• A Cucumber Map of Europe
  
  With a bonus map of oranges.
  (tags: languages maps )
• President Obama plays Daniel Day Lewis in White House skit
  
  Quite funny (and short).
  (tags: uspolitics funny )
• Stalemate in Western Sahara frustates organizers
  
  Interview with a Saharawi human rights activist.
  (tags: westernsahara )
• Museums in Macedonia
  
  Constructing history both sides of the border.
  (tags: greece macedonia )

Rather than wait for the Hugo voters’ pack this year, I have acquired the written fiction nominees as far as possible, and this has meant getting to the novellas first. Unusually, four of the five works shortlisted in this category were published as standalone volumes, which will boost my book count for this month.

5) San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats, by “Mira Grant” (Seanan Maguire).
Sorry about this, but the zombie thing doesn’t really work for me, and the notion of fandom as heroic (and in this case doomed) defenders of all that is good, healthy and not yet undead seems a bit exaggerated. I may even put this below “No Award”; not sure.

4) After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, by Nancy Kress
A lot of this was actually quite good – tale of how ecodisaster hits the world in the very near future, and the interaction between the straggling band of imprisoned survivors who are timescooping their past for supplies (including involuntary recruits) and the present-day scientists tracking them. But I wasn’t sure that the means and motivation of the non-humans quite worked.

3) “The Stars Do Not Lie”, by Jay Lake
The one magazine-published story (Asimov’s, inevitably) on the list. Again, I liked ths a lot, but I was a bit baffled by both the references to Childhood’s End and by the enigma of whether this was meant to be a parallel Earth or a future history of some kind, so was frustrated to feel that I might have missed the point.

2) On a Red Station, Drifting, by Aliette de Bodard
Good solid world-building, non-Western spacegoing culture, lots of interesting women characters; my one disappointment was that I expected a stronger plot payoff.

1) The Emperor’s Soul, by Brandon Sanderson
I did not expect to enjoy this so thoroughly. Totally a fantasy story, though it gets a slightly scientific feel because the heroine is an adept in magical technology, trapped into rendering assistance to a hostile regime. It is possibly not the most literary of the shortlisted works, but for me it was the most entertaining.

I don’t feel terribly strongly about this ranking, except that the zombie story is definitely in last place for me and I shall grumble if it wins.

• This disability ruling reveals new depths of political dishonesty
  
  "an inaccessible courtroom, so the people who brought the action couldn’t get into the room to hear the verdict."
  (tags: ukpolitics disability )
• The Email I Just Sent to the Chief Executives of BT and TalkTalk
  
  Customer service fail.
  (tags: internet )
• George W. Bush
  
  Emperor Honorius Kept Rome Safe, except that one time it was sacked by the Visigoths.
  (tags: uspolitics )

Never let it be said that I ask questions and don’t give the answers. Here are the results, from most-seen to least-seen, of my poll a month ago of Oscar winners for Best Picture.

The decade that seems to have real staying power (or possibly the power of being shown a lot on TV when the controllers were the age that most of my readers are now) is the 1960s, with three in the top ten (The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady and West Side Story) and another at 11th place (Oliver!). The noughties contribute the poll-topping Return of the King and fourth-placed Gladiator. And rounding out the top ten is the 1940s with Casablanca, though the only other film from that decade in the top half of the table is Rebecca, at #36.

I am interested to learn if Wings (the first ever winner of the Oscar for Best Picture) and The Life of Emile Zola from ten years later deserve their comparative obscurity!

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2008

Broadcast of The Sontaran Stratagem, bringing back Martha Jones, UNIT and the Sontarans to meet the Tenth Doctor and Donna.

2002

Webcast of part 2 of "Death Comes To Time", confusingly the twelfth of thirteen episodes, in which a peculiarly depicted Seventh Doctor and Ace prepare for their final confrontation…

1975

Broadcast of episode 2 of Revenge of the Cybermen, in which Harry takes the poisoned Sarah to Voga and the Fourth Doctor tries to sort things out on Nerva.

