tobycettera

I've been dancing

2011-02-20T18:46:00.001Z

Hello, I haven't posted for a few years. At the beginning of 2007 I started going to ballroom and Latin dance classes. When I was at school my mother had sent my sister and me to a few lessons. I'd also done a few lessons when I was at university but that was all in the dim and distant past and was in America so there would be differences in what is done here anyway.

Dancing seemed like it might be a good way to get out of the house and meet a few more people. I'd done art classes and yoga and while people were friendly these activities were not primarily social. Dancing on the other hand is, that is why people have always danced. More formal partner dancing became less fashionable in the sixties and seventies, but as the success of TV programmes like Strictly Come Dancing (or Dancing with the Stars in the US) there is definitely an appetite for the dances that originated in the early mid twentieth century.

Many people may be surprised to learn that the dances which they may have supposed date for periods like Jane Austin are in fact far newer. One of the oldest of the dances we would include in ballroom is the waltz and when a version more like what we would now refer to as the Viennese waltz first came to England in 1816 it was considered scandalous that partners should dance in such close contact.

After World War I there was a lot of social change brought about by many factors including rising living standards and increased access to media. There was a flowering of many different types of dance some of which turned out to be fads but others had more staying power. There was a formalisation of dances and the steps in them on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930's and 1940's which has lead to different forms of the same dance in the American style and in the International style. It has also lead to a different list of dances.

The classes I go to teach the five International style ballroom dances and four of the five international style Latin dances. The dances are as follows:

Waltz - (also referred to as the Modern Waltz or the Slow Waltz) is the bedrock ballroom dance that all instructors start with. At beginner level, it is very simple with three steps of even timing in each bar. The same footwork can also produce different patterns on the floor when an amount of turn is added over the three steps. This means the waltz is relatively easy for new dancers to do and provides satisfying results with enough variety right from the start.

Foxtrot - The next ballroom dance taught is actually not one of the ballroom dances. There are two types of foxtrot, one is the "slow foxtrot" which is a ballroom dance, but there is also the "social foxtrot" (or sometimes called the "rhythm foxtrot") which is a social dance. The social foxtrot is taught to introduce the idea of a "quick" and a "slow" in the steps of the dance, where slows take twice the time of quicks. The social foxtrot is relatively slow and undemanding so students can concentrate on the timing.

Quickstep - Once students are familiar with quick and slow steps speed is added when learning the quickstep. The music is significantly faster and because of the quicks, there are a lot more steps to take in the time. Both the waltz and the social foxtrot are "progressive" dances which mean the dancers travel around the room as they dance. The quickstep also goes round the room, but much faster and so being able to plan moves and avoid other dancers becomes essential with this dance.

Tango - Tango is a ballroom dance and not a Latin dance contrary to what many people would expect. As with most dances there are different forms, and when dances were being formalised, aspects of the orignal tango styles were tamed and set in a dance that has the features and style of a ballroom dance. Tango Argentine is a social dance that is closer to the dance's original form. Ballroom tango has quicks and slows and the same sort of tempo as a waltz, but the hold and the poise of the dance is what gives it its character.

Viennese waltz - This form of the waltz is closer to the original waltz which has existed for a couple of centuries. It is fast, very fast. It is twice the tempo of a slow waltz meaning three steps have to be taken every second. If the dancers have to think for even a split second about what to do with their feet, it all goes wrong. So the Viennese Waltz is not taught until people have been dancing for a couple of years and many of the basics of dancing have become second nature.

Cha Cha Cha - This is the first Latin dance taught. It can be danced to modern music in 4/4 time and a tempo around 30 bars per minute which is very common in pop music. Latin dances are characterised by a loser hold and often no hold at all and partners simply dance in front of each other. The name of the dance is supposed to be onomatopoeic being the sound made when doing the chasse (three quick steps to the side) that are done in each bar.

Rumba - The second Latin dance is the Rumba which has much in common with the cha cha cha, but is slower and replaces the side chasse with a single step. One of the things that gives the rumba its character is the fact that there are usually no steps taken on the first beat of the bar. This gives each bar a sense of hesitation. Many of the initial patterns in the cha cha cha can be transposed directly to the rumba which helps start the rumba quickly, but after time, the patterns diverge.

Samba - The Brazilian carnival dance is fast and has a special bounce to it. Samba music is in 2/4 time but 4/4 time music an be used as well. There is a rise and a fall in each two beats which gives the bounce. As it is a Latin dance there is supposed to be a bit of "hip action" which is the pelvis changing angle due to the bending and straightening of the legs and not simply a case of wiggling one's bum!

Jive - The fact that the jive is a Latin dance may surprise some people as it doesn't actually feel very Latin, but it also does not feel ballroomy at all. Jive comes from Lindy Hop and is a close relative of Swing and is the sort of dance the GI's in WWII would have done. Jive is relatively fast and there are lots of patterns to learn. Part of the reason it feels so fast is that one takes steps on syncopated beats. So although the music is in 4/4 time, there are usually eight steps taken on each bar.

Paso Doble - This is the last of the international style Latin dances, but it is mainly danced in competitions and display dancing and less so in a social context so it is taught less often at classes intended for social dancers. The music is often a kind of march and the idea of the dance is that the man is a matador and the lady is a combination of the bull and the cape.

Salsa - Salsa is Latin in origin but not included in the official set of Latin dances. It is danced socially and has both New York and Cuban styles, the latter being much harder because the dancer has to tap his foot instead of not moving his foot for one beat in each bar.

Cats' Tails

2007-10-07T09:24:00.000+01:00

Question for the day: Do cats stop chasing their tails because

a) they learn that they cannot catch it
b) their sense body awareness means they no longer perceive their tails as something external
c) tail chasing is merely a behaviour associated with a developmental stage which passes
d) cats get lazier as they get older

The history of video games

2007-09-30T09:15:00.000+01:00

Back when I were a lad...

OK back in the dark ages video games were completely new and novel. Pong was quite mind blowingly amazing and fun to play. Part of what was exciting was seeing something you were controlling on a TV screen. These days we are all used to this idea but apart from changing channels, TV screens used to be entirely autonomous. It was also strange to see a generated image as everything on TV was normally from a camera.

Home computers were also just beginning to happen, but they were not powerful. Programming early micros to actually be fast enough to make a video game was a real challenge. (Hands up all those who know what a "pre-shifted bitmap" is.) The screen resolution and colour range (if you had colour at all) was very limited, typically four or eight colours (including black).

With these limitations firmly in place video games had to be really innovative to be both entertaining and to simply work at all. The results were entirely new environments.
Space invaders was a real breakthrough game. This was originally a monochrome game but the screen had horizontal strips of coloured transparent film over it so that the defence blocks were green and the different levels of aliens appeared in different colours.

Here in this precambrian sort of point in the evolution of video games there were some significant branching in the developmental paths.

Obvious descendants of Pong are games like Breakout and Tetris.

Space Invaders was transformed into Defender and Missile Command.

Pac Man spawned a whole line of 2D games involving mazes and obstacles and collecting things and avoiding other things. Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, Sonic, etc.

Night Rider was a driving game which ingeniously avoided most of the problems of rendering a road by setting it at night with only the cat's eyes at the sides of the road and the car itself in the foreground. All driving and racing games can trace a lineage to this.

And was it Zork that is the ancestor of roll playing games including Tomb Raider and Halo.

All of these were raster image based but there was a separate vector based line which has now become extinct. The first game was Asteroids. Battlezone was one I really liked but it was very difficult to play. And my all time favourite video game was Tempest which had spider web like shafts with geometric enemies crawling out from the centre and your character ran around the top dropping bombs on them to prevent them getting up to the top and killing you.

Looking for screen shots I came across a few oddities. Here is someone's idea of what the pac man skeleton would look like.

This is brilliant, a battlezone tank made for the Burning Man festival.

