The Doctor, Ace and Benny find themselves confusingly distributed between Akhenaten’s Egypt, Napoleon’s Egypt and 1871 Paris, facing implacable foes intent on dismembering the Doctor. It was all very vivid and enjoyable to read, and only now that I try to summarise it do I realise that the plot was really all over the place. Ace departs the series at the end of the book, and Sophie Aldred writes her character a farewell afterword; Big Finish was still several years in the future at this point…

This standalone tale by Rankin is about a Scottish SAS veteran seeking revenge for his murdered brother (NB that brothers crop up a lot in Rankin’s plots). The story is supposedly about the global chemicals industry’s conspiracy to poison our food, which was even more topical back in 1995, but actually the real point is the central character’s quest for vengeance across America, England, France and Scotland, and how it unexpectedly ties into an old and forgotten personal feud. Exciting action stuff at the end, but presumably our hero would end up facing a significant jail term for the methods he uses to deal with his brother’s killers.

Haven’t been well enough to do anything but read today, and have therefore got through a number of books, the first being this tale of Lovejoy going to Rome to steal an antique table from the Vatican Museum. Lovejoy is at his most psychopathic here, gratuitously violent to bad guys and to women, and so utterly besotted with antiques as to be unaware of any other person’s feelings. Gash redeems the novel as a reading experience with loving detail on Rome, on the Vatican and on Lovejoy’s audacious plan to rip an exhibit from the tightly guarded city-state, and also by Lovejoy getting a mildly comical if emotionally improbable comeuppance at the end, after the bad guys have met their just deserts. But I think the narrator’s sheer unpleasantness makes it a weaker entry in the series.

• Memorabilia Antonina: Richard III
  
  Tony looks at the Princes in the Tower.
  (tags: history )
• Marissa Mayer Just Gave Every Yahoo Employee An iPhone 5
  
  Strictly speaking, anything but a Blackberry!
  (tags: technology )
• Mitt Romney’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Campaign
  
  “If [Obama] ends up winning, the skeptics—of whom I have been one—will have to acknowledge that the Obama team understands something important about twenty-first century politics that we don’t.”
  (tags: uspolitics )
• Inside the campaign: How Mitt Romney stumbled
  
  The post-mortems begin!
  (tags: uspolitics )

In April last year I was able to announce that I had finally completed doing a write-up on-line, be it ever so humble, of every winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Now that I have read Ursula Le Guin's Powers, I can say the same for the Nebula. Here is the full set of 49 winners in 47 years:

1966 Frank Herbert, Dune
1967 Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17
1967 Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
1968 Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection
1969 Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage
1970 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
1971 Larry Niven, Ringworld
1972 Robert Silverberg, A Time of Changes
1973 Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
1974 Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
1975 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
1976 Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
1977 Frederik Pohl, Man Plus
1978 Frederik Pohl, Gateway
1979 Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
1980 Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise
1981 Gregory Benford, Timescape
1982 Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator
1983 Michael Bishop, No Enemy But Time
1984 David Brin, Startide Rising
1985 William Gibson, Neuromancer
1986 Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
1987 Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
1988 Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman
1989 Lois McMaster Bujold, Falling Free
1990 Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, The Healer's War
1991 Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea
1992 Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide
1993 Connie Willis, Doomsday Book
1994 Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
1995 Greg Bear, Moving Mars
1996 Robert J. Sawyer, The Terminal Experiment
1997 Nicola Griffith, Slow River
1998 Vonda McIntyre, The Moon and the Sun
1999 Joe Haldeman, Forever Peace
2000 Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
2001 Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio
2002 Catherine Asaro, The Quantum Rose
2003 Neil Gaiman, American Gods
2004 Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark
2005 Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls
2006 Joe Haldeman, Camouflage
2007 Jack McDevitt, Seeker
2008 Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
2009 Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
2010 Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
2011 Connie Willis, Blackout/All Clear
2012 Jo Walton, Among Others

My favourites, in no particular order, were The Healer's War, The Left Hand of Darkness, Flowers for Algernon, Rendezvous With Rama, Parable of the Talents, Speed of Dark, Gateway, Doomsday Book and The Dispossessed.

I remain utterly unconvinced of the merits of The Quantum Rose, The Terminal Experiment, Darwin's Radio, Blackout/All Clear, and, though I realise mine is a minority view, Neuromancer and The Gods Themselves.

My next serial prize-winner reading project was foreshadowed in this poll.

