Scribble, scribble, scribble

heather

There are a few newish baby photos, for those who like such things, on Heather's page.

christmas letter

If you've had a Christmas card from us, you'll probably have got a little summary-of-the-year thing inside. (If not, it's because we think either that you've heard it all already or that you're unlikely to be interested. Our apologies if we misjudged.) This is just to say: There's a longer and even less interesting version if you want it.

change on 2006-12-12 at 01:24:42

Page changed: index.html

No, I don't work for Synaptics any more. Plus a few other
uninteresting cleanups.

Update: now the link points at the right place. Oops.

broken

Be it noted that the "gjm11_blog" feed at LiveJournal was not created by me and is not maintained by me, and that it is not my doing that it has recently gone pear-shaped.

The person whose doing it is has quite enough to cope with without being the recipient of the grief that Certain People have directed in my direction, and the slip-up involved is an extremely understandable one that anyone could easily have made, so I shall point no fingers.

Normal service will be resumed shortly. Or you could just point your regular feed aggregator at http://www.mccaughan.org.uk/g/log/index.atom instead of going via LiveJournal, unless the only blogs you read are LJ ones.

Update, later the same day: Actually, I thought I knew who the person responsible for that feed is, but I was wrong. So: the person in question may or may not have quite enough to cope with without being, etc.

Update, a few minutes later: Ahem. It's my fault. I'm a moron. It should be fixed now. We apologize for the convenience.

Update, some hours later: Although this was my fault, the LJ account now appears to be stuck with the wrong URL. If whoever maintains it happens to be reading this, could you please tweak it accordingly? Thanks.

moved

If you're reading this at a URL that includes "ntlworld.com", you're in the wrong place. You want http://www.mccaughan.org.uk/g/log/; the RSS feed is at http://www.mccaughan.org.uk/g/log/index.rss and the Atom feed is at http://www.mccaughan.org.uk/g/log/index.atom.

The right way to tell you this would have been to make all the old pages and feeds return a 301 status code ("Moved Permanently"), but I don't think I can arrange for that to happen at ntlworld. (It's possible that I have, or will soon have, successfully done so. For reasons I shan't go into lest I grow angry, I won't be able to tell until after this goes up.)

books twenty-one, -two, -three

I'm starting to work through the stack of 19 books I've read since moving house. Daniel Dennett's robust attack on obscurantism about consciousness, Sweet Dreams; Ruth Padel's microscopic examination of 52 modern poems, 52 ways of looking at a poem; and Martin Rees's exploration of cosmological fine-tuning, Just six numbers.

absence

Yow. After well over a month, we finally have Internet access again. NTL, BT, and (I think, though the fault here might be BT's again) the ISP used by the previous occupant of this house, are all rubbish. Film at 11.

Our new house is excellent, Cottenham is a very nice place, and we're looking forward to settling in here for a good while.

Oh, and my company's closing its UK office. They'd like me to move to Santa Clara. Um.

eppur si muove

Barring disaster (which is still possible, for reasons I shan't go into because if I do I'll get angry) I'll be moving house tomorrow (that is: Thursday). It may take a little while before I'm back on the net. Apologies to anyone whose e-mails get ignored...

die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine

Our daughter is home from hospital today. I shall forbear further comment, lest I grow immensely tiresome and twee, and say simply: Wahey!

To our local friends: You are very welcome to come and coo, but there's a price: you have to give us some help with the packing. (For those who don't know: we're hoping to move house on Thursday, though that's still dependent on solicitors getting their act together and therefore quite doubtful.)

over the rainbow

My parents recently came to visit our daughter, bringing cards and presents from several of their friends. One of them is called Dorothy Tinman. We were very disappointed not to receive anything from her friends Toto Scarecrow and Munchkin Wickedwitchofthewest.

("I say, I say, I say, where do you go to weigh a pie?")

change on 2006-08-15 at 02:59:32

Page changed: index.html

New child!

irreducible complexity

Gosh, how come the creationists haven't spotted this one?

History has built irreducible complexity and variety into the bounteous world of organisms.

(Emphasis mine.) Of course, what Stephen Jay Gould meant by that phrase, in his essay "Red wings in the sunset", has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what Michael Behe meant when he used the same phrase several years later. Gould meant only that the world is too complicated to be fully described by simple "monistic" schemes like Abbott H Thayer's theory that all animal colouration serves the purpose of camouflage.

(Gould's essay appears in "Bully for Brontosaurus", published in 1991; it first appeared in 1985 in Natural History magazine. "Darwin's black box" was published in 1996. I wonder whether Behe had read Gould.)

for your security

McCaughan's Law of Customer Centredness: Whenever any measure is described (by a corporation to its customers) as "for your security" or "for your convenience" or anything of the kind, the real reason for the measure is "for our profit margins" or "for our convenience".

Case in point: on aeroplane flights you're likely to hear some spiel along the following lines: "Attention, please. Here is an important security announcement. For reasons of security, you must remain within the class of seating for which you hold a ticket. If you attempt to enter any other class of seating, our staff will direct you to return to your own class. Thank you for complying with this important security measure." Security. Ri-i-i-ight. Real reason: maintaining the distinction between seating classes, so as to increase the feeling that the more expensive seats are exclusive and desirable.

wie hat der sturm zerrissen ...

