Marco Cappato, an Italian Liberal MEP, has set up a website tracking the attendance and activity records of all the members of the current European Parliament. It’s mostly in French, and the eplanation of the methodology is not yet complete, but it is an interesting set of data: very glad to see some good friends of mine (Raul Romeva, Sarah Ludford, Ana Gomes) scoring highly; not at all surprised to see some big names rather low in the list.

In Belgium, top marks go to Gerard Deprez of the MR and Bart Staes of Groen!, with lowest marks going to the VLD’s Dirk Sterckx and CD&A leader Marianne Thyssen (who is a neighbour of ours). (Even they are not too bad, but they are the only Belgians who score below average.)

In Ireland, the top mark goes to veteran pol Prionsias De Rossa, now Labour, and the lowest mark (by quite some way – the only Irish MEP to score below average) goes to a fellow Dublin MEP, Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald.

Of the British MEPs, Sarah Ludford of the Lib Dems takes top spot, followed by her fellow Londoner Charles Tannock (Conservative) and South-East England MEP Caroline Lucas (Green). The system ranks Chris Huhne bottom (which is a bit unfair as he stopped being an MEP four years ago) and then we have six of the UKIP crowd (including the now expelled Roger Knapman). Of the three from Northern Ireland, Jim Allister ranks 24th, Jim Nicholson 35th and Bairbre de Brún 57th.

The glitch with Huhne, and the incomplete and monolingual explanatory notes, suggest that there are still some gremlins in the system, but I’m glad Cappato has taken the initiative.

TV version of George R.R. Martin‘s A Game of Thrones to be made in Belfast.

Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness making a joint sytatement about GRRM is, well, bizarre, incredible, unreal and just odd. Great news, of course. (Probably.)

Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.

Looking at international examples of conflict resolution, I have often felt that the same is true for countries.

Am I right in thinking that most surface-based observers will not usually see satellites in polar orbits pass over the celestial poles / pole star?

(And if you know which book I am reading, have I missed something, or is this a slip by the author?)

This is an academic text on EU integration written by the current Macedonian ambassador to the EU in his native Albanian, with a handy 80-page English summary. It is already a bit dated, and it’s interesting just how much the debate has moved on from early 2007 when it was not at all clear that there would be another EU treaty to replace the failed Constitution, and all kinds of weird ideas were being thrown around (including by me). Reka eschews the temptation to provide his own answers, instead putting a number of questions to the EU from the perspective of a concerned outsider who wants to be an insider in due course. He draws quite a lot on the ideas of Andrew Duff MEP, who contributes a foreword. (I maybe should add that I know both Reka and Duff quite well.) It would have been more helpful for the English-speaking reader if Reka had got a native speaker to smooth out his prose, but we are not his primary audience, and I hope the students in Tetovo are grateful for his efforts.

Delighted to find this article by Philip O’Leary of Boston College, discussing the rather minimal amount of sf written in Irish.

Even interpreting “science fiction” quite broadly—as we will do throughout this essay—we find startlingly little interest in a kind of writing with proven appeal for a wide range of readers—in many ways precisely the kind of writing one would expect to have most excited those in charge at An Gúm, people never faulted for their elite standards in literature… original Gaelic works of science fiction are thin on the ground and thoroughly mediocre.

What there is of it, O’Leary surveys pretty comprehensively, devoting a reasonable chunk of the essay to the works of Cathal Ó Sándair, “whose productivity and sales figures will almost certainly never be matched by any other writer of Irish.”

To get an idea of Ó Sándair’s approach we can focus here on An Captaen Spéirling, Spás-Phíolóta (Captaen Spéirling, Space-pilot) (Dublin, 1961). The story is set in 2000, when the earth’s most precious resource, uranium, is running out and war for what remains is imminent. An Irish scientist has, however, determined that there is an abundant supply on the moon. The Irish government benevolently decides to fund a mission to prove his theory and then secure and distribute the uranium to all countries on earth in need of it… Ó Sándair’s astronauts travel in a real rocket built and launched on the Curragh of Kildare. On the moon they discover a humanoid civilization whose members still bear the disfiguring scars of their own nuclear holocaust. The Irish manage to overcome their suspicions, win their trust, and acquire a huge supply of uranium on condition that it never be used to make weapons. More importantly, the moon people share with their new friends their own greatest technological advance, “so-ghaethe” (good rays), energy beams that immediately neutralize feelings of aggression and cause an overwhelming desire to cooperate. Needless to say, when the astronauts return to Ireland, their government arranges for these rays to be made available through the UN to every country on earth.