The script of what is still the best Cyberman story, published in 1989 at a time when the episodes were still lost. There’s a brief introductory interview with Davis (and a few words also with script editor Victor Pemberton) pointing out the roots of the story in Erich von Däniken, and the advantages of using very few sets and of not giving too much away. Though actually what struck me was that this is partially a reboot, the first time a season had opened without William Hartnell, and so there are a couple of background information moments – the Doctor’s age, and his thoughts about his family – that we don’t often get. Victoria also gets more action than usual, though Jamie is more comic relief and Doctor’s boyfriend. Interesting to approach it from a different angle.

• Before Rockwell, a Gay Artist Defined the Perfect American Male
  
  The wonderful homoerotic art of J.C. Leyendecker
  (tags: art )

I linked a few days back to the Wikipedia discussion of Philip Roth's novel, The Human Stain – in summary, Roth objected to an inaccurate statement about which of his acquaintances he had based the main character on, found it difficult to get the change he wanted made, and went ballistic all over the media. I'm not a fan of Wikipedia's technocratic and dehumanised internal culture, and this seemed to me worth noting but no more.

However I came across this piece by the Wikimedia Foundation's Oliver Keyes yesterday, in which Keyes lays into Roth and into the mainstream media for believing Roth uncritically. The fact is that this has been a media disaster for Wikipedia, and it's just possible that Wikipiedia could have handled it better. I posted this comment on Keyes' piece, but I do not know if he will publish it.

I realise of course that the fuss is entirely Roth’s fault for failing to read up properly on Wikipedia’s policy and procedures, and writing about them only from the perspective of a grumpy old man who found it difficult to make the improvement he wanted to an article which he thought he was in a good position to know about.

However, the fact is that Wikipedia does not, anywhere, offer an answer to the question, How do I fix inaccurate information about me and/or my organisation on Wikipedia? In fact, Wikipedia’s answer to that question is, basically, “You can’t.”

So what do people do in that situation? Those with time and inclination will set up sock-puppet accounts to make the change anyway. The socially powerful will reach out to the media and demand that the change be made, as Roth has done. Those without time or power will shrug and walk away, determining that they won't bother to interact with Wikipedia in the future. Those behaviours are actually encouraged by the way Wikipedia works.

That's one thing. The other is that this affair has been a complete media win for Roth and a serious hit to Wikipedia's reputation. It is true that almost all the media coverage took Roth at his word and failed to give Wikipedia's side to the story. Whose fault is that? Perhaps there is nobody at Wikipedia charged with dealing with the press, and/or with with digging into the details of public disputes to ensure that Wikipedia's side of the story is given. Certainly a journalist wanting to call Wikipedia to get their side of the story would probably stop looking for a phone number or email contact after a few minutes of frustrated poking around the site. So since nobody is the press contact for Wikipedia, it is nobody's fault, I suppose.

Choices have consequences. Wikipedia has chosen to make it difficult for people to change inaccurate information about themselves, and that choice has the consequence that grumpy old men like Philip Roth will complain in public that his word isn't good enough, and that smarter people will undermine your system and use pseudonyms to make the changes they want anyway. Wikipedia has chosen not to bother engaging with the media on the assumption that any interested party can easily review the changelogs and the talk page discussions, and that has consequences when a journalist is writing to a deadline, and finds that one side of the story has provided them with a good narrative and the other hasn't.

Edited to add , below, and Keyes on his blog, point out that I am completly wrong about Wikipedia’s lack of visible press contacts. Note also a response from “A Wikipedia admin” making it clear that it is all the outside world’s fault and that Wikipedia is right.

I picked up some sort of bug on my travels last week, and though I struggled into work on Thursday and Friday have spent today pretty much horizontal and not really operating at top speed. So, I thought, why not prepare for this evening's episode by re-reading the two Doctor Who novels actually set in the Wild West; and found that they were about at the right level.

I said in my earlier post that Doctor Who – The Gunfighters, by Donald Cotton, is one of the best of the Target novelisations, and I'm glad to report that it stands up to re-reading; Cotton tells it in the character of journalist Ned Buntline, reporting Doc Holliday's account of events many years after the fact, and presents what is actually a fairly close mapping of the original script (including the "Doctor Who?" joke) in a passable pastiche of the appropriate style. It's funnier than the original, with some fairly minor characters given actual personalities – Johnny Ringo's fascination with classic literature, Phineas Clancy's desperate attempts at appropriate metaphors involving animals. On the other hand, there's almost no characterisation for the three regular characters, the exception being, oddly enough, Dodo, of whom we discover that "she had learned all about poker at her finishing school". Here, the Doctor actually atrts the OK Corral shootout by accident (in the original he is far fom the scene). I wrongly reported in my previous write-up that the "Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon" is omitted; it is all here, in fact, and that's fine with me.

