145 Me (leaning Huhne)
81 Jonathan Calder (Huhne)
57 caribou95 (Campbell)
48 John Hemming MP
45 James Graham (Huhne)
44 Peter Black AM (Hughes)
40 Richard Huzzey (Huhne)
35 Nick Barlow (Huhne)
34 burkesworks (Hughes)
34 Will Howells (Huhne)
34 Lynne Featherstone MP (Huhne)
33 imperial_artist (leaning Campbell)
30 Tim Hicks (Campbell)
24 Peter of the Apollo Project (Campbell)
22 Andy Darley (Campbell)
21 Susanne Lamido (Hughes)
20 blue_condition here (Hughes)
20 Alex Foster (Huhne)
19 Simon Mollan (leaning Campbell)
16 Stephen Glenn (Hughes)
14 Edis Bevan (Huhne)
13 ig1234 here (Huhne)
10 Stephen Tall (Campbell)
9 Libertycat and Femme de Resistance (Huhne)
9 Ryan Cullen
8 Rob Fenwick (Hughes)
7 redfiona99 (Hughes)
6 sinsir (leaning Hughes)
7 Sandra Gidley MP (Huhne)
6 Chris Black (Huhne)
5 Martin Tod (Campbell)
5 Dave Radcliffe (Campbell)
5 Steve Guy (Huhne)
5 Cicero
4 Iain Sharpe (Campbell)
4 hikari_neko here (Hughes)
3 Dave Smithson (Campbell)
3 Chris (Campbell)
3 Helen Evison (Hughes)
2 James Thompson (Hughes)
2 Barrie Wood (Hughes)
2 Andrew Milton (Hughes)
2 Alan Beddow (Huhne)
1 Joyce (Campbell)
1 Matt Jenkins (Hughes)
1 Jock Coats (Huhne)
0 Jimbo (Campbell)
0 Martin Turner (Hughes)
0 David Goodall (Huhne)

А а [a] – Aa
Б б [b] – Bb
В в [v] – Vv
Γ г [g] – Gg
Д д [d] – Dd
Ѓ ѓ [gʲ] – |
Е е [ɛ] – Ee
Ж ж [ʒ] – @`
З з [z] – Zz
Ѕ ѕ [dz] – Yy
И и [i] – Ii
Ј ј [j] – Jj
К к [k] – Kk
Л л [l] – Ll
Љ љ [ʎ] – Qq
М м [m] – Mm
Н н [n] – Nn
Њ њ [ɲ] – Ww
О о [ɔ] – Oo
П п [p] – Pp
Р р [r] – Rr
С с [s] – Ss
Т т [t] – Tt
Ќ ќ [kʲ] – ]}
У у [u] – Uu
Ф ф [f] – Ff
Х х [h] – Hh
Ц ц [ts] – Cc
Ч ч [tʃ] – ^~
Џ џ [dʒ] – Xx
Ш ш [ʃ] – [{
î – è
é – е́
í – и́
ñ – ѝ

The BBC are to axe Radio 4’s “UK theme” which starts every day at 0530 British time (ie 0630 our time, when the alarm clock goes off).

For those of you who haven’t heard it: it starts with a snatch of Early One Morning, appropriately enough given the time of day, then starts to get interesting by playing two well-known tunes simultaneously – especially daring is What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor? mashed up with Greensleeves, but we also get Men of Harlech combined with Scotland the Brave, and The Londonderry Air/Danny Boy melded with Annie Laurie, ending with Rule Britannia and an added helping of The Trumpet Voluntary.

I guess if I wasn’t used to it, I would in fact prefer to have a few extra minutes of news at that time of day, rather than patriotic music for a value of patriotism that I don’t particularly share. But I will miss it once it’s gone.

Many Russian dialling codes have changed. All local codes starting with 0 have been changed to 4 – most significantly, the local code for Moscow is now 495 rather than 095. The old codes are still valid but will be phased out over the next few weeks. Change the details for your Russian contacts now.

The Nebula short fiction nominees, in a nutshell.

Novellas (5/5)

Albert Cowdrey: The Tribes of Bela (F&SF, FictionWise)
* Golden Age stuff (except with female characters equal to males). A straightforward sf story, well enough told, but not spectalular. In the Dozois collection.

Kelly Link: Magic for Beginners (F&SF)
* Awfully good. Should win.

Robert J. Sawyer: Identity Theft (Author’s site)
* Amazingly, a Sawyer story that I actually rather liked, taking the absurd premise of last year’s Hugo nominee “Shed Skin” and putting it into a film noir setting on Mars. Ending a bit too pat but otherwise enjoyable.

Bud Sparhawk: Clay’s Pride (Analog, FictionWise)
* Crumbs. The one dud of this entire list. Clean-cut military types with European surnames outwit local corrupt planetary hierarchy with Asian names, in a plot straight out of ‘Nam (with off-stage aliens to give us some sfnal content). I am amazed this stuff still gets published, let alone nominated.

Paul Witcover: Left of the Dial (SCI FICTION)
* I liked this one too, as did , though wondered if it was really much more than a ghost story.

The Link and Sawyer stories were first published in 2005 and thus are eligible for this year’s Hugos. I shall certainly nominate the Link, and (and I never thought I would say this) possibly the Sawyer as well.

