Month: March 2011

Categories
Humour

St Patrick’s Day 2011

Ireland
Ireland without borders. Or weather.

Watching the St Patrick’s Day parade from Dublin on TV. Huge crowds, people of all ages from all parts of the world having heaps of innocent fun. Weird to think that just two days ago I was on that street, in a shop that sells what I will refer to only as apparel of an intimate nature. But that’s another story¹.

Some like to complain that the St Patrick’s Day parade has become Americanised. I have news for them; if anything it has become Irishised. There may be a lot of things about Ireland that have gone to America and come back strangely transformed. The Taoiseach spoke in the US yesterday wearing a green bow tie, something that would be unthinkable at home. The four-leaved clover you see everywhere these days is another case in point. That’s not an Irish emblem at all, simply a well-known symbol of luck because of its rarity. It’s become confused with the shamrock, presumably with the idea that it’s ‘even luckier’, but of course a four-leaved shamrock makes about as much sense symbolically as a five-legged muskrat.

The St Patrick’s Day parade however is no American version of an Irish tradition. It is an American tradition – and about as old a one as there is. They’ve been having them in New York for two hundred and fifty years, so it pre-dates even the US itself. It was begun by Irish soldiers in the British forces there, and became a tool for recruiting Irish colonists. So, not exactly the associations it has today… Shows you how mutable traditions really are.

So while celebrating St Patrick’s as a special day for Ireland has been traditional since mediaeval times, parading is a much later innovation, only becoming an official national thing as recently as 1931. Naturally Ireland’s own St Patrick’s Day parades were highly influenced by the much older US tradition, with expert American marching bands and cheerleaders frequently stars of the show.

Over recent years though it has been becoming more Irish. Today there are still the bands from overseas, but interspersed with them are arts groups from all over the country using floats, performance and giant puppets to tell chapters from a Roddy Doyle children’s story. Looks like a lot of fun at ground level. St Patrick’s Day parades may have begun as military marches, but it’s good to see them moving on.

  1. Which I am not telling.
Categories
Humour

Food For Breakfast 1

Deep fried pork intestines
Deep fried pork intestines

I am trying to eat breakfasts. Not a lot of them. Just one a day as nature intended. The main thing is that they not be fried. I allow myself fried food in the winter when you need a layer of fat to settle on the midriff and keep you insulated. But as soon as it is even nominally Spring – and I have to admit, the last couple of days have been downright summery – I resolve to eat like a herbivore.

So now it’s all fruit, seeds, yoghurt. I love it. Since I gave up drink I have found a strange comfort in such food. I think it contains all the important vitamins I was previously getting from beer.

To this end, I am seeking a great breakfast cereal. Maybe you consider that cheating. A real health person would be buying their grains and dried fruit by the sack and preparing breakfast with a scoop. But I am not a health person, and I am not a morning person. If it’s not in a big colourdy box marked “Breakfast”, there is a danger that I’ll eat the cat’s stuff.

It turns out my favourite one is by Kellogg’s, of all people. I like it for its mellow fruitfulness, and also because of its name: “Just Right – now with more fruit” – a pretty clear admission that it actually wasn’t just right.

And to be honest I don’t think it’s quite there yet. Slightly too many oats for my liking. Though it’s probable that too many oats for my liking is any oats at all. I’m just basically suspicious of any grain you don’t make beer out of. (You’re welcome to comment that, actually, you can make a perfectly good beer out of oats. You can play golf with a set of bagpipes if you try hard enough. It won’t make you popular though.) My girlfriend eats porridge every morning anyway, so I feel I am making sure that we have a balanced diet between us.

Categories
Technology

Don’t Panic – But Do Walk Away

The China Syndrome
Image via Wikipedia

If I was in Tokyo right now, I fucking wouldn’t be. It sounds like they’re rapidly losing control of the situation at Fukushima. With the cooling system gone, the fuel stored at the number four reactor first melted and has now gone critical – that is, it’s acting like a nuclear reactor itself, generating vast amounts of heat and radiation. And the occasional explosion.

So now they have a pool of self-heating molten metal that is too dangerous to approach. It is hard to imagine what exactly they are going to do about that.

It looks like we could see China syndrome here. Except of course in Japan it is somewhere near the Falklands Islands syndrome. There is a real possibility that Fukushima is going to become the worse nuclear accident ever. And it is close to one of the greatest cities on Earth.