1969

Broadcast of episode 2 of The War Games, in which the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe begin to realise that this may not be the real First World War after all…

1967

I was born!

… to rhyme with “glass”, “ti” being pronounced /s/ in Gilbertese. It is said that the Rev Hiram Bingham jr, when he brought “civilisation” to the islands in the 1860s, neglected to ensure that he had enough “s” blocks in his printing set; but this seems to me too good to be true.

As pointed out, one of the islands of Kiribati is Kiritimati Island, also known, with nearly the same pronunciation, as Christmas Island.

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• The case of the disappearing teaspoons
  
  A classic. "We observed the teaspoons for a total of 5668 teaspoon days."
  (tags: science )
• Are a million people fit to work yet living on benefits?
  
  No. The UK’s coalition govt is lying.
  (tags: ukpolitics disability )
• I Read All The Baby Sleep Books
  
  Says it all!!!
  (tags: children )
• One Road
  
  A journey through Yugoslavia in 1952. Beautiful writing.
  (tags: serbia greece croatia travel macedonia austria )

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Current:
1632 by Eric Flint (nearly finished)
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (just started)
TARDIS Eruditorum – A Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell by Philip Sandifer (half way through)
Blackout by Mira Grant (Hugo nominee, half way through)
On A Red Station, Drifting by Aliette De Bodard (Hugo nominee, half way through)

Last books finished:
The Roots of Evil by Philip Reeve (new Fourth Doctor book)
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercombie

Next books:
After 1632, The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi
After Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
After Blackout, Redshirts by John Scalzi

• Trident replacement plans are based on outdated ideas, says former minister
  
  Scrap it!
  (tags: ukpolitics libdems )
• Peak Break-Up Times On Facebook
  
  March is the cruellest month. Also, December.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• Azerbaijan: “Advocate- Persona non grata”, a text by Anar Gasimli
  
  An Azeri lawyer writes.
  (tags: azerbaijan )
• DWP Services and benefits online
  
  "designed to work with the following operating systems and browsers. Many of these are no longer available."
  (tags: ukpolitics disability )
• Is your Twitter password secure?
  
  Good question!
  (tags: twitter security )

This was death? Then why did it hurt so much?

It’s not Joe Abercrombie’s fault, but epic fantasy rarely ticks my boxes – I thoroughly bounced off Brust’s Vlad Taltos books as well. I didn’t find characters or setting attractive or interesting, and struggled through to the end to confirm my feelings. I have Best Served Cold waiting on the shelves as well but I may not give it the same amount of time.

• A memory
  
  The real rewards of a good deed.
  (tags: lessons )
• CJ Cherryh on Finding Nemo / Finding Dory
  
  "Finding Nemo has killed more small fish than you’d like to believe."
  (tags: animals )
• Oswald’s Stone, the Lost Palladium of Middlesex
  
  Millions live in or near Ossulstone, but only a handful have ever heard of it.
  (tags: london maps )
• How we made: The Wombles
  
  Mike Batt and Bernard Cribbins reminisce.
  (tags: tv )

For several Januaries past, I did a poll of books celebrating their 50th, 100th, 150th etc birthdays in that particlar year. I realised that I had forgotten to do it this year, but there is time to put that right. The books below are ranked by the number of people who have rated them on Goodreads, which has flagged up some interesting cultural points which I would not otherwise have been aware of. However I expect that the top book from 1813 will pwn the rest.

I’d be very interested to hear recommendations in comments. (I’ll start with my own.)

• 28 Newspaper and Magazine Layout Disasters
  
  The first of these is the best. (From @paul_cornell)
  (tags: funny )
• Dimensions in Time out-takes
  
  Slightly more fun than the original programme…
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Author responds…
  
  …to one of my reviews.
  (tags: doctorwho )
• 18th-Century Connecticutian or Muppet?
  
