Edinburgh

Anyone in town for the Festival? Have signally failed to get down to that London this year (so far).

Grey Skies

http://open.spotify.com/track/0dkAnXwATMm8xQmbxabZ68

Antichrist

Just reading the review of this movie disturbs me somewhat.

Yo

Just checking in. How is everybody? I'm going to do some renovation work on my commuter bike over the next few days and will post a picture of it when it is done. I was embarressed by the ammount of rust on it when I met Colin last time.

Without Hot Air

Heard this Cambridge physicist bloke on the radio. He's written a free e-book about how much energy we use, and how much alternative energy provision we'd have to bring in to cover it if we don't reduce consumption.

Gross National Happiness - again

The Bhutanese have had a lot of mileage and publicity out of their GNH idea over the years (including on this blog), but I didn't realise how seriously they took it. It's actually a constitutional requirement to consider the impact on happiness of any proposed political proposal, and they have devised a complex methodology for monitoring it:

"the Bhutanese produced an intricate model of well-being that features the four pillars, the nine domains and the 72 indicators of happiness.

Specifically, the government has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good governance. It breaks these into nine domains: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, time use, community vitality and good governance, each with its own weighted and unweighted G.N.H. index.

All of this is to be analyzed using the 72 indicators. Under the domain of psychological well-being, for example, indicators include the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of feelings of selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration as well as suicidal thoughts.

“We are even breaking down the time of day: how much time a person spends with family, at work and so on,” Mr. Dorji said.

Mathematical formulas have even been devised to reduce happiness to its tiniest component parts. The G.N.H. index for psychological well-being, for example, includes the following: “One sum of squared distances from cutoffs for four psychological well-being indicators. Here, instead of average the sum of squared distances from cutoffs is calculated because the weights add up to 1 in each dimension.”

This is followed by a set of equations:

= 1-(.25+.03125+.000625+0)

= 1-.281875

= .718

Every two years, these indicators are to be reassessed through a nationwide questionnaire, said Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission, as he sat in his office at the end of a hard day of work that he said made him happy."

(From the New York Times.)

Edna unveiled

It was my old schoolfriend Richard Maclean! I found out as - being a bit irritated with Edna's witticisms - I restricted comments to site members only and he emailed me to complain...

So not Seumas but relatively close geographically speaking as Richard's based in Inverness.

JG Ballard

JG Ballard has died. A sad loss. Perhaps the world had become too much like his dystopian fictional one.

Gazza on Match of the Day 2 this evening

Making sense and looking reasonably well. Hurrah!

And in a similar vein...

America cheers as satirist delivers knockout blow to TV finance gurus.

Interestingly, mad Max (see below) upbraids Jon Stewart for not raising this sooner. Is Peston right to say that the British press has been much better at reporting on the markets and appreciating the seriousness of the crisis?

Global banking fraud

Tom sent me this article by Patrick Wolf in the FT the other day, which is a pretty sobering assessment of the implications of the current financial meltdown. The era of financial liberalisation has resoundingly failed, and it's not clear what will replace it. Poverty and suffering is likely to increase on a grand scale, and there's a serious risk of geo-political instability, more wars, the rise of extremist politics etc. And this from a guy who wrote a book a couple of years ago on how anglo-saxon style liberal democracy was the inevitable model for the world. 

This morning I heard this guy - Max Keiser - being interviewed on Radio 5. He also does a show on the BBC World tv news channel, and on Resonance FM (which is worth checking out more generally, by the way).  Now, there's more than a touch of the blogging crank about him, but he was refreshingly angry about the whole economic situation and incredulous about how governments are dealing with it, and how we're all complacently going along with it. I checked out one of his slightly shrill podcasts, and beneath the bluster he makes a lot of good points (as far as I can tell). For instance:

