I’ve been updating my presidential stats page to reflect recent developments and also to include some data on the wives of presidents and vice-presidents, and have run up against a slightly surprising problem: I can’t find a birth date, not even a year of birth, for the first wife of current Vice-President Joe Biden. As is well known, she was killed, along with their infant daughter, in a car accident in December 1972, just after he was elected to the US Senate; they apparently met in the Bahamas on holiday in 1964, and married in 1966. Biden had moved to Syracuse in 1965 after graduating to be with her, which suggests that she had not yet graduated so must have been a year or two younger than him (he was born in 1942).

Of course, she lived at a time when it was considered impolite to ask about women’s exact ages, but I am a bit surprised that I wasn’t able to find even her year of birth easily.

I am also still looking for sates of birth – though I have the years – for the following vice-presidential wives born in the nineteenth century:

• Evelyn Colfax, born in 1823, whose husband Schuyler served under Ulysses S Grant from 1869 to 1873
• Mary Wheeler, born in 1828, whose husband William served under Rutherford Hayes from 1877 to 1881
• Dorothy Barkley, born in 1882, whose husband was Truman’s vice-president in 1949-53 (though she had died in 1947).

Edited to add: Thanks to passer-by who pointed me at a good source which gave me 28 July 1942, so she was four months older than Joe.

Also Dorothy Barkley was born on 14 November 1882.

Still looking for Evelyn Colfax (née Clark) and Mary Wheeler (née King).

• reading_gibbon: Chapter V, which is mostly about Septimius Severus
  After Pertinax is murdered, the Prætorian Guards auction the empire to the highest bidder, one Didius Julianus. His rule is contested by Clodius Albinus in Britain, Septimius Severus in Pannonia, and Pescennius Niger in Syria. Septimius Severus outwits and kills the other three (starting with Didius Julianus), and settles down to rule Rome.
  (tags: gibbon)

looks like a swing of 15-25% from No to Yes in the Irish referendum, on a slightly higher turnout, according to RTÉ.

Last month was a bonanza for us Who audio fans. Not only was there an extra Big Finish release, concluding the story of Charley Pollard, but Tom Baker returned to the role for the first time since 1981 (not counting The Thing We Don’t Talk About).

Hornets’ Nest 1: The Stuff of Nightmares, by Paul Magrs, brings back the Fourth Doctor in alliance with ex-Captain Mike Yates (who was actually a Third Doctor companion, but never mind), inhabiting a peculiar country house with even more peculiar stuffed animals. I’ve seen a couple of reviews commenting that it has a lot more talking-book style narration by Yates and the Doctor, and hence much less actual dialogue, than we are used to from Big Finish; myself, I felt that this was being honest to an earlier style of doing things, namely that of Doctor Who and the Pescatons, the first ever Doctor Who audio from the. 1970s; except that The Hornet’s Nest, so far, is much much better. And I think it will certainly attract those who enjoy nostalgia for the glory days of Hinchcliffe and Holmes / Letts and Dicks, but are less interested in obtaining new adventures from the John Nathan-Turner era Doctors (let alone Paul McGann). Amazon tells me that the second CD is already winging its way to me; can’t wait!

The Prisoner of Peladon, by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, is the latest in the Big Finish series of Companion Chronicles, although this time the story is told by a non-companion who appeared in only one story in 1972, King Peladon of the eponumous planet (played by David Troughton, son of Patrick, who has also of course appeared in other Who stories both Old and New and recently took on the cloak and dead bird of the Black Guardian for Big Finish). Troughton is, as ever, great, and Nicholas Briggs is, as ever, good as the monsters (Ice Warriors this time, of course). The concept is very interesting – Peladon has taken in large numbers of Ice Warrior refugees after an internal conflict, with the result that Ice Warrior politics spills catastrophically over to the host planet; the Third Doctor arrives to sort things out, of course, but – and this is the bit I really liked – the King gets a brilliant rant about how badly Three behaves to people, to which the Doctor has no answer. Scott and Wright would not have got away with it if Pertwee was still alive, but it gladdened my heart. (This was directed by Nicola Bryant who herself visited Peladon as Peri in a Fifth Doctor audio last year.)

I turned to the next two releases in the main Big Finish sequence, which both came out last weekend, reflecting that the recent Companion Chronicles have often seemed the more sure-footed of the two series. But I changed my mind after listening to Paper Cuts and Blue Forgotten Planet. Marc Platt is a bit hit and miss for me (is he the only writer for Old Who who is still at it?) but Paper Cuts was a real hit. We return to another alien monarchy of the Third Doctor era, Draconia, or rather off Draconia, in the orbiting mausoleum of the Draconian emperors; the Draconian version of chess (“Sazou”) is prominent; the Sixth Doctor and Charley (though it isn’t really Charley, of course) expose long-hidden dynastic secrets; Platt plays with life and death and crossing between them, and the whole thing is very much up to the standards of his Seventh Doctor TV story, Ghost Light. Big Finish makes the scripts of the stories available to us subscribers after a decent interval, but I have never yet downloaded one – this time I will.

