Flash games
I just discovered that my web host provides some free Flash games, so here are a couple of timewasters for you:
Blocker – a “rising blocks” puzzle game in which you have to click on groups of 3 or more blocks to remove them before the towers reach the top.
Packets – load packages onto lorries in the most efficient way ready for delivery.
pax et bonum
Track with co.mments
Track with del.icio.usHow not to do it
Is this the worst website design in the world? Or if you want something a bit more flash (pun intended), how about this? You’ll want to watch that second one to the end, just to see the title the bishop’s wife is given!
(“Thanks” to Howard for pointing those out.)
pax et bonum
Jews arrested for 'anti-Semitism'
Yes, you read that right. Ruth Gledhill reports on the recent arrest of four Jews for ‘anti-Semitism’ – handing out leaflets promoting a Protocols of the Elders of Hackney party. The party will apparently now take place in another venue in the East End of London and will include entertainment from a “radical beth din” and a “live borscht show”. Go read Ruth’s post. It’s a sad indication of the current state of politics.
pax et bonum
Eat less fish, urges WWF
Worldwide fish stocks are in severe danger, reports the Worldwide Fund for Nature. Overfishing means that “over the past 30 years global cod catches have decreased by over 70 per cent, with catches by the current EU countries now just 10 per cent of the 1970 level”. Indeed, the UK consumes a staggering one-third of the global cod catch (mostly as fish and chips).
Perhaps now would be a good time to start boycotting cod – I’ve a co-worker who already does. The WWF is asking consumers to consider alternatives such as pollock, hake, hoki, Pacific cod, sablefish and mackerel icefish, preferably with a “Marine Stewardship” label. “Products with this label have been independently assessed as meeting the rigorous MSC standard – the only internationally recognised set of environmental principles to assess whether a fishery is well managed and sustainable.”
(_Thanks to The Register for the tip._)
pax et bonum
The secret life of a cell
This is awesome – a CGI animation of what goes on inside a cell.
pax et bonum
Iraq torture 'worse after Saddam'
We can all feel even more proud of our Government’s plan to set Iraq free and to instill all the wonderful democratic virtues. According to the UN’s chief anti-torture expert, torture in Iraq is probably worse after Saddam than it was before. Most abuses are committed by security forces, militia groups and anti-US insurgents, and bodies found in the Baghdad morgue “often bear signs of severe torture”, including broken bones, missing teeth and wounds caused by acids, cigarettes, nails, electric drills and more.
Good plan, well executed, I think we can agree.
pax et bonum
£100 PC launches
Fancy one of these – a PC costing under £100? Well, it was launched today in China. The processor runs at 1 GHz, giving plenty of horsepower for most purposes (especially given it’s not running the huge overheads of Windows), and was developed in China. I wonder if they’ll launch them over here? At that price (lower than a palmtop or many mobile phones, and less than the cheapest copy of MS Windows sells for just as the operating system!), I think they might do well…
pax et bonum
Xena is no more
Xena was an icy object in the outer solar system, and shot to fame by causing Pluto to be officially stripped of the title “planet” (it’s now officially only a “dwarf planet”) because it is actually larger than Pluto. Now Xena itself has been given an official name – “Xena” was only an unofficial label and solar system objects aren’t generally named after the heroines of cult TV shows! So, henceforth, Xena is to be known as “Eris” – the Greek goddess of discord. Quite appropriate after all the fuss she caused. Eris’ moon is now called Dysnomia (Eris’ daughter in the myths, and goddess of lawlessness).
(_Thanks to The Register for the tip._)
pax et bonum
Green supermarkets?
A new report from the National Consumer Council looks at how well the top supermarkets do in environmental friendliness. Unsurprisingly, the answer is “not very”. Again unsurprisingly, perhaps, Waitrose came out best in the survey, although they did stock organic strawberries that had been flown from New Zealand. Morrison’s and Somerfield came bottom.
[The NCC] urged them to make environmentally-friendly options the norm for all shoppers, rather than simply the more ecologically aware.
“We all need to understand that food is the typical household’s number one contributor to climate change,” NCC chairman Lord Whitty said.
“By throwing away ten billion carrier bags each year and transporting carrots from Egypt and strawberries from New Zealand, we hit the environment hard.”
pax et bonum
Hezbollah accused of war crimes
The BBC reports that Amnesty International has followed its condemnation of Israel for war crimes with a condemnation of Hezbollah – for war crimes. Israel targeted Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. Hezbollah deliberately aimed rockets at civilian buildings. Tit for tat, an eye for an eye, blood calling out to blood. The cycle of hatred that no one seems able to stop.