  Warning – one of these is *both* an 18th-century Connecticutian *and* a Muppet!
  (tags: funny )

Next in the sequence of Tenth Doctor comics that started with Fugitive. As with the previous volume, I wasn’t wild about the first two issues collected here, where I felt that Al Davison’s art didn’t quite match Lee’s script of aliens invading the Tardis. But then things really take a turn for the better, with a four-issue story gorgeously illustrated by Blair D. Shedd, which has Martha Jones, walking trees, Greenwich Observatory and John Dee, and another joke about Belgium.

There’s a reference to Martha having married Mickey, and I thought at first that this might have been anticipating The End of Time as they go off to chase Sontarans at the end. But in fact the comic was published in mid-2010, after The End of Time was broadcast, so no surprise for the reader who had been paying attention.

I hope Shedd does more Who work; I was really impressed.

The Doctor loaded his plate with thick slices of meat stuffed with a rich green dressing. “Pale wine and pistachio lamb! Thanks to All-Providing God that not everything He sends my way is a maddening trial!”

The least-owned on Librarything of this year’s Hugo nominees, Throne of the Crescent Moon is a sword-and-sorcery adventure set in an Arabian Nights-style environment, with an undercurrent of social revolution. It’s not really my subgenre to be honest, and I felt that in the early chapters before the author found his pace it was occasionally reminiscent of reading someone’s account of their D&D campaign , but I enjoyed it a lot more than The Blade Itself which I was reading at about the same time.

As with A Tale of Two Cities, I did consider mischievously posting judiciously chosen extracts to Doctor Who forums and asking people what novel they thought they might be from. (The central character is often referred to as “the Doctor”.)

I chaired a session at a conference yesterday, and unfortunately had to add these remarks to the traditional thanks and compliments to the organisers with which I opened the discussion:

There are 22 panellists and moderators for today's conference, and we are all men. I see only one woman in this room out of more than thirty people. This isn't good enough; in fact it is unacceptable. We are all here because we are experts on today's topic; we all know women who are engaged as deeply as we are with this particular issue; as it is, we are now supposed to have an in-depth discussion in which half of the population will not be represented adequately. I hope that the organisers and the funders will ensure that this never happens again. I will not participate in any future event where this is allowed to happen, and I hope that the rest of you here will commit to do the same.

The only detail I want to give about the event is that, ironically, one of the funders was the government of an EU member country which has a female head of state. (There are four of them – can you name them all?)

The organisers did say that they had originally had two women panellists scheduled (and I think that they must have been on the draft programme for the event that I was originally sent) but that they both pulled out for family reasons. They also said that they accepted my point (which is why my remarks were directed at least as much to the other men in the room).

• “Our Splendid Misery”: Louisa Catherine Adams in the White House
  
  " this would be magnificent habitation which after all like every thing else in this desolate City is but an half finished Barn"
  (tags: history uspolitics )
• Serbia / Kosovo Agreement
  
  Toby Vogel with the full text.
  (tags: serbia kosovo )
• Don’t Judge the Chechens Yet
  
  Charles King (who actually is an expert) writes.
  (tags: terrorism )

Looking down the agenda of today’s conference, at which I am chairing a session, I realise that all 22 panellists and moderators appear to be male.

Maybe it’s 21, though; some of the names are unfamiliar. I ask the bloke beside me if Kamil is a male or female name in Polish. He replies that he himself is the Kamil in question. OK, so it’s 22 out of 22 then.

I think I will use my authority as chair to make some pertinent remarks.

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…and then a few moments later you realise you are standing next to the President of Estonia.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

• 1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place
  
  Oh, Vienna!!!
  (tags: history )
• ‘I’m following all the rules, but they won’t pay for me to survive’
  
  More from the UK government’s war on the poor.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• France won’t block U.S. proposal on Western Sahara
  
  Hooray!
  (tags: westernsahara )
• Courageous Senators Stand Up To American People
  
  Short but incisive analysis.
  (tags: guns uspolitics )
• “Les violations des droits de l’homme sont plus fréquentes au Nord du Maroc”
  
  I am not sure that this is the best argument to make!
  (tags: westernsahara )