Novelettes (9/10)

Daniel Abraham: Flat Diane (F&SF)
* This is simply a horror story rather than fantasy or science fiction. Not my thing. (Though liked it.)

Paolo Bacigalupi: The People of Sand and Slag (F&SF, Feb04)
* Also a rather disturbing and nasty story, but at least it was sfnal (and a Hugo nominee last year). In the Dozois and Haber/Strahan collections.

William Barton: Harvest Moon (Asimov’s)
* Good romantic stuff about lunar exploration in a slightly different 1960s. After an excellent build-up I had expected a slightly heftier punchline though.

James L. Cambias: The Ocean of the Blind (F&SF)
* Another nasty story, unpleasant future version of Jacques Cousteau gets his comeuppance from sonar-using aliens. Shows promise but prose a little clunky and characters behave stupidly for the sake of a good story. In the Dozois collection.

Cory Doctorow: Anda’s Game (Salon.com)
* Very good story combining the themes of virtual gaming and globalisation. Surely this will win.

Eileen Gunn and Leslie What: Nirvana High (Gunn’s website)
* More futuristic schoolchildren, like Doctorow’s story. Lots of good bits but didn’t quite fit together for me.

James Patrick Kelly: Men are Trouble (Asimov’s)
* Rather good – Clarke’s Childhood’s End meets Wyndham’s “Consider Her Ways”. But female point-of-view not quite convincing. In the Dozois collection.

John G. McDaid: Keyboard Practice Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals (F&SF)
* I just couldn’t get into this one; seemed to be about a near future piano contest but it never became clear to me what was actually going on.

Paul Melko: Strength Alone (Asimov’s, Dec04)
* Human gestalt-mind future, trainee spaceship pilots caught in natural disaster; characters sadly two-dimensional, but look at the scenery!

Beth Shope: Dragon’s Eye (Lords of Swords, Daniel E. Blackston, Ed., Pitch-Black Books, Dec04)
* Not on-line so haven’t read it (yet.)

The Barton and McDaid stories were first published in 2005 and thus are eligible for this year’s Hugos. I shall certainly nominate the Barton.

Short Stories (14/16)

Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta: Rough Draft (Analog)
* Fun story about a science fiction author confronted with his own literary activities in an alternate universe. Zoran Živković has done this one better but it’s nicely done here.

Dale Bailey: The End of the World as We Know It (SF site, FictionWise)
* Nice elegiac story about the end of the world, with many riffs on past disasters and tips of the hat to sf authors who have gone before.

Richard Bowes: There’s a Hole in the City (SCI FICTION, Jun05)
* A 9/11 ghost story, though rather an effective one (my favourite in that category is still Lucius Shepard’s “Only Partly Here”)

Carol Emshwiller: I Live With You (F&SF)
* Another ghost story – I think. Didn’t really feel sfnal enough to me.

Anne Harris: Still Life With Boobs (Author’s livejournal)
* Funny story about wandering breasts.

John G. Henry: Small Moments in Time (Analog)
* Time-travel story which addresses the old question: if you could change history by preventing a major awful event, would you? Done decently enough though I didn’t feel it added any more.

Nancy Kress: My Mother, Dancing (Asimov’s)
* Nicely written but I really didn’t understand what was going on. In the Haber/Strahan collection.

Jonathan Lethem: Super Goat Man (New Yorker)
* Story about a minor superhero growing old as a college professor. Style nice, not grabbed by the substance.

Kelly Link: The Faery Handbag
* Has already won the Hugo for Best Novelette. A good piece, though I felt not as good as some others on that list. In the Haber/Strahan fantasy collection.

Mike Resnick: A Princess of Earth (Asimov’s, FictionWise)
* Was a Hugo nominee. Old man meets famous fictional character for long rambling conversation and cop-out ending.

M. Rickert: Cold Fires (F&SF)
* Impressive short piece of magical realism in the American midwinter.

Benjamin Rosenbaum: Start the Clock (F&SF)
* Zany and touching story in a future where people can choose to remain stuck in childhood (though some of the details are left a bit obscure). In the Dozois collection.

Lawrence M. Schoen: The Sky’s the Limit (All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, David Moles and Jay Lake, Ed., Wheatland Press, Nov04)
* Not on-line so haven’t read it (yet.)

Ray Vukcevich: Glinky (F&SF)
* Tale of alternate timelines, also in the Hartwell/Cramer collection; didn’t quite work for me.

Bud Webster: Christus Destitutus (Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan, Ed., Tor, Aug04)
* Not on-line so haven’t read it (yet.)

K.D. Wentworth: Born-Again (F&SF)
* A silly silly story about cloning Jesus.

The Anderson/Moesta and Wentworth stories were published in 2005 and thus are eligible for this year’s Hugos. I will probably nominate the former but definitely not the latter.

I have to say that I remember the Nebula preliminary lists of recent years as being distinctly less impressive and memorable than this one. There are very few real stinkers here, and more often when the stories failed for me it was through being over-ambitious rather than actually bad.