I realised as I picked up The Peacemaker, by James Swallow, that I had actually only listened to a seriously abridged audio version rather than reading the actual book previously. The plot is the least exciting part of it – it's basically an alien intrusion into a historical setting, which has been pretty much the standard Who historical story since The Time Warrior. However, the fact that one of the competing alien presences has become associated with a local healer allows some development of Martha's own background and ambitions, and to a lesser extent on the Doctor himself as healer. And the book gains in terms of drama by restricting the alien threat to just the local area, and eventually to just the Doctor and Martha. There are also lots of continuity references both to New Who and to appropriate bits of Old Who – and there is mention of Battle Tardises, which is a rare intrusion of a Big Finish invention into New Who, though the context is the Doctor's very New Who memory of the Time War. The abridgement, as far as I remember, omitted a rather silly opening chapter set on a far future Hollywood planet.

Doctor Who – The Gunfighters has no non-white characters at all, as far as we can tell, and fails the Bechdel test (Kate and Dodo do have several conversations, but always about a man, which is an interesting illustration of the point of the test). The Peacemaker has Martha and a single Native American character (who gets killed off). It passes the Bechdel test with a conversation between Martha and the local schoolteacher about local history and fashion, at the start of Chapter 3.

There is considerable variation in the popularity and ratings of these and the other Western Who stories between LibraryThing and Goodreads, though I guess this reflects small smaple size more than anything else:

Doctor Who stories with Western settings:

The Gunfighters (TV, 1966) – the First Doctor has a toothache and visits a dentist who turns out to be Doc Holliday in Tombstone, Arizona. (Doc Holliday and Kate were the last historical figures to appear on Who until George Stephenson in 1985.)

Doctor Who – The Gunfighters (novelisation, 1986). Listed separately because it is one of the best of the Target novelisations, telling the story largely from Doc Holliday's point of view on his deathbed years later.

A Town Called Fortune (Big Finish audio, 2010). The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe visit a town where the Doctor appears to be wanted for murder.
Trailer.

The Peacemaker (Novel and audiobook, 2007). The Tenth Doctor and Martha find themselves trying to thwart an alien invasion in the Old West.

And of course tonight's offering…

Edited to add: Thanks to jogging my memory I should also include:

Freakshow (Big Finish audio, 2010, available in this set). Turlough gets kidnapped and displayed as a carnival exhibit.

The Runaway Train (BBC audiobook, 2010): The Eleventh Doctor and Amy have to prevent global catastrophe and catch a train. Also has a neat time paradox (foreshadowing The Pandorica Opens).

• Facebook and Twitter: the art of unfriending or unfollowing people
  
  Folks, every day is defriending amnesty day as far as I am concerned!
  (tags: socialmedia twitter facebook )
• Seagull Steals Camera, Films Itself Flying Off Into the Sunset
  
  Hilarious.
  (tags: photos )
• Why Americans don’t understand the Middle East
  
  Very short piece reminding us of the dismal quality of most US news coverage.
  (tags: news middleeast )

William Hartnell's Bacon number is 3
William Hartnell and Richard Attenborough appeared in Brighton Rock.
Richard Attenborough and Ariana Richards appeared in Jurassic Park.
Ariana Richards and Kevin Bacon appeared in Tremors.

Patrick Troughton's Bacon number is 3
Patrick Troughton and Christopher Lee appeared in Scars of Dracula.
Christopher Lee and Rose Byrne appeared in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
Rose Byrne and Kevin Bacon appeared in X-Men: First Class.

Jon Pertwee's Bacon number is 3
Jon Pertwee and Richard Wilson appeared in Carry On Columbus.
Richard Wilson and James McAvoy appeared in Gnomeo and Juliet.
James McAvoy and Kevin Bacon appeared in X-Men: First Class.

Tom Baker's Bacon number is 2
Tom Baker and Bruce Payne appeared in Dungeons & Dragons.
Bruce Payne and Kevin Bacon appeared in Pyrates.

Peter Davison's Bacon number is 2
Peter Davison and Matthew Macfadyen appeared in Wuthering Heights.
Matthew Macfadyen and Kevin Bacon appeared in Frost/Nixon.