Well, that was pretty good but it's still too hot and humid. Can we have another thunderstorm, please?

Update 2006-07-27: it turns out that the answer was yes, but we still need more.

I took (and comfortably passed) my driving theory test today. Two minutes after I left the test centre I came within a second of walking straight in front of a bicycle. But never mind; at least I know I have good hazard perception skills.

book twenty

Lewis Thomas's elegant and charming (perhaps a bit too self-consciously elegant and charming) The lives of a cell.

some day every city will have one

From one of the essays in Lewis Thomas's very nice book "The lives of a cell":

Even when technology succeeds in manufacturing a machine as big as Texas to do everything we recognize as human, it will still be, at best, a single individual. This amounts to nothing, practically speaking. To match what we can do, there would have to be 3 billion of them with more coming down the assembly line, and I doubt that anyone will put up the money, much less make room. And even so, they would all have to be wired together, intricately and delicately, as we are, communicating with each other, talking incessantly, listening. If they weren't at each other this way, all their waking hours, they wouldn't be anything like human, after all. I think we're safe, for a long time ahead.

Oooops.

meta-translation

Emma: ... and he said, And so we say, not goodbye but ... um, what's the French for "auf wiedersehen"?.
Gareth R: The French for "auf wiedersehen" is "hasta la vista".

book nineteen

J L Mackie's The miracle of theism gives theism a pretty fair hearing but finds it seriously wanting. Mackie's book is showing its age a bit now, but is still well worth reading for anyone interested in the subject.

too much lisp

I was thinking about what we should encourage Child to call the grandparents-to-be, and it suddenly occurred to me: if we were to revive the rather old-fashioned words "Grandpapa" and "Grandmama", we could tweak them to disambiguate between maternal and paternal grandparents: you have Grandmama and Grandmapa, and Grandpama and Grandpapa. And, even better, this gives a simple way of referring to people further up the tree: Grandmamapama, etc.

book eighteen

Still way behind with my original plan. Anyway, Feynman's letters are enjoyable reading, though there are no big surprises for those already reasonably familiar with the canon of Feynman hagiography.

books fifteen, sixteen and seventeen

Atwood, Fforde, and Schelling. Something there for everyone, I think.

a post as y

After a very great deal of thought, reading and prayer, I have come to the conclusion that Christianity is not (for me) intellectually tenable. As of a few days ago (no, not 6/6/6!) I am no longer a Christian.

There's more information at the far end of the link above; I may post some other comments on my reasons, or on how it's working out, as time goes on.

book fourteen

Oh dear, I am getting behind. It's not that I haven't been reading; just not much I've felt like writing about. Ah well. Here's an absurd little delight: Michael Bywater's Lost Worlds.

transport of delight

Friday evening: missed train, by less than 10 seconds.

Monday morning: missed train, by less than 10 seconds.

This evening: puncture in rear tire. Fixed puncture. Patch came unstuck. Fixed puncture again. Cycled 5 minutes towards home. Patch came unstuck. (Memo to self: never, ever buy pre-glued puncture repair patches.) Gave up and walked to nearby train station. 8-minute journey delayed by 1 hour and 10 minutes because of person on the line: apparently a suicide attempt.

Perhaps I'd better just stay at home tomorrow.

spaced out

Things that should not exist in the 21st century, #7126: commercial websites where you have to enter your card number without spaces because some moronic moron was too moronic to write one line of code to take them out or to parse the number complete with spaces.

The particular morons I'm thinking of on this occasion get extra credit for (1) providing an error message that gives no clue what they think is wrong with your card number, and (2) taking the opportunity of your having to re-enter your card details to re-check all those "spam me harder" checkboxes on the purchase form.

#1=(self-reference in #1#)

Mindless link propagation: Chris Hruska's essay that reviews itself. Don't miss the link to David Moser's equally fine short story.

books twelve and thirteen

Blair Tindall's Mozart in the Jungle: a tale of the music industry, "broken down by age and sex" as the careless statistician once put it. And Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, the first in his "Aubrey-Maturin" series of nautical novels.

a triumph of vapidity over insanity

Dan Brown wins in court, and the judge is entertainingly rude about everyone concerned. It's a pity that it wasn't possible for both parties to lose.

change on 2006-04-07 at 00:28:53

Page changed: essays/utility.html

Add some disclaimers.

mens sana

From the Department of Statistical Illiteracy (and the Cambridge Evening News):

With about 109,000 people, Cambridge should boast more than 2,000 people eligible to join Mensa. However, there are only 209 members listed in the area -- despite the city's reputation for academic excellence.

Hmm. "Academic excellence". That reminds me of something... Why, yes! I seem to recall that Cambridge has a rather good university, with something like 16,000 students, approximately 99.44% of whom would qualify for Mensa membership, not to mention the academic staff, former students, other large-brained people working for the local high-tech industry, and the like. But hey, what's an order of magnitude between friends?

