The Leader

The promise of power and the thought of sex.

Some episodes of Game of Thrones are harder to find general talking points for others.  Thankfully, this time around a character is good enough to spell things out for us: how does one hold power without friends?

(Yaar! Spoilers ahead, m'lads!)

Taking The... Redux

I see dogs and urine are once again in the news (clearly this is a combination with potential).  This time round, it's because the study of doggy wee has led to breakthroughs in the understanding of human kidney behaviour, which in turn has helped out with regard to type 2 diabetes.

Much as I love our canine companions, of course, can I just mention how depressing it is to realise the nine months I've spent trying to smash a huge data set into shape so as to detect the effects of new diabetes treatments has turned out to have been less use than a dog pissing into a bottle?

Research fellows: for when no dog is available, or none of those nearby fancy emptying their bladders.

Radio Friday: Interpreting The Classics

Posted purely because I've been watching this vid for over a week and I still can't stop laughing whenever I play it.



Happy Friday!

Vote Evil, Children!

I tend to be agnostic (no pun intended) on the subject of faith schools, because there are so many angles to consider that I can never slice through them.   Clearly, though, they have can cause problems , and this story from New Humanist illustrates one such instance:

[P]upils at St Philomena’s Catholic High School for Girls, a Catholic state school for 11 to 18 year-olds in South London, have been urged by the headmistress to sign the Coalition for Marriage petition against the legalisation of gay marriage. This followed a request from the Catholic Education Service, which sent a letter to all Catholic secondary schools asking them to draw attention to the petition and the Catholic leadership's opposition to the reforms.   

Not only were several of the pupils present themselves gay - which must be difficult enough in a Catholic school - it doesn't seem particularly unreasonable to suggest that a secular society allowing faith schools is different to allowing faith schools to engage in political activity. People would be furious, and rightly so, if a secular school's head teacher were to encourage their students to vote for or otherwise support anything but the most anodyne of political initiatives (and by "anodyne", I essentially mean no-one in parliament is objecting to the idea). 

If this woman simply wanted to point out the Catholic church isn't in favour of same-sex marriage, I'd say (like normal) that it's a ridiculous thing to get worked up about and makes the speaker seem paranoid at best, and I'd also point out (as does Philomena student Katherine) that it's kind of a shitty thing to do when talking to kids who might be gay and want to get married themselves one day, but that would at least arguably be what faith schools get to do. Attempting to mobilise one's students for a political cause seems unambiguously bad. 

(This would be true if she'd been "urging" them to sign the petition going in the opposite direction, of course, though if she'd wanted to put together an assembly calling for acceptance of homosexuality, that'd be fine.  It's brandishing the paperwork at the end that's the problem.)

Update: Had to edit the penultimate paragraph so it actually scanned.

Rebel Waltz

A voice that called ,"Stand 'til we fall!
We stand 'til all the boys fall!"

Last week we discussed the difficulties that arise from trying to protect some assets at the risk of others; the idea that the exercise of power (however it is being manifested at the time) is often a balancing act.  In "What is Dead may Never Die", that thought is returned to more than once.  In addition, however, we take a look at some of the inhabitants of Westeros who either don't realise that balance is required, or who are aware of the idea in theory and yet choose to ignore it completely.

(Spoilers below.)

Prior Data Conflict

My friend Gero (pictured here - and I still don't have my prize money, BTW) works in the field of prior data conflict.  To simplify extraordinarily, this deals with the situation in which you've begun collecting data under certain assumptions about what you're going to find, and your first few results look like that theory is going to be blown out of the water.

I mention this purely because I just heard a snippet of Front Row on Radio 4 in which I received my first information about Joss Whedon's The Avengers: it's an embarrassment to feminism with terrible dialogue and a strongly right-wing message.  So claims John Wilson, at least, about which I know nothing (save to say that anyone who precedes quoting MacBeth by pointing out he's about to use Shakespeare's words is either condescending, foolish or, on Shakespeare's "birthday", being entirely too cute).

I could phone Gero and ask him how to handle the exceptionally tricky task of figuring out exactly how to alter my preconceptions.  Or, I could just read more reviews.  It's almost as though all the stuff Gero (and I, and BigHead, and Ibb) work on turn out to not be useful in daily life.  How strange...

Obvious Objections

Whilst we're (briefly) on the subject of warmonger for hire Charles Krauthammer, his latest column makes me once again of alternative editorial systems.  In a perfect world, anyone wanting to write a piece of political commentary would be forced to answer one question on what they'd written.  The question would be determined by vote, and failing to answer the question would result in your piece being pulled.  I'd be quite happy suggesting this idea across the political spectrum; the immediate curtailment of the careers of Krauthammer, William Kristol, David Brooks et al would surely be worth whomever we might lose on the left.

Regarding Krauthammer's ridiculous lament over the scaling-back of US space-power (which naturally isn't just stupid but actively misleading), I'm struggling to decide between Kevin Drum's "would you still argue this if rich people's taxes were raised to pay for it?", and Daniel Larison's "How does planning to do something 56 years after America managed it qualify as 'overtaking'?", but the universe would be a less frustrating place if people were required to place opinions in context, and whilst using the actual meaning of words.  You'd think that would be an editor's job, actually, but here we are anyway.

Right, I'm off to take my Corsa to the northern Mediterranean, drive round Circuit de Monaco, and therefore overtake Stirling Moss and win the 1956 Grand Prix.  That'll be a great result to have, though of course I can't be sure I'll retain it until we reach 2068.