• Banks are effectively holding governments to ransom - give us more trillions or we'll blow up the economy. And we're going along with it. But while governments are desperately attempting to stabilise the situation for the good of their countries as a whole, the banks (and other large companies) are still motivated by corporate self-interest - they want the cash to continue to enrich themselves.
• Similarly, a couple of pharma companies in the US got a massive chunk of Obama's bail out in order to do a merger, and promptly sacked 17,000 people (would need to check the facts on this one) - not really the rationale for giving it to them in the first place.
• The whole 'toxic bank' model doesn't just get the bad assets off the balance sheet at vast expense for the taxpayer - it enables the banks to re-package the bad assets and sell them on (again) as commodities, and take fees for doing so. (This was part of what led to the problem in the first place: banks' liabilities - i.e. dodgy mortgage loans - were getting repackaged and sold on, so they ceased to be regarded as liabilities and instead became assets - and thus were not subjected to the same degree of risk analysis, as there were profits, commissions and bonuses at stake.)
• He reckons that media reporting on financial markets should be approached in the manner of a scandal sheet - trying to uncover fraud and bad practice, which has always been extremely widespread, but is only now getting a lot of attention. His view is that in the last 25 years, the dubious practices of dodgy 'bucket shop' stockbrokers have become standard practice throughout the financial industries. There is sharp practice at all levels, but everyone with a stake has been complicit, but kept schtum for as long as they were making cash. For instance, execs at Citibank and Goldman Sachs or somewhere were selling their customers financial products, but taking short positions on the same products themselves because they believed they would underperform. Similarly, they were also shorting on their own company's shares - in order to make cash for the company. Financial institutions invested in Madoff even though they must have known what was going on, because they still made massive returns. And so on.
• Quantitative easing essentially involves the government borrowing money to buy back its own loans. Hm... Historically, this kind of behaviour generally results in uncontrollable inflation. 

 I don't know how on the money his analysis is (to use an appropriate phrase), but he's certainly right that we should all be furious about what's going on and very politically engaged with it all. There's a lot at stake - and I don't mean wealth necessarily, but the state of society. But it all seems to complicated, and the sums of money involved so unreal, and nobody knows what the solution is, so we're just watching it all happen and hoping it will all turn out ok. 

By the way, he says buy gold. 

The Fitzroy - as good as ever

Colin and I had a beer last Wednesday in the Fitz. You'll all be pleased to hear that it is exactly the same as always. John, Seumas - any chance of a Fitz get-together this year?

They Rule

Anyone had a go at this? Interesting concept, though struggling to get any particularly striking results.

Meetup

Great site, what a good idea.

Fight global warming even if it's untrue

I quite like this line of argument, that was published in a letter to the Sunday Telegraph from Cafod. Of course, the sceptics were out in force the next week, but it makes sense to me. 

Fight global warming even if it's untrue

SIR – The longer I work on climate change, the less important I think it is whether or not the warmists or the sceptics are right. This may seem a rash statement, but hear me out. Just imagine a future where the majority of the world's climate scientists are proved wrong and global warming does not occur at the rates predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If we hadn't listened to them, we might enjoy the satisfaction of saying "told you so", but we'd still be living in a pretty miserable world. That world might not be much warmer but, my goodness, it would be beset by a host of other serious environmental issues: diminishing water resources, rampant deforestation, massive soil erosion, uncontrollable urbanisation and the frightening loss of biodiversity.

Peoples lives would be threatened and whole ecosystems destroyed because we hadn't bothered to address the causes of this environmental degradation under a global economic system that, in its current state, can only grow if nature dies.

Now imagine a world where we had listened to the climate scientists and started to change our resource-consuming behaviour and address the inequities of the global economic system. Although the warming still didn't materialise, we would have addressed a host of environmental issues and be living a largely pollution-free existence.

We may even be saying thank you to the climate scientists who, although they got it wrong, provided us the opportunity to create a cleaner, brighter and fairer world.

Dr Mike Edwards, CAFOD

And I think they should go ahead with the Severn barrage!

Spotify

Do you guys know about Spotify? Link to free sign up sans invitation here.

Diana and Actaeon 2

Diana and Actaeon to stay in Scotland

Hurrah! Some mealy mouthed labour MP (or MSP or whatever) on the Scottish news just now complaining about the use of taxpayers' money - bah to him.

Btw, i've granted all you chaps admin privs so you can hack around with FT

Oversight, should have done this a while ago. Everyone is now able to tinker with gadgets etc should they so wish.

Is anyone else here using Google Reader?

Because you can add a shared item widget into blogger which shows a feed from your google reader shared items (looks to right).

Bookshelves. Finally.

Have worked out where to get some decent bookshelves for the living room. Vitsoe. Thank god. Can die happy. Or at least with a decent shelving system that will integrate with the shelves I put up myself.