Blue Forgotten Planet by Nicholas Briggs, is India Fisher’s swansong as Charley Pollard. Once she hooked up with the Sixth Doctor after her adventures with the Eighth, it was clear that some pretty dramatic resolution was needed, and the stakes were raised a couple of stories ago by the introduction of a fake Charley identical to the real one. Briggs brings back the virus-hunting Viyrans, who he introduced for a series on one-episode stories a while back, for a resolution which barely works in plot terms but pays off very well emotionally and dramatically. Fisher is brilliant as the two versions of Charley – we are rarely in much doubt as to which she is acting. The setting of a devastated post-apocalyptic Earth is superbly portrayed, and the fact that the few surviving sane humans are making nature documentaries (with lovely background music) about their blue, forgotten planet, seems tragic rather than ludicrous. I didn’t find it quite as good as Paper Cuts, but it is pretty good. (Unfortunately one of the guest cast, J.J. Field, takes most of the first episode to wake up to the fact that he is supposed to be acting.)

See also review of this by and Why Charlotte Pollard Pwns Rose Tyler by .

Meanwhile the one-episode-per-release story The Three Companions continues; John Pickard as Thomas Brewster is finally getting the hang of it, I think.

I came across a really stupid article about the European Defence Agency, by Vincent Browne who should know better. The best analysis of it and where it fits into overall EU plans is by its former Chief Executive, here. I would like to summarise it but don’t have time.

Meanwhile this is a brilliant parody of the “No” posters:

• Pathetic Motorways
  (tags: maps)

I bumped into John Cushnahan this afternoon in the European Parliament, and he raised a perfectly reasonable objection to my description of him in this entry. Entirely fair; I should have written “sometimes acerbic” rather than “somewhat acerbic”, and I should have added “always a shrewd judge of character”. To which I would now add, “increasingly mellow”.

(I doubt that he is a regular reader here but any sensible person in public life has set up blog alerts for their own name.)

After reading Wally K. Daly’s untransmitted Doctor Who story, I became curious about his other work – he was a moderately prolific writer of (mostly radio) plays, and I discovered that he had written a science fiction trilogy in the late 1970s. The BBC as usual junked the original tapes, but Daly’s own off-air recordings survive and can be downloaded from various places around the internet (no links here; it’s easy enough to Google). They are an interesting demonstration of what a writer normally known for non-genre work might produce in the era of Blake’s 7 and the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide (and Doctor Who when it was very slightly past its peak). The biggest problem is that the sound quality is not all it could be – I couldn’t listen to these on my normal train commute, though they were OK for Wii workouts or driving.

Before the Screaming Begins (1977) is a good start: our central characters, Tom and Sally Harris, are celebrating their wedding anniversary with a walk in the woods when he is abducted by aliens. Sally is frustrated when the police refuse to believe her, but then Tom is returned with new strange powers and a message from the aliens for the people of Earth, and it turns out similar appearances and disappearances have happened simultaneously all over the world; we get mixed up with the Prime Minister (Patrick Troughton, doing a brilliant impression of Harold Wilson) and sinister official A.P. Smith (played by Donald Hewlett, the only main cast member to appear in all three plays).

The Silent Scream (1979) is I think the best of the three, and has interesting foreshadowing of Torchwood: Children of Earth – so much so that I wonder if RTD has acknowledged it as source material? – though of course The Midwich Cuckoos/Village of the Damned is probably a common root. Lots of creepy children endowed with super powers (one played by Susan Sheridan who was the original Trillian at about the same time), and the government pondering extreme measures to deal with them. No Patrick Troughton this time, but Hannah Gordon takes over as Sally Harris.

With a Whimper to the Grave (1984) has the best cast but weakest plot of the three. Patrick Troughton takes back the role of Prime Minister, but loses the election to “Marge”, played by Angela Thorne (not her only such role). Timothy West is a chief alien. Maureen “Vicki” O’Brien takes over as Sally. But the central character is Donald Hewlett’s A.P. Smith, who links between the aliens’ revelation of What They Were Really Up To, and the authorities’ attempt to neutralise the alien threat. Unfortunately the to plot strands confuse rather than reinforcing each other, and the wipe-out-the-alien-menace bit is very poorly paced (and there is a very irritating character called Geoffrey Palmer, which must be an in-joke). However you’ll want to listen to it for completeness if you’ve heard the first two.