This video is what started me off on today's posting. It is a "history" of the video game Halo which extends two decade into the future and has a sort of Terminator backstory feel to it. Very funny, but also thought provoking (kinda).

UPDATE: Not that I have anything against HALO, heck I've never even seen it actually running, but this guy has some amusing things to say about it. I'm still not interested.

Invisible Sandwich

2007-09-14T12:39:00.000+01:00

I loved that image. There were other invisible things, but the manic look on that cat's face just made this perfect (or should that be purr-fect).

So I was quite amused to find the image below of the despicable Steve Ballmer. I'm guessing steve's sandwich is baguette based. If you have any complaints about Microsoft or its products please send them to this man. Bill is mainly out of the office these days.

Honestly this is the man running Microsoft. Only watch this video if you are not easily embarrased by other people's behavior.

Talking of lack of coolness, this is a fairly odd video.

DVD Copyright Warnings

2007-09-11T09:14:00.001+01:00

DVDs whether purchased or rented begin with copyright warnings. These cannot be skipped or fast forwarded which means one has to sit through them every time the disk is inserted in the player. Because UK DVDs are region 2 which covers Europe and Australia and other parts you often have to sit though the pointless legalese in several different languages.

The point is that regardless of whether renting or owning DVD, I am a paying customer and not violating their copyright and yet they are punishing me. Do these warnings deter piracy? I suspect not. On rental DVDs they even have an advert comparing film piracy to other acquisitive crime which again cannot be skipped or fast forwarded. The movie below is a spoof which is pretty close to the originals bar the extreme consequences.

Digital technology has made the creation and distribution of films cheaper and easier than ever before. The best result for the consumer would be an increase in choice delivered by more titles from a larger number of creative people who can express more and varied views. The worst scenario for the consumer is that the studios pile more money into producing a small number of hackneyed blockbuster films and then promote them until everyone is sick of the ads. They then print millions of disks and use copyright law and their monopoly position to charge £15-£20 for a disk that has cost them less than £0.50 to manufacture. How else are they going to cover the $100m film budget plus the $40m promotional budget.

Until the gap between the cost of manufacture and the price of the product closes, there will be piracy both by individuals and at an industrial level. Good films can be made for £10m-20m. In the mean time we have to pay though the nose for films and sit though the warnings which are there only to serve the people who are doing us a disservice.

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy - A Missed Opportunity

2007-09-09T10:38:00.000+01:00

Star Wars is part of the cultural fabric of the modern world. Its influence has been substantial and the generation that loved the original trilogy as children are now the established professionals within film and media. And even if you are not a fan of the films you cannot escape their influence.

That is why it is so sad that the recent prequel trilogy was frankly so weak. When episode I (The Phantom Menace) was released in 1999 sixteen years after the Return of the Jedi in 1983 there were huge expectations and a real pent up demand. The effects were stunning and broke new ground in the Industrial Light and Magic tradition of always pushing the envelope on every film.

The plot was dull and contrived and fairly aimless. That could be forgiven as this was the first instalment which had to set up the story for the remainder of the trilogy and then dovetail into the existing films.

There were, however, three things that were simply unforgivable.

The first is Jar Jar Binks. If at any moment there was any risk of you getting absorbed into the story and actually believing any of it up jumps Jar Jar with his prat falls an "stupid negro" talking which is simply cringe worthy if not actually racist. A similarly disgruntled "would be fan" created a version of episode one and put it on the internet calling it "The Phantom Edit" which was a cut down version which simply removed all shots that included Jar Jar. I had considered doing the same myself simply to see what the film would be like without this hugely annoying creature.

The second unforgivable mistake was the inclusion of the droids R2D2 and C3P0. Yes, the use of the droids , inspired by the servants in Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, as the unifying thread by telling the story more or less from their point of view did work in the first trilogy. And a similar device could have been used in the new trilogy. But to use the very same robots at a point in the story set 25 years earlier is just moronic. The idea that Anikan, a ten year old boy, could actually have built C3P0 is just insult to injury. If C3P0 was unique that would not be so bad, but other robots exactly like C3P0 are present in both the original trilogy and this film. It would be like a film where a modern kid built his own Sony PlayStation 3.

The third thing was the dialogue which was simply awful. Lucas had too much control as write/director/executive producer. Rick McCallum may be a good producer but he is in awe of Lucas and simply does what he is told and does not question or attempt to rein in Lucas' excesses. The screen play should have been handed to someone else to fix the dialog at some point.

There are all sorts of things that also undermine the story which are more than minor quibbles:

Anikan's "virgin birth"
The introduction of midiclorians
The fact that Anikan and his mother are "slaves" but seem to come and go as they please, have a nice home and posessions
The idea that Anikan also built his own pod racer (how much free time and spare cash do these slaves have?)
The trip though the Naboo planet core in a submarine space ship
The fact that the "queen" was elected
The menagerie of impractical and unlikely creates on the Jedi council.

The second and third films picked up the pace and reduced Jar Jar's part which initially gave the impression of an improvement. But now with a few years perspective, these films are in many was even lesser films that Episode 1. By the end of Episode three you just want to smack Yoda over the head and tell him to stop talking backwards.

Where the original trilogy was strengthened by having a back story, this trilogy was weakened by being the back story. In the original 1977 Star Wars film we know in the first few minutes that Leia is the good princess who needs to be rescued, Darth Vader is a terrifying baddy, that there are some stolen plans that are important and need to be delivered to the good guys to defeat the bad guys. There are clear dramatic objectives for the audience to follow. The final space battle has primarily two models of ship, good ones and bad ones, the objective of the battle is to fire a torpedo into a ventilation shaft and we have identifiable pilots in both the good and bad ships. The consequences of failure are also very clear in that if they fail to destroy the Death Star, it will blow up the planet on which the rebels are based and that will be the end of the good guys.

By contrast, the new trilogy seems to exist almost solely to tick points on a checklist of things prerequisite for the original films. These are not in themselves of any dramatic interest. There is a huge cast of characters, few of whom make any impression on the viewer. The battles have no apparent objective and there are so many different types of space craft it is simply too confusing an ambiguous to inspire much desire to see a particular outcome.

Despite this the new generation of ten year old kids have lapped up the films and they have been hugely successful. I have to wonder if the problem is not the films themselves but the fact that both trilogies are kids films and that the difference is that I was a kid in 1977 and not in 1999. But somehow I just cannot believe that.

By way of contrast there is Battle Star Galactica. This was a 1978 Star Wars copy cat film and TV series. It too was set in a different galaxy. The premise was that man who inhabited "the twelve colonies" (which were separate planets) had created robots called Cylons which looked like chrome covered storm troopers from Star Wars. The Cylons had rebelled and a long war had followed. The series begins on the eve of a peace deal which turns out to be a Cyclon ambush which wipes out all of humanity except for one "Battle Star" a sort of spaceship aircraft carrier called "Galactica" and a "rag tag fleet" of civilian ships carrying the last surviors of humanity. They flee the old colonies in search of the mythical thirteenth colony known as Earth.

Again I was a kid and enjoyed the series, but it had limited success. Galactica has also made a come back in the "re-imaged" series. Fans are divided and die hard supporters of the old series refer to to this as GINO (Galactica In Name Only). The premise is more or less the same except that the Cylons had left man alone for 40 years and unknown to man had developed themselves to be almost indistinguishable from real humans. Their sneak attack to wipe out the real humans was facilitated by their ability to jam all the networked human computers with viruses.

The big difference is that the new BSG (Battlestar Galactica) series is devised as a drama for adults. Unlike Star Trek and its derivatives, these are not morality plays, but focus on the relationships among these surviving humans and their struggle against the Cylon threat. They do not have laser beams, only real bullets and tactical nukes. The rockets use directional thrusters to manoeuvre and the space scenes are shot as if by a hand held camera by a news crew with frequent rough zooms and pans. Everything about the series seeks to be credible and engaging to a grown up audience.

If only Lucas had tried to make something new with the prequel trilogy and not wasted a real opportunity to create something truly great.

