Let me bask in this...

Been spending a lot of time on Urbis recently. This is a creative writing website that works off a very interesting system of credits, where the more you review other people, the more reviews you get. Most of the users are people who desperately want to get published, so there is an element of the blind leading the blind, but I still find it useful and interesting anyway.

But I've just got to get my gloat on very briefly - one of my stories currently has the highest rating of the sci-fi/fantasy category. It might not stay that way once it gets more than 6 reviews, but I'm chuffed nonetheless...

A few of my favourite things

I like webcomics. I read them compulsively, which I consider an extension of being overexposed to the Beano when I was younger. I've also been asked before which ones I read, so I decided to put together a list of the ones I read regularly in ascending order of which I like.

Anyone who knows their webcomics will immediately notice that I tend to go for the story based comics rather than gag-a-day ones. But it still has to be funny. Also, I normally like the artwork to be up to a decent standard, but that isn't always the case.

13. Kitty Litter
The art isn't great but the humour is wonderfully sadistic. Think if Sluggy Freelance were to solely focus on Bun-Bun.

12. Lizzy
Rather inventively uses Flash rather than still images, i.e. stuff happens and speech bubbles appear when you move your mouse over. The plot, however, is yet to really build up and the cybernetic stuff is a bit gory in places. Plus the humour levels are massively inconsistent.

10. Alien Loves Predator
Pretty innovative as far as the art goes. Rather than drawing stuff, this features photographs of action figures against photographs using the gift of Photoshop. The updates have become few and far between recently but some of the humour is priceless, if a bit specific to New York.

9. Maxwell the Demon
The idea of comparing the workings of hell to desk jockeying isn't a new one, but this one still does it wonderfully well with a lot of sharp gags and really nice art. The subplots involving his human girlfriend make for some very funny stuff, and I like the nice touches like Gabriel being a chainsmoker.

8. Belphegor (RIP)
Good while it lasted. It was another hell-based comic, only featuring a lot more of the more classic demonic imagery. It started out as simple potty humour and compuer game references but it eventually managed to evolve into left-wing political satire. Unfortunately, it ground to a halt over a year ago.

7. Applegeeks
This took me a while to get into. Hawk's is possibly the best webcomic art out there, but and he and Ananth have this annoying habit of shifting styles a little too often and taken as a whole, this doesn't conform to any particular style. There will be some favourite story that most people will find, but it may take some searching for. The treatments of Ramadan should dispell any notions of Muslims not having a sense of humour.

6. Hate Song (RIP)
I miss this strip a lot. A lot of really disgusting and incredibly offensive humour that rarely pulled its punches. Kept losing its way a lot but always recovered with something even more disturbing that you'd expect in any one situation. Rather ominously, the banner across the top now says, "changes are coming". Not sure what that means.

5. Scary Go Round
The only British comic in the list but it is incredibly funny in places. John Allison's artwork is good but I preferred his original style to the freehand one that he uses now. The stories tend to meander and not connect with each other and in places they really lose the plot but there are some genuinely charming characters and humour that is far more quirky than most American strips are capable of.

4. Megatokyo
Manga, but made by an American. The pencil artwork, particularly the later stuff, is top notch (despite Fred Gallagher's apparent inability to distinguish between female characters by any method other than changing their hair) and the humour often has me laughing out loud, especially when Ed or Dom make an appearance. Just a shame that the mushy subplots get too self-pitying in places. Some of the parody is classic though, such as rent-a-zilla and the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division, and the overusage of l33t never gets old.

3. Goats
The genious of this in in the writing, with Jon Rosenberg churning out some real belly laughs on a regular basis, although I think you have to have the right sense of humour for it. Not so sure I like it as much post-infinite monkeys, but the gags alone are enough to keep me coming back if nothing else. The art has also come on massively over the years.

