'Impossible motion' trick

Everything is not as it seems...

'Impossible motion' trick wins Illusion Contest - physics-math - 11 May 2010 - New Scientist

Ronnie James Dio dies at 67

RIP Ronnie James Dio.

The reaper may take them but the music goes on forever. Long live rock and roll.

Flash Forward & Hereos Axed.

Just in... NBC has killed off Hereos and ABC has killed off Flash Forward. Looks like I will be almost completely giving up watching TV for the foreseeable future. Looks like a diet of reruns of Top Gear on Dave until someone decides to make something I want to watch like a new Star Trek series or something in the style of Blade Runner.

UK Election - Meet the new boss

So Gollum's uglier brother has finally left the house with London's most photographed front door and scampered back North of the Border to lick his wounds. To see him give his cringe inducing speech on the doorstep of number ten was painful in the extreme and although I feel a little sorry for him it is only because I know how awful moving house can be. During his speech Mrs B looked like she had consumed vast quantities of Valium. She stood there with a vacant look that was made all the more scary by her eyes that darted every which way, like a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights. Bye bye Gordon it was nice to see how your party stood by you after you screwed up the election for them.

The worrying thing for Labour party supporters is who takes over as leader. Say what you want about Tony Blair he dragged Labour in to the modern world, but the so called 'New Labour' has been set back years by Gordon Brown's mishandling of the economy and iffy leadership qualities. The vampires and werewolves are coming out of the shadows ready to exert their own type of evil master at the helm. The problem is that whoever they decide is up to the job must be a strong charismatic person, which discounts most current MPs and just leaves some of the most untrustworthy self-serving bar-stewards in politics. Whoever they choose I think we will see a change that makes Labour either more new and middle of the road or drags them back to their Socialist roots. Their supporters need to think very carefully if they want their party re-elected again. With hindsight it is so easy to see the mistakes all the parties have made with their choice of leaders over the years.

Unlike most people I speak to I am quite positive that the alliance between the Tories and the Lib/Dems can work, only time of course will tell. Let me explain... although I have not had access or even done an Internet search for what is in the document that David Cameron and Nick Clegg signed I believe it contains the gems of what could be a brave new world for British politics. I have like most people seen snippets in the newspapers and I listened to extracts from it during a radio interview with Clegg and it all seemed to make sense. What surprised me even more was that Nick Clegg sounded like he sincerely believed what he was saying and I cannot remember hearing that level sincerity from a politician ever. It appeared that the two had taken all the best bits from their policies and rejigged them to become better than the sum of their parts. In the past I thought that the Lib/Dems ideas for electoral reform were totally unworkable, while at the same time I felt that the attitude of most Tories (and Labourites) that reform was unnecessary was blinkered. From what I heard the two leaders have come up with a cunning plan. They now just have to sell it to their respective parties and the public. I believe it goes a massive way to restoring the faith of the British public in Parliament and politicians.

At what one of the newspapers called 'The Great No.10 Love-In' David Cameron and Nick Clegg stood side by side to answer questions from the press. Laughs were a penny a dozen as the new Prime Minister was reminded he called his new Deputy Prime Minister a "Political Joke" during the election. Strange how such bitter rivals have become such bosom, bosom friends in such a short time. A week is a long time in politics and one has to wonder how long this can last. There are without doubt hard times and hard decisions ahead, but if these two can find enough common ground and see their way to doing what is the best for the country while putting aside their differences there is hope. If what I suspect is in that document from the snippets I heard we might just see changes for the better but they will rock the established order of things like Motorhead at a church fete. Bring it on, I say, life is too short for regrets.

The bitter pill will be increased taxes and however hard that is to swallow the blame can only be placed firmly on the departing PM and his cabinet who acted like so many of their public and went mad with the credit card leaving us billions in debt. What supporters of all parties need to realise that these taxes were coming in some form or another whoever was in power. I would hope there will be at least a honeymoon period where the press stop twisting and misquoting everything and let this strange pact prove it can work.

There is an ancient Chinese curse that says "May you have an interesting life"; well whatever happens it will be interesting, even if the Right Honourable Member for Dudding on Thames does sleep through the whole debate. I am sure Mr Brown will have an interesting life with his £184,000 pension and a whole rack of book deals as a reward for ruining the economy. It should be fun though as everyone digs out those old speeches and finds all those things that the politicians said that they would never support but are now proposing, they will hate YouTube shortly.

UK Soccer Fixtures Copyrighted

It appears that the fixture lists of UK Soccer matches are now considered copyright material after a court case. Judge Christopher Floyd said in summing up "The process of preparing fixture lists involves very significant labour and skill in satisfying the multitude of often competing requirements of those involved, (it is) not mere sweat of the brow, by which I mean the application of rigid criteria to the processing of data. The quality of the solution depends in part on the skill of those involved." So the judge has ruled that the information is intellectual property and that anyone who wants to publish it will have to pay for the privilege.

Now my interest in football is non-existent but this seems totally ludicrous. If I was running the newspapers I would simply say okay if you want us to publish your fixture list then you will pay us for advertising. I suspect that the newspapers will simply pay for the sake of their readership and the only victims of this stupid idea will be the fan sites who upon publishing when and where their team is playing will face either a bill or a fine.