When central bankers rescued, then ruined, the world

John Lanchester seems to have been picking up some work for the New Yorker lately. This review of a book about central bankers is up to his usual standard - although he's Americanised his style a wee bit, or the editor has. Turns out his dad worked at HSBC in Hong Kong when he was a kid, which might explain his fascination with the global financial system over the last couple of years - over and above the more obvious reasons.

Mu Mu!

One for you John? Bill Drummond on the death (he hopes) of recorded music from Radio 3's 'Free Thinking Festival'. I heard this on the weekly Radio 3 Arts and Ideas podcast, which often has interesting stuff on it, despite the annoying presence of Philip Dodd. 

I increasingly find I don't care one way or the other what happens to recorded music - despite devoting about 15 years of my life to being absolutely obsessed with it. What a waste of time - I could have been doing something useful instead.

What is Stephen Harper reading?

Cats aside, this is the best website I've seen for a while - brilliant stuff from the writer Yann Martel

Apropos the below

The latest environmental disaster - Google

Sorry guys, to do the first global warming horror story of 2009, but this was a bit alarming. It seems that Google searches use up an incredible amount of energy. Like pretty much everything we do in the modern world.

This is probably as retrograde as anything in terms of cool

But I'm quite liking lolcats. It's related to the failblog thing and is (ummm) lots of pictures of cats with funny
captions. They've evolved their own lolcat-speak...





I've also spent yesterday evening playing with Windows 7 on a tablet PC. It's not bad (see below)...

Productivity plummets

The office has discovered Fail Blog.

Atheist Advertising

I like the look of this campaign. I agree with the sentiment of course, but also the quite cheery tone of it. The UK's high-profile public atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens) can be a bit of a turn-off with their truculence and aggressive materialism. I think this is a bit more gentle and positive.

Best of the Fitz 2008

Another year over. Much has happened, both good and bad, but frankly it's not been a vintage year for our blog. In 2004 we had an astonishing 302 posts - in 2008 it was down to just 30. Has Facebook killed the Fitz? Or have we all got better things to do - if so, I'd like to know what. Anyway, there was still plenty of good stuff and, for the record, here are my personal favourites in no particular order:

1) Rainy Edinburgh Morning from the No. 30 Bus

2)Christian the Lion

3)The Best Documentary Ever Made

4)The Drugs Don't Work

5)Happy pi Day

The Mouse hits 40

Interesting that the Mouse is now 40. I don't think I saw one until the early 1990s, which shows I guess how long even the most brilliant of inventions can take to be widely adopted.

If a thing's worth doing...

...it's worth overdoing. I bring you Edinburgh by Camera Phone, the blog.

Rainy Edinburgh morning from the No. 30 bus

From Fitzrovian Tuesdays

Playing around with Picasa web albums in accordance with my adoption of all things google. There's no "blog this" option, oddly...

Google Artist Themes

These are really good. I'm moving over to Google for all my internet "stuff" as my Yahoo account is overflowing with junk and Google are now completely winning on style...

On the McCain campaign trail..

Ok, I promise this will be my only post on the subject of the US election. I haven't got anything to add really other than what we've known since 2000 - that half the American electorate are completely bonkers. This piece on the sober, highly conventional CNN website it home to me once again. It seems that as crazy as Mccain is, many of his supporters are another couple of steps even further removed from reality.

Iain Banks on climate change

I was a bit surprised when I read Iain Banks's book on whisky to discover that he's a complete petrol-head, with a string of sports cars, land rovers etc. The book was more about cars than whisky.

However, he's now got rid of them all for environmental reasons and owns a solitary Toyota Yaris instead. Here's a short  interview he's done with Friends of the Earth.

If only there were more like him and fewer Clarksons.

Although I do sometimes regret that by the time I was old enough and earned enough to think about being into cars, the environmental evidence discouraged me from doing so.

The dark side of David Foster Wallace

Sad to hear that David Foster Wallace has commited suicide. I have to admit I never made it to the end of Infinite Jest, but I did enjoy a book of his essays that I once read.

The Rorschach Test

This actually looks like it might be quite good: http://watchmenmovie.warnerbros.com/

Visually faithful to the graphic novel, anyway.

Hammershoi

On at the Royal Academy. It's only till 7 Sep though so I don't imagine I'll make it down, which is a shame as I'd really like to see this. And the Hadrian one.