Colin Baker's Bacon number is 3
Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy appeared in The Airzone Solution.
Sylvester McCoy and Frank Langella appeared in Dracula.
Frank Langella and Kevin Bacon appeared in Frost/Nixon.

Sylvester McCoy's Bacon number is 2
Sylvester McCoy and Frank Langella appeared in Dracula.
Frank Langella and Kevin Bacon appeared in Frost/Nixon.

Paul McGann's Bacon number is 2
Paul McGann and Stuart Townsend appeared in Queen of the Damned.
Stuart Townsend and Kevin Bacon appeared in Trapped.

Christopher Eccleston's Bacon number is 2
Christopher Eccleston and Rose Byrne appeared in G-Force.
Rose Byrne and Kevin Bacon appeared in X-Men: First Class.

David Tennant's Bacon number is 2
David Tennant and James McAvoy appeared in Bright Young Things.
James McAvoy and Kevin Bacon appeared in X-Men: First Class.

Matt Smith's Bacon number is 2
Matt Smith and Toby Jones appeared in Christopher and His Kind.
Toby Jones and Kevin Bacon appeared in Frost/Nixon.

Note that X-Men: First Class and Frost/Nixon both appear four times; and that Sylvester McCoy is Colin Baker's link to Bacon, via a BBV video from 1993!

I have a 90-page, 30,000 word document which needs editing by a native English speaker and also if possible an Executive Summary by roughly yesterday. I know a few people reading this are in that line of work, though possibly had other plans for the day! If you are interested in taking this on please email me at work – nicholas.whyte@independentdiplomat.org – with a quote (or with any further questions).

Thanks for replies – solution has been found.

• Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks
  
  On neurology and nonsense.
  (tags: science )
• Atomic bond types discernible in single-molecule images
  
  Fantastic pic.
  (tags: science )
• Why Is There a Helium Shortage?
  
  @ITregillis wrote more about this last year at http://bit.ly/QKpygf and subsequent. (Warning: rabid libertarian comments.)
  (tags: science )

The fifth in the ongoing manga series set in a seventeenth-century Japan from which most men have been eliminated by disease, the pick of the remainder sequestered in the Ōoku, the shōgun’s harem. This volume collects four of the original parts of the story, and after the first three, I was beginning to wonder if I would continue with this series; the misgovernment of the shōgun Tsunayoshi is not all that exciting a story, apart from the dramatic death of the young heir. I also realised that I was not picking up Yoshinaga’s cues about her characters’ ages; presumably readers more accustomed to the genre can spot the markers showing that they are in their 40s or 50s, but they almost all look about 25 to me (with a few clear exceptions). I was feeling a bit adrift, and finding it hard to keep track of the characters’ multiple names (and wishing the publisher had provided a dramatis personæ).

But the last of the four parts re-engaged my interest; I don’t know much about Japanese history, but just knowing that this was a gender-rotated re-telling of a real historical event (the Ako Incident of the Forty-Seven Samurai) made it more interesting to read, particularly since it has dramatic political repercussions in Yoshinaga’s world (as I suppose in our own, though I know practically nothing about it). And at the end we meet the child who will become the shōgun Yoshimune, with whom this whole story started (we have been in extended flashback for a very long time now). So I will get the next volume, if with a slight feeling that it’s on probation.

Thanks, all, for earlier comments, which revealed some interesting variations in recruiting culture across organisations. Candidate A’s second referee just replied with a sufficiently positive write-up that I feel confident in making the offer. Checking the records I find that we had already asked Candidate B to help me reach their referees.

As it happens, Candidate A was marginally the front-runner after interviews, so I will tell Candidate B, perfectly truthfully, that unfortunately there was a better candidate on the day, and incidentally they need to re-check the coordinates and availability of their referees.

Choosing between two differently but equally well qualified candidates for the internship vacancy coming up in my office. I emailed their four referees (two each) on Monday, and have had the following responses:

Candidate A:
First referee is an EU official who has changed job and email address, but was at least still hooked up to their old system, and replied with a positive testimonial.
Second referee is a university professor who has not replied to my email (which on inspection was sent to the general departmental address as given by Candidate A). I googled for other email addresses this morning and forwarded Monday’s email to them. I also called the department but he only works there on Tuesdays.