I’m unlikely to finish any more in the next day (as of this evening I am 100 pages into two 700-page books, 60 pages into one 270-page book).

Non-fiction: 7 (YTD 74)
      
 
Fiction (non-sf) 7 (YTD 48)
       

SF (non-Who) 4 (YTD 62)
   

Who/Sarah Jane: 14 (YTD 56)
             

3 (YTD 54/284) by women (Kidd, Bronte, Rayner)
1 (YTD 13/284) by PoC (Naipaul)
Total page count ~9,100 (YTD ~80,700)
Owned for more than a year: 5 (Anglo-Norman Ulster [reread], Jane Eyre [reread], Stand on Zanzibar [reread], Appleseed, England’s Troubles)
Also reread: Doctor Who Programme Guide x2 (YTD 31 rereads)

I’m not a fan of Dawkins’ views on religion, but as editor of this book he has done a fine job; it clearly makes a difference that he is writing about topics he knows and likes, and his introductory pieces to each extract are informative and often self-deprecating.

I was less sure that the book actually works as a concept. The selected pieces are necessarily extracts rather than complete works, and the result feels more like a scrapbook than an anthology. Certainly none of the pieces is bad, and several of them made me want to seek out more by that author (from the sublime – Albert Einstein’s thoughts on God – to the ridiculous – Francis Crick’s advice to avoid gatherings of more than two Nobel Prize winners). But the nature of the book means a succession of changes of pace, some of which are rather jarring. This contains a number of chunks out of various excellent books about science but doesn’t quite end up being one itself.

• The Titfield Thunderbolt – The DWM Top 200 Meme
  (tags: doctorwho)
• Trousers! – Doctor Who: All 200 stories meme
  (tags: doctorwho)
• 413 – The McFarthest Place: 145 Mi to the Nearest Big Mac
  (tags: maps)

Looks like the Christian Democrats and FDP will have a clear majority, although this is the worst result for the CDU/CSU since 1949 and the worst for the SPD since, er, 1933 (scroll down).

Fingers crossed for Cem Özdemir in Stuttgart South (I’m not really a Green voter but I know and like him); I imagine it’s a bit of a long shot though.

NB the Pirate Party did best of the minnows, at 2.1%.

Two very good audiobooks read by Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. In The Time Capsule, the team find their work experience disrupted by time-travelling aliens; The Ghost House has a similar problem but in the house down the road. Neither is totally perfect (Anghelides could work on his pacing; Cole has Sarah occasionally switching from first person to omniscient third which no doubt looked better in the script than it sounds) but both are fun listening.

The fourth of the Rebus detective books, an engaging read about an MP who is caught in a brothel, and the relationships between him and his schoolfriends which run out of control; there is also a very charming institutionalised psychopath, plenty of office politics and personal dilemmas for Rebus, and some excellent plot twists. I will keep at this series.

What with there not being much televised Who this year, the BBC have partially filled the gap with this series of books for younger readers, the first of which was published in January and the tenth and final one last week. The full list is:

1. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Dust of Ages by Justin Richards
2. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Caves of Mordane, by Colin Brake
3. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Colour of Darkness, by Richard Dungworth
4. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Depths of Despair, by Justin Richards
5. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Vampire of Paris, by Stephen Cole
6. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Game of Death, by Trevor Baxendale
7. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Planet of Oblivion, by Justin Richards
8. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Pictures of Emptiness, by Jacqueline Rayner
9. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The Art of War, by Mike Tucker
10. Doctor Who – The Darksmith Legacy: The End of Time, by Justin Richards

There are basically two models for multipart stories like this, the Key to Time / Keys of Marinus model where our hero has to pick up individual items which make a wholen and the McGuffin model as in the Daleks’ Master Plan (or indeed the Lord of the Rings) where the vital object has to be kept out of the hands of the bad guys and if possible destroyed. This is an example of the latter approach, with the Eternity Crystal, as created by the Darksmiths, clearly drawing inspiration from both Tolkien’s One Ring and the Nation/Spooner Time Destructor (or more exactly its taranium core). These are good precedents, and the Darksmith Legacy makes the most of them. Each book has a different setting (including two historical visits to Earth) and usually a new alien species as well as the relentless Darksmiths in the background. The Doctor travels solo for the first few volumes and then picks up a young companion, Gisella, who is more than she seems. There are excellent cliff-hangers at the end of each book, and I rather regret reading them all in one go rather than spacing them out as they were published. Also each book has a puzzle or two, integrated into the plot (“Which button should the Doctor press? Crack the code!”) and some further information “from the Tardis databanks”, either about fictional planets or something factual and relevant. All in all they are a jolly good contribution to the younger end of Who literature; I felt the third (by Richard Dungworth) was the least accomplished but all the others are pretty good.