2. The Adventures of Dr. McNinja
The concept is easy to explain but hard to visualise. You have a doctor, who is also a ninja. His assistant is a gorilla, his mentor a clone of Benjamin Franklin and his sidekick a pubescent, velociraptor-riding Mexican bandito who grew his moustache by force of will alone. If you think that is daft, you should see his family. The strip is funny going on hilarious and while the art is done in a very traditional outline and ink way, this serves to further the parody. Relatively new but has already proved to be massively sucessful.

1. Sluggy Freelance
The the webcomic I have read the longest and still my favourite. Good artwork (the later stuff at least), funny and at times hilarious jokes and involving plotlines. Often faces criticism for some of the arcs getting overly complicated (especially the ones with the big back stories) and hard to stick with but if you can, it makes the picture as a whole all the more better. The stories don't seem to conform to any one overall masterplan but I see that as simply being more indicative of how long it has been running for. The general style has evolved over time, but Pete Abrhams continues to keep improving his writing and every now and then produces something that outdoes anything else out there. Ten minutes at a party has to be one of my favourite stories of all time.

So that's it.

Conspiracy theorists and GWB are more alike than they think. Discuss.

Something that has soaked up a lot of my time of late (mainly to relieve work stress of getting the new aircraft rack finished) on the internet is visiting 9/11 conspiracy theory debunking websites such as this, this and this (Jon being the one to blame for my interest). For those not familiar with such things, it's more or less akin to the various other conspiracy theories such as those surrounding the JFK assassination or the moon landings. For the most part, they're not quite as sinister as Holocaust denial or as ridiculous as David Ike's lizard people, but there's quite a lot out there, most revolving around the whole shebang on September the 11th being organised by the US government to justify everything that has occurred since, such as the Iraq war. It seems that most of the people coming up with this are either the ones who actively want to believe the worst about the government, the ones who like to think that they're in on some big secret or the plain and simple attention seekers.

Most of this I just find mildly entertaining, but the bit that really winds me up is the continual misuse of science and critical thinking. I do both for a day-job and hate to see them messed around with and as a result, I love seeing the perpetrators put in their place. The straight-up lies and bogus physics are painfully easy to smack down and fanciful interpretations almost as much so. Beyond that, you simply have pure speculative stuff that is impossible to prove either way because the theorists can't back up their facts and they automatically disbelieve anything the authorities say otherwise. And then you have the odd person who claims to have insider knowledge but is in fact full of crap.

The bit where the spurious arguing sets in is when they start cherrypicking facts and deliberately ignore anything that might contradict their arguments. The classic example is poring through transcripts of witnesses' testimonies and picking out any reference to seeing flashes or hearing bangs as evidence of explosives being used in a controlled demolition. The bit they never, ever tell you is exactly when and where these things were reported because they they often occur minutes or even hours in advance of the collapses, which of course means they had to have been something else. This kind of mentality is sent up brilliantly in the spoof Loose Trains.

I peer-review papers all the time for my job and one of the most obvious things that gets alarm bells ringing is when the authors proactively avoid any possible counterarguments to their argument rather than meeting them head-on and systematically explaining why their theory is the more plausible. Conspiracy theorists do this all the time, not in most cases because they are deliberately out to deceive but because they are so sure in their convictions that they are right that they will latch onto anything that supports their case. Everything else, no matter how comprehensive or authoritative, they develop this blind spot towards, dismissing it as meaningless or part of the conspiracy.


Which brings me nicely onto a parallel with the conspiracy theorists' arch-nemesis, the Bush administration. The fact that they told a bunch of lies to justify the Iraq invasion is not in question, but this story caught my eye today, which is basically a retelling of a documentary on CBS. If their version of events is correct, all the stuff about chemical weapons etcetera was based on a lone bullshitter from Iraq who wanted to claim asylum and get a green card. The US authorities should have had reasons to doubt his testimony (the Germans, who had picked him up, expressed reservations about his credibility) but instead decided to base a big chunk of their WMD intelligence on it. Subsequently, the powers that be played innocent, saying they were only acting on information they were presented and they couldn't help it if it was flawed and so on, but I can't help but to think that if they had been willing to look at the whole picture instead of the bits they liked, they would have come to more factual conclusion. Not that that was ever the objective for them, of course. They had a war to start.