Candidate B:
First referee is an ambassador based in Geneva, who has not replied to my email (which on inspection was sent to the general embassy address, as given by Candidate B). I called the embassy this morning and they promised that the ambassador would call back today. My hopes are not high as it is a busy week in Geneva.
Second referee is a university professor who has not replied to my email (which on inspection was sent to a personal address as given by Candidate B). I googled for a university address and forwarded Monday’s email to it this morning. No telephone number on the university’s website.

I think it’s quite likely that I won’t hear back from any of the other three; this is a frenetic time of year for university professors and for ambassadors in Geneva to be asked to give testimonials for people who worked with them for a few months some time ago. In that case I will go for candidate A who at least had one person willing to speak to their abilities. But I feel I should let candidate B know that I was unable to contact their referees and consequently offered the position to another candidate. I will also advise candidate A to update their referee coordinates.

Any thoughts on how to do that tactfully?

• My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall by John Major – review by Simon Callow
  
  One for the Christmas list.
  (tags: books )
• New evidence that Leicester skeleton ‘was Richard III’
  
  University administrator trying unsuccessfully to hide his excitement!
  (tags: history )
• A Crucial Election in Georgia
  
  A relatively objective guide.
  (tags: georgia )
• Crushing Debt Drove Me to Kosovo — And Then to Iraq
  
  An accidental election technology specialist writes.
  (tags: iraq kosovo )
• EU Parliament spat: “Why can’t you understand?”
  
  “Can’t you, Mr Earl, understand the modern world?”
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )

This is my sixth Lovejoy book in my current run, and the first of those which is set entirely in East Anglia. It is also one of the best; Lovejoy’s obsession with antiques and his particular code of personal loyalty lead him to a dramatic and waterlogged showdown, with cosmic vengeance delivered by a bereaved donkey because the state’s forces of law and order are too corrupt and compromised to do it. I think I’d recommend this one to people wondering if the Lovejoy novels are their kind of thing.

This is a novel set between 1518 and 1555, mostly in Germany with excursions to surrounding countries, about a radical Anabaptist and the papal agent who pursues him through the sixteenth century’s wars of religion. It has had a lot of attention particularly in Italy (“Luther Blissett” is apparently a pseudonym for four Italian writers) and is seen by some as a metaphor for modern global politics, and/or in the Umberto Eco tradition of The Name of the Rose.

I wasn’t completely satisfied with it. I thought that the nameless hero’s story of shifting identity and conflict was quite well realised, with lots of grim and effective contemporary detail, even though it wasn’t really clear until close to the end that this was going anywhere, but Hilary Mantel pursued a similar idea rather better in Wolf Hall. The Q sub-plot, however, annoyed me; much of it is told in letters ostensibly written by Q to his patron in Rome which totally fail to get the contemporary idiom (and necessarily include much info-dumping); and the final revelation of Q’s identity was disappointing.

It was interesting to read this alongside Not of this World? with its rather different framing of Protestant/Catholic relations.

A few months ago an old friend strongly recommended that I try the classic bandes dessinées series Les Mondes d’Aldébaran, a set of 15 albums by Paris-based Brazilian writer/artist Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira, Leo for short. I thought it would also be a good opportunity to hone my French (a language I use less often than you might think), so went and got the first of the fifteen in the original (though it has been translated into English if you are interested).

The first five albums are set in an isolated human planetary colony called Aldébaran, which (we are told on the first page) lost contact with Earth long ago. Our central characters, 17-year-old Marc and 13-year-old Kim, witness peculiar things happening in the ocean near their village, and then – as promised in the title – catastrophe destroys their homes, and the story switches to odyssey format as the two of them travel to, and beyond, the distant metropolis.

Although the setting is much the same as one might get in a traditional hard sf novel, the execution is very different; the bande dessinée tradition concentrates much more on character and dialogue than on technology and Being Smart. The tech we do have is almost but not quite streampunkish, with motor vehicles apparently made of wood and a mad professor type who turns out to be rather banal in his nastiness. The human and physical landscape clearly owes a lot to the author’s native country – Marc and Kim’s home village appears to be pretty multi-ethnic, though it’s less clear if that is true of the city; the jungle is a place of risk but not deadly danger; distances are vast but not unbridgeable.

I’ll certainly keep going with this series. The French, thank heavens, is manageable – a fair bit of subjunctive but I was able to cope, and the vocabulary is all pretty obvious. And basically I want to find out what happens next.