I enjoy social networks. Finding connections with people I’ve met is a small hobby in itself. I have 441 livejournal contacts (ie those who are reading me rather than vice versa), 1010 on LinkedIn, 1456 on Facebook; basically people whose continued existence in the world I am glad to be reminded of now and then. I realise that this is unusual, as some have been kind enough to point out. But my attention is always caught by research like the Milgram small world experiment or the Erdős–Bacon number.

I was therefore interested to see Keith Ferrazzi’s recent article, slightly recycling a chapter from his Never Eat Alone, listing seven types of person who are likely to be super-connectors:

1. Restaurateurs
2. Headhunters
3. Lobbyists
4. Fundraisers
5. Public relations people
6. Politicians
7. Journalists

I scratched my head a bit at this. My job has aspects of #3 and #5, and I personally used to be an example of #6, but I would describe what I do as closer to consultancy; we are after all a "diplomatic advisory group", not lobbyists or a PR firm. I wondered what other super-connectors I know, and how they would fit in to Ferrazzi’s categories?

LinkedIn, which is a more professional social network than Facebook or LJ, conveniently gives the number of contacts for each person in your network, and I discovered that there were precisely ten who fit its superconnector category (more than 500 contacts) and who I know from my list. (Also in the course of this exercise I realised that there were a couple of other superconnectors on my list who I don’t know from Adam, so I removed them.) In order of length of time I have known them, they are the following:

1. a friend from my days in postal Diplomacy around 1983-85, who now describes himself as a "Strategist for Social Investment, Grassroots Lobbying, and Corporate Accountability Campaigns" (he has moved from his native England to Washington DC). Like me, his job has aspects of lobbying and of PR but doesn’t really fit comfortably into either category. Interestingly, he is the only one of the ten who is on livejournal.
2. a fellow student at Clare College, who I only really got to know as he was crashing out of his postgrad science course in 1989, now a "Freelance Business Analyst". He does a fair amount of consultancy in the telecoms area these days, and I get the impression that he actively uses LinkedIn as a means of drumming up business. He does not appear to fit into any of Ferazzi’s categories.
3. a fellow member of the Cambridge University Students Union executive in 1989-90, now a "Search and Talent Intelligence Expert", ie a head-hunter, with over 3600 LinkedIn connections. She clearly fits Ferrazzi’s category #2. Interestingly, she is the only one of the ten who is not on Facebook (as far as I know).
4. a former MEP who served from 1999 to this year, though I have known him since 1993 or thereabouts through liberal politics. A clear case of category #6.
5. a member of the same political party who I knew around 1996 through young liberal politics, now working his way up the political tree in his country’s largest city. Another clear case of category #6.
6. a Brussels-based management consultant who I have known since 1999 as a promoter of business connections between Belgium and Luxembourg on the one hand and certain other countries in which I take an interest on the other. Probably the oldest person of these ten.
7. another former MEP from the same country as d (though from a different political party), who I got to know only after she was elected in 1999. Now works as chef de cabinet to a very senior (though not very prominent) international official. Yet another clear case of category #6, though she has other interests as well.
8. a Canadian guy who I turned down for a research job in 2003, but he forgave me, we got on well and have stayed in touch; he is now a "Principal at a research-based strategy firm" in Toronto.
9. One of my former interns (from 2005) who has now also gone into business consultancy in the energy sector in Brussels
10. the youngest on the list, a researcher at one of my former workplaces who I met last year for the first time; also does a little journalistic writing but not enough to qualify as category #7.

Now, of course, Ferrazzi’s seven categories will not map directly onto LinkedIn connections, especially not LinkedIn connections of mine – I don’t know many restaurateurs, and I am on emailing terms with very few of them; and I imagine that LinkedIn would not be a terribly useful tool for you if you are in the catering business. I do, however, know a lot of journalists, who are not at all represented in the above list; and I suspect that they choose not to share their contacts with LinkedIn, since they are operationalising them daily in quite a different way.

What does strike me is that I think my relatively few friends who are business consultants are over-represented in the above list, and I think Ferrazzi has missed something here. I’m sure (indeed, I know from occasionally passing on messages) that they are operationalising LinkedIn as part of their business approach, as a means of contacting and checking out clients. Possibly they are less likely to put their vast network of connections at the service of a friend or acquaintance (thus not the type of virtuous superconnector that Ferrazzi is highlighting in his article), but in fact that’s not my experience of any of them.