So for some fun examples, illustrations and irrelevancies.

This is simply a clip from Episode I with a subtle change made a couple of minutes in. Bare with it until then because the point it makes is startlingly valid.

This is a funny song about the new series of Battle Star Galactica with clips from both the old and new series.

And this is a video a group of guys made at home with the Imperial Cruisers from Star Wars doing battle with the Battle Stars of BSG. What is amazing is how little difference there is between the efforts of multi-million dollar visual effects companies and what has been produced by six guys and their home PCs. Sure there are differences and some would argue this is just a good animatic but I'd be proud of it.

Balloon Fiesta 2007

2007-08-12T10:59:00.001+01:00

Another year another balloon fiesta, and this one was pretty good. The first morning was simply perfect. The sun had just risen above the tree line and bathed everything in a golden light, the sky was blue and clear except for some cirrus, and there was so little breeze that the balloons just went up and stayed overhead waiting to be photographed. There were also lots and lots of balloons that morning.

Just before the sun was up preparations were under way and pilots were testing their burners.

The ground was damp with dew so the balloons were getting wet, but once the burners started heating the air inside, the dampness on the balloons soon came off as steam.

These are three of the prettiest balloons this year. I love everything about the orange one. The blue one with the gold "flames" is just so elegant and has a beautiful upside down tear shape.

Below are past favourites including the black and silver one at this years event. Note that it is the same size and shape as this year's orange one.

The forecast for this morning was not so good and I was pretty tired from the previous two days so I decided not to go this morning. I think the balloons missed me because the few that did launch came right over my house.

Space Shuttle Launches

2007-08-09T08:45:00.000+01:00

Space Shuttle Atlantis launches at sunset. The sun is behind the camera, and the shadow of the plume is cast across the vault of the sky, intersecting the rising full moon. The top portion of the plume is bright because it is illuminated directly by the sun; the lower portions are in the Earth's shadow.

I have always been interested in the space program. I lost some interest in the manned space program when I understood just how difficult it was to put people I space and to keep them alive there. The amount of knowledge that is returned by probes such as Cassini-Huygens is so much greater compared to projects such as the International Space Station for the money spent.

Each shuttle launch costs about $500 million (half a billion) based on 8 launches per year as the program costs $4 billion a year. Adding an individual launch costs about $100 million (ie fuel, boosters etc) but there are only so many that can be squeezed into a year.

Cassini-Huygens cost $3.26 billion in total over a number of years (i.e. less than one shuttle year budget). The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity had a total budget of $820 million (i.e. less than two shuttle launches). In terms of results unmanned probes are the best value. There have been 118 shuttle flights, which has cost $60 trillion.

Even so you have to marvel at the shuttle. It weighs 2000 metric tons at launch, including the external boosters and fuel tank. It can carry 25 metric tons into low Earth orbit, but when it lands the orbiter weighs only 70 metric tons. It goes into space in about ten minutes and travels at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour. Sound travels at around 770 miles an hour. It goes around the Earth once every 90 minutes. It is probably the most complex vehicle that will ever be built as computer designs these days are helping to simplify machines.

The launches are also spectacular. Below are two movies, the first is a single silent film from a camera on the external tank. The second is a ten minute video of the most recent launch which is partly from ground cameras but also from the camera on the external fuel trank. It is a very wide angle lens so the image is quite distored and quite a lot of the time not much seems to be happening but it is sufficiently interesting that I could not tear myself away from it.

Data Robotics

2007-08-05T09:34:00.000+01:00

Not wanting to "geek out" too much I just have to spread the word about drobo. This is what hard disks should have been doing for the last fifteen years and is what I thought RAID arrays did when I first heard about them.

Drobo (short for Data Robot) is a little black box with slots for four IDE hard disk drives. Drobo manages the one to four physical drives as a single volume as far as you and your computer are concerned (i.e. it shows up as a single external hard disk on the Mac or PC).

It holds data redundantly so that if one of the physical drives fails you do not lose data. If you are running out of storage space you can add another drive in one of the slots or pop out one of the existing drives and replace it with one of higher capacity. Drive units are hot swappable so not only do you not need to shut anything down but you can actually continue accessing data from drobo while adding or changing drives.

The blue lights along the bottom of the drobo show how much capacity is used up and the indicator lights next to each drive unit show green for normal, yellow for a warning or red for a failure. New drive units are automatically formatted when they are first inserted.

This truly brings hard disk management down to an "appliance" level of complexity (or should that be simplicity). It also provides data security through the inherent backup system without any of the hassle or discipline of normal backup methods. And it makes drive failure a non-event because there is no restore operation, just the need to replace a drive.

If they could provide an integrated on-line service where nightly offsite incremental backups could be done this would be a total solution.

Balloon Fiesta Next Week

2007-08-03T22:32:00.001+01:00

It's the Bristol Balloon Fiesta next weekend. Last year it was a bit of a fiasco as it was too windy to launch balloons on five and a half of the six launch times. It looks like the weather was vary accommodating for the Reno event shown in this amazing time lapse footage.

Hey There Delilah

2007-08-02T22:32:00.000+01:00

Just came across this video "Hey There Delilah" by The Plain White T's. Someone should tell them that the apostrophe is not needed in a plural. The track has more than a passing resemblance to McCartney's Yesterday. The use of a letterbox format is very effective and the split screen is a bit retro but retro is "in" so it works.

The lyrics work too because they are slightly unexpected. They do not follow the normal couplets and use assonance quite often. Checking out some of the bands other stuff, they seem pretty average and tend to have the guitars grinding away and the same earnest singing. This track is a bit atypical for them being acoustic.

Royksopp - Remind Me

2007-08-01T22:47:00.000+01:00

Information overload

Ugly Kid Joe

2007-07-30T10:23:00.000+01:00

Back in 1991, the heavy metal band Ugly Kid Joe had a hit with "(I Hate) Everything about You". The single could easily have been dismissed as a one off novelty song, and yet it had a lot more going for it. Yes it had some very humours lyrics but the music itself was solid. The four minute track was far more complex than most popular singles: A slow intro, bridge, a few versus and then after two minutes there is a slow intermission followed by an excellent guitar solo and at three minutes the song goes into double time in a sort of taunt to the subject of the song, and finishes with a long drawn out "I hate everything about, yooooooooou."

I bought the "As Ugly as They Wanna Be" EP which had six tracks in total (including Everything About You), all of which were very good. Some of them were also very humorous such as "Whiplash Liquor" with lines such as "A serious disease you learn about in school/If your dad's an alcoholic then you'll be one too". Others showed real accomplishment like the seven and a half minute long "Sweet Leaf"/"Funky Fresh Country Club". These boys obviously listened to lots of music and were happy to mix many different styles.

Then I did not listen to it for ages and ages because EPs are not long enough to bother putting in a CD player. But with iTunes, shorter things are much easier to play and I found that I was listening to the EP quite often. I wondered if Ugly Kid Joe had been a one hit wonder or if they had produced any albums. They had produced three in fact.

1992 America's Least Wanted

Obviously propelled by the success of Everything About You and its inclusion in Waynes World II this Album was similar to "As Ugly as they Wanna Be" but showed even more range than the EP. Tracks like "Neighbour" continued the strong humorous style, but other tracks like "Busy Bee" showed a much mellower side. There was also quite a bit of social commentary as in the Panhandling Prince (The streets are cold/but at least there's soul) and Same Side. They also covered "Cats in the Cradle". The only mystery is why this album did not bring them greater success.

1995 Menace to Sobriety

This is a much darker album due to three years of music industry grind and a new drummer after the original left because he did not like the life style. The guitar is stronger, the beat is faster, the vocals more gravely and malevolent. Humour is still present (e.g. "Jesus Rode a Harley") but it is no longer at the forefront. In fact after the high enegry start, there are a number of slower reflective songs such as "Cloudy Skies" (So it's time to leave our home/And see the faces we've out-grown/Through the years we've kept our backs to the wind/So long, farewell, good-bye my friend) and the last two tracks "Cangle Song" and "Slower than Nowhere" bring the album to a calm and reflective end. A track like "Milkman's Son" should have been a massive hit but was not.