The Best Documentary Ever Made

YouTube is amazing - I'm so glad I've found this documentary about a Japanese professor trying to track down Einstein's Brain. Apparently they removed it in Princeton medical school during his autopsy, and kept it for research - but it went missing when the guy in charge of the project moved on. The Japanese prof just keeps approaching random hospital staff (or doctors with the same name who he's found in the phone book) and saying 'I rooking for Einstein brain', to their complete bafflement.

For years I've had a hazy memory of it, but it seemed so bizarre that I wondered whether I'd dreamed it or imagined it or something. Now I know that the doc exists as I remember it - although whether it's genuine, or a clever pastiche, or a profound art film, I'm still not certain. (Sketchy details on IMDB.)

Where it gets questionable is when he tracks down the guy who did the research to some town in Kansas, but doesn't know where he lives. He asks a local resident if he knows where to find him - and it turns out to be William Burroughs (see part 5 - 2:45)! Then when he does find the old researcher, he has the brain in a jar - and cuts him a slice on his chopping board to take home. You have to take a look.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6
Conclusion

Christian the Lion

Must admit to being delighted by the latest Youtube hit. It IS genuine, isn't it?

13 in a Volvo

Don't mean to racially stereotype, but no surprise to me that this chap seems to be an orthodox Jew from Tottenham. I've seen plenty such huge families crammed into Volvos around Stamford Hill. Although what was he doing in Wales?

Leaving New York

What a song, and what a video. Manhattan Island almost as much a spiritual home as Fitzrovia and Kinross Services I think.

How it feels to have a stroke

If I didn't have Gin, I wouldn't really have a life

What credit crunch?

City bankers receive £13bn bonuses this year - only1% down on last year.  Why I oughtta... [waves clenched fist in the air impotently]

The best way to find meaning at work? Don't look for it

Some sensible points here, although it does conclude by saying you're lucky to have a job in the current climate and that should be enough - which isn't that encouraging.

Cheney's Toy

*Bit* of a good track, was on Radio 2 earlier this evening. Never heard of James McMurtry before, initially thought it might have been Lou Reed singing.

Global Recession - what do we think?

Are we heading for a global economic slump? Are any of us worried about it if we are? The Ecologist magazine is claiming that we need one to save the planet. Whatever we think about the subject, paul Krugman's columns are quite enlightening..

Bigger Trees near Warter donated to the Tate Britain

Fantastic, I love this painting. The Yorkshire landscape abides (to misquote the Dude).

Eskimo Disco

This is on the official Pingu website. I particularly like the Emo penguins...

Happy Pi Day

Or Pi approximation day. March 14 you see, 3.14... Although July 22 is also Pi day (22/7 = 3.14...). You're supposed to eat pies. I like it.

No great surprise that the guy who thought it up looks like this, though:

Was listening to Radio 2 in the car this evening

Marc Radcliffe and Steve Lamac - it was bloody brilliant.

The drugs don't work

All across the news today that Prozac and some other SSRI's aren't any better than a placebo - I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on this.

My experiences with these things haven't been particularly good - a feeling of speediness for the first few days followed by same old same old only with increased mental muzziness and anxiety. I *really* didn't like Prozac...

Ideas worth spreading

According to the Daily Torygraph business section , which I found on the tube today, the TED conference is like 'a creative Davos on steroids'. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable, but you can watch videos of presentations by lots of clever people on it's website. In a similar vein, Google also hosts internal seminars by boffins and gurus and hosts films of their presentations online. In keeping with my normal Fitz posting habits, I haven't actually tried to watch any of these yet, but I'm sure there's some interesting stuff in there. Although it could all be a bit Wired magazine - you know, we're going to solve all the world's problems with nifty technological solutions and get rich in the process, but in a good way.

On a completely unrelated tangent (although I'm sure Wired will appear on here at some point), I happened across this questionable blog while googling stuff about fixed wheel bikes. Not entirely sure where it's coming from - it seems to have satirical intent, but it's not entirely clear who's satirising whom. But some of the entries are pretty funny, although a lot of the commenters don't seem to be in on the joke.

Gazza

Poor old Gazza, another low. Self-medicating all the way.

Hopefully this time he'll get some decent help and somehow turn things around.