The details of the case can be read here.
Thanks to J-Walk Blog who spotted this item at Law.Com Legal Blog Watch

This whole intellectual property thing is just getting out of hand. Picture the scene "Hey Bob! Where is the match next week?" "Sorry Jacko if I tell you that then the league will charge me a tenner."

UK Election - What a mess!

The election in the UK has made Britain look like a third world banana republic. Not content with the leaders of the parties showing their ignorance and un-preparedness on television, showing serious lacks of judgement, social skills, leaving their microphones on, and concentrating on the smearing of the other candidates rather than the key issues, but there seem to have been the sort of dirty underhand tricks that we have read about in places were democracy is considered a dirty word.

In what seems like the desperate attempts of a desperate man to cling to power there have been allegations of thousands of fraudulent postal votes in key marginal seats that is being investigated by the police. No one has dared to accuse anyone just yet but that is just the British way. That sort of thing does not go on here, or does it? I am just waiting for the cover up that will probably show it was all to do with Asian betting rings or maybe they will try and pin it on Nick Griffin and his fascist BNP.

Probably more significant is the massive of numbers of people who were stopped from voting because they found themselves locked out of polling stations. There were problems in parts of London, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle and Surrey where as the polls closed many people who had been queuing for three hours were unable to cast their vote.

Not only were voters denied their right to cast a vote by the inability of staff to cope with the high percentage that turned out, but several polling stations ran out of ballot papers and there is simply no excuse for this.

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social networking sites were a hotbed of discontent from those denied their democratic right. Videos and photographs of the reaction of crowds of angry people outside polling stations showed how close we came to the sort of thing we have been seeing in Greece. The British stiff upper lip was quivering.

In Hackney, in east London, angry would-be voters staged a sit-in and police were called to a polling station in Lewisham, south London, where about 300 people had still to vote by 10 pm. In Sheffield Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg apologised to voters that had waited for three hours.

While British politicians may be content to wait a few weeks for the dust to die down and let everyone forget it the Electoral Commission has said it will hold an inquiry, a terrible slight on a country that considers itself the bastion of democracy.

Gordon Brown is said to “Be concerned” and David Cameron is reported as saying "An early task for a new government is to get to the bottom of what has happened and make sure that it never happens again,".

Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC suggested on the ITV News that people who were unable to vote might like to sue. The European Convention says that by law people have a right to a vote. When asked how much a denied voter might be likely to get he said "They will get at least 750 pounds (1,100 U.S. dollars)”. The vultures are circling the carcass already. If legal challenges are made then we could see candidates having to fight by-elections in those areas where there were problems.

The desperate man is still holding desperately on to power and refusing to concede defeat. The man who was never elected to the office of Prime minister but inherited it from his predecessor is sticking to his guns by saying he has the right to form a government even when the other side won. It may well be his constitutional right to do so, because it is not a majority, but it is clearly morally wrong. What is it that these politicians do not understand? They confess to playing by the rules but bend those rules to line their own pockets and maintain their power whatever the cost to the people that elected them.

What we wanted in Britain was what we got, a hung parliament, but not in the way we wanted it. There is scaffolding up around Westminster we should use it; it would bring a new meaning to the swingometer. I think it is time for Gordon Brown to do the honourable thing and fall on his sword. How many people would pay to see that?

I do not think it matters what your political persuasion is Britain needs a strong and stable government lead by a charismatic and honest man and Brown ticks none of the boxes. If Labour wants to will over the UK voters they need to get rid of Brown and start to come good on their broken promises. The Tories have someone at the helm who is much easier on the eye but who needs to be kept better informed. You need to be decisive and firm when you are questioned by the public and often during debate he came across as out of touch, not that the opposition were any better. If the Tories had come up with some real policies instead of just promising change the whole outcome might have been better for them. The Liberal Democrats came out well in public debate but a lot of their policies are ill-conceived, not because they are bad ideas but because people in Britain despise change. It was the reason the Conservatives campaign backfired; all they spoke about was change, change, change. We do not want change, we want stability and constant change for change sake never did anyone any good.

The change issue is also the one that stops people voting for the fringe parties too; that and the fact that only the deluded seriously believes they are not wasting their vote. In most cases a vote for one of the smaller parties is a protest vote, something the Liberal Democrats have relied upon for years. These protest votes are divisive and are one reason that maybe we should change how we do politics so that we narrow down the choices somehow. I am not sure that proportional representation would be the right way to do it either. We would end up with an unstable government every time and even the lunatic fringe would have a platform from which to disrupt the running of the country.

The worst thing about this mess is that the whole thing is going to drag on. Government should be like a small child, seen and but not heard very often. Instead it is a screaming brat that demands more attention than it deserves. Every now and the UK press exposes their wrong doing and for a while they sit on the naughty stair, what is needed is for someone to give them a good spanking and send them to bed without their tea from time to time. Although talking of politicians they might enjoy the spanking bit and I would be worried what they were getting up to in the bedroom.

In a perfect world it would not matter that there was no clear winner to this election because all parties would be working together for the good of the people that elected them instead of bitching and fighting with each other, but it is not a perfect world.

I often think that maybe we might be better off with a dictatorship than a democracy as without all the hot air it would be so much easier to get things done. So when can I take over? Actually that would not be a good idea because the heads on stakes outside the houses of parliament might drive the tourists away.

I Voted

I voted and can now sleep safe in the knowledge that I did my civic duty and used the vote that thousands died in two world wars to preserve. God save the Queen and God help our enemies.