1996 Motel California

Now on their own label the band produced their most sophisticated album. Their influences now less clear as the band's own style and confidence is at its height. The first listening of this album does not grab ones attention so easily as the others but its power to grow on you over subsequent listenings is far greater.

The trademark humour persists as evident from the parody album name and tracks such as "Rage Against the Answering Machine". But on the whole the lyrics are far more ambiguous if not downright enigmatic. It is hard to work out what "Little Red Man" is about is. I have wondered if the little red man was the don't walk man on traffic lights, or the devil but ultimately I think this must simply be a song inspired by a dream. "Bicycle Wheels" is an equally strange song which plays with the rhythm and rhyme of the words more than telling a narrative or explaining itself.

Sadly the band disbanded after the complete commercial failure (and at the time lack of critical success).

"In conclusion to the band's overall sound and vision, the members of the band have cited many times, that they were simply a manifestation of their environment and lifestyles -- mounting from their geographic location of Southern California."

The good news is that you can get the entire back cataluge from amazon marketplace for under £10 which truely seems to be the musical bargain of the century.

Brief Encounter (1945)

2007-07-29T14:32:00.001+01:00

There have been and still are a number of film "classics" which I feel bound to watch. Not all of the ones I have watched in the past have been very rewarding. Classic status can be quite valid where a film was groundbreaking at the time it was made but the techniques it pioneered may since have become quite common place. Or sometimes they broke new ground socially and were shocking or surprising at the time but now lack much punch or surprise.

I had placed "Brief Encounter" on my films list with my DVD rental service because it was "a classic" and felt I should see it, and, when it turned up I was not enthusiastic. I expected a slowly paced film with an overbearing musical score with a substandard print.

The first surprise was that it was written by Noel Coward. The second was that it was directed by David Lean who directed among many others, Lawrence of Arabia, which is one of my all time favourite films. So things were off to a good start. The print and transfer to DVD were also excellent and the crisp blank and white photography was a delight to look at in its own right.

The final surprise was simply how engaging and approachable the film was. It is firmly set in 1945 and that world simply does not exist any more on a physical, social or moral level. And yet the film at its heart was about love and temptation, two things which are timeless. The course of the romance is credible and one is drawn along in its current.

The film is not a morality play, nor does it seek to preach in any shape or form, but it does suggest that although the pursuit of romantic love is strong and powerful, there are other things in life which are just as valuable and precious and should not be overlooked in the search for long term happiness. It is a study of emotional attachment and loss. It is not overly sentimental and never drifts into soft focus or Mills and Boon territory. I would recommend the film to all but the most hardened cynics.

23 years of Robyn Hitchock

2007-07-29T11:38:00.000+01:00

I have been a Robyn Hitchcock fan since 1984 so that makes 23 years of fandom. "I Often Dream of Trains" was just out and my roommate who had a show on the university radio station had a copy. He also had a copy of "Black Snake Diamond Role" and I was hooked. Since then I have been buying all the new CDs (skipping some of the compilations) and have seen Hitchcock play numerous times in London and here in Bristol.

* Black Snake Diamond Role, 1981, * Groovy Decay, 1982, * I Often Dream of Trains, 1984, * Fegmania!, 1985, * Gotta Let This Hen Out!, 1985, * Element of Light, 1986, * Invisible Hitchcock, 1986, * Globe of Frogs, 1988, * Queen Elvis, 1989, * Eye, 1990, * Perspex Island, 1991, * Respect, 1993, * The Kershaw Sessions (Robyn Hitchcock), 1994, * You & Oblivion, 1995, * Gravy Deco, 1995, * Moss Elixir, 1996, * Greatest Hits, 1996, * Live at the Cambridge Folk Festival, 1998, * Storefront Hitchcock, 1998, * Jewels for Sophia, 1999, * A Star for Bram, 2000, * Luxor, 2003, * Spooked, 2004, * Olé! Tarantula, 2006

Before his solo career Hitchcock had a band called The Soft Boys who released three albums plus a double CD of live and unreleased material.

A Can of Bees (1979/1992), Underwater Moonlight (1980/1992), Invisible Hits, 1976-81 (2 CD) , Nextdoorland (2002)

Nextdoorland was the result of a short reformation of the band. Two band members also formed part of the Egyptians, the backing band from 1985 to 1993.

The music is so diverse it defies categorisation and possibly even description. In a recent interview Hitchcock struggled to describe the sort of people who are his fans. I think fans are those people who enjoy his sense of humour which is sort of the skeleton under all of his music. A sense of humour cuts through all other tastes and genres and his fans tend to be a fairly incongruous mix of people.

Here is a clip of a live track called "Surgery" from the album "You and Oblivion" which is a good sample if not representative of the range.

This is a video for "Adventure Rocketship" from "Olé Tarantula" with his latest band called The Venus 3, a band which consists of R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, Young Fresh Fellows' frontman Scott McCaughey, and Ministry's Bill Rieflin.

Green Dot™

2007-07-26T13:39:00.000+01:00

There are lots of symbols on packaging these days and some are more obvious than others. One that has had me a bit puzzled is the one called "Green Dot™". "Yes Basil but what does it mean?" It's a good question and one that I found hard to track down. In fact it took a bit of sleuthing to even find out what it was called.

The short explanation is

The Green Dot™ is a symbol used on packaging in many European countries. It signifies that the producer of the packaging has made a contribution towards recycling that packaging - just as UK businesses invest in recycling through the PRN system.

There are different schemes in different EU countries, but all aiming to comply with the "European Packaging Directive". Basically if a company produces 50 or more tones of packaging, they have to demonstrate that they have paid for an amount of equivalent packaging to be recovered and recycled.

In the UK this is done by recyclers issuing PRN (Package Recovery Notes) which they sell to companies which produce packaging. Some companies export waste for recycling an they can issue similar PERN (Packaging Export Recovery Notes). These are bought and sold like any other product so there is a reasonable market efficiency to the pricing and keeps recycling firms competitive which is good.

Only accredited recycling firms can issue PRNs and only for recycling packaging. There are different types of PRNs for paper, glass, aluminium, steel, plastic and wood.

In fact it is quite complicated because apperently the cost responsibility is spread across the whole packaging production process from the supplier of the raw meterial to the fabricator of the packaging to the producer of the end product that uses the packaging and even the retailler who sells the packaged products.

Once a company has shown it is paying for its share of packaging recycling (by buying PRNs), they are then granted a licence to print the Green Dot™ on its products.

The symbol does not mean that the packaging is made from recycled materials or that it is can or should be recycled (there are other symbols for that). Confusingly, in the UK it is not even a compliance symbol like a kite mark. Presumably criteria for use of the symbol are lower than the criteria for compliance with the EU regulation, but I could not really find out exactly how it falls short of a compliance mark.

Curiously the Green Dot™ is a trademark and if a company uses it without paying for its share of recycling then action will be taken via trademark violation rather than for actually failing to pay for recycling.

Oh and the Green Dot™ can be printed in other colours too so that it does not require different inks if the packaging does not include green.

Carbon Offsetting

2007-07-25T09:11:00.001+01:00

Title: Icons Photo by: Mika Hiironniemi Licence: CC Attribution License

The latest wrinkle in the global warming hysteria is "carbon offsetting". The idea is that when you pollute (add carbon to the atmosphere through fuel consumption) you pay someone else to do something that will negate or remove that carbon. It's a bit like rock stars trashing a hotel room and then paying to have it fixed.

But stop for a minute to consider how this actually works. If there was a good large scale way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, then global warming would not be the serious issue that is considered to be. There are three main strategies used by carbon offsetting companies (the people who get your carbon offsetting money).