• 17 London Underground Maps You Never Knew You Needed
  
  Some of these are more helpful, but less entertaining, than others!
  (tags: london maps )
• Atos apologises to long-term sick wrongly assessed as fit for work
  
  Rather a non-apology, if you ask me. "If we get something wrong then I’m very happy to say sorry."
  (tags: ukpolitics disability )
• UN/Western Sahara: Give Peacekeepers a Human Rights Mandate
  
  US now in favour; will France do the right thing?
  (tags: westernsahara )
• A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip
  
  Gabrielle Giffords speaks out.
  (tags: guns uspolitics )

Current:
The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie – about two-thirds of the way through
1632, by Eric Flint – about half way through
Tesseract, by Tony Lee (Tenth Doctor comic) – about half way through
Throne of the Crescent Moon (Hugo nominee), by Saladin Ahmed – nearly finished but fell asleep in the train on the way home

Last books finished:
Father Time, by Lance Parkin (Eighth Doctor Adventure)
The Emperor's Soul, by Brandon Sanderson (Hugo nominee)

Next books:
After The Blade Itself, Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
After 1632, The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi
After Throne of the Crescent Moon, Blackout, by "Mira Grant".

• The Everyday Sexism Project
  
  A year of shouting back.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• Influential Reinhart-Rogoff Pro-Austerity Research Riddled With Errors: Study
  
  HuffPo summarises.
  (tags: economics )
• Panic in the Kingdom
  
  Morocco objects to human rights monitoring in the Western Sahara.
  (tags: westernsahara )
• The Monsters of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, As Drawn By Children
  
  To cheer you up.
  (tags: children eldritchhorrorsfrombeforethedawnoftime )
• Azerbaijan & Iran: A Soft-Power Struggle?
  
  Every presidential election in Iran since 1997 … has produced surprising outcomes. This cannot be said about Azerbaijan…
  (tags: azerbaijan )

I was contacted earlier this week by a researcher wondering if it was true, as received wisdom has it, that the 1998 referendum on the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland received overwhelming support from Nationalists but only a slim majority among Unionists.

My unhelpful answer is that we cannot tell.

In the referendum on 22 May, 953,683 people voted – 676,966 Yes, 274,979 No and 1,738 spoilt.

In the Assembly election on 25 June, only 823,565 people voted, which means that there are 130,118 voters (net) who voted in the referendum but cannot be classified as either Unionists or Nationalists because they did not then vote in the Assembly election.

One can break down the Assembly election vote as follows:

185,094 votes for anti-Agreement Unionists (DUP, UKUP, Ulster Independence Movement, Robert Lindsay Mason – UIM though not strictu sensu Unionists probably belong in this category)

321,349 votes for Nationalists (SDLP, SF, Oliver McMullan and Delores Quinn)
201,510 votes for pro-Agreement Unionists (UUP, PUP, UDP)
79,237 for centre parties and other independents
625,135 votes for pro-Agreement parties

It’s clear that pro-Agreement Unionists had a narrow lead of 16,416 votes over anti-Agreement Unionists in the Assembly election. However, the pro-Agreement vote was 51,000 lower, and the anti-Agreement vote almost 90,000 lower, in the Assembly election than in the referendum.

Can we map this difference in any more detail? Yes, a little. Although we don’t have constituency breakdowns of the “Yes” and “No” votes in the referendum, we do have turnout figures. They show that the turnout differential was much greater in Unionist areas than in Nationalist areas, and that there is an even stronger correlation with the electoral strength of centre ground political parties. So there is some evidence for the view that Nationalist voters turned out for both referendum and election, and voted overwhelmingly “Yes” in the referendum, probably contributing a majority of the “Yes” votes (if anything, I detect signs of some SF voters abstaining in the referendum but them coming out to support the party in the Assembly election).

The rest of it can be interpreted in various ways. Occam’s razor would suggest that there was a reservoir of voters, more anti- than pro-Agreement, who came out for the referendum, and then abstained in the election (as they usually do). Do they count as Unionist voters? Not by my reckoning, I think you have to actually vote Unionist to be a Unionist voter. Were they mainly from a Protestant background? Yes, probably.