I just find it very entertaining though that for all the claims of the governments being these inhuman puppetmasters and so on, it turns out that they're not that different after all. Bush doesn't need some clandestine plot to blow up buildings and blame it on someone else. He just uses the same logical fallacies that the conspiracy theorists have at their disposal. Although, I'll admit, what he achieved with those was far more devastating.

The diet starts tomorrow

Imagine, if you will, the analogy of global warming to human obesity. The more you eat and less you exercise, the fatter you get. The more CO2 you put in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet gets.

The earth needs to diet. Badly. But I can personally vouch for diets being hard. Sacrifices have to be made if you want to avoid higher risks of heart attack, diabetes and being a fat bastard. Such is the way of life. Using this view, the attitudes of the head-in-the-sand brigade are pretty simple to summarise:

"The earth isn't warming up" = "I'm not fat, I'm big boned"
"The earth warming up is a natural process" = "It's just water retention"
"The science isn't complete" = "You haven't taken into account my motabilism"

All complete toss, naturally. You can argue about the finer details until the cows come home, but it doesn't stop you being a serious fat-ass who needs to cut down on the lard.

On that note, some of dear Georgie latest paltry offerings at a US-hosted climate conference are just plain laughable:

Mr Bush stressed that combating climate change should not damage the economy.
...
"We must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people," he said.

i.e. "I'm going to lose weight but I'm not giving up my cream cakes."

And he again hinted that the US would not commit itself to mandatory CO2 cuts.
...
"By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem. And by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it," Mr Bush said.

"I'm going to lose weight, I've bought the books and the treadmill, just let me do it in my own time."

"Each nation must decide for itself the right mix of tools and technology to achieve results that are measurable and environmentally effective," Mr Bush told delegates in Washington.

"I'm not going to hassle you, so you don't hassle me. We can all do this without Weight Watchers meetings or weigh-ins or anything."

How many people do you know who have sworn they were going to lose weight to these sorts of statements and didn't? (I'll admit to being one of them) Wake up, Mr. President. Please.

OK, so it's an improvement on his previous line, but he's still living in a serious state of denial. His vision is that with the right investment, some bright American will invent a magic bullet to solve climate change (that presumably they can sell to the rest of the world). Trouble is, I don't know about anyone else, is that when you have access to low-fat mayyonaise (e.g. hybrid cars) you either end up using twice as much of it or use it as an excuse to have that extra bag of crisps.

Open for Buisiness

It was going to happen sooner or later, but now they've announced that the fabled northwest passage, the route between the Atlantic and the Pacific that goes over North America, has opened for the first time after all the centuries of explorers trying and failing to find a way through the ice. The reason, you guessed it, is our old friend global warming.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6995999.stm

This raises an interesting point. If people can suddenly get between the two oceans without having to go through the Panama Canal and paying the extortionate fees associated with it, should one have to pay someone else for the pleasure? Funnily enough, Canada thinks you should. Everyone else thinks you shouldn't. Cue lots of international wrangling and lawyers lining their pockets.

But in my mind the more important question is what bizarre maritime rituals are people going to invent for first-timers doing this, akin to the treatement administered to hapless new recruits and postdocs get when they do things like the equator, the international date line, the Panama, Suez and Kiel canals etc. Only time will tell on that one...

Iron Maiden's plans for 2008

Iron Maiden have announced their tour plans for 2008, in the shape of a world tour dubbed "Somewhere Back in Time". They'll have their own plane (which Bruce is piloting, naturally) and will be playing stuff from the eighties to kind of make up for their last tour in which they played their (albeit amazing) new album start to finish.

