Family news

No 1 Son achieves 15 seconds of fame: he's got a video clip up on the BBC's Be on TV site.

His mother reckons he'll be on TV soon: the first continuity announcer in the family!

A spot of color

I've been out and about with the camera.

Vox populi

Beige Van Man.

Black and white

Stuff white people like.

Stuff black people like.

Bargain of the week

My latest purchase from Tenovus, the local charity shop:



One of the best collections I've seen in a long time and, at £2.50, it was a bargain I couldn't resist - it's £16.25 on Amazon.

The Kosovo question

Is Europe ready to go to war in order to guarantee Kosovo's independence?

I'm just asking.

Ethnically challenged

It just occurred to me that some people reading this post might imagine that my claim to Irish ethnicity was frivolous and unfounded. After all, I'm a German-American living in England - where does the Irish come in?

Well, my mother's parents were of Irish descent: my grandfather was educated in Tipperary (his family farmed the land around Roscrea for generations - until the potato famine came along) and my maternal grandmother's family were from County Mayo.

So I don't think my purported ethnicity is at issue. Hey, I'm even wondering if I could get an Irish passport - it's safer for international travel.

At least it used to be.

Castro on the other hand

Over at the Glasperlenspiel that is Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram adds his 2 cents worth to the coverage of Castro's retirement:

So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid. Let’s hear it for the middle-aged Cuban construction workers who held off the US forces for a while on Grenada. Let’s hear it for Elian Gonzalez. Let’s hear it for 49 years of defiance in the face of the US blockade. Hasta la victoria siempre!

Hmm.

I'm with Armed Liberal on this one: "If the price of universal literacy is prison camps for writers, count me out."

Duty Calls

From xkcd: "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language."

The Mathamatical Universe

I'm not blogging much: posting and high doses of codeine are not compatible. I'm doing three days on and two days off - both to prevent tolerance developing and to avoid the worst of the withdrawal symptoms. Unfortunately, that means I'm either too morphed out to blog or I'm so distracted by the pain and discomfort that I really can't be bothered.

Also, when I do have lucid time, I've been using it to work through Max Tegmark's paper The Mathamatical Universe(pdf).

Here's the abstract:

I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. I argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. I discuss various implications of the ERH and MUH, ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like consciousness, parallel universes and Gödel incompleteness. I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Gödel’s sense) structures exist, which alleviates the cosmological measure problem and help explain why our physical laws appear so simple. I also comment on the intimate relation between mathematical structures, computations, simulations and physical systems.

Fascinating.

Beatbox chef

The boys' current favorite on YouTube.

Beware the bearded weirdy

From the BBC: The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable".

Really?

The folks at Harry's Place have got something to say about that.

Afghanistan or bust

David Aaronovitch spells out the consequences of a NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan:

The Afghan Government would collapse, to be replaced by an overt civil war fought between the Taleban and local governors in the various provinces. A million or more Afghan refugees would again flee their country, many of them ending up in the West. Deprived of support from the US, as recommended by our commentators, President Musharraf or a successor would effectively withdraw from the border regions, leaving a vast lawless area from central Afghanistan to north central Pakistan. Al-Qaeda and other jihadists would operate from these areas as they did before 9/11. This time these forces - already capable of assassinating a popular democratic politician - would seriously impact upon the stability of Pakistan, which is a nuclear state.

Jihadists everywhere, from Indonesia to Palestine, would see this as a huge victory, democrats and moderates as a catastrophic defeat. There would hardly be a country, from Morocco to Malaysia, that wouldn't feel the impact of the reverse. That's before we calculate the cost to women and girls of no longer being educated or allowed medical treatment. And would there be less terror as a result?

Good news and bad

IRIN, the UN's humanitarian news service, reports that a group of women in Guinea are choosing health over tradition:

About 150 communities in Guinea on Sunday collectively abandoned the practice of female genital cutting - a landmark declaration in a country where more than 97 percent of women undergo the ritual, the event’s organisers said on Monday.

Delegations led by women from each village converged on the central Guinean town of Lalya to speak about genital excision and participate in the declaration. All of Guinea’s ethnic groups practice genital cutting, despite a law that forbids it.

Unfortunately, the Telegraph reports that a number of female medical students in England seem willing to put cultural traditions before health.

Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of deadly superbugs, because they say it is against their religion.

Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands, because it is regarded as immodest in Islam.

Living with pain

My life has turned into a codeine fugue – wake up, take the tablets, doze for four hours then more painkillers. Do that a couple more times and then off to bed.

In truth, the dozing is becoming more fitful – I’m building up a tolerance for the codeine so it’s not really dealing with the pain. Meanwhile I have a dull thud where my consciousness used to be.

Right now, I am a perfectly useless human being – I can’t cook, clean, shop, blog, read, write or play poker.

Still, I reckon I’m lucky – all that pain I was ignoring for so long turned out to be a gall stone. Tim Blair’s pain, on the other hand, turned out to be cancer.

It isn't unusual, after you hit 40, to have the occasional unexplained ache, or muscle cramp, or sleepless night, or other types of non-dramatic complaint - though it might be unusual for those things to start happening all at once.

That is where I was three months ago. Things got worse, in tiny increments. Within two months - by degrees so small I didn't notice them - sleepless nights sometimes became nights roiled in sweat so drenching I was woken by drops falling across my eyelids.

Previously generalised aches took root in specific areas, and once in a while turned from ache to agony.

At which point any sensible person should have seen a doctor.

But a lot of men don’t. Me included. I’d have still been suffering in silence if I hadn’t been rushed to hospital one night with severe abdominal pains.

Thankfully, Tim's doing fine. Post-op, he's out of hospital and blogging again.

Me, I'm still waiting for a surgical assessment. And once I'm sorted, any pain I get I'm going straight to the doc.