The society promotes itself as a social organization for the highly intelligent.

A social organization for the highly intelligent? Well, there certainly aren't any of those in Cambridge. I can't imagine why the good people of the city aren't hammering at Mensa's doors.

Famous members of the organisation -- which refuses to confirm or deny any of its membership -- are said to include [...] inventor Sir Clive Sinclair [...]

So the 30-odd names at http://www.mensa.org.uk/mensa/contacts.html, which include that of the Honorary President (a certain Sir Clive Sinclair), are presumably just a cunning trick to deceive the rest of us into thinking we know who some of the members of Mensa are.

book eleven

David Gries's austerely mathematical guide to constructing correct programs, The Science of Programming.

lift up thy voice with strength

Tonight's performance of Messiah went well. Tomorrow's (St Peter's Church, Oundle, 7pm; be there or be somewhere else) should be good too, provided we can find a tenor soloist -- the originally-billed one is ill and tonight's substitute can't do it tomorrow.

Handel composed more than one version of some of the arias, and some of the ones we're doing are quite different from the ones usually sung. This is good, because it gives one a renewed appreciation of the usual versions. (Well ... the unorthodox versions aren't that bad, really, but the orthodox ones are better.)

book ten

Life in Moving Fluids, by Steven Vogel. The second edition of a book whose first edition pretty much created the field of biological fluid dynamics -- at least, so the publisher implies on the back cover, and for all I know it's true. Anyway, it's good.

book nine

The Algorithm Design Manual, by Steven Skiena. My first impression: "What a nice book". That hasn't changed on closer reading; it's a very nice book. But I had a few nits to pick.

all the math that's fun to print

Browsing in a bookshop on a recent trip abroad, I ran across something claiming to be The Complete Book of Fun Maths. It's only 173 pages long. How depressing! I always thought there was more than that.

change on 2006-03-14 at 21:49:56

Page changed: index.html

Update count of children.

abolition of parliament

My MP wrote an article for the Times about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. It sounds pretty horrifying:

The boring title of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill hides an astonishing proposal. It gives ministers power to alter any law passed by Parliament. The only limitations are that new crimes cannot be created if the penalty is greater than two years in prison and that it cannot increase taxation. But any other law can be changed, no matter how important. All ministers will have to do is propose an order, wait a few weeks and voila, the law is changed.

But then the article goes on:

For ministers the advantages are obvious: no more tedious debates in which they have to answer awkward questions. Instead of a full day's debate on the principle of the proposal, detailed line-by-line examination in committee, a second chance at a specific amendment in the Commons and a final debate and vote, ministers will have to face at most a short debate in a committee and a one-and-a-half hour debate on the floor. Frequently the Government will face less than that. No amendments will be allowed. The legislative process will be reduced to a game or take-it-or-leave-it.

(Added emphasis is mine in both cases.) The curious thing here is that the first paragraph seems to say that the Bill, if it became law, would allow ministers to create new legislation without ever needing to vote on it, whereas the second seems to say that there would be voting but it would be done more quickly and with fewer options. The difference between these possibilities is enormous; the first would indeed merit the nickname "Abolition of Parliament Bill" that's apparently been attached to this thing, whereas (in my opinion) the second obviously wouldn't.

Well, let's take a look at the Bill itself. (Full text is linked to above.) According to clause 13, there are three procedures called (in order of increasing stringency) "negative", "affirmative" and "super-affirmative". The minister gets to choose one; it is used unless either House of Parliament resolves within 21 days to require a more stringent one, or a committee charged with looking at the order asks for it.

The "negative resolution procedure" means that the change goes through unless either House of Parliament resolves within 40 days not to let it. The "affirmative resolution procedure" means that the change goes through if each House of Parliament resolves within 40 days to let it. The "super-affirmative resolution procedure" is much like the ARP except that it allows for longer consideration and for revision of the order if Parliament asks for it.

Unless I'm misunderstanding this pretty badly, this means that David Howarth's first paragraph quoted above is (while not actually untrue) deeply misleading; Parliament does still have the authority to stop legislative changes made in this way. For anyone who's thinking "Beware of the Leopard" at this point, I should mention that clause 12 requires that Parliament be informed.

The Bill may still be terrible; perhaps it will make it easier for the government to introduce nasty oppressive legislation; it may be stupid for entirely different reasons too; but it isn't quite the thing of infinite evil it's been portrayed as.

book eight

Killing Monsters, by Gerard Jones. He argues convincingly that parental paranoia about media violence is misplaced and that children need violent entertainment and fantasy; this would be more entirely convincing if his evidence were less anecdotal and if he didn't have an obvious vested interest.

book seven

Carfree Cities, by J H Crawford. Probably next up: "Killing Monsters", by Gerald Jones.

doctor doctor

Mindless quote propagation: the following is from a discussion at Crooked Timber. I do hope it's true.

A collegue was attending a formal German event as guest of honor. He has two doctorates so he was introduced as Herr Doctor Doctor Professor X.

His wife is also a professor and has a doctorate. She was introduced as Frau Doctor Professor Doctor Doctor Professor X.