This is a study of evangelical Protestants in Northern Ireland, published in 2001. It is a very interesting book, phrased as a series of conversations using extracts from dozens of interviews with self-described practising or former evangelicals; while some fit the stereotype of barnstorming bigots, there is a full spectrum of those whose faith leads them to ecumenism and cross-community outreach, in some cases even to support for Irish nationalism, or indeed to turn their backs on politics and get on with witnessing for a different kingdom.

Jordan himself is a semi-outsider; though a Belfast church-worker, he is from Bray, Co Wicklow, and has converted from Catholicism. He makes it fairly clear that his own sympathies are with those who choose to engage positively with politics and with their neighbours, but sensibly and compassionately resists moralising and allows all of his interviewees to give their testimony in their own terms.

2001 was a low point in the Northern Ireland peace process, and Jordan’s interviewees are split between those disappointed with the results of the 1998 agreement and those gleefully claiming that they told us so. Most of them must now be voting for the DUP, whose remarkable swing to support of implementing power-sharing coincided with their rise to political dominance among Protestants. It would be interesting to hear from his interviewees now.

But basically, the book shows that if we want to, we can learn much more about people who we disagree with by listening to what they have to say than by yelling about how wrong they are. I found it very useful.

• The Real Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin, 1926-1928
  
  Awww!
  (tags: photos )
• A Visual History of the Best Professional Artist Hugo Award Winners
  
  Prize-winning art through the years
  (tags: sf art )
• Steve Biko – Wikipedia
  
  Died 35 years ago today.
  (tags: death race )
• How I Learned to Defrag My Brain | Alex Hillman
  
  Might be worth a try. I use Evernote.
  (tags: lifehacking )

I’ve read a couple of other books set in Iceland – an unusually dull one by the otherwise reliable Jane Smiley, and of course Njal’s Saga. Independent People, which more or less won Laxness his 1955 Nobel Prize, is halfway between them; a tale of an exceptionally stubborn farmer who attempts to maintain his self-respect through grinding poverty and family disasters, not caring in the least what his neighbours or relatives think about him. He’s not a particularly attractive character but the society and landscape of Iceland are brilliantly evoked. Given recent events, the fact that evil Icelandic banks pop up at the end of the story was interesting. Also note that for Iceland, the First World War was undoubtedly a Good Thing because wool prices went up causing an export boom. Lots of poignant passages too, of which the one about the calf sticks in my mind. A somewhat grim read but more interesting than some of the Nobel winners I have sampled.

• No Georgian dolphin?
  
  Of sea-pigs and loanwords. (Do read comments too.)
  (tags: linguistics )
• How Irish women lost political power
  
  Not convinced by explanation that feminist gains were reversed due to factional conflict within the wider revolutionary movement. I would eant to see evidence that Republicanism had really internalized feminism in the first place. My suspicion is that, like the Labour movement, politicized women were convenient allies for the leadership of SF (and later CnaG/FF) on the way up, and equally conveniently discarded once power had been achieved.
  (tags: history ireland )
• Greece’s Pampered Armed Forces Revisited
  
  Judy Dempsey rebutts her critics.
  (tags: eu greece )
• The Bush White House Was Deaf To 9/11 Warnings
  
  Iraq was more important.
  (tags: waronterror )

• Talk:The Human Stain – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  
  There you go again!
  (tags: wikipedia )
• Saakashvili eats own tie – YouTube
  
  From 2008. I missed this at the time.
  (tags: georgia )
• Why We’re Happy Being Sad: Pop’s Emotional Evolution : NPR
  
  The shift from major to minor keys in Top 40 hits.
  (tags: music )
• The Weatherman Is Not a Moron
  
  “The I.B.M. Bluefire supercomputer in the basement of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., is so large that it essentially creates its own weather.”
  (tags: mathematics )

• The GOP convention negative bounce: a final look
  
  I feel like I am cheating on Nate Silver (my secret psephological boyfriend) by reading this. But if you’re only doing it online it doesn’t count.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• Underground, by Suelette Dreyfus
  
  See chapters 8 and 9 about Julian Assange.
  (tags: wikileaks internet )
• Do Our Gadgets Really Threaten Planes?
  
  Probably not.
  (tags: travel )

For those interested in the earlier career of Julian Assange under his hacker identity of Mendax, over twenty years ago, I refer you to chapters 8 and 9 of Suelette Drefyus’ 1997 book Underground, available here in a variety of formats provided by my old mate Justin Mason. An interesting read.