More details are here but the bit that had me interested was this bit:

Rod Smallwood, Iron Maiden's Manager, further commented; "Following Bruce's various hints from on stage this last year about our plans for 2008 ("We are taking some time off to build some pyramids!"), fans have been pestering me for details of the tour and especially asking which songs from that era will be played. That may be as easy as a run in the hills but we will keep our aces close to our chest on this issue. I know it would only take a couple of minutes but at this stage of planning, I'd have to be clairvoyant to know what they will do. I'm sure though it will be no revelation for you that we intend to make up for those wasted years by visiting a large number of hallowed metal venues around the world. Historically 'Powerslave' was an incredibly important album for the band and it would be madness if we didn't give the fans a taste of the full on Iron Maiden show from that time. With our jumbo there really is no rime nor reason why the band cannot now visit fans almost everywhere as many have been real troopers to have waited this long. Heaven only knows what the band will choose but if l could and did tell you now l would have to shoot you! You'll all have to be patient and see. But it will be spectacular. No fear!!"

Most Maiden fans should be able to pull the batting order out of that. Depending on how much imagination you have, I counted maybe 12 or 14 references but I probably missed a couple. I hope the last bit means FOTD will be played, given that it isn't technically 80s but is awesome anyway. Anyway, I will have to catch them somewhere, ideally Wacken but anywhere would suffice.

Another weekend, another wristband

As if one in August wan't enough, I've just got back from another music festival, this time the Solway Music Festival, AKA Solfest, that took place in northern Cumbria over the bank holiday weekend. The overall theme of the music was folky stuff, although there was quite a lot of variation, with a handful of rock acts and a dance tent (which I never entered). However, there was a much bigger emphasis placed on the general festival vibe with quirkiness being the order of the day.

Put it this way; on one of the days, whilst there was a hula hooping workshop going on in the middle of the fields, a brass band (I never found out their name) set up shop. They wore alternating purple and lime green suits, the lead singer used a loud hailer and they handed out maracas and tambourines to the audience for percussion. Then towards the end of their set, a group of belly dancers showed up in full regalia and gave an impromptu dance. The real kicker of course is that at this festival, it wouldn't be considered unusual.

There was all sorts of other stuff as well. A healing area where tents offered everything from Thai massages to crystal therapy, an African musical instrument shop with people seemingly drumming permanently outside (public free to join in), a clothes stall where every item was made out of hemp, a wood-fired vegetarian pizza stall, scheduled storytelling sessions and a wood-fired sauna and shower, operated in a tent out of someone's trailer. Overall, stuff straight out of Viz's Modern Parents that made the tent selling bongs and legal highs seem mundane in comparison.

They had a good spectrum of music with a main stage and a beer tent doing the main acts and the 'Drystone Stage' doing some of the more unheard of stuff, which included a lot of local talent. This was a good place to go if you weren't doing anything else because you'd be guaranteed to find something unusual and cool. The Weirside Ceilidh and Bad Acid are the ones that stick in my mind the most.

The bar stage had some interesting stuff, most of which I'd not heard of but some I may have to chase up in the future. Ben's Brother were a guitar band playing something that amounted to a more uplifting version of James Blunt or Coldplay that oozed quality. Uniting the Elements were a girly hard/goth rock band whose quality and showmanship seemed at odds with the fact that they appeared to be unsigned (at least, they were selling CD-Rs afterwards). The Bluehorses were a Welsh Celtic Rock band who played a very progressive set that ranks as one of my favourite bits of the festival. The emo-tinged alt-rock of Johnny Panic proved to be a welcome change at the end of the weekend but you got the impression they were wasted on most of the audience.