O’Leary does find one or two sparks of hope for the future, though more in the line of a sort of urban Celtic magical realism, including

Tomás Mac Síomóin’s Ag Altóir an Diabhail (2003), where contemporary Ireland’s cultural identity crisis is mirrored by the entirely unreliable narrator’s obsession with a lifelike robotic sex partner with interchangeable heads—he opts for Hilary Clinton and Mary Robinson.

I slightly question O’Leary’s analysis on one point: he buys into the widely-held view that interest in speaking and learning Irish tended to preclude any parallel interest in science. My own investigations (as part of my thesis, on-line separately here) lead me to conclude that the relationship is a bit more complex than that. But O’Leary’s observations are an important piece of evidence against my own revisionism.

The nice people at this year’s Worldcon, Anticipation, have made available a large number of the nominees for electronic download by members of the convention. Thanks in particular should go to John Scalzi for getting this started.

The following nominees in the fiction categories are not included in the download:

Best Novel nominee: Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Best Novella nominee: “The Tear”, by Ian McDonald
Best Novelette nominee: “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner.

However, it does include all the Best Short Story nominees, and two complete books in the Best Related category – John Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded and Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy, as well as an extract from Paul Kincaid’s What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, by Paul Kincaid. I must say that the 55 Canadian dollars for a supporting membership for the Worldcon, which gets you all the fiction nominees not mentioned above (including novels by Gaiman, Stross, Scalzi and Doctorow) plus an actual vote for the Hugos is a very good deal.

If you haven’t already heard of Susan Boyle, you really need to watch this extract from last weekend’s broadcast of a British TV talent show. As comments:

We love her because she reminds us that we don’t have to stop living at 47, or 57, or 67, or 77, or ever.

We love her because she reminds us that we don’t have to wait till we lose weight or get some new clothes or get a better job or make more money to start living.

We love her because she reminds us that we are already good enough to go on to our own next round (as it were).

We love her because she reminds us that we don’t have to let anyone else tell us who or what we are.

We love her because she reminds us that we don’t have to give up.

In addition, “I Dreamed A Dream” is one of my favourite songs from Les Miserables, and this is just fantastic.

A rather beautiful book about animal communication, based on years of personal observation from the writer’s country estate by the river Danube. The story of the water-shrews will linger longest in my memory, but it’s all fascinating.

I just won an auction for a PDA on eBay, for a pretty good price.

The seller has contacted me saying that the price is not high enough and they don’t want to sell it after all.

Since they didn’t set a reserve price, am I right in thinking that they darn well have to sell it to me for the value of my winning bid?

We had the Easter weekend in Burgundy, which explains why I missed out on #amazonfail and similar events over the last few days but read plenty of books. Pictures below the cut. (None of little U here because she was a bit off-colour and quiet, now fully recovered though.)

and little S, now aged seven months

F and his cousin (compare picture from October here)

F meets an old friend of mine (who some of you will recognise)

Rollerblading! Renting skates from LudiSport (warning – site plays music at you). I did not last as long as my wife and son.

The recent Amazon kerfuffle, which now seems to be over, prods me to post my own preferred (and in some cases aspirational) mechanisms of getting hold of books to read.

Amazon have a huge market advantage. There are other alternatives out there too. If you tend to buy a lot of second-hand books, the places to go are AddAll and Bookfinder – both do worldwide searches, and both include the Amazon providers and others who may do the same books but cheaper.

I’ve also recently joined BookMooch, which I hope will live long and prosper.

Here in Belgium, I flirted a few years back with Proxis, but in those days Amazon’s rates were simply better. I may try Proxis again now.

Also, of course, we should support our local independent bookshops. For me, that means Sterling Books in Brussels, now that the American Book Center in Leuven has closed. Go on, pick up the phone and ask them to order that book you want. It will probably be no more expensive than Amazon would have been, and let’s face it, the walk to the shop won’t do you any harm. (Probably.)