You too can drive a bulldozer to clear away the protestors

Since December 24th I have watched a lot of Doctor Who for the second time. Spoiler-free summaries follow, in the order in which they were first broadcast (but I should first of all mention that all but the last of the stories below are at least mentioned in Graham Sleights’ superb essay for Strange Horizons, Take Me To The Fantastic Place):

Pyramids of Mars (1975) – from Tom Baker’s second year as the Doctor, which also included The Seeds of Doom and The Brain of Morbius, surely near the top of any fan’s listing of best stories. This is the one with the mummies and ancient Egyptian gods. It survives pretty well, and the DVD commentaries give it extra value – in fact it’s particularly touching that Michael Sheard, who of course died last August, obviously really enjoyed reliving his Who days via fandom and especially cons. The one serious problem is the special effects towards the end… but more than compensated for by the mini-documentary about Philip Hinchcliffe’s influence on the show.

All the rest are episodes from 2005 revisited:

Rose – this really is very good, better on second viewing than first if anything. In particular, Rose’s first encounter with the TARDIS is just superb. The climactic scene with the Nestene Consciousness seemed better paced than I remembered, and the wheelie bin scene seemed somehow more appropriate and less silly second time round. And of course, the Doctor and Rose are absolutely perfect, from their first meeting up to the final scene. (But surely the Doctor’s dialogue with the Nestene Consciousness was a bit of a lift from the star of Men In Black?)

Dalek – this is still great, though only as good second time round as it was first time. The different reactions to the captured Dalek from the Doctor and Rose are beautifully done. (ObLJ – the LiveJournal of the Last Dalek.) It also has my second favourite line of the entire series – “Broken… broken… hairdryer… broken…”

The Long Game – Thought it was OK first time round, and no reason to revise that second time round. Could fit as an episode into almost any sf series, to be honest. I was impressed by Anna Maxwell Martin as Suki and understand she came from playing Lyra on stage in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and went on to great things as Esther Summerson in Bleak House.

(Father’s Day – I didn’t re-watch this one properly, but just want to state that it has my favourite line of the entire series: “Who said you’re not important? I’ve travelled to all sorts of places, done things you couldn’t even imagine. But you two..! Street corner, two in the morning, getting a taxi home. I’ve never had a life like that.” That last sentence is superb.)

The Empty Child – even better second time I watched it, and I loved it first time round. I must sit down and see the second half of the story, The Doctor Dances, again soon.

But this brings me to a serious point about Hugo nominations. I had originally take the view that I would nominate my favourite single-part story (Dalek) for the best short dramatic presentation Hugo, and then nominate both The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances in the long category. Cheryl Morgan points out, quite reasonably, that Serenity is 100% certain to win the long category, and so better to concentrate our Doctor Who nominations in the short category. Do others follow this logic? Makes a certain amount of sense to me. If it’s clear that The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances togterh make a valid short form nomination, I would very much hope it wins.

And finally, The Christmas Invasion – watched it tonight with Anne, who had been prepared by reading the Graham Sleight/Tim Phipps reviews. Well, I take a neutral position. I didn’t like the Lion King/Arthur Dent lines as much second time round, and the plot holes seemed even more egregious. But it was fun. And While I don’t go overboard about Tennant the way some people do (Ecclestone was as good as Tom Baker in his early years, and from me there is no higher praise) I still thought he was up to it. Looking forward very much to Anthony Stewart Head/Elisabeth Sladen in the new series…

Crumbs, Lembit does know how to pick ’em, doesn’t he?

Ibrahim Rugova, the President of Kosovo, has died.

I’ve been doing some more thinking after my post of last weekend.

1) Rates of inter-country migration: The results of my poll are really rather startling. OK, it’s not completely scientific – there are a few inconsistent answers about grandparents, and one case of siblings giving different answers about their own parents (cough, cough). But I think it’s interesting.

94 of you answered all three questions. Of your 188 parents, 32 (17%) were born in a different country to you; and of your 376 grandparents, 87 (23%) were born in a different country to you. This compares with the inter-country migration rate of one in a thousand (0.1%) assumed by Rohde in the most conservative of his models. I’m sure that those of you who read my LJ are more likely than the norm to to have an interest in travel, as I do, and to have had parents who, like mine, were also interested in travel, but even so I’m sure that one in six is close to the real rate of inter-country migration than one in a thousand.

Noteworthy also that the survey results do not show a random distribution. If one of your parents was born in a different country from you, it is more likely than not that the other was as well.

It’s only impressionistic, but it seems to me that migration from country to country has been pretty frequent for a very long time. As I look at my history shelf, the nearest book is F.E. Peters’ study of Jerusalem, which chronicles the waves of settlement over that city in the last 3000 years starting when David conquered it from the Jebusites. Next along is my abridged version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. On the same sheld I have Peter Balakian’s account of the Armenian genocide and diaspora, Keay’s History of India and a collection of essays on the life of the much-travelled twelfth-century queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (whose son Richard I, if you remember, was married to a Spanish princess shortly after conquering Cyprus). Probably it’s even easier now than it was, and probably more people can travel now than did a hundred years ago; but moving to different countries has probably been part of human life since there were different countries to move to.