On the main stage there were some fantastic acts. Neck did a great Celtic rock set and Show of Hands added to the folk credentials of the festival, even if they were lyrically depressing. The Bikini Beach Band were simply a fun surfer tribute band and great at it. The Ozric Tentacles gave some of their psychedelic progressive rock, marred by some unfortunate power cuts, and the Undertones showed that they still have it where it counts, getting the whole crowd going. Badly Drawn Boy was good but not great (he didn't seem as cheerful as the last time I saw him) but the best act of the weekend for me was the Levellers. My in-laws just kept saying how much of a ripoff of the Waterboys they were, but I didn't care. They got the crowd really fired up and jumping and me and Eimear were right by the fence for it.

Downsides were general inadequacies of the toilets; the portaloos themselves were nice (providing the seats stayed intact) but there weren't enough of them and the gents' piss-pots kept overfilling. Some of the stewards appeared stoned and the sound systems were pretty poor; most bands on the beer stage were continually signalling for the monitors to be turned up and the main stage couldn't be heard well from the mixing desk backwards.

None of it was bad enough to put a downer on things however and a good time was had by all. Would definitely consider going back next year. Maybe have to sort out fancy dress costumes as well, which was the order of the day on the Saturday.

Apology to Mr. Gates

Finally got to the bottom of the weird Vista slowdown bug. Turns out it wasn't Microsoft's fault after all, it was Endnote's (an academic bibliography package that interfaces with Word). Turning off the instant formatting option solved everything. That's my biggest Vista gripe dealt with.

Still, Bill's not off the hook for all the other stuff ranted about previously...

Back from Wacken

Just got back from Wacken Open Air and I have to say it ROCKED. For those that don't know, it is the biggest heavy metal music festival in the world and takes place in a small town in northern Germany. I've just been there for the first time with Eimear, Jon, Leo and Robin. Photos to follow when Eimear finds her camera.

The trip there was a bit taxing; there was an accident on the autobahn near the town that resulted in us being stuck in a traffic queue for a number of hours and us pitching our tent long after dawn. From there on in things got better.

As festival campsites went it was pretty good. There were showers and flushing toilets if you were prepared to part with a few Euros and the campsite not too crowded. The town of Wacken seemed to enjoy all the extra business with extra market stalls and things put out on the street and the local supermarket building a temporary beer market extension. The atmosphere was on the whole pretty relaxed, so long as you don't mind your neighbours playing Rammstein at God-knows-when in the morning. Industrial grade earplugs sorted that one out a treat.

The festival ground itself was great, considering it had been turned to quagmire only days previous by heavy rain. This had been remedied by carpeting it in straw, something that lead to inevitable hijinks. Drink-wise, Becks and mead were the order of the day, preferably drunk from one of the horns for sale in the huge market area. Also for sale included lots of clothes, t-shirts, CDs and a whole plethora of accessories.

But what about the music? Given that it was a northern European festival, there was an emphasis on the black metal subgenre, which wasn't to my personal taste but Jon and Leo loved it, in particular the melodic stuff like Norway's Dimmu Borgir. However, that wasn't the be all and end all; the first band we saw, Rose Tattoo, were a classic Aussie hard rock band, their use of ZZ Top-style slide guitars setting them apart from contemporaries such as Aerosmith and AC/DC.

A lot of my favourite stuff over the course of the festival were those that really got the crowd going and Finnish folk metallers Turisas were experts at that. How many bands can you think of that replace the lead guitar with a fiddle and accordion, dress up in furs and war paint and proceed to sing about getting drunk and charging into battle? Even amongst metalheads, it either works or it doesn't but I for one loved it, as did Eimear and Robin. Also great on the small stages were the American thrash-hardcore outfit Municipal Waste, who by the strike of the first chord turned the crowd into a beer-fuelled, frenzied circle pit that only let up to let people crowd surf on boogie boards and watch an audience member do a beer bong on stage. The German band Heaven Shall Burn would also fit into this category; I'm not normally into death metal but their sheer amount of thrashy intensity and energy was impossible to dislike and made for a great mosh pit. Similarly superb were Electric Eel Shock, a Japanese three-piece playing classic metal and punk that make up for sophistication with sheer insanity and a totally carefree attitude. Just a shame they didn't have their regular drummer, which meant they only had two nutcases on stage.