A bleak, gripping post-holocaust narrative, focussed very very tightly on the journey of a man and his son across the blasted and horrific landscape. The setting has been done many times before (from my reading this year alone, here and here for instance) but I felt this was indeed something different – the psychology between the two key characters beautifully studied, and the moral questions posed by their survival and continuing need to survive neatly explored. Not a book to help you sleep at nights, though.

What’s so difficult about rollerblading anyway?

It’s just like riding a bicycle.

Well, like walking with a bicycle under each foot.

Well, like walking with two little bicycles under each foot.

You know, there is no shame at all in admitting that your wife and son are better at some things than you are.

Hello ground.

(Bump.)

What is the Irish for “political consultant”? (If possible implying that the politics in question are international?)

Latest in my set of Hugo nominees for this year (and Anathem is sitting accusingly on the bookshelf, while I’ve ordered the paperback of Zoe’s Tale for when it comes out later this month). Lots of good stuff here, with the setting a solar system where the robots have taken over after the extinction of humanity, and our narrator a sexbot designed to pleasure a race which no longer exists, dragged into espionage. Charlie gets significant points for insisting on the vast distances within the solar system, especially once you get out as far as Jupiter, never mind the Kuiper Belt.

He even came close to over-riding my general distaste for stories about cute (indeed, in this case, very sexy) anthropomorphic robots, with a decent ratiionalisation for their shape – the robots here are actually designed for functionality rather than anthropomorphism, and with sexbots the one implies the other. The prose is typically fastpaced and I’m afraid lost me a couple of times. Still, great fun as ever.

We’re not quite sure how this novel made it onto our shelves; it won the Whitbread Prize in 1999 and is set largely in the royal court of Denmark in 1629 and 1630, where a young English musician falls in love with one of the king’s estranged wife’s maidservants. There’s a lot of long lingering flashback to the earlier lives of the lovers, their respective bosses, and extended families; from my own interest, there’s a child with an Asperger’s-ish disorder; but I wasn’t quite sure what it all amounted to. Still, it was a picturesque ride.

I first read this the year it was nominated for the Hugo, and don’t have a lot to add to what I wrote then, except that for some reaon I didn’t enjoy it as much the second time round. Perhaps it is because I now know how the Sirius Black storyline ends?

< Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | The Tales of Beedle the Bard >

Stratfor have published a “Red Alert” about a potential revolution brewing in Georgia. (The former Soviet republic, not the U.S. state.) I’m a bit sceptical. It’s clear that Saakashvili is not as strong as he was a year ago, but neither is his popularity at the single-figure depths plumbed by Eduard Shevardnadze toward the end of his rule. The opposition has yet to demonstrate that it has a critical mass.

I’m also a bit sceptical about Stratfor’s speculations regarding the south of the country. Adjara is more firmly under Tbilisi’s control than Stratfor seems to think. Samtskhe-Javakhetia will take its lead from Yerevan rather than Moscow (if anywhere), and Armenia does not want its only land route to the outside world blocked (yet again) by crisis in Georgia.

Still, I agree with Stratfor that this is one to watch.

This was a recommendation from some time ago by , and is indeed a fascinating read. Ifrah has catalogued the totality of archæological and other knowledge about counting systems since the dawn of humanity, and put it all into a single book, with lavish illustrations (black and white line drawings) of how ancient cultures counted.

It reinforces just how revolutionary the discovery of the concept of zero was – a lot of cultures had groped toward a place value notation system, ie writing 429 instead of (400) (20). (9), but this falls down when you try and write 409 unless you have something signifyng nothing. It is pretty clear that our use of it stems from Indian mathematicians of around 800 AD.

A lot of the book is simply well-illustrated cataloguing, but there were a few other points of analysis that jumped out at me. Ifrah lays out several proposed explanations for the origin of Roman numerals, before coming down with an interpretation where they came from notches on tally sticks. His description of the destruction of Mayan civilisation is intriguing and awful – is it really true that only three Mayan manuscripts survived the Spanish conquest? And of course I was interested to see how the medieval numbers that I was once familiar with fit into the longer tradition of the Hindu-Arabic numerals.