First is planting trees. Plants like all living things are mainly water and carbon. When you grow a tree it absorbs carbon (remember that plants breath in CO2 during photosynthesis and exhale O2, keeping the C within them). A fully grown tree could have a couple of tons of carbon in it.

The second is to produce energy from renewable sources. The third is to help conservation such as providing low energy light bulbs.

The problem with trees is that trees die and when they die the carbon goes back into the eco system. A forest fire is the most rapid version of this reversal of the carbon collection process. Really all trees are going to do is sequester the carbon for 50 to 100 years and then it will be back in circulation. Nothing compared to the 100 to 200 million years that the oil spend under the ground.

The problem with both planting trees and building renewable energy sources is that carbon offsetting fees are not going to have a big impact on whether these projects are done or not. Currently banks are not willing to finance projects where carbon offsetting fees are a critical component (because it is unproven and not sufficiently secure). Therefore carbon offsetting fees are merely going to add to the profitability of such projects. So the carbon offsetting fees are more likely to end up in the pockets of the investors than actually increasing the number of acres planted or the number of wind turbines or hydro electric dams built etc. Perhaps in the very long run this may attract more investment to the energy sector, assuming carbon offsetting also stays around.

A problem with conservation measure such as providing low energy light bulbs is that carbon offsetting fees are simply one of the most inefficient ways to approach the problem. It would be far more efficient to make tungsten and halogen based lighting illegal or put the offset fee into the actual price of the inefficient products so that consumers will naturally choose the more efficient products because they are on the same price level. If we can get CFCs out of fridges and have laws governing efficiency on boilers and appliances it is not a great leap to do this in other areas too.

The problem with all carbon offsetting is that it allows people to continue producing large amounts of carbon dioxide and feel that they are not doing any harm by it. One is reminded of papal indulgences, "pay us some money and knock years off your stay in purgatory".

Most people think that carbon offsetting is offsetting the bad effects by adding good effects but it is quite the reverse. Really carbon offsetting is offsetting any good measures taken by allowing people to use up those carbon savings.

The same logic applies to carbon trading which is offsetting at a national level. The idea is that all nations on a per capita basis have an equal right to ruin the planet so a level of damage is agreed. Underdeveloped countries that are not capable of causing their share of the damage sell their rights to developed countries who are very capable of doing more than their fair share of the damage. Has anything improved? Well, it won't help the environment and it may transfer a tiny amount of cash to developing nations. So why not skip the carbon trading bullshit and simply improve foreign aid, remove trade barriers and start reducing your own carbon footprint and stop expecting other people to clean up your mess.

Teenage Angst is not Dead

2007-07-24T22:04:00.001+01:00

Wow. I recently found My Chemical Romance. I'm not crazy about the name as it has too many syllables for my three golden rules of pop success (google "MCR" and you will see even the fans prefer a three syllable maximum) and the obvious drugs reference in "chemical".

But "Teenagers" is a superb song. Under three minutes it never overstays its welcome and leaves you wanting more. Virtually all the tracks on The Black Parade are talking about death, quite a healthy subject really. There is however an interesting ambiguity in their songs in part due to the frequently incomplete and awkwardly formed sentences. And yet there is more purpose and direction than in the lyrics of Placebo which always seemed to be 90% posture and 10% substance. Here there is a real feeling of genuine passion for the material.

There is also a definite star quality to front man and band leader Gerard Way. The point where he drops to his knees in Teenagers is incredibly cool.

The other thing that stands out about this group is that even though the sound is very much of right now and any ten second section of music could be from any number of other contemporary bands, overall, they maintain a distinctiveness between songs and do not allow the exuberance to become a sheer and undifferentiated wall of sound. Mama is my second favourite track on Black Parade, and this is a good live performance.

Eating Fuel

2007-07-22T10:04:00.000+01:00

The food we eat is our fuel. In the UK and US people spend around 12% of their income on food (both at home and eating out). This is a relatively small percentage and has been falling over the last century. However this is slightly misleading because we now spend more on food than we have ever done in the past and it is the fact that we are significantly wealthier now which means that as a proportion of income food is a smaller part even though it is still an increasing amount.

There are many reasons for the increase in the cost of food. In part there are higher demands on quality and variety than in the past. There is also an increase in productivity per acre now than there has been in the past. All of these things are fuel driven. Food quality and higher yields are increased by the use of fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation, packaging, refrigeration and faster transport of produce. All of these things are derived directly or indirectly from fuels and at the moment most of that fuel is petrol.

Bio-fuels as a replacement for fossil fuels is not such a clear cut alternative as they appear at first. Crops grown for use as fuel will inevitably require the same sort of fuel inputs that are used for food agriculture to run the farm equipment, and for fertiliser and pesticides (products of the petro-chemical industry). In terms of the energy in and the energy out that is still a net gain. But it will put pressure on food production.

If all of the UK's arable land was converted to use for bio-fuels, it would still only be able to produce about 10% of the country's energy requirements. Clearly bio-fuels are not going to be a total solution (nor should we expect any single energy source to be a complete solution). However even if only a fraction of the farmland in this country was converted to fuel use this will inevitably reduce the amount of food that can be produced locally forcing more food to be imported incurring more transport costs. It may also lead to more intensive farming for food production thus increasing the direct and indirect petrol input for the same agricultural output.

An even bigger irony could be where poorer nations switch to production of bio-fuels as a "cash crop" for export. In poorer countries spending on food is a higher percentage of their income and yet if domestic production of food is reduced then this will increase the cost of their food. It may also mean that land that has been forrested will be cleared for bio-fuel production. Much of the South American deforestation has been done in pursuit of creating farm land rather than for wood production (forests are usually cleared by burning releasing much of the carbon stored in the trees into the atmosphere). In the past it has been livestock farming for beef which has been one of the main culprits in this area.

Adding a completely new use for agricultural land which is in competition with both forestry and food production should be considered carefully as this has the potential to create as many problems as it solves.

The debate is not over, it has hardly started.

In the BBC news article "Charity attacks rush for biofuels" The charity Grain says their research shows the rush for biofuels is causing much more environmental and social damage than previously realised.

Another article "Biofuels 'will not lead to hunger'" is very much from the view point of the agricultural industry which is actually quite keen on bio-fuels because it is extra business for them and will raise prices for food produce too. Claims that low grain prices are holding back the third world and that bio-fuels forcing the price of grain up will be a boon to poor African nations seems a very unrealistic argument. Sub-Saharan countries have some of the worst conditions for agriculture and would benefit from cheap food imports and should build their economies around non-agricultural exports. It is precisely the first world's desire to make third world countries self supporting for food which causes those countries such huge problems. When there is drought they have neither food to eat or profit to buy it.

A third article "Food prices on the rise and rise" looks at why food prices in the UK have risen. In the last 12 months, bread has increased by 15%, milk by 11%, eggs by 18%, butter by 5% and meat by 6%, all well above the rate of inflation. The article cites three causes for the increases. First is the increased price of petrol. Since this is one of the major input costs to agriculture food prices will always be significantly affected by fuel costs.

The second reason is increased world demand for food. China gets the blame for lots of things but as living standards there improve people who are still significantly poorer than we are, will be improving their diets and eating more high protein foods such as meat. They will also want to eat more in volume and variety. Since food is a global market, this will have an impact everywhere.

The third reason cited by the article is bio-fuels. There is already a significant amount of sugar-beet production directed at producing bioethanol fuel. "The International Monetary Fund say there's no question that demand for biofuels is driving up food prices - and that it will go on doing so - though in the UK the National Farmers Union disputes that."

Bio-fuels are appealing, but perhaps we should look for sources other than agricultural land. We should also be careful to realise that bio-fuel is not without its drawbacks and it should not be thought of as a completely "guilt free" fuel source, merely a slightly better alternative to fossil fuels. One encouraging possibility is algae grown on barges in the sea.