Or possibly they are just compulsive about plugging every business card they collect at conferences and receptions into LinkedIn to see if the people they meet are there. <irony>Can’t imagine doing that myself.</irony>

• Chapter IV: The cruelty, follies and murder of Commodus [with added Pertinax]
  This chapter is about 70% Commodus and 30% Pertinax; the former reigned for 13 years and the latter less than three months. Though from what Gibbon says, Pertinax is much the more attractive of the two as characters. A lot about Commodus himself, but it is rather long on outrage at his infamy (…infamy, they’ve all got it in for me) and short on detail; compared to Caligula he seems fairly small beer.
  But then the story of Pertinax is told succinctly and well, actually rather moving in places – an old man, unexpectedly made emperor, trying to do his best to undo his predecessor’s mistakes and then move forward, but who is then very quickly brought down by the military. If you don’t know what’s coming (and I didn’t) the end of the chapter is a brutal shock.
  (tags: gibbon)

Doctor Who monthly’s latest issue publishes the results of a reader poll of all 200 Doctor Who stories to date, ranked in order of popularity. (The article also includes scores for the two Dalek films and other ephemera, but never mind that). The top stories are difficult to argue with, though I am sorry that the best of the black and white era doesn’t feature higher. The bottom of the list is impossible to dispute, with The Twin Dilemma coming last by a very significant margin.

There is plenty of discussion going on elsewhere, but my idea for turning this into a meme is to do the list with the stories which you think should be ranked much higher in blue and the stories that you think should be ranked much lower in red, for whatever definition of "much" you feel happy with. (LJ’s rich text posting will let you do this; also there’s always the option of typing <font color="red">…</font> and <font color="blue">…</font> around the text you want to alter). I’ve cut-n-pasted the list from here, but also added which Doctor is in each story. If you haven’t seen all of them, I encourage you to do this anyway but just put the ones you haven’t seen in italics.