WTF

Pleas for condemned Saudi 'witch'

Turnabout

pliny the elder

Have been reading selected extracts from Natural History by pliny the elder, as part of an attempt this year to read the classics. It's actually well worth looking at - a fascinating and often quite charming mixture of well-grounded and factually informative observations described with typical Roman rationalism and confidence (for instance, there is a section which mocks the credulity of the Greeks for believing in werewolves) coupled with the most ludicrous accounts of unicorns, giant sea monsters, talking horses and much else besides.

Cityphilia

As ever, a great article by John Lanchester in the LRB. I never really understood how things like derivatives and hedge funds worked until I read this.

In fact, I didn't wholly appreciate how banks worked either:

"Imagine a country with only one bank. A customer goes into the bank and deposits £200. Now the bank has £200 to invest, so it goes out and buys some shares with the money: not the full £200, but the amount minus the percentage which it deems prudent to keep in cash, just in case any depositors come and make a withdrawal. That amount, called the 'cash ratio', is set by government: in this example let's say it's 20 per cent. So our bank goes out and buys £160 of shares from, say, LRB Ltd. Then LRB goes and deposits its £160 in the bank; the bank now has £360 of deposits, of which it needs to keep only 20 per cent – £72 – in cash. So now it can go out and buy another £128 of shares in LRB, raising its total holding in LRB Ltd to £288. Once again, LRB Ltd goes and deposits the money in the bank, which goes out again and buys more shares, and so on the process goes. The only thing imposing a limit is the need to keep 20 per cent in cash, so the depositing-and-buying cycle ends when the bank has £200 in cash – all the cash there is – and £800 in LRB shares; it also has £1000 of customer deposits, the initial £200 plus all the money from the share transactions. The initial £200 has generated a balance sheet of £1000 in assets and £1000 in liabilities. Magic! In real life, it's even better: the UK cash ratio is 0.15 per cent, so that initial £200 would generate £133,333 on both sides of the balance sheet."

Letter from God

Best of the Fitz 2007

It's been a relatively quiet year for the Fitz, though we did of course manage a get-together back in June. Also, some good innovations in terms of the sidebar have helped keep it as dynamic ever. In no particular order, here is my traditional pick of the year's postings:


How Things Change

Finding Someone


Fitz Redux

Buckie Gift pack

Northern pilgrimage

And yet more telly

David Cameron's Incredible Journey. What a spiv.

More telly

Is anyone watching deadliest catch? It's completely brilliant.

Space Needle Webcam

Our office in Seattle has gone completely offline (can't even phone them) - have therefore been looking at the Space Needle webcam to see if there is any extreme weather happenning over there or suchlike.

All looks OK but looking down on downtown Seattle it occurs to me what a fantastic place it must be in the run up to Xmas - great shops and coffee bars, Frasier like ambience etc etc. Aaah...

TV tonight

This looks really good.

L.A.S.E.R. Tag

And while I'm doing videos, here's one that should appeal to the artist in you all ;)



http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=76#video

Liquid Rescale Images

I found this really cool new style of image rescaling. Have a look at the video to see what it's about. Also, there's a GIMP plugin to do this, so you can try it out on your own photos! Website is http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/en:examples

Arrgh Arrgh Arrgh

Man-sized sea scorpion claw found

Conchords

Has anyone been watching the Flight of the Conchords on BBC4? I didn't much like the look of it at first, but it's now my favourite show. They have a nice line in underplayed, self-deprecating humour - see this little medley of jokes at the expense of New Zealand.



It's all quite gentle too - a nice break from cynicism. (Tuesdays, 9.30pm.)

Northern Pilgrimage

We're on holiday in Avimore at the moment. On the way up we stopped off at a place that I know has been of great importance to some of us in our individual spiritual journeys.

Jimmy Eat World - Hear You Me

Oh right - really good songs are still being written.

Timothy and Rafe Spall Vs Denholm Eliot and Julian Sands

Not sure how I feel about this.

The Most Beautiful Planetary Maps Ever

These maps, featured in a Wired News story, are cool - they look like abstract designs, or some kind of fractal/yellow submarine hybrid, but actually show things like the geological composition of the dark side of the moon.

Inspirational blog

This blog is the best thing I've read all year, I think. I've been reading the archives in chronological order. First blog to make me cry at any rate.

How is Granpaw Broon still alive?

If he's been eating this stuff all his life? And smoking that pipe...