Humilliate Your Pet

2007-07-21T16:30:00.000+01:00

Not quite up to William Wegman Standards but quite funny.

Here are some genuine William Wegman images (click on them to go to the Wegman store.

How to Ruin a Good Song

2007-07-21T16:23:00.000+01:00

I'm a fan of the Red Hot Chillie Peppers. Not a big fan but a fan. And like many other people I find "Under the Bridge" has a stand out quality from the rest of their material. It is the band's most successful single after all.

The song was written by the band's lead vocalist and describes his past drug addiction, however most listeners will not realise this and think it is only about loneliness and isolation. Perhaps then, this is why the comply useless girl band All Saints omitted the verse that mentions taking heroine intravenously "under the bridge" ("Under the bridge downtown/Is where I drew some blood").

This is not the only popular song to be misunderstood by the audience. A fairly well known example is The Kinks' "Lola" which is frequently thought to be a normal romantic song, completely missing the fact that Lola is a transvestite.

The Police song "Every Breath You Take" is also thought to be a normal love song, which is why it gets played at weddings so often. But it is actually written from the point of view of an obsessive stalker, who no doubt believes he loves the subject, but might not be the sort of attention everyone wants.

Here are the two version of Under the Bridge, you decide which is excellent is which is utter sh*t!

Under the Bridge - Red Hot Chillie Peppers

Under the Bridge - All Saints

The Willowz, Jubilee

2007-07-19T09:15:00.000+01:00

This is an interesting little video on YouTube. I guess that is why it is on the YouTube front page, so you may have already seen it.

Still the tune is, well, tuneful, and the light drawing is charming. Why is slide guitar so appealing? I presume they have used a normal digital stills camera set to a low resolution and with a two or three second shutter speed and then imported the sequence of stills into a video editing package. The tricky parts would be finding a camera with enough control not to overexpose each frame and how to click off each frame automatically as there are a lot of frames to capture.

The Willowz, Jubilee

My new favourite cloud formation

2007-07-19T09:04:00.000+01:00

I have a new favorite cloud formation. Forget cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, or strata. Even forget lenticulated clouds. Try mammatus clouds. Not only are they incredible to look at they are named after breasts!
More photos

Two photos stolen from the interweb:

Mac User Letters Page

2007-07-18T13:35:00.001+01:00

Hey, I got published on the MacUser letters page. Small thrills!

This Modern Life

2007-07-18T09:36:00.000+01:00

Yello Motion Picture

2007-07-18T09:32:00.000+01:00

When I was in high school and still listened to the radio, a song came on which was unlike anything I had ever heard before. I waited holding my breath for the DJ to announce what the name of the song was, but he did not. I then listened to the radio almost non-stop for the following two days hoping that it would be played again and that they might tell me who it was. Eventually they did and the song was "Lost Again" by Yello.

The next challenge was finding the record in shops and a few years later when I was at university I managed to buy the LP "You Got to Say Yes to Another Excess". I loved the album and eventually bought the entire Yello catalogue on CD.

"Flag" was a fantastic album, and in a way it raised the bar so high that they really could not beat it with the same sort of material. The following album "Baby" was a good album. One of my favourite tracks was "Blender" which came close to rivalling "The Race" from "Flag" but did not quite equal it.

I think they also realised they had reached a pinnacle with "Flag" and started to change their style with "Zebra". At the time I found this album a bit disappointing, as I was still hoping for another "Flag". It took years for me to approach it on its own merits and now find Zebra stands very well amoung the other Yello albums and is one I listen to more frequently than the earlier work.

During the period when I thought Yello had lost their way they released "Motion Picture", "The Eye" and "Pocket Universe". When I finally bought The latter two my dedication to the group returned and I tried to get a copy of Motion Picture. Sadly as with my early pursuit of Yello, this album had been released in 1999 and was now virtually unobtainable. I ordered a copy through a marketplace seller on the German Amazon.de site. But after months of waiting and being told it was on back order, they cancelled the order.

Ultimately I had to find a second hand copy and buy that at great expense. I have failed to buy other Albums when they were available and felt years of frustration when they went out of print and I could not buy a copy. I could not face that with Yello, a group I have followed for over twenty years.

This is a big problem with the music industry, that material goes out of print and hopefully music downloads will solve the back catalogue problem. Yello maybe somewhat obscure but they have been featured in several film soundtracks and had an international hit with "Oh Yeah". It is really unacceptable that their catalogue should begin to become unavailable.

Bostich - This is one of of their earliest tracks. Not my favourite song but the video is interesting and shows a pattern they will follow for the rest of their videos.

"Squeeze Please" from the "Motion Picture" album

"Jungle Bill" from "Baby" - This is one of the more enjoyable videos for both viewer and participants.

"The Rhythm Divine" Featuring Shirley Bassey from "One Second" - This could be a James Bond theme, Bassey brings an undeniable class to this number.

"Lost Again" from "You Got to Say Yes to Another Excess" - I had never seen the video before now

"The Race" from "Flag" - this is the yellow song which is only rivalled by "Oh Yeah" below

"Oh Yeah" from "Stella" and "One Second" - This was used in both "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "The Secret of My Success"

Electric Kitty Defies Gravity

2007-07-17T09:47:00.001+01:00

This kept me grinning for a while, hope you enjoy it too.

Rotoscoping

2007-07-17T09:42:00.000+01:00

According to Wikipedia Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films.

Here are a couple of good examples from 1980s videos. The first A-Ha's "Take on Me" is an all time classic video although sadly it looks quite dated now and the pace is far to slow for a generation that has grown up on cuts every half second.

A-Ha - Take on Me

The second is a video I don't remember seeing at the time by Howard Jones "You Know I Love You ... Don't You". This video actually stands up far better. It is pacey and rather than trying to tell a story it is simply having fun, playing with ideas forms and transformations.

I had gone off Howard Jones for years and years but got back into his music a couple of years ago and find his incredibly positive and healthy lyrics are really inspiring without ever being patronising or overly goody-goody. Just a shame about the haircut.

Howard JOnes - You Know I Love You ... Don't You

Other Howard Jones Videos

Like To Get To Know You Well - more rotoscoping

New Song

Look Mama

What Is Love

No One Is to Blame

Can you guess what it is yet?

2007-07-14T09:17:00.000+01:00

The fun is not knowing so watch and figure it out without any clues.

Somewhere Else

2007-07-14T08:48:00.000+01:00

This is a video by the band Razorlight. I had a couple of their singles on a hits compilation CD and although I liked the tracks in a vague way, they had not been enough for me to really notice this band. I only really noticed them when I saw this video and only after buying their debut album "Up All Night" did I realise that I was familiar with other tracks mentioned above.

My only disappointment with that CD was that this single "Somewhere Else" was released after the CD which was then re-released. So there are two versions of "Up All Night", one with and one without this track and I ended up with the "without" version. Still this has been one of the CDs I have played the most over the last couple of years and am still moved by the lyrics, the passion and constantly impressed by the musicianship of the whole band. This is good honest rock and roll but with a strong intelligence and heart.

The followup album eponymously named Razorlight was not met with very good reviews. Up All Night was a pretty hard act to follow. But hopefully after licking the wounds on his considerable ego, Johnny Borrel will be back with a worthy third album soon.

As for the video, my first impression of him standing there before he starts singing was how weedy and insignificant he looks, nervously adjusting his cuffs and seeming like a rabbit caught in the headlights of the camera. The song starts slowly but you begin to notice a swagger. Soon I realised that his young age hides a poetic wisdom far beyond his apparent years. To be singing of a sense of loss to do with state of mind, of a happier time and to sum it up with the image of "really really really which I could be somewhere else" is supremely powerful. By the end of the video this man has transformed himself and although he may not have the best singing voice it does have considerable power. This low budget video really shows the excesses of many million dollar videos which, for all their money, cannot match the impact and effectiveness of the simple back and white London street scenes.

Here is one of the reviews of Up All Night from Amazon which I thought was good.