001. The Caves of Androzani. (5)
002. Blink. (10)
003. Genesis of the Daleks. (4)
004. The Talons of Weng-Chiang. (4)
005. The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances. (9)
006. Human Nature / The Family of Blood. (10)
007. Pyramids of Mars. (4)
008. City of Death. (4)
009. The Robots of Death. (4)
010. Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways. (9)
011. The Girl in The Fireplace. (10)
012. Turn Left. (10)
013. The Stolen Earth / Journeys End. (10)
014. Remembrance of the Daleks. (7)
015. Dalek. (9)
016. The Seeds of Doom. (4)
017. Terror of the Zygons. (4)
018. The Evil of the Daleks. (2)
019. Earthshock. (5)
020. The Deadly Assassin. (4)
021. Power of the Daleks. (2)
022. Army of Ghosts. (9)
023. Web of Fear. (2)
024. Silence in the Library. (10)
025. Tomb of the Cybermen. (2)
026. Horror of Fang Rock (4)
027. Last of the Time Lords (10)
028. The Ark in Space (4)
029. The War Games (2)
030. The Curse of Fenric. (7)
031. The Invasion (2)
032. Inferno. (3)
033. School Reunion (10)
034. The Daemons (3)
035. The Impossible Planet (10)
036. Spearhead From Space. (3)
037. The Daleks. (1)
038. The Five Doctors. (1,2,3,5)
039. The Green Death (3)
040. The Brain of Morbius (4)
041. Fury from the Deep (2)
042. The Daleks’ Master Plan (1)
043. Midnight. (10)
044. The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1)
045. Doctor Who and the Silurians (3)
046. Revelation of the Daleks. (6)
047. The Time Warrior (3)
048. The Christmas Invasion (10)
049. Fathers Day (9)
050. The Sea Devils (3)
051. Terror of the Autons. (3)
052. Tooth and Claw. (10)
053. Logopolis. (4)
054. The Unquiet Dead. (9)
055. The Tenth Planet. (1)
056. The Fires of Pompeii. (10)
057. The Aztecs. (1)
058. The Three Doctors. (1,2,3)
059. The Abominable Snowmen. (2)
060. The Mind Robber. (2)
061. An Unearthly Child. (1)
062. Carnival Of Monsters. (3)
063. Rose. (9)
064. The Shakespeare Code. (10)
065. Marco Polo. (1) – I’m actually watching the recon of this at the moment, and it is really good.
066. Smith and Jones. (10)
067. The Stones of Blood. (4)
068. Rise of the Cybermen. (10)
069. Kinda. (5)
070. The Keeper of Traken. (4)
071. Day of the Daleks. (3)
072. Enlightenment. (5)
o73. Image of the Fendahl. (4)
074. Gridlock. (10)
075. The Time Meddler. (1)
076. Ghost Light. (7)
077. The Visitation. (5)
078. The Ice Warriors. (2)
079. Planet of the Ood. (10)
080. Survival. (7)
081. Warriors Gate. (4)
082. The Curse of Peladon. (3)
083. The Unicorn and the Wasp. (10)
084. Planet of Evil. (4)
085. The Masque of Mandragora. (4)
086. The Massacre. (1)
087. State of Decay. (4)
088. Castrovalva. (4)
089. Planet of the Spiders. (3)
090. The Ambassadors of Death. (3)
091. The Sontaran Stratagem. (10)
092. The Mind of Evil. (3)
093. Resurrection of the Daleks. (5)
094. The End of the World. (9)
095. The Androids of Tara. (4)
096. The Hand of Fear. (4)
097. The Romans. (1)
098. Partners in Crime. (10)
099. Planet of the Dead. (10)
100. The Crusade. (1)
101. Full Circle. (4)
102. Mawdryn Undead. (5)
103. The Sontaran Experiment. (4)
104. Frontios. (5)
105. The Ribos Operation. (4)
106. Robot. (4)
107. The Next Doctor. (10)
108. The War Machines. (1)
109. The Pirate Planet. (4)
110. The Awakening. (5)
111. The Seeds of Death. (2)
112. The Moonbase. (2)
113. Frontier in Space. (3)
114. Voyage of the Damned. (3)
115. The Runaway Bride. (3)
116. The Face of Evil. (4)
117. Black Orchid. (5)
118. Planet of the Daleks. (3)
119. The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. (7)
120. Snakedance. (5)
121. Destiny of the Daleks. (4)
122. The Faceless Ones. (2)
123. The Android Invasion. (4)
124. Vengeance on Varos. (6)
125. The Two Doctors. (2,6)
126. The Myth Makers. (1)
127. The Rescue. (1)
128. Death to the Daleks. (3)
129. The Claws of Axos. (3)
130. Revenge of the Cybermen. (4)
131. Invasion of the Dinosaurs. (3)
132. Aliens of London. (9)
133. Mission to the Unknown. (no Doctor but during first Doctor’s era)
[The Ultimate Foe (6)]
134. Planet of Fire. (5)
135. Doctor Who The TV Movie. (8)
136. 42. (10)
137. The Macra Terror. (2)
138. The Idiots Lantern. (10)
139. The Enemy of the World. (2)
140. The Doctors Daughter. (10)
141. Boom Town. (9)
142. The Trial of a Time Lord. (6)
143. New Earth. (10)
144. The Reign of Terror. (1)
145. The Highlanders. (2)
146. Battlefield. (7)
147. The Sun Makers. (4)
148. The Mark of the Rani. (7)
149. The Leisure Hive. (4)
150. The Lazarus Experiment. (10)
151. The Celestial Toymaker. (1)
152. Evolution of the Daleks. (10)
[Terror of the Vervoids (6)]
153. Love and Monsters. (10)
154. The Ark. (1)
155. The Invasion of Time. (4)
156. The Wheel in Space. (2)
157. The Chase. (2)
158. Edge of Destruction. (1)
159. The Smugglers. (1)
160. The Keys of Marinus. (1)
[Mindwarp (6)]
161. Attack of the Cybermen. (6)
162. The Savages. (1)
163. Planet of Giants. (1)
164. The Invisible Enemy. (4)
165. The Long Game. (9)
[The Mysterious Planet (6)]
166. The Krotons. (2)
167. Nightmare of Eden. (4)
168. The Armageddon Factor. (4)
169. Terminus. (5)
170. The Happiness Patrol. (7)
171. Colony in Space. (3)
172. Galaxy 4. (1)
173. Four to Doomsday. (5)
174. The Power of Kroll. (4)
175. The Gunfighters. (1)
176. Silver Nemesis. (7)
177. Arc of Infinity. (5)
178. The Web Planet. (1)
179. The Monster of Peladon. (3)
180. Delta and the Bannermen. (7)
181. The King’s Demons. (5)
182. The Mutants. (3)
183. The Sensorites. (1)
184. The Creature from the Pit. (1)
185. Warriors Of The Deep. (5)
186. Dragonfire. (7)
187. The Time Monster. (3)
188. Meglos. (4)
189. The Horns Of Nimon. (4)
190. The Space Museum. (1)
191. The Dominators. (2)
192. Fear Her. (10)
193. Paradise Towers. (7)
194. The Underwater Menace. (2)
195. The Space Pirates. (2)
196. Time-Flight. (5)
197. Underworld. (4)
198. Time and the Rani. (7)
199. Timelash. (6)
200. The Twin Dilemma. (6)

The worst injustice is The Daleks’ Master Plan coming as low as 42nd; I think this is probably because few have settled down to the whole 12-episode saga in a frame of mind to appreciate it. I will never understand the popularity of Remembrance of the Daleks, but the most over-rated story in the poll for my money is The Faceless Ones, which if it weren’t for Pauline Collins should have been in the last ten, and in no way deserves even the rather low rank of 122nd.