2) Age between generations. I wrote before that [Rohde’s] model assumes that women have an equal probability of bearing children every year between the ages of 16 and 40, thus giving an average age difference between mothers and their children of 28. I reckon this flattens out the natural bump (!) at the lower end of that age range, and my suspicion (without any proof) for most of human history is that most children were born to women aged between 14 and 30. That too will decrease the time to our most recent common ancestor, as the time between generations will be shorter.

replied, Most children may have been born to women between 14 and 30 but the ones born to older mothers may be more likely to have survived (and their mothers to have died as a result or shortly after). A large number of children born to younger mothers succumbed to poor infant care (nursemaids dropping babies off battlements, bizarre infant-rearing theories not contradicted by inexperienced parents, malnutrition etc).

It’s an interesting point. Rather arbitrarily picking the year 1250, and the European monarchs then in power according to Wikipedia, and filtering down to those whose birthdates (and whose spouses’ and childrens’ birthdates) I could identify pretty quickly, I find that mothers gave birth between the ages of 13 and 39, average age 25; and fathers had children between the ages of 15 and 45, average age 32. So in fact Rohde’s average of 28 years between generations is not too bad, for monarchs in the mid-thirteenth century at least, though I suspect the comparatively younger age of mothers will shorten the time to the most recent common ancestor.

(data set: James I of Aragon and Yolande of Hungary; John I of Brittany and Blanche of Navarre; Ferdinand III of Castile and Jeanne of Ponthieu; Henry III of England and Eleanor of Provence; Margaret of Constantinople, countess of Flanders in her own right, and William of Dampierre; Béla IV of Hungary and Maria Laskarina; Håkon IV of Norway and Margrét Skúladóttir; and Henry I of Cyprus and Plaisance of Antioch – counting only children who survived to adulthood, ie older than 16, and only parents who were alive and married in 1250; which gave me 40 child/mother pairs and 47 child/father pairs).

3) The influence of people with lots of progeny. I have no research of my own to add to this, but I’m sure that most of you will have seen this week’s news item about Niall of the Nine Hostages (see full research paper here (PDF)). News reports that he may have 3 million descendants alive today are exaggerated. Under-exaggerated, that is. That’s three million male-line descendants – the real number of descendants must be much higher, indeed, Niall himself is at about the right time-frame to be Rohde’s Most Recent Common Ancestor (though not in the right place; difficult to see how his descendant line would have penetrated indigenous populations in the Americas or Australia).

I emailed Rohde about my previous post and he was good enough to send a brief reply. I guess my research stops here, but I hope his continues.

On 23 December, friended my livejournal; on 29 December, did as well, and the following day so did and . (Yes, I am that obsessive, and check ‘s page every day.)

All five user info pages for these accounts were conspicuously blank. They had all friended the same few dozen people, including . There was nothing of substance on any of their user pages except that one had a link to a “gay love story”, which isn’t my thing. (Don’t go looking for the link to the “gay love story” site. Wait until you’ve finished reading this post.)

Well, I thought nothing of it. But then this week, we’ve all become aware of Livejournal’s change of policy owing to a newly discovered “security flaw”; and thanks to linking to this Washington Post blog entry, I have realised that this was all part of an attempt by the hackers to crack my account, along with all the others. The “gay love story” site is thus part of this plan, and somehow (I suppose) looking at it must enable the hackers to steal the cookies with your livejournal login details.

(See? I told you not to go looking for the link to the “gay love story” site. If you did, and you spent any time at all on it, you probably have to log out of livejournal, expire all your cookies, and change your password.)

So there we are. Mystery explained with a little bit of drama added.

Get well soon, Gerald.

In particular, please don’t die before 13 November. I really don’t want Ronald Reagan holding the record for longest-lived president any longer than can be avoided.

Are you here?

“I know now where Azerbaijan is located but I don’t think that will help from a hockey point of view.“

From one of my mailing lists:

1. Take out a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the center.

2. On the left side, write down the names of all the negative people that suck the life out of you and whom you dread seeing.

3. On the right side, write the names of all the people who give you energy and motivate you.

4. Make a 30-day commitment to minimize the time you spend with the energy drainers and maximize your time with the energy suppliers (and then continue this strategy for life.)

If only it was really that easy…

Let’s be quite clear: the letter yogh (Ȝ ȝ) is completely different from the letter ezh (Ʒ ʒ). See?

I hereby resolve to write about Sir Menȝies Campbell in future, to avoid confusion.

Edited to add: Rather to my surprise, in my journal’s default view, they actually are completely different!

Well, I came into this, like most people, accepting that a Menzies Campbell victory was inevitable. And, like most people, I am shifting my views.

First off, though, in Campbell’s defence: I’m not convinced by the “he’s already 64, he has only one election left” argument. Last year both Tony Blair (by self-declaration) and Michael Howard (on age grounds) were clearly fighting their last elections as party leaders, and both got more votes than Charles Kennedy.

More widely, I think it’s very unhealthy to expect party leaders to stay on for a decade as a matter of course – how many of us expect to be in our current jobs for that long? Four or five years should be the standard, and the party as a whole should be capable of generating sufficient talent to fill the top spot, and resilient enough to cope with elections every so often.