There is another possible interpretation: that the voters who turned out in May but not in June were actually more pro-Agreement than anti, but that in June a substantial number of UUP voters who had voted “No” in the referendum none the less supported the party in the election, on grounds of traditional loyalty, accepting the popular vote, etc. Occam’s razor shaves this one close, but I think it maps better to the subsequent fraying and disintegration of UUP support.

Conversely one could argue that there were vast numbers of voters who turned out to vote “No” and then a large number of “Yes” voters who changed their minds over the following month. But I think that much less likely.

But basically, the proposition that the 1998 referendum was supported or opposed by any kind of majority among Unionist voters is impossible to prove. The numbers can be read to suggest that, as in the Assembly election, a slim majority of those who normally voted for Unionists also voted Yes in the referendum; but the evidence is very weak indeed.

“You have two hearts, you’re stronger and fitter than other people, you’ve got greater mental capacity: better memory, faster responses. Have you ever wondered why you are different?”

Years before Georgia Moffett sprang from David Tennant’s thigh (or wherever), the Eighth Doctor had an adopted daughter: Miranda Dawkins, lost scion of a imperial family from the far future, growing up in the vividly recalled 1980s (reminiscences of Thatcherism rather appropriate for the moment), the target of youthful desire from her classmates and assassination attempts from her political enemies, and trying to get to grips with both. It’s not completely clear to me that Miranda is actually a Gallifreyan; though she has two hearts and a lower body temperature, she ages at the normal rate for a human child / teenager, and her future Empire doesn’t sound very Timelordish to me. Parkin’s portrayal of the Doctor (still amnesiac as he has been for the last few books) as a loving but very absent-minded single parent is very compelling, and the final section in which the Doctor and his human companion Debbie steal a space shuttle to rescue Miranda is suitably bonkers.

I am not yet a convert to the Faction Paradox concept, but if this book is part of it then I am a few steps closer now.

I was sufficiently intrigued by Miranda to want to find out what happened to her afterwards. She appeared in three issues of a planned six as the central character of the comic Miranda before the company publishing the story ran out of money. The comic leans quite heavily on Father Time to the point where it would be difficult to follow for readers who did not know the novel. There’s some humour at 80s child Miranda being thrust into ruling a future empire, wearing school uniform as the least inappropriate thing in her wardrobe, but then we lose the boring (and not terribly convincing) politics for exciting attempted kidnapping and assassination, and escapes and chases. We end on a cliffhanger with Miranda losing allies and confronted by her enemies. What happened next? We shall never know.

• News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
  
  I completely agree with this. I try to only read news which is relevant for my job.
  (tags: information )
• 2013 Skoll Awards: Independent Diplomat and Crisis Action
  
  A short video about our work from one of our funders.
  (tags: id carneross )
• Ignore the news
  
  Charles Stross on the same lines as the previous link. (Which I chose Monday morning, long before the Boston events.)
  (tags: information )
• Het is nu ook officieel: stemcomputers rammelden
  
  Our voting machines don’t work properly.
  (tags: elections belgium )

• Social mobility and higher education in Britain, some further thoughts
  
  "And what about higher education? If we can’t (honestly) sell it to the students or the taxpayers on the basis of the labour-market advantages it will bring to them and their families, what can we do? Essentially, we have to persuade people that being better educated is more of a good in itself even if not an effective means to an end. We may have some trouble with that."
  (tags: ukpolitics )

The third in Leo’s classic bande dessinée series, with a lost human colony on a lush tropical planet where something very odd is happening to the local fauna. Where the first two albums had our heroes Marc and Kim slowly making their way to the city of Anatolia, here we have Marc being sprung from prison three years after being banged up by the local goons by the peculiar Mr Pad, who simply wants to break into the local museum for Marc and Kim to examine some old photos. This doesn’t seem much of a plot hook, and our protagonists have fun exploring the city’s yoof subculture while staying a step ahead of the authorities; and then on the last page they and we finally see the photograph of the title, and it is delightfully mind-blowing.

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