Bugger.

Categories
Cosmography Technology

The Argument For Nuclear Energy 2

History of the use of nuclear power (top) and ...
Image via Wikipedia

The first question then is: Does the world need nuclear to avert global warming and/or replace fossil fuels?

And I’m afraid the answer is an unequivocal Yes. It is pretty much inevitable that as fossil fuels dwindle, we are going to use nuclear more. But we must not make the error of seeing it as a solution to these problems. Debate goes on over how long supplies of uranium and other fissile materials will last, but there is no question that like fossil fuels before them, they are finite. Even if they are safer than hydrocarbons – even if they were perfectly safe – they remain a stopgap measure.

The real technical challenge we face is making these non-renewables hold out until renewable energy systems are sufficiently developed to take their place. We have a destination to reach, if you like, and just one tank to get there on. We do not know how long the journey is. There are no filling stations.

And we need to get there as soon as we can. In part of course because both fossil and fissile are environmentally harmful, but mainly because the more of them we use up, the more expensive they will become. A world that is struggling to find sufficient energy just to keep going is not a world that will be able to take on massive engineering projects. If we do not reach that destination while energy is still relatively cheap, we may find that we cannot afford to get there ever. In which case, we face war and starvation on a barely imaginable scale. Energy is, quite simply, the means to survival.

So what I fear most about nuclear power is not its risks, but that it will give us a sense of energy security where none is justified. We need – and we need right now – to focus on the long-term destination, not on finding new ways to keep the unsustainable going that little bit longer.

Categories
Politics

Look Behind You

Foreign troops have entered Bahrain to quell the month-long uprising. Some are calling it an invited peacekeeping force from neighbouring Gulf Cooperation Council states. Others are calling it what it looks like – military intervention by Saudi Arabia.

Remember the raving lunatic Gaddafi who seemed to be under the delusion that he was the ruler of Libya? Well he’s winning. He may only have minority support, but it’s the minority with most of the heavy weapons.

There is little the rest of the world can do for Japan now. They have the resources to deal with the disaster; any specialised help needed they will get. The danger is that while we are fixated on the human tragedy and nuclear drama, besieged dictatorships in the Middle East will move to crush their nascent democracy movements.

Categories
Cosmography Politics Technology

The Argument For Nuclear Energy 1

Nuclear CartoonIt was not the best day to argue for nuclear energy.

However Philip Walton, emeritus prof of physics at NUIG¹ and son of Irish Nobel laureate Ernest Walton², appeared on national radio last Friday to do just that. News of Japan’s reactor emergency was just coming in at this point, but the appearance was part of a campaign that he and two other physicists had launched at NUIG on Wednesday, so cancelling was really out of the question.

It all seemed a little surreal.

We should not of course let circumstances carry the debate. There are strong arguments in favour of using nuclear fission to generate electricity. Walton is perfectly right to say that all other methods have their risks and their costs too.

The debate is really over how you quantify those costs, and one person’s convincing argument is another’s canard. Walton for instance says that more people are killed mining coal in China every year than in the whole history of the nuclear industry. This may be true – but should we really take greater risks here just because the Chinese have an appalling safety record?

The argument needs to be broken down further:

  • Does the world need nuclear to avert global warming and/or replace fossil fuels?
  • Assuming the answer is yes, do we need to have a nuclear generator here?

The first part is of course enormously controversial right now, and is going to get more so.

I will try to deal with it tomorrow.

  1. The National University of Ireland, Galway. (My own alma mater, as it happens.)
  2. (As in Cockcroft and)
Categories
Cosmography Technology

Accident and Design

It is weird how people focus on the nuclear angle. One Irish news programme even got a radiological official on to assure us that we wouldn’t be in any danger here. We really have no sense of proportion about radiation – and I speak as someone who is not in favour of nuclear electricity generation. This is against a background of perhaps 10,000 actual deaths caused by the natural disaster. So far it’s only been reported that 160 people may have even been exposed to some level of radiation.

For sure, questions do need to be asked about why such an earthquake-prone country is so dependent on this energy source. And it is also true that the nuclear threat is a human element in the story, a preventable disaster.