I know very little about Mark Oaten. A colleague tells me pleasing anecdotes of personal favours; an old friend tells me that he’s done very well on Five Live. I think that he was very unwise to play the card of loyalty to Kennedy after that story was over (and I feel the same about Lembit Opik), and it’s interesting that he couldn’t even get seven MPs to sign his nomination papers having stuck his neck out.

Loyalty to both parties and leaders in politics is over-rated anyway. Those of us who are in any branch of politics – and I include myself, in both my professional role and my roles as a member of the Lib Dems and of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland – are in it to change the world for the better. A political party, and its current leader, are only part of the means to that end, and as a political activist your support of either party or personality must be constantly judged against the question, “Is this going to help change the world the way I want it?” If your loyalty to either party or leader is stronger than the answer to that question, you are no longer a political activist but an adherent of a religious sect. Which is why I suspect that for both Oaten and Opik, their partisanship of Kennedy after the man himself had given up did them no favours.

Simon Hughes – well, what’s not to love about Simon Hughes? Apart from the fact that he is known to turn up chronically late for meetings (Paddy Ashdown has a hilarious set of anecdotes about this in his memoirs), and that he is reputed to do as much constituency work as any two other MPs put together (or three, if one of them is George Galloway). I sat up and watched his extraordinary by-election victory back in 1983, and thrilled to every minute of it (the more controversial elements of the campaign were lost on me when I was 15).

And yet, and yet. There is the known character flaw of tardiness (and I voted last time for a candidate with a known character flaw), and I’m just generally not convinced that he will convert the voters rather than frighten them. Maybe I will be. I remember back in 1988 I was certain I was going to vote for Alan Beith until I opened the envelope with the election literature from the two candidates and realised that Ashdown might be risky, but would at least be interesting.

Which brings me to Chris Huhne. I know him vaguely and consequently like him from his time in Brussels as an MEP; he co-wrote a book with my former boss; the Oxford Mail is trying rather desperately to smear him as an extremist. I am rather impressed that despite his substantial economics background, he chose the environment as the main basis for his campaign launch, prompting some rather desperate me-tooism from the other candidates. Sure, he is not a household name; but be honest, who had heard of David Cameron twelve months ago?

And on the economics front: I’m aware of the suspicion generated recently by the publication of the Orange Book. I think its significance has been overblown. There is little prospect of a right-wing clique taking over the party a la Jorg Haider. I find it interesting that Liberator, which I take as a touchstone of the parts of the Lib Dems further (though not much further) to the left than me, responded to the Orange Book, not with the outright hostility which I remember the magazine taking to the leadership and the SDP in the Steel era, but by welcoming the fact that there was a debate at all (eg here and herereview for Liberator, singles out Huhne’s contribution to it as “in many ways the most impressive piece in the book”.

So, on balance, I’m a not very committed Campbell supporter, drifting towards Huhne. Having said that, as in 1988, I may just find that the candidates’ own literature convinces me to change my mind at the last moment.

Novellas (5/5)
Cowdrey, Albert: The Tribes of Bela (F&SF, Aug04)
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/ac01.htm
* http://www.fictionwise.com/servlet/mw?t=book.htm&bookid=36011&id=8474 (free)
Link, Kelly: Magic for Beginners (Magic for Beginners, Small Beer Press, Jul05)
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/kl01.htm
Sawyer, Robert J.: Identity Theft (Down These Dark Spaceways, Mike Resnick, Ed., Science Fiction Book Club, May05)
* http://sfwriter.com/2006/01/for-your-hugo-consideration-identity.html
Sparhawk, Bud: Clay’s Pride (Analog, Aug04 (In July/August issue))
* http://www.analogsf.com/0602/Clay.shtml
* http://www.fictionwise.com/servlet/mw?t=book.htm&bookid=32047&id=8474 ($2.25)
Witcover, Paul: Left of the Dial (SCI FICTION, Sep04)
* http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/witcover/

Novelettes (9/10)
Abraham, Daniel: Flat Diane (F&SF, Nov04 (Oct/Nov 2004 issue))
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/da01.htm
Bacigalupi, Paolo: The People of Sand and Slag (F&SF, Feb04)
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/pb01.htm
Barton, William: Harvest Moon (Asimov’s, Sep05)
* http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0602/harvest.shtml
Cambias, James L.: The Ocean of the Blind (F&SF, Apr04)
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/jc01.htm
Doctorow, Cory: Anda’s Game (Salon.com, Nov04 (Online 15 Nov 04))
* http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/15/andas_game/index_np.html
Gunn, Eileen and What, Leslie: Nirvana High (Stable Strategies and Others, Tachyon Press, Sep04)
* http://www.eileengunn.com/StableStrategies/nirvana_high.html
Kelly, Jim: Men are Trouble (Asimov’s, Jun04)
* http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0602/menaretrouble.shtml
McDaid, John G.: Keyboard Practice Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals (F&SF, Jan05)
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/jm01.htm
Melko, Paul: Strength Alone (Asimov’s, Dec04)
http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0602/strength.shtml
Shope, Beth: Dragon’s Eye (Lords of Swords, Daniel E. Blackston, Ed., Pitch-Black Books, Dec04)

