is, we are all humans; and humans come with dogma as standard equipment. We can no more shake off our biases than Liz Cheney could pay a compliment to Barack Obama. The best we can do-- the best science can do-- is make sure that at least, we get to choose among competing biases.

That's how science works. It's not a hippie love-in; it's rugby. ... Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries. Science is alchemy: it turns shit into gold. Keep that in mind the next time some blogger decries the ill manners of a bunch of climate scientists under continual siege by forces with vastly deeper pockets and much louder megaphones.

How many sachets of brown sauce is "lots and lots of brown sauce"? (you may enter a range, if you think "lots and lots" has an upper as well as a lower bound)

Feeling v bouncy this morning. Quite looking forward to teaching.

Boss greeted me, said 'you sound worse'. I denied this.

Thirty mins in asthma got so bad had to leave them to work alone. Left after one hour. Have seen nurse and have prescription for stronger drugs. Currently in bed with cat. She has this strange idea that if she sits on my chest I will feel better.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Earlier this week I got a bug report for unifdef from Jonathan Nieder, who now maintains the Debian package. This prompted me to do some work on it, which it sorely needed - I hadn't touched it since March last year, and I had a bunch of unincorporated patches from Anders Kaseor, and I haven't backported the fix for an embarrassing bug from FreeBSD-8 to FreeBSD-7.

I've dealt with all but the last of these, and the latest version unifdef-1.188 is available from http://dotat.at/prog/unifdef/. I have also committed it to FreeBSD-9-CURRENT. When the code freeze for FreeBSD-8-STABLE is lifted (FreeBSD-8.0 should be released RSN!) I'll backport unifdef to the 8-STABLE and 7-STABLE branches.

This evening I also did a bit of work on FreeBSD's version of factor. I noticed a while back that it has a performance bug: it's very slow to factorize some numbers, for example my phone number. I got its bignum factoring code from NetBSD back in 2002, so I went back there to see if they knew anything about this bug. It turns out that jsm28 fixed the bug in 2004. Five and a half years later I've finally committed the fix to FreeBSD...

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Photos of the week

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Curtains

Thanks for joining us. To our American friends, have a fantastic Thanksgiving. To all of our international neighbors, we'll eat a little extra for you!

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/more_holding_patterns.html

If you're wondering what this week's excuse for scanty blog updates could possibly be, it might have something to do with me being 40,000 words into the (projected) 100,000 word first draft of 2011's novel, "Rule 34". It's a sequel to "Halting State", set some five years after the earlier novel, and focusing on the way our definitions of crime and morality (not to mention the practice of policing) change over time. (Yes, the title is an explicit call-out to you-know-what. The term "Hitler Yaoi" has been used with intent ... but only after I googled, rubbed my eyes, and concluded that rule 34 was in effect.)

So it's with some interest that I spotted this news item on the web today. Nutshell version: Dennis O'Connor, HM Chief Inspector of Police, has issued a report on the conduct of public order policing (commissioned in the aftermath of the G20 protests in April). It's damning in its condemnation of heavy-handed tactics adopted primarily by the London Metropolitan Police, in emulation of crowd-control techniques used on the continent and in the United States: "The report, published today, called for a softening of the approach and urged a return to the "British model" of policing, first defined by 19th-century Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel. O'Connor advocated an 'approachable, impartial, accountable style of policing based on minimal force and anchored in public consent'."

All I can say is: it's overdue. The Americanization of British policing has visibly been in train for a decade now — and not in a good way. The culture of Britain's police forces sprang from very different roots, and the increasing emphasis on bureaucratization, pre-emption through the threat of massive force, and alienation from the public that has characterised the current government's tinkering with the machinery of law and order is a radical and unwelcome departure. It's given us such travesties as the RIPA Act, with its implicit abolition of the right to silence (the first victim of whose anti-terrorism provisions appears to be a harmless schizophrenic), the practice of police routinely arresting people in order to justify collecting DNA samples, and the use of police intelligence apparatus to help corporations snoop on protestors. The creeping expansion of police surveillance and suspicion of legitimate political dissent — I'm not talking about bomb-makers here, but simply people who want to demonstrate in public their disagreement with government policies — is deeply worrying. Let's hope that the O'Connor report marks the beginning of a sea change in the relationship between the British police forces and the public, away from the American/European paramilitary model and back towards "the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."

http://www.greenend.org.uk/steph/diary6.shtml#4B0C0F89

---------------------------------------------------[Tue Nov 24 16:53:29 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings  (steph)

Subject: The dumps

I've been feeling depressed today.  Every problem is insurmountable, it's a
herculean amount of effort to get even the simplest task done, and even when I
can muster the motivation to do something my memory for short-term details is
working even less well than usual so it's a case of two steps forward and
somewhere between one and three steps back...

There is a big heap of things to do, but that's not normally a problem.  My
usual attitude is to find the next thing and do it, and slowly I work my way
through most of what's important.  Today, though, it's a huge pile of Stuff
that needs my attention, which in this case I have not got.  No less huge,
though rather less metaphorical, is the mess on my desk, which isn't helping.

I suspect I just have to write today off as a bad job and start again tomorrow.