What, Why & How do we Know ?
All UK Nurses to be graduate entry only ! WTF ?
Public project structures are important, like cathedrals used to be – and I like this idea – the funding architecture as well as the physical architecture.
I might be considered a bit of a luddite when it comes to automated sensors and navigational aids on private cars – I can never see the point of taking the human out of the loop – don’t believe the dumbing down can be net positive.
But this road-train idea I like. Totally guided – hands-off / brain-off freedom as in a train when linked to the lead vehicle, but private motoring when it’s the motoring flexibility and freedom you want. Can see the efficiency working if the cars themselves are hybrids – with performance when you want it.
Guess there must be a few failure modes to work out before this can go live ?
OK, so for all sorts of prejudiced social reasons, I don’t like Chelsea, but despite my view of the two significant refereeing decisions, I do believe they deserved to beat Man U yesterday, who despite Rooney’s hard work just didn’t have the strike power. And I don’t have any time for Sir Alex’s rantings about fouls awarded or not – the cases in point were debatable, matters of the referee’s perspective.
Booking Drogba ? 100% right. OK so he was fouled and he didn’t feign injury, and yes Fletch deserved a card more than once yesterday, but Drogba feigned imminent death in full view of referee and the rest of the world. A bookable offence. Referee correct.
Terry’s goal ? 100% wrong. Drogba was clearly interfering with play right in front of the keeper – in full view of the referee’s assistant. Van der Saar didn’t even dive till Drogba had failed to kick it, he was covering Drogba’s strike. 100% offside, no goal. Referee’s assistant wrong, referee correct.
The referee did nothing wrong.
[Note : Psybertron is primarily about right and wrong in action. Chelsea FC are just an interesting source of contentious decisions – a high-profile case-study of individual, social and authority based ethics. But, yes, I do care about football too.]
A page discussing Pirsig at Reddit which I picked up from the del.ici.ous tag on Pirsig which grows all the time – must use del.ici.ous more myself.
Is a 60/70/80’s mainly UK rock musicians reference site from the 90’s (pre-blogs and wikis) that has just had all its content at Geocities go offline. Good luck to Miguel Terol getting the content re-built in Blogger / BlogSpot form.
I’ve not been following the detail of what’s in, what’s out of the health reform bill, and it was a close margin with only one Republican crossing the house – but a momentous vote bringing tears to the eyes.
If this were adults rather than children perhaps the “piss-up in a brewery” metaphor might be more apt, but I love the dead-pan delivery of the choices in planning a childrens party from Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge. I saw Dave do this a few years ago, so it’s good to have the video to share – the point is well made anyway.
“Cross that line you little ba****ds and you die.”
Audience participation for conference speakers ? The common power of the pentatonic scale demonstrated by Bobby McFerrin at the World Science Festival.
After rehearsing just two notes the entire audience is spot on the third – with absolutely no warning of where he’s going next, up or down. And it continues eventually to the tonic / octave via random intervals. Simple but very impressive.
(Don’t know anything about WSF – looks a lot like TED – but got the link via StumbleUpon.)
Two ironic points struck me at last night’s Muse gig at Oslo Spektrum. Excellent performance by Matt, Dom and Chris as we have come to expect, and performance is the word.
(1) as Muse repertoire grows, the new stuff slots in with the old quite seamlessly, even though it clearly becomes impossible to experience all your favourites at one gig. The last two albums have been more symphonic, even “themed”, and even they fit the tried and tested Muse pattern – hence the seamless fit – and they’re so damned good at it. BUT … it’s all getting a bit 1970’s overblown pre-punk “concept” album and tour backlash. Don’t go there Muse … back to basics for future variety please, you know it makes sense.
(2) Supporting the audience. Muse have never been great at engaging with their audience, beyond the performance itself (which is of course excellent – see above). If Dom didn’t stop to talk to acknowledge the crowd occasionally – the personal engagement would be zilch. Ironic that when Muse were invited to support U2 recently, Matt noticed that “We must be doing OK, but not as well as them, clearly”. Following that “honour” I have to say Muse (or their tour promoters) need to be taken out and shot for serving up “The Horrors” as a support act to the Muse audience, to any audience.