This is a somewhat frustrating book. The opening chapters, based apparently on the author’s PhD thesis about diplomacy in the nineteenth century, are pretty dull, even soporific. But once Kissinger gets to the twentieth century, it all gets rather exciting – particularly as regards the foreign policy of Germany in the period between the two world wars and between 1945 and 1961; I don’t think I have read a better analysis. But then, rather surprisingly, as Kissinger himself becomes an actor the book becomes less interesting; his fascination with the characters of Nixon and Reagan robs him of any ability to judge their efforts objectively, and even his account of ending the Vietnam War is repetitious and oddly unenlightening.

The book fails to establish its main intellectual theses which are that a) America is unique in bringing its own moral values to international diplomacy and b) that this is only successful when these are consciously married to a realist perception of what is possible. The first proposition is easily falsified by the large number of other countries which have attempted to export their own ideologies to the rest of the world. America has been more successful, admittedly (though the jury must surely still be out on the Chinese), but that’s not the same as being unique.

The second proposition is trickier. Kissinger’s bête noire is John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, who he blames for Suez, Hungary and the initial and irreversible commitment to Vietnam. But on Kissinger’s evidence, the problem with Dulles was not faulty ideology but poor personal management skills; Dulles made speeches without reference to his own officials’ painstakingly compiled research, containing commitments on which he was utterly unable to deliver (or, worse, from which it was impossible for him to disengage). It was, on Kissinger’s account, fortunate for Dulles that for most of his term of office the Soviet Union was led by Khrushchev, whose own personal management skills were even worse.

Kissinger’s praise for Ronald Reagan, despite his total lack of intellectual depth (which Kissinger describes in a couple of devastating phrases), is further evidence for my view that knowing a lot about international relations in theory is not a good qualification for actually being involved in practice. I’m dubious anyway about the genuine value of Reagan’s legacy – again, on Kissinger’s own evidence, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze first discussed how to change the Soviet Union years before Reagan came to power, thanks to the CSCE process started by Nixon and ended by Ford; SDI had little to do with it. But if you think Reagan was in any way successful, that in itself is a serious strike against the idea that studying IR is any use at all (other than for potentially generating literature to be read by other IR scholars, rather than practitioners). Kissinger damns Carter by barely mentioning him.

I also found fault with Kissinger’s analysis of American discourse. He singles out the Vietnam war as having been a uniquely divisive and horrible event in the American psyche. But the more I read about American history, the more it seems to me that the nasty, viscerally horrible debate that was happening 40 years ago about Vietnam, the brutal debate happening now about health care, the question of slavery which sparked armed conflict in the 1860s, the division between John Adams and Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s, that this style is all fairly characteristic of the standard mode of American discourse. It’s not for the faint-hearted, and it’s not for me, but it’s a recurrent phenomenon through history. I’m sure that for Kissinger and for many of his colleagues, Vietnam was a uniquely searing experience. But in the context of American history, it seems less so (at least to me).

Cyprus conspiracy theorists will be (and already have been) disappointed that the island is not mentioned even once in the book.

It is over 25 years since I last read this book; it was one of our set texts for Eng Lit O-level, so I remembered it as a source of material for essay-writing rather than as an actual reading pleasure. I had forgotten quite a lot of it:

1. that little Adèle is probably Rochester’s illegitimate daughter
2. the whole death scene of Jane’s aunt
3. Jane’s inheritance from the uncle in Madeira
4. that Jane is actually a rather sassy, assertive teenager, who knows what is best for her and, very gracefully, refuses to take crap from anyone (though like her author she is a bit of a snob and racist)
5. the repeated instances of the supernatural – prophetic dreams, culminating in her hearing Rochester call to her from a hundred miles away – which make it a magical rather than realistic novel
6. that it is actually a very enjoyable book.

My Penguin edition has an excellent introduction and a few well-considered endnotes by Queenie Leavis, which shed extra light on the text without showing off the editor’s command of trivia. Brilliant stuff.