The boy with the Golden Touch, 14 Jun 2004 - by William Geoffrey

Johnny Borrell's reputation precedes him. Having famously proclaimed himself to be the greatest songwriter of his generation, you could easily be forgiven for dismissing him as just another conceited and deluded young hopeful. That is until you realise that he has the material to support such a claim - with this first offering from Razorlight threatening to be the most significant debut since The Stone Roses fifteen years ago. Flanked by two Swedes, Björn Ågren's jagged guitar and the pounding bass of Carl Dalemo augment Johnny's songs, who, with a voice that belies his tender years, makes sharp observations of London life – telling seedy tales of love and rock'n'roll from the bars and backstreets of the city, far removed from the glitz and the glamour. The maturity and intelligence of the writing is startling coming from one so young. The spiky early singles "Rock n Roll Lies" and "Rip It Up" showcase the band’s energy and vigour, whilst the edgy and menacing "Up All Night" is a worthy and fitting title track. The standout tracks on the album are the majestic single "Golden Touch", sure to fill the airwaves this summer, and the thrillingly anthemic "Vice", which sounds like The Clash covering Costello. Other highlights include the frantic "Stumble & Fall", and Johnny's impassioned Dylan-esque torrent of words on the live favourite "In The City". An album with no weaknesses, and the sort of record that you like the first time around, love after the second listen, and can't stop playing from thereon in. Razorlight can seemingly do no wrong at the moment, and thankfully you get the impression there is a lot more to come from one Johnny Borrell...

Perpetual Motion

2007-07-11T18:29:00.000+01:00

Perpetual motion or extracting free energy from the cosmos has such an appeal that people through the centuries have sought it even though basic physics prohibits its existance. More impressive then that a company has financial backing for just such a project and was going to publicly demonstrate the company's product at the Kinetic Museum in London. But apparently the heat of the lights at the museum were causing problems and the demonstration has been postponed, indefinitely.

I'm not making this up

Kinetica Museum
Orbo - Steorn
BBC News article

They had better get that demo working soon as it seems like the guys below may have cracked it first.

Springtime on Mars

2007-07-08T11:45:00.000+01:00

This is a nice short little animation about "life" on Mars, in, well, the spring time. If you only watch one YouTube video today, make it this on.

Iris Recognition

2007-07-05T10:47:00.001+01:00

I went to the HP Science lecture at the HP offices here in Bristol yesterday. The speaker was John Daugman OBE of Cambridge University and he is the author of the algorithms used in all iris recognition systems deployed to date.

Every iris is unique (so far as anyone knows) even your left and right irises are different and identical twins also have different iris. The patterns within the iris are set before birth and do not appear to change throughout a person's life. There is no genetic determination of iris patterns.

All of the above makes them very good biometric identifiers. This is even better than DNA because identical twins have identical DNA and it is therefore not a unique identifier. And finger prints also have had cases where identical patterns have been found on different people.

I don't want to get into the civil liberties debate here but here are some points that would feed into that discussion.

In the UK individuals must consent to having any of their biometrics being recorded and only individuals aged sixteen or older may give consent.

We are happy to use passwords, cards with chips or magnetic strips, keys and so on to allow machines to identify us as individuals and mainly for our own benefit and the protection of our own assets. And yet all of these proxy identification systems are fallible to a greater or lesser extent. Iris recognition would mean that no one could steal your bank card and take your money out of an ATM.

International travel currently requires paperwork such as passports and visas. In a sense this is already a form of ID card.

And positive recognition of individuals is already possible by other humans. We don't know how we do it but we can recognise an individual from all different angles and even when a person has changed over years of ageing. In a sense iris recognition is simply allowing machines to do what humans already do.

Ultimately biometrics will come into common use because they will simply be too convenient for people in every day life. Being able to walk through immigration at airports without queuing because positive identification can be made in seconds by staring at a kiosk. Mobile phone theft becoming pointless because the phones only work in the presence of the owner. Never needing to carry cash or credit cards because you can walk into any shop and simply pay for goods by looking into a lens at the checkout. Never having to carry keys because your car, home and workplace all recognise you and let you enter or operate them. The health service will be able to retrieve your medical records regardless of whether you are conscious or not and know your blood type, allergies, special condition such as diabetes instantly. Taxpayers will also like the fact that benefit fraud will become much more difficult because multiple identities, or pretending to be other people will be virtually impossible.

Returning to the technical aspects of the system, there are three basic areas:

1) isolation of the iris within an image and identifying noise (such as reflections, edges of contact lenses, eye lashes), obscuring of the iris by the eye lids and deviations from perfectly circular and non-centring of the pupil (most pupils are not actually perfectly centred)

2) transformation of the iris pattern into a key value

3) using the key value statistically to determine matches with known iris patterns.

The first step is the sort of image recognition you'd find in robotics labs where there is edge finding and so on. There are also issues such as the eye not looking directly at the camera and transformations can be done on imperfect shots to "rotate" the eye within the image so that the iris appears as if it was looking directly at the camera. At the end of this step, the iris will be held as a perfect circle with a perfectly circular pupil perfectly centred within it.

The second step is the most "interesting" of the three as it is the one that is most specific to iris recognition, and yet it is likely that the techniques could and will be used in other areas. The image is captured in infra red as this removes the effects of pigmentation which is not as stable as the actual structure of the iris. The pattern of the structure is then encoded using wavelets which are a fairly new mathematical idea (mid 1980s) that allows any point on a surface to be given a "phase" in the same way a sin wave has a phase in two dimensions. Gauss and Fourier are involved. The result gives a binary bit plus an imaginary part (also expressed as a bit) for each location. Essentially two bits per sample and the information density of the iris allows for 50 samples or 100 bits of data which is a reasonably high number of bits.

The third stage is the statistical part. In any given test you are trying to determine if the iris just scanned is the same as another iris we scanned earlier. What is actually being tested is whether the two irises are statistically independent. That is to say to test if it is how likely it is for all the similarities to have occurred by chance. If the probability that the similarities occurred randomly and independently are small enough then one has a positive match.

The big issue is the likelihood of false positives and false negatives. In a data set of similar items one gets a bell curve when the data points are plotted on a graph. When you have two populations they will have the peaks of their curves at different points on the graph. The false positives and false negatives occur where the bell curves overlap and the data point in question could come from either population.

The two populations here "are eyes that are the same eye" and "eyes that are not the same eye". Because the randomness within each eye (the 100 bits) is large, it means that the bell curve when comparing different eyes centres around 50% mark and the "tails" on the bell curve are very short. The bell curve for eyes that are the same is a very similar shape but centres around the 0% mark. This means that there is virtually no overlap of the two curves and in theory the reliability of the matching should be very high.

As ever there are flies in the ointment. The main one is that if the iris scan being tested is not of a high quality then the "is the same eye" curve broadens and there is a larger overlap so false positives and false negatives become more likely. This is referred to as uncooperative samples. Glasses, contact lenses, movement, distance from sampling cameras can all reduce the quality of the scans. This is mainly about getting false negatives. However these issues would all be related to surveillance rather than controlled tests such as at immigration or during other transactions where individuals require a positive identification.

Another issue is faking which is about getting false positives. If the scanner can be fooled by a photo of an eye then the whole system is no better than magnetic strips or any other physical key system. Scanner systems can be made to detect eye movements and pupil dilation (which occur even when light levels are unchanging) to verify that it is scanning a real eye. As ever there will be a technological arms race between techniques to fool the scanners with fake irises and for scanners to detect fakes.

The Funny Side of the Force

2007-06-28T09:55:00.000+01:00

Hey Star Wars fans, you have got to watch this. Three parts to make it easier to watch. It ranges from continuous chuckles to choke on your coffee laugh out loud stuff. Which gags will get you is a personal thing and everyone will have a different "favourite" bit. Anyway enjoy:

Bullet on the Brain

2007-06-28T09:04:00.000+01:00

On the BBC news web site today there is an article that begins:

A bullet has been removed from behind the right ear of a US man who went to hospital complaining of a headache.

