A little roast Kiwi with that , sir

Innovative NZ gourmonds have found a new taste sensation in a dish that symbolises the changes wrought by man on this green and pleasant land. Burning kiwi sanctuaries to lure deer with the re-growth, we would have to say, epitomises the "Kiwi-can do" attitude. Whilst torching the national symbol, of course
But the venison stuffed with char grilled kiwi? Finger lickin' good!

Well, education seemed like a good idea but it costs too much

News from the UK  that they are going to slash and burn the tertiary education system. And rightly so! The last thing we need is a lot of over educated types runnin' about scaring people with talk of Global Warming and the like. All you need to know in this life can be written on the palm of one hand!1~

Highlights: • Entire campus closures at Cumbria and Wolverhampton universities, where buildings will be mothballed and students transferred to other sites.
• Teesside University scrapping £2m worth of scholarships and bursaries that would have helped poorer students

While in Sensibleland

The policy adopted by the government is in stark contrast to the response in the US where President Obama this week proposed a 31% increase in education spending for next year in order to combat unemployment and develop skills.

Someone is WRONG on the Internet

According to this site, the first dress-up paper doll was manufactured in England in 1810, followed by US knock-offs in 1812. Goes to show how little they know. In point of fact, Andreas Vesalius invented the idea in 1543.


Imagine what he could have done with a drag-&-drop graphic interface.
Perhaps he would have stacked them all up as layers in a self-undressing GIF.

Out, damn'd spot, and someone please close the door so he can't get back in

"Crib notes written on my hand? Unpossible!" exclaimed the candidate, attempting to wash away the evidence.

Fortunately, half the press corps were too busy comparing their new hats to pay any attention, while the others were actually drama critics who were present by mistake, under the impression that they were attending a performance of the Scottish Tragedy.

Earthquake Weather

Apparently our readers up there in Lower Canada are experiencing snowstorms and generally dismal conditions.
We would be more sympathetic, but we have our own problems with extreme weather events.

One reason why I like Hans Bellmer

"Here in his foxhole in the rue Mouffetard, [Bellmer] lived in discomfort but he lived in style, and stories about him soon acquired legendary status. He kept his money in a cigar-box under the bed, and amongst the chaos of his room, his work-table with the dentist's drill which he used for engraving was always scrupulously clean. He cooked frugal meals on the two burners of his stove, but to celebrate a sale he would send for champagne and caviar. For a while he was troubled by a huge rat on the stairway to his room; he swore that it always stared at him malevolently, so he vowed to kill it. He borrowed a shotgun and blasted away but succeeded only in wounding it. Filled with remorse as it lay panting on the stairs, he lined a shoebox with soft pink paper and nursed it tenderly back to health."

Workshop of the Telescopes

According to this here wikipedia page, telescopic sights come in a variety of reticules. I suppose the idea is that if you carry them around in a silk embroidered lady's handbag, people will mistake you for a Jane Austen character rather than a sniper. Unaccountably, this fascinating detail was omitted from Enemy at the Gates, and I look forward to its inclusion in the inevitable remake.

I further learned that people have been experimenting with telescopic sights since the early 17th century, with Robert Hooke inventing the idea of cross-hairs for sighting; any number of designs were tried.

In this test from 1674, the 'omega' design provided a neat body-shot, the horned-circle-cross design was too high, and the others were all over the place. Judging from the burning tower in the background, that bird has been up to no good so don't waste your sympathy for it.

Now they're testing the same designs with night-sights in a cave, in a hostage-rescue scenario. This time the horned-circle-cross pattern is the one that takes out the feral baby. Several of the other patterns are bad luck for one or other of the hostages. But you can see from the bones on the ground that it's already too late for two of them so let's hope someone does something quick.

Heh Heh, that's close enough, lads.

Westham United performance art continues. In the latest episode of "A Team on the Edge of Relegation" They lose to Burnley, a team they quite recently beat. Now during the famous Beach Holiday I saw the Hammers play twice. Both times, as a piece of theatre, it had it all: Farce, Slapstick and Farce but beyond the artistic imperative I think that we must look at the fact of being in the Premier League wiv fancy grounds and nice things as opposed to being in lower leagues, riding a bicycle, playing on former bomb sites  and having boiled onions for dinner.
So yes we've got the point about man's essentially futile striving for Football excellence or skill or being able to kick a fucking ball!! But I think we could perhaps try to get more goals than the opposition in the future.

Preconceptions Please!

Time to play - Spot the Tory. One of these guys is a Conservative politician from the UK. The other three are Labour party MP's. They are all going to be fined for having centrally heated Sparrow nests made on the Public money (or some such cheatery). The question is which one  is the Tory, the party of Thatcher. 

I was wrong will you be??

A bottle of The Old Entomologist's Something-or-other Cider to the winner*!

* Winners will not actually receive anything.