• What’s wrong with the Irish Greens | David Cronin | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
  (tags: ireland eu climatechange)
• The Associated Press: EU nations fail to agree on bluefin tuna ban
  Disgraceful.
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• Rid Europe of "tac nukes" | open Democracy News Analysis
  …without public announcements, the administration of President George W. Bush removed all nuclear weapons from Greece in 2001 and from Britain in 2008, plus withdrawing most of the deployed weapons from Germany in 2007 and a large number from Italy… Today, five countries [Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey] host "tactical" nuclear weapons… The basing countries thereby have many of the responsibilities of nuclear weapon states but little of the ultimate authority… Does NATO unity really depend on outmoded weapons and increasingly obsolescent delivery aircraft? … Washington and five European capitals have it easily within their power to create a de facto European nuclear weapon free zone between the French and Russian borders. No real security would be lost; much money would be saved.
  (tags: war)

The Fifth Doctor novels have rather a good strike rate for me (the audios even more so). This confirmed the trend: a sequel to the Fourth Doctor’s TV story Planet of Evil, with the Morestran empire, centuries later, destroying itself by experimenting both with anti-matter and harnessing the kinetic energy of the planets, at the same time riven by internal conflict between church and state. Messingham’s concepts of anti-matter and planetary kinetics are pretty disconnected from actual science, but faithful enough to the spirit of the story which he is sequelling (and improving on). We have, as so often in Fifth Doctor novels, a rather good Nyssa storyline as she goes off investigating with dire consequences; Tegan is less well served. The Doctor here is somewhat damaged from his previous encounters with anti-matter (including Omega) which also takes the story in interesting directions. The Morestran politics are somewhat improbable but well told. I recommend this one.

Apparently Nixon hung portraits of Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson in the Oval Office. Is there any information available as to which portraits were chosen by other presidents?

(My bet on the current one and his predecessor would be Kennedy/Lincoln, and Bush Sr/Reagan.)

We got a bulletin from CD&V, the prime minister’s political party, through the door yesterday. This was supposedly targeted at the needs of our small village (where the party’s national chairman happens to be a resident). Now, I am rather charmed by the current PM, but his predecessor, who was from the same party, struck me as a total disaster (and now, God help us, he is our foreign minister; maybe he will be more mellow when not dealing with his fellow Belgians). On the other hand again, I have met several other CD&V ex-prime ministers (Dehaene, Tindemans, Eyskens) and been impressed by them (though all three predate the party’s most recent name change). So I was prepared to be open-minded about the CD&V.

Not any more, I’m afraid. The second page of the leaflet boldly proclaims their new legislative initiatives – not as part of the government, but as proposals from individual CD&V senators. The first of these was to make it compulsory for cyclists to wear fluorescent clothes. Not a word about punishing bad driving more severely, or even doing something positive to increase road safety like build more bike lanes; no, legislate against the victims, that is the CD&V answer.

But the offensiveness of that proposal is far exceeded by the other one that caught my eye, to make it illegal for women to wear face-covering clothes in public, one reason given being that it makes “many people” (ie CD&V voters) feel insecure. It’s difficult to know where to start; I am aware that this is a deeply contentious issue, but as far as I am concerned, if it was wrong for Ireland’s English rulers to ban the wearing of Irish traditional clothing in 1367, it is wrong for the Belgian state to oppress its own citizens (and residents) in that way in the 21st century. Perhaps the CD&V will equalise their proposal by also banning the wearing of face-covering masks at Carnival time, but I am not holding my breath.

With any luck the other parties in the senate will kill these proposals off before they even get near the lower house.

• http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.php?id=47884&amp;cat_id=1
  "At this point the challenge is how to go about flushing out the Cyprus moon rock"
  (tags: cyprus space)
• doctorwho: Trivia fact: If you decided to sit down
  and watch the complete canonical Whoniverse in one sitting without toilet breaks, sleep or anything else, it’d take you 15 days, 19 hours and 36 minutes to get through One-Ten, Torchwood, Sarah Jane, even K-9 &amp; Company.
  (tags: doctorwho)
• A prediction: Vaclav Klaus will sign Lisbon this year | Charlemagne’s notebook | Economist.com
  Scroll down for his interview with a Czech journalist
  (tags: eu)

The numbers 2 and 3 are both prime, so both have two factors, themselves and 1.

While there are no other examples of consecutive primes, it’s not difficult to find more pairs of consecutive integers with the same number of factors:

Eventually you get to sets of three consecutive integers with the same number of factors:

It isn’t possible to have a sequence of more than three integers with only four factors, but so far I have found this set of four consecutive integers with six factors:

I’m sure that somewhere out there I can find out whether or not a) there are longer sequences of consecutive integers which the same number of factors and b) whether there is a natural limit to the process. That’s as far as I can take it in the sleepless hours of the night though.

Well, it seems that I am a former member of an infamous Soros witch conclave. Who knew?