Short Stories (14/16)
Anderson, Kevin J. and Moesta, Rebecca: Rough Draft (Analog, Feb05 (Jan/Feb 2005 issue.))
* http://www.analogsf.com/0602/Roughdraft.shtml
Bailey, Dale: The End of the World as We Know It (F&SF, Nov04 (Oct/Nov 2004 issue))
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/db01.htm
* http://www.fictionwise.com/servlet/mw?t=book.htm&bookid=36012&id=8474 (free)
Bowes, Richard: There’s a Hole in the City (SCI FICTION, Jun05)
* http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/bowes5/index.html
Emshwiller, Carol: I Live With You (F&SF, Mar05)
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/ce01.htm
Harris, Anne: Still Life With Boobs (Talebones, Aug05 (In Summer 2005 issue))
* http://annesible.livejournal.com/1864.html
Hemry, John G.: Small Moments in Time (Analog, Dec04)
* http://www.analogsf.com/0602/smallmoments.shtml
Kress, Nancy: My Mother, Dancing (Asimov’s, Jun04)
* http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0602/mymother.shtml
Lethem, Jonathan: Super Goat Man (New Yorker, Apr04 (Appeared 5 Apr 2004))
* http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/?040405fi_fiction
Link, Kelly: The Faery Handbag (The Faery Reel: Tales From the Twilight Realm, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Ed., Viking Press, Aug04)
* http://www.lcrw.net/fictionplus/link-handbag.htm
Resnick, Mike: A Princess of Earth (Asimov’s, Dec04)
* http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0602/Aprincess.shtml
* http://www.fictionwise.com/servlet/mw?t=book.htm&bookid=31106&id=8474 ($0.65)
Rickert, M.: Cold Fires (F&SF, Nov04 (Oct/Nov 2004 issue))
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/mr01.htm
Rosenbaum, Benjamin: Start the Clock (F&SF, Aug04)
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/br01.htm
Schoen, Lawrence M.: The Sky’s the Limit (All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, David Moles and Jay Lake, Ed., Wheatland Press, Nov04)
Vukcevich, Ray: Glinky (F&SF, Jun04)
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/rv01.htm
Webster, Bud: Christus Destitutus (Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan, Ed., Tor, Aug04)
Wentworth, K.D.: Born-Again (F&SF, May05)
* http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/kw01.htm

I’ll edit this entry if any of the remaining three is put on-line (or turns out to already be available).

A rather grand job is being advertised in NATO. I emailed my senior contact there (who indeed previously did that job) and said that it looked awfully interesting, but I wan’t sure I had enough experience. He replied,

Simply put, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The position has been readvertised because Sec Gen is seeking a range of new candidates and so the field is wide open. So give it a try.

So I think I will.

1) rates of inter-country migration

The results of my poll on this are really rather startling. 87 of you answered all three questions. You report that of your 174 parents, 24 (14%) were born in different countries to you; and of your 348 grandparents, 73 (21%) were born in different countries to you. (So you guys are more likely to have been born in a different country to your parents than they are to have been born in a different country to theirs.)

But even making allowances for that, the rate of inter-country migration used by Rohde in his paper – 0.1%, one in a thousand – seems far too low. One in seven of your parents was born in a different country to you. One in twelve of your grandparents was born in a different country to their child who became your parent. The “true rate” migration worldwide today may well be much higher than I had realised.

It could be argued that moving from country to country has become easier and more common in the last few decades, and the fact that one in seven of your parents, but only one in twelve of their parents, was born in a different country to their child might be an indicator of this. Myself I’m more inclined to put this down to the selection effect that those people who respond to polls in my livejournal are probably more likely to have an interest in travel, as I do, and to have had parents who, like mine, were also interested in travel.

It’s only impressionistic, but it seems to me that migration from country to country has been pretty frequent for a very long time. As I look at my history shelf, the nearest book is F.E. Peters’ study of Jerusalem, which chronicles the waves of settlement over that city in the last 3000 years starting when David conquered it from the Jebusites. Next along is my abridged versioon of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. On the same sheld I have Peter Balakian’s account of the Armenian genocide and diaspora, Keay’s History of India and a collection of essays on the life of the much-travelled twelfth-century queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (whose son Richard I, if you remember, was married to a Spanish princess shortly after conquering Cyprus). Probably it’s even easier now than it was, and probably more people can travel now than did a hundred years ago; but I reckon most of us in, as Nick Barnes put it, the area north of the equator and west of the Gobi (and going west right the way round to California) have common ancestors in the last 800 years.

2) I wortoe before that [Rohde’s] model assumes that women have an equal probability of bearing children every year between the ages of 16 and 40, thus giving an average age difference between mothers and their children of 28. I reckon this flattens out the natural bump (!) at the lower end of that age range, and my suspicion (without any proof) for most of human history is that most children were born to women aged between 14 and 30. That too will decrease the time to our most recent common ancestor, as the time between generations will be shorter.

speculated that Most children may have been born to women between 14 and 30 but the ones born to older mothers may be more likely to have survived (and their mothers to have died as a result or shortly after). A large number of children born to younger mothers succumbed to poor infant care (nursemaids dropping babies off battlements, bizarre infant-rearing theories not contradicted by inexperienced parents, malnutrition etc)..

Interesting point. It’s not a scientific sample, but the easiest data to get for, say 1250 AD, are the statistics for reigning monarchs and their queens of the day.