Serious pants: Stereo vision in a single eye

This is several kinds of wonderful -- Paradoxical fusion of two images and depth perception with a squinting eye. In strabismus (squint), where one eye is misaligned so that the centre of the field of view is not focussed on the normal fovea, the part of the retina where it is focussed can become a kind of "pseudo-fovea". The brain develops the connections that compare it with the fovea in the other, correctly-functioning eye, thereby providing stereofusion and depth perception.

These authors found 44 people with intermittent strabismus; in the affected eye they had a normal fovea and also a pseudo-fovea off to the side. Their stereo vision worked by 'normal retinal correspondence' with the normal eye when they weren't squinting or 'anomalous retinal correspondence' when they were.

So far so good. But what these 44 patients have also developed -- and this seems quite unfair -- is the neural wiring that can compare the images from the fovea and the pseudo-fovea of the same eye. In other words, if the normal eye was blindfolded and a pair of random-dot hidden-picture images was shown to the squinty eye so that one was focussed onto the fovea and the other onto the pseudo-fovea, they could see the 3D image.*

Indeed the human brain is a wonderful thing, as ZRM has been saying for yonks.

* Ramachandran encountered a similar case in 1994 -- if the fovea of the affected eye saw one texture and the pseudo-fovea saw a differen texture, the patient had 'monocular rivalry' between them, like the normal binocular rivalry between eyes.

UPDATE: in comments, tigris proposes that 'fauxvea' would be a better term than 'pseudo-fovea'.
If she's so smart, why doesn't she HAVE HER OWN BLOG?

Increasingly belated skull blogging -- Analog Technology version

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1919:

What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind? It is this: The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has–let us assume–a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally–well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?

It turns out that this DOES NOT WORK with a CD player. Also the people at the hardware shop reckon that I have voided the guarantee.
I hate digital technology.

A poem

Light and Memory

Light bounces down the years,
with all angles equal.
Memories are made where it hits,
by light on a film in a camera.
Except that we are the camera box
and our brain is the film.

The angles are equal
So the strikes are evenly spaced.
And from parent to child
memories can pass.
With some overlapping.

But it is information that passes
which we colour ourselves.
With lives and experience,
context and meaning.
Projecting a life.

Does the film stick in the gate sometimes
get too much light and heat?
Blister and bubble inside
while on the screen of our life
the sudden change
jolts the watchers.

Or does the light when it hits
carry some memory away
on the reflective bounce.
Taking a bit more each time
until too much is missing.
Not being replaced by incoming light.

Or the film just wears out.
Meat and bone in the end.
Not made for infinitely
bouncing down the years.
Like light, spreading memories.

The Bute Collection of Decorated Renaissance Stove-Hoods at Cardiff Castle

John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847-1900) devoted his life to the culinary arts.* He insisted that a sine qua non of civilised life was having access to cooking facilities in every room of a gentleman's house (or in his case a castle), so that one need not disturb the rest of the household should one be seized in the middle of the night by a craving for a caramelised onion tart. As part of this enthusiasm, he furnished Cardiff Castle with these ornately-decorated fume-extractor stove hoods, brought back from his grand tours of Europe.

The majority of the hoods hail from Catalonia, Provence and Liguria.

In later life, Lord Bute became inspired by the Celtic cultural revival movement. While others organised the first Eistenfodd and created an elaborate though largely fictitious history for this flag-bearing cultural event, or reprinted the Mabinogion in comic-book form, Bute convinced himself that a rich history of Welsh cuisine had been brutally suppressed by the incursions of the Plantagenet kings, and set about reinventing recipes not cooked since the days of Owain Glendwr. His experiments proved that leeks were not just items of personal adornment, but could be cooked and eaten. However, the expenses of his research squandered the Bute fortune, and his children were reduced to playing with crude improvised toys.
Join us on Unusual Museums of the World next week, when we visit the Open-Air Gas-Light Collection in the Tiergarten, Berlin!

* Insert jokes here about "Consuming passion", if you must.

Bye Bye Boortz

Tattooed followers upset. Poor babies. Go get more grafitti. Might cheer you up.
Your fat GF needs an ankle tat 

Twitter from Neal Boortz    

He's a no account jerk, I guess. It is about the only reading one can make of this. It is unusual to see one of these buffoons being so nakedly honest about it

Guess who was re-reading "The Atrocity Exhibition"

Evidently if NASA want to stay in the space-program business then they'll have to engage in some serious lobbying and appealing to the public, what with this talk of increased budgets but outsourcing the earth-to-orbit part of the job (let's see if Russian or Chinese companies tender the most competitive bid).