But we shouldn’t overlook the preventable disaster that was prevented. An earthquake and a tsunami of unprecedented size struck one of the most densely populated places on the Earth. There might easily have been millions dead.

In a place where almost all habitable land is coastal there is little one can do to stave off a tsunami, short of abandoning the country altogether. But buildings can be designed to withstand tremors. They were, and they did so brilliantly. Compare this to Christchurch where they were not anticipating an earthquake and so hadn’t built for it. Amid this tragedy, Japan can take some comfort in the fact that tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.

Categories
Cosmography

Tragedy

Some days you really don’t know what to say. I’m messaging via Skype with a Japanese friend. Her family are okay, but one of her friends can’t contact their parents. They’re in Utsunomiya which looks to be well inland, so hopefully it is just a breakdown in communications.

My heart goes out to the people in Japan.

Categories
Technology

The Cookie Monster

Cookie CartoonLook at this, this is cool! The classic arcade game Defender, but miniaturised to the 16-pixel square of the page’s favicon (the little logo that appears in your browser’s address bar and bookmarks). You can actually play it.

Of course, you may fairly ask what is the point of playing an old video game in a space about one ninth the size of a postage stamp. But I don’t care, it’s a wonderfully clever bit of Web programming.

Speaking of which, do cookies worry you? The browser ones I mean. Perhaps they should. They were innocent things to start with, just a simple file that a website you visit is allowed to leave on your computer. Yet that can be extremely useful, allowing sites to recognise you when you visit again and log you in automatically.

But then, they can be abused… Suppose you visit a site that has an advert on it. The ad will normally be served from a whole other computer, belonging to the advertising service. And that computer gets to leave a cookie too.

Think what happens next – you go to a lot of sites, you see a lot of ads. But many of these will actually come from the same source, and when that computer reads the cookies it put on your computer earlier, it has a record of other places you’ve been.

A picture can then be built up of your movements across the web, and even used to serve adverts tailored to your particular interests. Or predilections. You might see that as a boon and a convenience, but others may find it uncomfortably intrusive. Especially if they share a computer with family or colleagues.

I’m in two minds about this. After all nothing you do on the Web is really private anyway, so making a fuss about cookies is like complaining that the gorilla on your chest has dandruff. And yet I don’t much care to look at adverts in the first place, so I like the idea of them watching me back even less. I routinely block all cookies, making exceptions only for the sites I visit regularly. This is easy enough with Firefox, using an add-on like Cookie Monster. Call me paranoid, but I’ll get upset if you do.

And it seems the European Commission agrees with me. An e-privacy directive will mandate that sites will only be able to track you with your explicit permission. Is it going to work though? Some argue it will make browsing irritating, with sites continuously popping up messages saying things like “Can I track you please? There are many benefits!” But in the competitive world of the Web, I doubt that users will put up with such nonsense.

So I think it will work. The real danger perhaps is that the ban will give people an illusion of privacy. It means no such thing. If you want real privacy on the Internet, use a proxy.

Categories
Humour Politics

Dame Enda

NYTimes Cartoon

Newspapers, never call yourself a ‘paper of record’. Every silly mistake you make then becomes a silly mistake, of record. It’s extra fun when an institution as grand as the New York Times decides that Enda Kenny’s name is wrong and corrects it. And his gender, while they’re at it. Couldn’t they employ a competent sub-editor from Estonia or somewhere?

Mind you, a certain paper I used to work for (ahem) made a similar mistake with my copy once. Or rather, the opposite mistake. At the time there were rumours about a certain Fianna Fáil politician receiving a payment of over a million from a certain businessman. We all knew who it was, but libel laws prevented us from saying. So I decided to refer to him as ‘Edna’, which I considered the least likely possible name for a TD – especially a male one.

My sub-editor happily ‘corrected’ this to Enda – three times – changing the deliberately strange into the merely confusing, and making it look like I was impugning the reputation of the man who is our Taoiseach now. Ironic, considering his promise yesterday.

But why am I telling you about it? Thanks to the magic of the Internet, here it is. From December 1996.

Knew I should have gone with Ethel.

Speaking of wealthy businesspersons, in the news this morning we learn that there are now five people in Ireland who have made the Forbes list of dollar billionaires. To think, only a few years ago I would have felt quite proud of that fact. Now I just want to see their tax clearance certs.