Queen of England: Eleanor of Provence (married to Henry III). She was born in 1223, married in 1236. Her children who survived to adulthood were:
Edward I ‘Longshanks’, King of England b. 17 Jun 1239 (mother 16)
Margaret of England b. 29 Sep 1240 (mother 17)
Beatrice of England b. 25 Jun 1242 (mother 19)
Edmund ‘Crouchback’ Plantagenet, Earl of Leicester+ b. 16 Jan 1245 (mother 22)

Queen of France: Eleanor’s elder sister Marguerite (married to St Louis IX), born around 1221, and married in 1234. Her children who survived to adulthood were:
Isabelle (March 2, 1241–January 28, 1271) (mother 20)
Philippe III (May 1, 1245–October 5, 1285) (mother 24)
Jean Tristan (1250–August 3, 1270) (mother 29)
Pierre (1251–1284) (mother 30)
Blanche (1253–1323) (mother 32)
Marguerite (1254–1271) (mother 33)
Robert, Count of Clermont (1256–February 7, 1317) (mother 35)
Agnes of France (c. 1260–December 19, 1327) (mother about 39)

Queen of Norway: Margret, married to Haakon IV in 1225; I don’t have a date of birth for her, but her father was born only in 1189 so if he was 36 when she was married she must have been born between 1205 and 1210. Their children who survived to adulthood were born in 1232, 1234 and 1238 (another born in 1226 died in infancy).

Margaret, Countess in her own right of Flanders and Hainault, had had children when she was 16, 19 and 24.

This is the explanation of my earlier cryptic unlocked post about not putting non-Western characters in your signature file.

As some of you will know, I’ve had the following signature to emails from my gmail account for most of the last twelve months:

Nicholas Whyte
Europe Program Director, ICG
Honorary Fellow, Institute of Governance, QUB
http://explorers.whyte.com
http://nhw.livejournal.com
“мислењето на др. Вајт се смета за божја вистина, а моќниците низ целиот свет, кога ќе го слушнат, климаат со главите во молчалива согласност.” – Jason Miko, 1 Feb 2005

The line at the bottom means “Dr. Whyte’s opinion is considered as God’s truth, and throughout the whole world, whoever hears him nods silently in agreement.” It was a quote from a Macedonian commentator who was pissed off with me after my commentary on the outcome of the November 2004 referendum, and my taking it out of context was a rather childish, obscure and self-indulgent way of getting my revenge for his article (which really got under my skin at the time).

Well, a couple of people had emailed me to let me know that my messages to them were being bounced back specifically because of the Cyrillic characters, so I made a mental note to delete the relevant lines whenever contacting them; it did not occur to me that some email systems might just delete the entire message.

Then over the last few days I tried a couple of times to send messages to , and she reported that they were coming to her completely blank. This evening, driving my mother to the airport, I suddenly thought, “Aha! I bet it is the Cyrillic that ‘s email system objects to.”

And then a very cold sensation ran down my spine, and I thought, “I wonder if that explains why I never got a reply to the long and heartfelt job application letter I sent that lobbying firm back on December 14th???”

So, to repeat: Do NOT put non-Latin characters into your signature file. Full internationalisation has not yet hit email as widely as I would have wished.

A survey about mobility.

(Feel free to interpret both “same country” and “parents/grandparents” as widely as necessary.)

Do NOT put non-Latin characters into your signature file.

I was having a row with a NATO official who felt unhappy about certain aspects of our Macedonia report. He was telling me that this would all make Lord Robertson very unhappy, given that he had been secretary-general at the time and that our report made reference to things he had done. I then read the NATO official this email:

Dear Nicholas,

Many thanks for sight of the Macedonia paper. I read it with great interest not least because of my own intimate involvement in the area and it would seem my lasting legacy of confusion over the amnesty. Remembering as I do the fraught circumstances of getting an amnesty and in doing so saving the peace process I’m not sure I want reminding.

I do not suggest any amendment – not least because I might make matters even more complex than they are. Any comment from me in the text would be blown out of proportion. I do however believe it right to get ICTY to hold their decisions, but also that local politicians to be restrained in commenting on the cases lest they paint themselves into very awkward corners.

Yours aye,

George Robertson

Tee hee.

Been meaning to write this up for some time, and I think for the moment as a blog entry rather than a web page.

Doug Rohde’s paper on the most recent common ancestor of all humanity is the most interesting of the numerous pieces of research cited by Mark Humphrys on this topic. Rohde set up a computer simulation of global population dynamics from 20,000 BC to the present day, including a fairly small allowance for migration rates between continents.

He found that his computer simulations gave results of between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago for the lifetime of the most recent common ancestor of all humanity. Reading through his paper, it seems clear to me that his conclusions are too modest; that in fact it is entirely likely that the most recent ancestor of all humanity lived around 2,000 years ago. I have several reasons for thinking this:

1) Rohde admits that he is using unrealistically low rates of inter-country migration, simply so as not to get results that are too startling. If the real rate of migration between countries and continents is higher than the one he used, the time to the most recent common ancestor decreases.