Now if I were consulted, I'd advise them to work on the concept of

A group of withdrawn catatonic patients were exposed to a montage of films of space-shuttle explosions. Results included improved psychomotor activity and social responsiveness. A majority found the images erotic, reporting violent traumatic fantasies, with spontaneous orgasm in 2%. Morphing software was used to create the optimum shuttle casualty; this image consisted of 40% Christa McAuliffe from the Challenger shuttle, 35% Kalpana Chawla from the Columbia shuttle and 25% Ed White from Apollo 1. Suggestions for increasing the traumatic nature of space exploration are appended.

Sorry, that wasn't me, that was Zombie J. G. Ballard. He keeps sneaking into the Riddled office somehow and drinking my akvavit from the freezer, in the understandable belief that it's actually embalming fluid. As I was about to say,

With its connotations of sterility and affectless neutrality, the technology of space flight lends itself to the fetishised eroticism that drives a depersonalised, post-human economy. A group of moderately-demented Alzheimers Syndrome patients (occipital / parietal form, with visual agnosia) were shown photographs of various rocket engines and asked to identify them. None were able to do so correctly. The rockets were most frequently described as women wearing flaring crinolines or farthingale dresses, with the fuel pumps, gimbals and pipes seen as the arms and breasts of the upper body, frequently unclothed. This interpretation was as common among female patients as among males. The Saturn F1 engine was chosen as the most appealing photograph. An artist's synthesis of these descriptions was distributed as pornography through a false website. Surveillance of customers who downloaded the synthesis showed improved social function, including greater work productivity and more frequent sexual activity with domestic partner or car.

Well it doesn't look as if I'm going to be able to say anything today. If anyone wants me I'll be by the freezer.

Oh look, Phoebe Gloeckner (illustrator of the RE/Search edition of Atrocity Exhibition) has a website.

The reports of the death of Global Warming...

... are somewhat overdone. Or, we might say, "more denialist crap"
BUT doing stupid things, fudging the results and not being rigorous about experiments doesn't work on the science side. Overblown publicity wallowers like Monkton and half baked science wannabes like Singer and Plimer can get away with it because, frankly, they don't have any credibility to lose.
The science dudes have.
Already we have seen the lies and half truths of selective editing of the hacked emails. The ferocious ballooning of the imputed importance of the two statements made by the IPCC which were not based on good science.
And it takes no time to see the galvanising effect that has has on the drooling denialist fan boys.
Any articles on global warming seems to get a hooting chorus whose smug ignorance gets a little wearing. These have been bad mistakes at a fundamental level and just the sort of thing Exxon have been praying for. No surprise to see the newspapers along to put the boot in too.
Plus it has been a very cold winter!!!2~1~2. Never mind the record heat of the Australian Summer. 
So it has been a winter of discontent. Did we ever think anything would come from the Copenhagen meeting? Did we ever think that the industrial rulers of the world would allow an easy change in thinking, beyond planting trees.
Nahhh. This is something for our children and grandchildren to defeat.

And the horse you rode on

In the trial of Continental Airlines and two of its technical staff in a French courtroom, for the destruction of an Air France Concorde airliner nearly 10 years ago, best-selling novelist Stephen King was today arraigned as a co-defendant. This unexpected development came after the Continental Airlines lawyer announced an intention of vigorously defending the manslaughter charges.
"Yes," he informed the court, "Negligence on the part of our maintenance crew did cause a large but fortunately unnecessary piece of metal to fall off a Continental DC-10 and lie on the runway, where it destroyed the Concorde's tyre ten minutes later -- which would have ruptured the Concorde's fuel tank and caused it to burst into flames and crash, killing 113 people -- except for the amazing coincidence that it was on fire already!"

Presiding judge Dominique Andreassier lost patience at that point, blamed "bestselling blockbuster novels from English-speaking authors" for the growing acceptance of ridiculous coincidences in a plot if they advance the narrative, and broadened the indictment to include Stephen King. She explained to reporters outside the court that she would have arraigned other authors as well but she could not remember any names.

The French laws on "culpable misuse of literary devices" are draconic albeit obscure, having changed little since the Napoleonic code. They allow for a range of penalties if King is found guilty, ranging up to "Execution by being bricked up alive while mounted on horseback".

UPDATE: Bonus equine misbehaviour

I have mixed feelings about the execution of the horse. It had been sentenced to death already for throwing its rider to the ground and trampling her.

But there are extenuating circumstances, for she had tried to make it read a book on analytic geometry, and everyone knows that you should not put Descartes before the horse.

Also notice on the ground, behind the horse. What else is she doing wrong? Someone? Anyone?
Yes, you at the back -- Plectrum.
That's right. Well done Plectrum. The carrot goes in front.

Tuesday cat blogging

Mrs Cat was a little cross when we got back from holiday. She had been looked after by different servants and some of them did not have the right attitude toward the privilege of feeding her.
Luckily the local "character" who is still trying to perfect his "Simultaneous Shakespeare" show was around to confront her. Sadly his good work was undone by his incontinence. It's never dull around here.