Michael Moylan, 45, from the state of Florida, is quoted as saying he had woken up with a headache so severe he thought it was caused by an aneurysm.

His wife, April, took him to hospital but left when the bullet was found. She was arrested later over the shooting, but said it was an accident.

see article

More worrying was the accompanying photo showing what looked like a rifle bullet about two inches long. Checking the properties of the image it, not surprisingly, was a stock image and not the actual bullet removed from this man's head. An hour later this image was replaced with one of a hand gun being fired, which is probably much closer to the actual kind used and being an action shot is more honest as an illustration.

One really has to wonder about this couple and their stories though. Would it be possible for him not to be woken by the gun shot? Apparently he said:

He reportedly told police he had woken up with a headache and asked his wife if she had elbowed him in the head while he slept.

If his wife was in the habit of elbowing him in this way it is amazing they were still sleeping together. But if he did know that she had shot him in the head why on earth would he cover for her?

And then there is the question of blood. Any head wound is going to bleed quite badly, and that is not a symptom usually associated with being elbowed, a bad headache or even an aneurysm.

I suppose the only answer is the obvious one. This guy must have a really thick skull!

Camera resolutions

2006-09-16T12:07:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning to post this one for a while. After using a fairly cheap 5 mega pixel camera for two years I now have now have a fairly serious 10 mega pixel camera. It's not an SLR but it does have a large CMOS sensor and a big Carl Zeiss lens.

Doubling the resolution does not double the size, in fact it is only 50% wider and 33% taller than the old pictures. The reason the percentages are different is that the old camera had a 3:4 aspect ratio whereas this is 2:3 (like 35mm film).

However because the lens is bigger and the sensor is bigger and of a higher quality the grain on the image is significantly improved. Just look at the side by side comparrison which shows the comparable part of two images taken at the same time from the same place.

Click on the image to see this at full size where you can really see the grain in the old image.

British Gas Clear as Mud

2006-09-16T12:04:00.000+01:00

British Gas recently got a bit of bad press because they were the first of the energy companies to raise their prices. The others followed shortly after but obviously some bright spark at British Gas decided that a leaflet explaining their tariff system would help people see what their rates actually were.

So as a customer I receive a leaflet entitled "Energy Price Rises. We want to make every thing clear" and the title is all blurred except the word clear. Clever.

But sadly intentions and reality have parted company and this is a twenty page booklet with virtually every page filled with tables of tariffs broken down by region, usage levels, and the various schemes that the customer may be on for both gas and electricity.

Tax _IS_ Taxing

2006-02-18T10:06:00.000Z

I signed up for the inland revenue website so I can do my company tax online. I know what you are thinking - "some people jusy know how to have fun." Currently it is optional and to entice people they promise cash payments each year for early adopters. It's £250 this year but will be less each year until filing online becomes compulsory in a few years.

The site is called "Government Gateway" but its url is http://www.gateway.gov.uk/ which is one of the only sites I know of where the name and the url do not match. When you register you are assigned a twelve digit user ID (consisting of random letters and numbers) and may choose your own password of eight to twelve characters.

When you finish filling in the online registration form, it says you cannot do anything more now until you get your activation code which they will now send you via the post (not email). When this arrives a week or two later you wonder what it is at first and then remember what it is about. In fact they send two separate letters, one with your user ID and another with the activation code.

The one with the activation code is protected with almost a quarter of the A4 sheet as a tear off flap with the random pattern on the front and back of the paper to ensure the code cannot be read by holding the paper in front of a light. The code itself is spelled out with full alpha, bravo charlie clarifications next to each of the twelve letters and digits.

It says says you have to activate the account within 28 days or the codes become invalid and you have to start again.

I did this over a year ago but was unable to get to a screen on the government gateway where I could enter the activation code. I typed in the addresses (urls) as instructed in the letter. I followed the links on screen and read any text I could find but would always end up at some general government portal screen. I tried on three different occasions but eventually my 28 days ran out and I gave up.

A few months later, my accountants said I should register so I could file my PAYE employers annual return. So I tried again and this time I did get to the right screen. Either something changed or perhaps the fact that this registration was for the PAYE service and not the VAT service that made the difference. (And this is part of the incredible nature of this process. If I want to add another service such as VAT form filing, I will have to repeat this process with new activation codes in the post.)

Anyway, I was able to file my employers end of year form which had ticks in all the "no" boxes and zeros in all the "to pay" boxes.

No word yet on my cash reward though ... or maybe there has.

Just after Christmas I got an email message from the government gateway. It said:

You have received mail in your Government Gateway Secure Mailbox for reference TaxOfficeNumber 846, TaxOfficeReference L2760. To read this message please logon to the Government Gateway

So I go to the site, log in, navigate to the secure mailbox screen, click on the message which says:

Date Received  21-Dec-2005 20:37
Subject  Online Filing Tax-Free Payment
Service  IR-PAYE
From  PAYE Enquiries
 
To view or download this electronic form please click on the following link: Inland Revenue PAYE Online for Employers

I click on the link which takes me to the inland revenue log in screen, and I log in there (thankfully it is the same user ID and password as the main gateway site).

This takes me to the front menu screen of the inlandrevenue.gov.uk site which calls itself "HM Revenue & Customs (just so that it matches it's url). This screen offers eight options including customer service, PAYE, VAT, stamp taxes, and corporation tax, but no mention of mailboxes. At this point I gave up.

But I have now received another email from the government gateway saying I have another email message. Again I followed the same trail and again ended up at the inlandrevenu.gov.uk front page.

Curiouser and curiouser, this time I click on PAYE. In the "view PAYE notices" I found a link in the text "view your messages" and like magic it displays exactly the same list of messages I saw back in the gateway message box. However when clicking on these I get an actual message.

And now I can see why all this security was necessary. The first message says, deduct the cash reward from your next PAYE payment, and the other says since you filed on line last year we won't send you the paper form this year. If either of these messages had fallen into the wrong hands, not only might it have lead to tax fraud but may well have endangered national security.

coffee and keyboards do mix

2006-01-29T09:27:00.000Z

They say you should try and do new things all the time. Sad to say my new experience this week was knocking my coffee mug onto my keyboard and getting a considerable amount of coffee into the thing. Sure I have dripped coffee on my keyboard before but only small amounts which usually stay between the keys due to surface tension and can be drawn off with a bit of tissue.

Anyway, my finger caught the handle of the mug as my hand swung back from the mouse to the keyboard. The mug did not fall but managed to rock in such a way that a miniature tsunami of coffee went high into the air and then splashed down all over the number pad.

Immediately I did what you are supposed to do when this happens and swore like a sailor. Then I unplugged the keyboard, took it to the kitchen and ran cold water over it. In fact I took the washing up brush and gave it a good scrub. I also totally flooded and drained the keyboard several times to give the innards a good clean.

I then placed it above a radiator and used an old keyboard (with several annoyingly intermittent keys) for a few days while the washed one dried out. It takes a while for all of the moisture and condensation to leave the plastic housing.

Since this is an Apple keyboard the outer housing is mainly transparent. This was a real boon for determining when there were no more beads of moisture inside it. However, this see through housing can have the disadvantage of putting on display any dust that has fallen into the keyboard.

I knew this bothered me in a small, background sort of way. From time to time I might try shaking the keyboard or blowing into the gaps in the hope of shifting some highly visible crumb or hair that had taken shelter in it. Being bothered by the dust is mentioned surprisingly often in Mac related media, so I take comfort that if I am a bit anal about this at least I am not alone.

But now that I have started using the cleaned board, I am surprised at how its cleanliness repeatedly catches my eye. Blimey its like a brand new keyboard! Even the tiny gaps between the keys radiate cleanness.

From now on I am not going to wait for a coffee accident to clean my keyboard and will give it a bath whenever I think it needs one!