Amnesty repeated its call for “a comprehensive, independent and impartial inquiry” by the UN into the violations and to ensure there was “full reparation” to victims.
It said those responsible for civilian suffering were “escaping all accountability”.
Ms Khan said: “Justice is urgently needed if respect for the rules of war is ever to be taken seriously.”
pax et bonum
IMF and World Bank meeting
The International Monetary Fund and the Word Bank are meeting this week to discuss (among other things) how they work with civil society groups to improve the lot of poor countries. However, the host country of the meeting, Singapore, is blocking the entry of many representatives of these civil society groups. As a protest, Christian Aid is joining the movement asking civil society groups to boycott the meeting.
“This is an extremely disappointing development by the Singaporean authorities,” said John McGhie, Christian Aid’s Campaigns Editor. “We are now keen to lend our full support to the international call for an immediate boycott of all formal talks with either the Bank or the Fund in Singapore. It would be a travesty to hold cosy chats with their officials while so many of our colleagues are being denied entry to the country.”...
The move is bound to embarrass Bank officials in particular. The World Bank’s new Director General, Paul Wolfowitz, a former member of US President’s George Bush’s cabinet, has spent his first few months in office pursuing a ‘governance’ agenda that sought to eliminate corruption in developing countries. In order to achieve this he was leaning heavily on civil society groups for both credibility and implementation, say campaigners.
“It is farcical for the Bank and the Fund to meet and discuss human rights in a country where human rights are restricted. It shows how out of step with reality they are”.
In a related move, Christian Aid is also calling on the UK Government to stop funding the IMF and WB, as part of the commitment it made last year after the Make Poverty History campaign.
Last year one of the successes of the Make Poverty History campaign, was that Tony Blair announced the UK would no longer force poor countries to implement controversial economic policies in return for aid.
This radical call to withdraw UK money from the World Bank and IMF is to try to persuade them to follow suit.
Update
I heard this story on the radio this morning, but haven’t been able to find it on the BBC News site. Hillary Benn MP, Secretary of State for International Development, has announced that the UK Government will be witholding £50 million of its contribution to the World Bank, in protest at its policies. Christian Aid has welcomed this announcement.
pax et bonum
Making it legal
GW Bush has proposed new legislation that would allow more methods of interrogation to be used by the USA on prisoners – methods including sleep deprivation and exposure to extreme heat and cold. These, let’s remember, are methods that were rejected by the US military on the very same day as Bush proposed this legislation. Worse even than this, other new legislation is already explicitly weaseling out of Geneva Convention restrictions on “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” by defining it much more narrowly as treatment that “shocks the conscience”. Leaving undefined, of course, whose conscience is to be shocked.
I often hear that the Geneva Conventions don’t bind the USA in this instance, but I’ve yet to hear an argument that’s even vaguely logical to defend this position. There’s nothing new in the current situation, apart from a new paranoia and hysteria that’s sweeping the USA and (to a lesser extent) Europe. There’s nothing new about terrorists attacking a stronger enemy. There’s nothing new about a strong country invading a weak one. The only thing that is new is a strong country (indeed, the strongest country of all) declaring that it need no longer abide by the legal and moral standards that bind every other country in the world.
Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military Win Bush’s Support
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: September 8, 2006
Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.
The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.
But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures…
The proposed legislation, said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University, “seems to be trying to surgically remove from our compliance with Geneva the section of Common Article 3 that deals with humiliating and degrading treatment.”...
Dean Koh said the administration’s new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would further isolate the United States from the rest of the world.
“Making U.S. ratification of Common Article 3 narrower and more conditional than everyone else’s,” he said, “by its very nature suggests that we are not prepared to make the same commitment that every other nation has made.”
(Thanks to Mike at WorD for the tip.)
pax et bonum
Hedge jelly
Summer’s coming to an end, which means lots of good things in the garden 
So, yesterday, we used the first crab apples from our new little tree (two years old now) to make hedge jelly. This is a nice little recipe that we found in Bob Flowerdew’s Complete Fruit Book. What’s especially nice is that it emphasises foraging for the ingredients.
You need:
1 quantity elderberries
2 quantities crab apples
4 quantities haws (the berries of the hawthorn)
(Anne gathered about 700g haws, so we based our recipe on that amount.)