There were some good listenable bands too. The German band Rage did an orchestra-backed set of progressive and power metal tunes that worked fantastically well. The performance by veteran US thrashers Iced Earth left me wondering why I haven't listened to more of their stuff previously and Italian goth metal band Lacuna Coil also far exceeded my expectations, with their set being much more energetic and varied than the recorded work I had previously listened to. Therion, another goth band, this time from Sweden, also blew me away. It wasn't for the instrumental work; they kind of meandered between styles such as symphonic, power and death metal but never really getting stuck into any of them. What did it for me was their use of operatic soprano backing singers. It sent shivers down me. The best theatrics had to have belonged to the German band Die Apokalyptischen Reiter, whose on stage antics worked well with their accessible brand of death metal. The highlight had to have been pulling a female audience member onstage to sing along with them for one song, then afterwards locking her in a cage with their gimp-suited keyboard player. Also deserving a mention are Faeroean folk metallers Tyr, if only for the sheer amount of testosterone on display. Think 300 with Vikings.

There were some stuff I inevitably didn't get. Brit classic metal veterans Saxon and German power metallers Blind Guardian didn't get me going like I'd hoped but I got the definite impression that they were playing to their existing fanbases (like Robin). The British band Napalm Death I saw just out of the general principle of them being the godfathers of grindcore, but they just reminded me that I don't actually like that style. The exact same could be said of Immortal and the Norwegian black metal genre and Americans Cannibal Corpse and brutal death metal, both of which only got a cursory glance from me despite the fact that they were some of the biggest bands playing.

Overall though, fantastic festival but one that I'm going to take a while to recover from. Later will come the inevitable question of whether I go next year. Given that Iron Maiden are already confirmed, it's a definite maybe.

Own worst enemy?

Had some more time to digest Windows Vista and things are working overall. The thing that amuses me the most is the fact that the majority of the compatibility problems I've had are all Microsoft related. Office 2003 is particularly annoying, with things like multiple instances of Powerpoint unable to appear properly as previews (which would be genuinely useful) and I still haven't got to the bottom of that Word slowdown thing. Windows messenger doesn't seem to want to do the whole Aero translucent window thing either, which given that it is supposed to be Vista native strikes me as odd. Third party apps are more or less fine though. Funny that.

There are a few exceptions. CutePDF, despite claiming to be compatible, is a pain to install, which I put down to lazy programming on their part. Also, videos working in the previews work fine for everything EXCEPT Quicktime, so all the Apple fanboys out there can shut up.

Oh yeah, and I disabled the sidebar. Couldn't see the point in it.

It's the Sony Killstick!!!!

OK, even I'm not usually dorky enough to get overawed by cosplay but this one of Megatokyo's Piroko at Otakon is awesome. The Flickr album belongs to Hawk of Applegeeks fame.

What's wrong with the air in China

This report (or lack of) came as little surprise to me:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6911784.stm

Basically, there is environmental research going on in China. It's not that the Chinese government don't know about things like all the smog and desert dust killing people and all the CO2 causing global warming and they do commit a pretty tidy sum towards researching it (although a big chunk is dedicated to researching weather modification). It's just that they don't like the results and they can't admit to having an environmentally unsustainable development policy. So they bury the bad news, pretend it doesn't exist and carry on regardless (as opposed to the western approach which is to at least pay it lip service and then carry on). Just goes to show that their policy on expression and access to information applies to science as well as everything else.

PS foreign scientists are very, very rarely allowed to do any atmospheric sampling in China, just in case you were wondering. They keep it staunchly in-house.

The weirdest Microsoft glitch ever?

Got a new computer at work. It's sweeeet. Dell Precision 390 with Core 2 Duo and a big-ass hard drive. However, I also saw fit to order it with Vista 64 installed, something that has confused the hell out of my coworkers, including Dave who ordered almost exactly the same computer with XP.