Solid stuff.

This excellent book has already won the Newbery Medal and is up for the Hugo this year. Bod Owens (the “Bod” is short for “Nobody”) is adopted by ghosts and brought up in a graveyard after his family are murdered by the sinister man Jack. His attempts to attend school and befriend a normal girl become entangled with Jack’s continued pursuit.

Gaiman fans will recognise a few things here: in particular, the split between the real world and the supernatural world of the graveyard, and the single-minded hunting of Bod by the man Jack, are respectively reminiscent of London Below, and Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, from Neverwhere. I think that both are done better in The Graveyard Book – I rewatched Neverwhere quite recently and was a bit underwhelmed. The most obvious creative debt here, however, is not to Gaiman’s own previous work but to H.P. Lovecraft: in one memorable chapter, Bod is captured by ghouls and brought to a subterranean world very similar to that of the Kadath stories. Again, I think Gaiman has improved on the original – it is less whimsical, and fits better with the overall worldview of the story.

Diana Wynne Jones blurbs the book as the best Gaiman has ever written, though we must bear in mind that she is occasionally guilty of hyperbole (Coraline does not appear yet to have displaced Alice). While I agree that it has few of the flaws that bothered me about American Gods and Coraline, I still prefer Anansi Boys (which Gaiman withdrew from the Hugo shortlist the year it was up for the award); it is both deeper and funnier. But The Graveyard Book must stand a good chance of winning this year (though I haven’t yet tackled Anathem).

Me good friend Nicu Popescu has full details here and here.

I’ve been watching The Prisoner over the last few months (having bought a complete set of videos at auction from the estate of the much-missed David Stewart) and reached the end this evening, treating myself to a double bill of Once Upon a Time and Fallout.

There are those who say that Fallout, the final episode is a true work of genius, and those who say that it is total nonsense. (I suppose there may be some who maintain both points of view.) Myself, I love it to bits. IMHO the only moment where it falters is where Number Six, The Kid and The Former Number Two are shooting down the bad guys to “All You Need Is Love” – I think that is in somewhat poor taste. But all the rest is brilliant: a triumph of showing rather than telling, leaving the viewer to put together his or her own interpretation. (Even if that interpretation may be “What a load of rubbish!”)

My favourite moments: are: 1) when the Controller puts on his mask and robe and goes to join the other masked, robed guys; 2) when they all echo Number Six’s first person pronoun to the point of drowning out what he is saying; and 3) at the end when Number Six and the Butler cross the road together. But I think it is almost all sheer genius.

What about you?

And what reference book about The Prisoner should I get?

I took B to the nature reserve at Het Vinne today, not too far from where she now lives. Part of the plan was to try and get decent pictures of her for friends and family. I think I succeeded. Her hair has gone very curly.

If you consider the square numbers in base 10, very few of them end in repeated digits, apart from the trivial case of all squares of multiples of 10 ending in multiple 0’s.

Square numbers which end in 1 or 9 always have an even number in the 10s column. (01, 09, 49, 81, 121, 169…) Square number which end in 6 always have an odd number in the 10s column. (16, 36, 196, 256…) Square numbers which end in 5 always in fact end with 25, so never with 55.

Square numbers which end in 4, however, always have an even number in the 10s column (04, 64) and so we get plenty ending in ..-44 (starting with 144 which is 12 squared) and even …444 (starting with 1444 which is 38 squared). But there it stops. If the last three digits are 4’s, the number in the thousands column is odd: 462 squared is 213444, 538 squared is 289444, etc.

What about other bases? Well, in binary, every even number’s square ends with at least two zeros (because they are all multiples of four), and every odd number’s square ends in …001 (because they are always one more than a multiple of eight).

In hexadecimal we start off promisingly:

Now we have to go up considerably in scale, and there aren’t any squares ending in more than five repeated 4’s, as the sixth last digit is always odd (1’s and 9’s, however, continue)

And I guess that we can keep going with steadily increasing numbers of 1’s and 9’s (this is probably trivial enough to prove).

Counting in an odd-numbered base, it is also pretty easy to build up repeated digits as the distinction between odd and even numbers no longer applies.