Wash the fruit, removing elderberries from their twigs with a fork, removing twigs from haws and chopping crab apples. Place all in a pan and just cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer until soft (we left them for a couple of hours). Strain off the juice. “Proper” cookbooks will tell you not to squeeze the fruit but that’s for the purists. It gets you the clearest jelly but loses more of the fruit. Once the juice has strained, weight it and add the same amount of sugar (we had 920g juice so added 920g sugar). Bring it back to the boil and boil until it sets (I like a temperature of about 104 degrees C, which gives a nice soft jelly), then pour into clean, sterile jars. We got over 4 pounds of jelly from this quantity – a small but worthwhile amount, and really quite quick to make!
Added to the glutney we made last week, we’re well under way. And our pear tree still has a huge crop on it – plenty of pear jams this year!
pax et bonum
Memes
I was doing so well, avoiding all these memes washing around the blogosphere, and then I get hit by two of them! First, Sven hit me with the “one book” meme, then Dr Moose hit me with the “six weird things” meme. So, with no more ado, here are my answers to these two.
Pandora's Star
Another new read for me was this book by Peter F. Hamilton. Perhaps surprisingly, I've not read anything by Hamilton before but, based on this, I will certainly be reading him again. The story is gripping and original (interstellar travel by diesel train!), and the characters are varied and interesting. The story is a first-contact variant – humanity has colonised the stars using wormholes through which the above-mentioned trains run. As a result, when the first true space ship is built to investigate some very odd astronomical events, tensions run high. The alien race that is eventually discovered is unexpected and hostile, and Bad Things start to happen.
The book is heavy on the action, with characterisation somewhat lacking, but he drags you along at a rip-roaring pace despite the 1100+ pages that this book takes. Indeed, and this is the only negative I'd mention, the story doesn't end there. This is definitely the first half of the story, in which the wasps' nest gets well and truly broken open. To get the end of the story I'll need to read the next book, Judas Unchained. And I'll be doing that soon!
Paperback: 1152 Pages
Publisher: Tor (04 March 2005)
ISBN: 0330493310
My Rating: 
Buy from Amazon
Singularity Sky
Another book I read recently, this time by Charles Stross. Stross posits a post-Singularity setting, in which humanity has been scattered to the stars by an entity known as the Eschaton, which seems to be from the future. The Eschaton has acted (and continues to act) to preserve its own future existence and, as a result, enforces a very few laws. The most important of these is “Thou shalt not violate causality”. That is, although humanity has the means to travel in time (because it has faster-than-light spaceships), the Eschaton will act to prevent us doing so – on a scale up to and including destroying entire solar systems.
The novel itself concerns a much smaller stage – an encounter between two radically different cultures. Rochard’s World is ruled by a culture that rejects advanced technology, relying in human intelligence and abilities. It is visited by the Festival, a post-human culture that travels the stars in search of entertainment. Through this clash, we follow two people, working for two different government agencies to push two different agendas. They must deal with war and prevent fools from taking actions that would bring the wrath of the Eschaton down on them and anyone within tens of light years. In general, a right good read. I’m dubious about the Singularity but Stross uses it well. The story gets a bit confusing in a few places but generally works. Worth reading, and I will try another of his books soon.
Paperback: 400 Pages
Publisher: Orbit (03 February 2005)
ISBN: 1841493341
My Rating: 
Buy from Amazon
Criticism of the Children's Index
Eileen Fairweather, the journalist who helped expose the Islington child abuse scandal, writes in the Mail on Sunday about the UK Government’s Children’s Index (a register of the names and full details of all children in the UK, including addresses, parents/guardians etc., with access granted to a wide range of civil servants and members of the public):
I have investigated child abuse scandals for nearly 20 years and interviewed many paedophiles.
Most, I am certain, will feel that, with the Index, all their birthdays have come at once. It will help them identify vulnerable children, plant malicious lies to discredit those who might speak up and discover – and possibly intimidate – those already doing so.
Paranoid? Sadly not. I have seen children’s files manipulated in this way time and again – particularly in Islington, the London borough whose 12 children’s homes were infiltrated by child sex-ring procurers while Margaret Hodge was council leader.
How ironic the Index is her legacy, shepherded in while she was Children’s Minister.
Does she still not understand how paedophiles operate? Many choose work with children, targeting councils, schools, hospitals and the police.
(Thanks to No2ID for the tip)
pax et bonum
Back from holiday
I’m back!
The family holiday to Greenbelt didn’t go as well as usual – a combination of arriving there very tired and over-excited children meant that I didn’t go to much, and the final indignity was having our trailer and all our camping stuff stolen on the way home. So, I didn’t have the energy to post last week. Fortunately, I’ve managed to catch up somewhat on sleep, so normal blog service should resume without further interruptions.
pax et bonum
