Segways and the law

Here's a cutting I ripped from the painfully inoffensive Metro newspaper a few weeks ago. It's about the House of Lords - Britain's strange, unelected upper chamber - discussing whether Segways should be legal. I love this story, because there are clearly so many layers of untold story behind the scenes...

Lords: Give green light to Segways
Scooters known as Segways should be allowed on the roads, peers said yesterday. The electric two-wheelers got the backing after peers tried them out.... Segways are used by police and the public in parts of Europe along with the US. There have been concerns here about safety. But [Liberal Democrat] Lord Redesdale said: 'I drove one straight at Earl Atlee and failed to do him any damage at all.'

Doesn't that last sentence just reek of disappointment?

[Edit: I just found the whole debate here. There are a couple of words missing from Metro's report... "I drove straight at the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, with his consent, and failed to do him any damage at all - unfortunately!" I was right about the disappointment!]

The numbers game

Just now, I heard our dog scrabbling around in the next room. I went in to find him with his snout reaching for some papers I had left on the table (his self-appointed mission seems to be to chomp every piece of paper -- and every pen -- in the world: he's clearly taking his inability to read very hard. Either that or, given that he was trying to eat a receipt, he's in the employ of the tax authorities*).

As I ejected him from the room I said 'I want you both to leave that receipt where it is and to get out of this room at once!'. In saying this, it occurred to me how odd the word 'both' is: why do we have this word that captures 'two-ness' but no equivalent words for other numbers? I guess we can say 'just' and 'only' when we're talking about one thing:

I want you just to leave this room

but what about when there are three things? Surely there should be a word like 'thrith'?

I want you thrith to drop that paper, get out of this room, and go to your bed!

And so on, with numbers for four, five, etc. So what's the deal, philologists? Why the hell is there this huge gap in our language? What are you doing when you should be sorting this stuff out?

* IT WOULD NOT SURPRISE ME IF ALL PETS WORKED FOR THE TAX AUTHORITIES, DESTROYING OUR RECEIPTS SO WE HAVE TO PAY MORE TAX

Movie reviews: Get it together

Film reviewers: can we please, for the love of all that is holy, agree on a single rating system? It seems every time I see a poster or other advert for a film it's plastered with star ratings. But some reviewers use a system of zero to four stars and others use zero to five stars. Can't you see that unless you standardize this, it's meaningless?! If I see a film with four stars, does this mean it's at the top of its scale and so "The best thing ever: miss this and you'll be excluded from every conversation for the rest of time and forced to fake-laugh when people quote lines of dialogue to each other whilst secretly you're dying inside!" or does this mean "Meh..."? Certainly, if I see a film with 5 stars, I can be pretty sure it's in the former category, but that's only until someone starts using a six-point scale and then the whole problem begins again.

As with so many things in life, psychology has the answer. As anybody with even a passing knowledge of the subject will know, to a first approximation our minds can only conceive of around 7 different levels of anything. That suggests that a six-star rating system would be optimal, with zero stars being one of the seven categories. You'll note that this mirrors recent developments in hotel ratings, which clearly proves I'm right.

Now at this point you might argue that because it's possible to award half-stars, we already have 9- and 11-point scales. To which I say: I'M NEVER WATCHING A FILM AGAIN BECAUSE IT'S ALL BECOME TOO STRESSFUL!

And now I battle werewolves

I just got tipped off about the synopsis of a novel called Thunder Moon, by Lori Handeland:

Residents of Lake Bluff, Georgia hope and pray that the small town has returned to normal after the werewolf incidents... However...something is stalking the town; this creature can rip a heart out of a person, but leave no marks on the epidermis. This killer seems to have arrived at about the same time that Dr. Ian Walker came to Lake Bluff. Attracted to the newcomer, she scoffs at his insistence that she contains powerful magic inherited from her Cherokee background. They team up to investigate a supernatural serial killer.

I... I don't know what to say.

Update: And now there's a promotional video! I know it's silly, but it really feels a little odd seeing my name there like that. But at least they accurately portrayed my rock-hard body and raw sexual magnetism...

Government's lost database: I'm ready

Given that our government has shown itself so incompetent that they see nothing wrong with giving junior staff the ability to burn a massive secret database full of personal information onto two CDs and bung them in the mail, I along with many others are now living in dread, given that our rulers are obsessed with national ID cards and storing all sorts of other biometrics about British people to foil every form of badness imaginable, from snoring to queue-jumping. As people have pointed out, if the government loses your bank account number and it falls into criminal hands, you can always get a new number. This isn't the case once the government is routinely using fingerprints and iris scans everywhere.

Or is it?! For I can reveal that I have finally perfected Remova-Finga™ technology, allowing quick and easy changes of fingerprints within moments of a government employee doing something so idiotic that it would be disappointing behaviour from a mollusc. I now just need to finish working on iBall-Swappa™ and we're all set to continue living safely under the rule of our mighty leaders.

The Golden Age that I missed

I recently discovered the terribly talented Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton. Perhaps my favourite cartoon on her website is her idea of what academic life must be like. As a 21st Century academic, I can't quite express the disappointment I feel in doing my job fifty years too late. Imagine how wonderful it would have been to teach at a university back in the days when one could sit in a seminar room with a group of students, sucking ruminatively on a pipe and watching the smoke play through a shaft of sunlight before eventually wagging the stem at one of the students and saying, "Hum, yes, but what you've overlooked is...". Now that's academic life as it should be.

Damn you, anti-smoking laws - you've ruined the dream! And all because of your "cancer" and "life expectancy". Bah.

Google adverts for weirdos?

Google's adverts are context-sensitive: they scan the page they are appearing on and advertise things related to that page's content, so that people viewing a website see adverts they are likely to be interested in.

Look at the advert I just spotted on this blog. Apparently Google thinks I attract cat deviants. Feed your passion? With hairballs?