Happiness doesn't cost the earth

The most happy European countries have smaller carbon footprints, according to NEF. Although we don't all have Iceland's geo-thermal resources, there's probably something in this.

Free Rice

An interesting site: improve your vocabulary and donate to charity at the same time! A bit addictive too.

www.freerice.com

Yaah

Seems Feels like only yesterday the that this CGI was cutting edge...

Bring on the Bears

I often find myself wishing that bears were brought back to the UK. Everytime they turn up on US news bulletins, they are invariably doing something brilliant.

Least appropriate fun run costumes

Watching the Great North Run on telly a moment ago, I wondered what the least appropriate novelty fun run costume would be. I reckon 'suicide bomber' - that would make everyone run faster.

(I've just posted this by email, by the way. Didn't know you could do that - it's an option in the Blogger settings.)

Telecom Rehab

I wholeheartedly agree with this - bring back the days of phantom meetings and time killed on park benches of an afternoon. The expectation of immediate response to all communications is a tyranny that creates stress and anxiety in the modern worker. People used to communicate by letter and the world seemed to function ok.

I Know What I Know

Might as well keep posting this evening's musical oddessy. Music was definitely better in the 80s.

Boy in the Bubble

Last one. Prophetic, as the one of the YouTube commentators notes.

In Your Eyes

Actually Peter Gabriel is way better than Phil and Co of the same era



Will now stop posting youtube videos (for this evening anyway) as QI is about to start.

Invisible Touch

Another storming track from back in the day. Phil Collins pretending that his drumsticks are a microphone is bloody annoying even 20 years later. Some part of me still reckons 1980s grey flecked suits are dead cool though, couple of beauts on show here.

Dark Ages

Not as polished as the (later) album version but this ROCKS from 4:57 in. Also check the lyrics. Awesome.

Buckie Gift Pack

Apparently spotted in a Glasgow Haddows: bottle of Buckfast, 20 Mayfair and some skins.

Scots rank second in world for obesity

Obesity levels in Scotland are the second highest in the developed world behind the US, statistics have revealed.

Come on Scots! Let's beat the Yanks and be number 1! Double pie suppers all round...

My Desk...

DSC00006
Originally uploaded by johnmain.

Relaxing, creative workspace you betcha!

Writer's Rooms

I find things like this strangely fascinating - particularly when you see how makeshift and uncomfortable some of their set ups are. There was a good programme on Radio 4 about this once too, although I can't remember who any of the anecdotes were about - people who could only write standing up, or by dictating perfectly formed sentences to a scribe and so on. The collected Paris Review interviews are also good on this stuff.

Manilow - what a star

Really! Is it just me or is he turning into Julian Clary btw?

Facebook in the Flesh

"Jean Baudrillard, as any philosophy student will tell you, theorized that, in the postmodern world, “the territory no longer precedes the map.” In other words, if you are a member of N.Y.U.’s class of 2011, you probably arrived in New York City with a pre-existing web of soon-to-be college friends from Facebook..."

Scotland 1 - 0 France

Blimey - what were the chances of that happening? Can we possibly keep it up and actually qualify for a tournament? (I'm suspending my self-imposed avoidance of football for one evening only.)

Kill the Gun

Check out this brilliant commercia.l If only commercials directors were getting this kinds of commissions more often the tired cliche that "advertising is art" would have a bit more going for it.

Hallam Foe

Saw Hallam Foe last night - really good.

Comic Life

http://plasq.com/comiclife/

Alan Turing Chess Program

I was told a really interesting story toward the end of last week - not sure if you guys are aware of it. Apparently in 1948-50 Turing wrote the first ever computer chess program, even though there weren't any computers in existence that could actually run it. Lacking a computer, Turing had to run the program manually, logically following the procedural steps to play chess (and taking about half an hour to make each move).

The coolest thing of all is the name he gave to his program without a computer... "Turbo Champ."

Vantage Point

I went to see a band called Vantage Point on Sunday - a guy from work's the drummer. Not my usual kind of thing but totally enjoyed it. The audience were great too - interesting how aggressive, heavy thrash metal attracts really nice people, while casuals etc tend to go for lovey dovey dance music.

My dog's got two noses...

How does it smell?

Er, pretty well actually.

(Can this be real?)

My wife's gone to the West Indies...