I do have my reasons; sooner or later I'm going to have to get a Vista machine working in the field (either ours or someone else's) and the sooner I learn how to hack about with it the better. Trouble is that any problems and I'm on my own. The university's IT Services quite sensibly don't support it yet.

So far though, it's not been all that bad. I like the new explorer interface and the new security model is long overdue. Aero and the sidebar haven't blown my skirt up yet but they're also largely unobtrusive. The only bit I don't like is Media Player 11, which I still haven't got used to. I liked 10.

As for snagging, getting it to talk to other computers on our antiquated network has been a pain thanks to the lack of IPX/SPX support. I've found the solution is to make sure whatever you want to talk to has IP NetBIOS enabled. Also, there was this weird thing where an mp3 would skip exactly 20 seconds before the end of each song, but an updated soundcard driver from Dell sorted that.

But here's the weirdest of the weird and I defy anyone to explain this to me: There seems to be a voodoo incompatibility with Word 2003. The symptoms are that the taskbar, sidebar and start menu slow to a crawl when I open certain documents. The odd thing is that there is still plenty of CPU and memory resources and the individual applications still run fine (although switching between them is a pain). The even odder thing is that it only happens for some documents and not others (I've not found a pattern yet) and if I have multiple documents open, it only happens if one of the offending documents is the topmost.

Bizarre as hell. Tried restarting the system, running in XP compatibility mode, turning off anti virus, disabling Aero and updating the graphics drivers and all sorts but nothing changes it. A couple of workarounds I've found is to make a new Word document and bring it to the front when I want to use the start menu. If a blank document is topmost, it seems to work fine. Or, if I copy and paste the contents of a nonworking document into a new document and close the original, that seems to work too. I've seen some pretty weird computer bugs in my time, but this has to be one of the weirdest. Hats off to you Microsoft.

This one's dedicated to our favourite planet

Rant begin. Live Earth... well?

My first thoughts have to be how pissed off I am with the BBC for cutting off Metallica, the Beastie Boys and worst of all Spinal Tap, each of whom when they were getting to their best. I really hope 'Big Bottom' with all those basists on stage finds its way onto YouTube somehow, I really do.

But also I'm a bit weirded out. Everyone who organises a charity or political gig wants to capture the spirit of the two holy grails, the two magical points in history that can never be recreated, being Woodstock and Live Aid. Boy have they tried over the years and boy have they failed and today was no exception.

A big problem lies in the fact that the whole climate change movement lacks a flag carrier (James Lovelock doesn't count). Instead of Bob Geldof telling us to "get on the fucking phones" we have Al Gore giving us his seven pledges about reducing carbon dioxide emission by X percent. It's not like I blame him because he has a much bigger mountain to climb; Michael Buerk's pictures of starving children don't compare to a bunch of numbers from the IPCC saying we're all going to find it a little hotter in generations to come. It's just that being an ex vice president and the husband of the woman who gave us the parental advisory label do not make you cool by default, no matter whether you wear a polo shirt or not. The fact that he lacks any sort of charisma by anyone's definition only makes things much, much worse. Uniting behind that man takes effort.

But he has the message. Opening the US leg in a native American heritage centre (despite dropping a bollock when he said "God bless you" to them) reinforces the sea change that people in general need. We need to think global and we need to get into the mindset that we have this two-way relationship with our planet. Sounds a bit hippy, but that if anything will be the way forward and engaging the current generation is how to do that. As Arnold Schwartzenegger has pointed out, we need to make it fashionable. And that means going MTV.