2) His models assumes that women have an equal probability of bearing children every year between the ages of 16 and 40, thus giving an average age difference between mothers and their children of 28. I reckon this flattens out the natural bump (!) at the lower end of that age range, and my suspicion (without any proof) for most of human history is that most children were born to women aged between 14 and 30. That too will decrease the time to our most recent common ancestor, as the time between generations will be shorter.

(A digression: female-female lines are much harder to trace, which is odd given that there is never any doubt about who a child’s mother is. For instance, little is known of Mary Garritt, the wife of Thomas Webb, a surveyor in Stow-on-the-Wold in the mid-18th century. Her daughter Frances (1775-1862) married Thomas Salisbury, landlord of Marshfield House in Yorkshire. Their daughter Anne (1806-1881) married another gentry type, Edwyn Burnaby of Baggrave Hall in Leicestershire. Their daughter Caroline (1832-1918) married a widowed clergyman who was the grandson of a duke. Their daughter Nina (1862-1938) managed to bag an earl as her husband. Her daughter Elizabeth (1900-2002) did rather better than a mere earl. Her daughter, another Elizabeth, was born in 1926 and is still alive; those of you in the UK and Canada will find her depicted on certain useful everyday objects, ie money. But her direct female line ancestry can be traced back only six generations before it is lost in the Gloucestershire middle classes.)

3) Rohde leaves out the effect of occasional exceptional individuals (what in homage to Asimov we might call the “Mule effect”), in this case those with vast numbers of children all of whom produce descendants, such as Genghis Khan. The paper I link to there shows that Genghis Khan’s Y-chromosomes are present in large proportions of the male population of his former empire.

That of course only measures the direct male-line descent of the individuals concerned. It must be pretty certain that if you take all lineages into account, Genghis Khan is an ancestor, quite likely the most recent common ancestor himself, of everyone between the Aral Sea and the Pacific north of the old boundary line. If he had not fathered the immense number of children he appears to have done, that would surely have added another couple of centuries to the time since the most recent common ancestor of the people of the region.

I’ve argued elsewhere that most of us are descended from the Prophet Muhammad. Someone living in the first few centuries AD, probably in East Asia, probably a man with children by several different women (quite possibly in different places), is the most recent person who is the ancestor of us all.

Of course, while this is a nice concept, it’s not quite as strong as it seems. Rohde points out one reason for this, which is that at the distance of 50 generations the likelihood that we have inherited any genetic material at all from this one particular ancestor is pretty minimal unless you happen to be fairly close in geographical proximity to them.

There is another reason as well, which is that family ties are not just about genetics but are also about how you feel. By emphasising the arrival of children in a family as the product of procreation between married couples of opposite sexes, the Most Recent Common Ancestry model leaves out all the messiness of real life – adoptions, most obviously, but various other possibilities are all around us. It’s an attractive mathematical concept, but we have to bear in mind that it isn’t the whole story.

Most of you who care will have seen most of these already; just for my own record-keeping:

The gender dynamics in cross-class relationships in Firefly. Great quote at the end, though irrelevant to the basic argument:

What I adore about Kaylee, as a character, is that she completely ignores any sort of gender stereotypes, she’s a mechanic, she’s girly, she really into sex, she’s innocent, and when she wants a pretty dress it is quite possibly the ugliest pretty dress you’ve ever seen – but you love her for it.

Follow-up note on Serenity and US politics.

Followed by on the Guild and the Bene Gesserit“Well, Maybe You Can Take That Part Of The Sky”, by Abigail Nussbaum on sin and society;

and on gender and class again especially Inara, which leads to a surprising discussion of Star Trek, especially “The Cage”.

Happy Birthday to and !
(And and yesterday.)

(Slightly surprised that none of you seems to know each other.)

4) The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle

I have been reading this on my Palm T|X after downloading more or less at random from Project Gutenberg. The last of the four collections of Doyle's stories about the great detective, published in 1927, but mostly set in 1900-1902, "around the time of the Boer War". It's an odd selection, not the best of the Holmes stories; there are several tales turning on freaks of nature (monkey gland injections, a disease almost like leprosy and a killer jellyfish) and several where Holmes doesn't actually solve anything but is more a kind of deliverer of absolution. I was also intrigued by the presence in different stories of no less than three Latin American ladies of fiery temperament. Did Doyle have a particular experience from his own past in mind?

The other thing that struck me was the universal use of the telegram as a method of communication. We've forgotten all about this now, but it combined elements of the fax, the SMS and the email. I wonder if anyone can date precisely when the telegram went out of use?

List the towns or cities where you spent at least a night away from home during 2005. Mark with a star if you had multiple non-consecutive stays.

Rome
Ljubljana*
London*
Thessaloniki
Belgrade
Geneva
Washington DC*
New York*
Tirana
Cambridge (Mass)
Paris
Belfast
Tbilisi
Rogate, W Sussex
Loughbrickland, Co. Down
Glasgow
Ohrid
Skopje*
Pristina
Prcanj, Montenegro
Kiev

Not as many as I thought, in fact.

Half a dozen new comment notifications to this post revealed to me that Neil Gaiman had come across my review of his latest book, as a result of browsing himself on Library Thing. It’s a small internet. (My very first post on this livejournal was about meeting him at an autograph session in Brussels.)