Not that that showed for the most of this evening. The majority of the stars attacked it with the usual amount of conviction they approach charity events ("yeah, I think XXXX is a really important cause, I think it's great that we can raise awareness, etc. etc.") and it didn't help that the great British cynicism kicked in right from the get-go. We had Ricky Gervais gleefully pointing out the hypocrisy of the high-carbon lifestyles of the celebs and God knows how many stars joking about how they'd accidentally left their TVs on standby and such. And the peanut on the turd was Jonathan Ross, who was peddling his usual trademark of being simultaneously encompassing and dismissive at the same time. Why has committing to any sort of opinion become so uncool in this country?

So as much as it galls me to admit it, the Americans were the ones who lead the way. Al Gore started it and Madonna certainly finished it after a blistering set by the Foo Fighters. No apologies, they had something to say and they just went out there and they fucking said it loud, clear and on our turf. I've got to admit, that's something that we as Brits living in today's society can learn a lot from the Yanks. Hats off to them.

Rant over.

Inevitable global warming rant

OK, saw this, got pissed off and just had to this it off my chest...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6263690.stm

Apparently, there's a majority of UK adults out there that think that we scientists are exaggerating the whole climate change thing. That in itself isn't the thing that pisses me off or is even unexpected really; collective denial is a powerful force when people are presented with something they don't want to hear. The thing that really annoys me is that the army of staunch disbelievers out there will somehow treat this as evidence that we are in fact making it all up, that somehow the science can be voted incorrect.

As far as they're concerned, we're just making this up to get more funding and the government is happy to play along because it gives them more things to tax. I can't comment on the latter (they could have a point there for all I know) but the thing that ticks me off about the former sentiment is that it shows a profound lack of comprehension of what climate science actually is. The whole scene moved on from the questions of whether the earth is getting hotter or colder and whether it is or isn't a result of human activity a very long time ago. Now the funding agencies are paying us not for simple yes/no answers but to actually attach numbers to the situation. Governments want to know exactly how much hotter it is going to get, which cities are going to be underwater by 2100 or which countries' populations are going to be displaced by drought so they can plan for the future. This means that beyond making wild theories, we have to put numbers on things and most importantly, these numbers have to be right.

The key thing here is that this involves taking detailed account of everything - solar cycles, the earth's orbit, the biosphere, ocean currents and of course man-made emissions. It just happens to be that the man made stuff is the biggest change in recent years. However, this is the bit that the press and the general public don't seem to pick up on - they seem to think that we're solely in the business of creating headlines and scaring people silly and that all the work we do is simply a means of achieving that.

Well, OK, that could be said about a minority of scientists; our line of work is by no means immune to media whores and they exist on both sides of the debate. However, if you want a balanced culmination of the state of the credible science out there, I suggest going to the IPCC report's faq (link below) because that's what it's there for. I actually know a handful of the authors personally and if nothing else, I can vouch for at least those ones not being sensationalists or part of some mad conspiracy or anything. The vast majority of scientists out there would rather be right than famous - history has judged the incorrect but noisy ones very harshly (faked clones and cold fusion anyone?).

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Pub_FAQs.pdf

For my part, as much as it galls me to admit it, I'd love us scientists to be wrong and the deniers to be right because that would mean we won't be spending our coming decades living in a crappier world (although we'd have a lot of humble pie to eat). However, given that every single climate model out there comes up with more or less the same answer to the original yes/no questions stated earlier, I'm not counting on it.

Rant over.

This paper is taking ages...

Yippee! My first ever blog. So what do I say?

How about talking about my Puerto Rico paper? A project I did back in December 2004, designed to study the effect of organic aerosols on clouds in tropical marine environments? What do you do when all the gear arrives late and you only get two weeks' worth of data (about half of what was planned)? And what happens when you don't get any organic aerosols?

The paper is almost ready to go into ACP, but not quite. Bouncing back and forth between me and Darrel. So close I can almost taste it. But not quite. It's not that there isn't a story or some decent science there, it's just that we were hoping to be able to say something more headline-grabbing. Plus we're going to annoy everyone who has been saying the organics are important for the last ten years.

Ah well, better get back to it I suppose. My future posts will be more interesting I imagine. This was only really a test.