Asthma
Phyllis noticed last night around 3am that Léon wasn’t breathing properly. Given that he was already on antibiotics (for two ear infections and a throat infection), it couldn’t very well be a chest infection, so she decided to take him to Yorkhill straight away.
They soon decided that he’s probably got asthma, so they gave him a steroid inhaler, and when that seemed to improve his condition, they discharged him later in the day.
I just hope he’ll get better now that he has an inhaler – he’s been ill far too often over the past half year!
The Streisand farce
Phyllis is a big fan of Barbra Streisand, so when it was announced that she was going on a European tour this summer, she of course decided that we should go. The only question was when to go. The options seemed to be Vienna, London, Dublin, Paris and Nice, so she tried London and Paris, but both got sold out immediately.
A few days later, they added Rome, and given that Ryanair fly there directly from Prestwick, it’s actually not any more expensive to go there than to London, so she bought tickets for both of us. So far, so good.
However, a couple of days ago they cancelled the show in Rome and added Zurich instead. And yesterday they added Manchester.
This is utterly ridiculous! The tickets are expensive, and they tend to get sold out almost immediately, so one cannot very well either buy tickets for all the shows or book new tickets when a show is cancelled or a when a more convenient show is announced.
Why can’t they make a complete and confirmed programme in advance so that people can choose the venue closest to them, and then trust that it actually is on? As it is, there must be people from Manchester who’ve got tickets for London, or for the cancelled show in Rome, just because they didn’t know Barbra was going to Manchester.
Who knows, they might even add Glasgow or Horsens yet.
Streisand should sack her concert organisers on the spot. This is a bloody farce that is benefiting none of her fans and is costing some of them lots of money and inconvenience!
Logo
For mange år siden havde jeg adgang til en simpel logo-fortolker, med todimensionel skildpaddegrafik.
Der er sket en smule i mellemtiden… I dag downloadede jeg FMSLogo for at lære Charlotte logo, og den har indbygget 3D-grafik! Illustrationen til højre er lavet med flg. kode:
to square polystart repeat 4 [fd 100 rt 90] polyend end perspective setpc [0 255 0] repeat 20 [square rightroll 18] polyview
polystart, polyend og polyview bruges til at definere udfyldte polygoner, perspective slår 3D-moden til, og setpc definerer en farve (der så belyses og derved skifter nuance). Resten er simpel, gammeldags logo, som vor mor lavede det.
Exolinguistics
I love Star Trek (esp. The Next Generation), but one of its shortcomings is its stance on alien languages. The Original Series and TNG tend to handwave the problem away completely by means of the universal translator. I’m currently working my way through Enterprise, which at least acknowledges the problem to a certain extent, insomuch as they have an exolinguist on board and the universal translator is sometimes faulty, but it’s still completely naïve, given that Hoshi can learn alien languages faster than anybody can learn a human language.
If we assume that aliens will speak languages (which is not certain – telepathy might be used on other planets), I see no reason to assume they will be pronounceable, or even parseable, by humans. Without even leaving Earth, imagine that the songs of whales were a real language of human complexity – who’d be able to pronounce that?
Furthermore, human languages seem to fall in a specific category of languages, very similar to context-free languages (but slightly more complex in some regards and not using all the features in other regards); who knows whether this would be true for aliens, too? If their language adhered to a regular grammar instead, I guess we’d have no problems learning their language, but they’d be unable to learn ours.
I’m not saying communication would be impossible, but I think it might take good exolinguists months if not years to get anywhere, and I think in most cases communication would be restricted to very simple ideas, and in most cases it would take place through a computer which would introduce a delay. But I guess this wouldn’t make for very good television.
The West Lothian question
The West Lothian question – that is, the problem that lots of areas are devolved to the Scottish Parliament, but the Scottish MPs can still vote on these issues when they concern England – seems to have found two bad solutions:
- The Tories seem to prefer excluding Scottish MPs for voting on issues affecting only England. While this sounds really attractive at first, it leads to problems with laws that contain parts that apply to Scotland, and even more importantly, if there was a situation where Labour was the largest party when the Scottish MPs were included, but not when they weren’t, what would happen to the areas that are devolved? In other words, would there be a Labour prime minister but a Tory health secretary? Or would the Labour health secretary be unable to pass legislation?
- Labour seems to prefer devolving power to the English regions. Apart from the problem that the people of England don’t seem to have any appetite for this at all, I fail to see how this would solve the West Lothian question. As far as know, only fairly limited powers would be devolved to them. The Scottish Parliament, on the other hand, has far-reaching law-making powers, so there would still be many areas that were devolved to Scotland but handled by Westminster for England.
The only real solution would be creating an English Parliament, and letting the UK Parliament deal only with UK issues. There would still be a problem with Wales, though, because fewer areas are devolved to the Welsh Assembly than to the Scottish Parliament – perhaps joint sessions of the English Parliament and the Welsh Assembly would be needed.
Of course the remaining UK Parliament could be cut down in size a lot, and perhaps it would be best to let the Scottish, English, Welsh and Northern Irish parliaments/assemblies send delegates to it, rather than electing it directly.
No mixed couples?
I found this Faroese sign on Flickr.
What is it supposed to mean? No racially mixed couples? Don’t walk close together? No heterosexual couples? None of these make any sense, do they?
The photographer doesn’t seem to have a clue, either.
I Danmark
Vi tager snart alle fem til Danmark igen. Vi ankommer til Billund fredag den 29. juni, og vi tager afsted igen søndag den 15. juli.
Eneste helt faste programpunkt er min søsters bryllup og min nieces barnedåb lørdag den 30. juni.
Vi regner med at leje en bil, så vi kan komme lidt rundt i landet – vi fik ikke set så meget ved nytårstide. Send mig en mail, hvis du/I er i landet og vil have besøg af mig og mine fire skotter.
If you don’t move, you sink!
I’ve blogged about the LibDem nonsense before.
Now, however, they’ve done it all over again in Wales!
This is ridiculous! If they want to work only with Labour, why don’t they join Labour?
I think the problem might be that the LibDems are torn between a faction that will only work with Labour (former SDP members?) and other members that will exploit the possibilities of coalition politics.
However, it won’t do that a party is so torn between two factions that it can’t manoeuver, or it effectively becomes a lame duck.
If there are members that refuse to vote against Labour in order to gain power, they should be named and shamed and thrown out of the party. Trying to keep everybody happy will just lead to the eventual demise of the party.
Is New Labour a neocon party?
I was reading up on the neocon movement on Wikipedia today.
It seems that generally speaking, neocons are former Democrats who thought their party didn’t stand up to the USSR in the 1970s and who therefore became Reagan Republicans. “These people tended to remain supporters of social democracy, but distinguished themselves by allying with the Nixon administration over foreign policy, especially by their support for the Vietnam War and opposition to the Soviet Union. They still supported the welfare state [...]“
I wonder what happened to this sort of people in the UK. I’ve never heard of any mass exodus of people with this sort of views from Labour to the Tories in the late ’70s.
I’m starting to think that perhaps they stayed in Labour, and subsequently became the core of New Labour, and that this is why Tony Blair and George W. Bush get on so well.
Tony Blair definitely seem to be very close to the neocon mindset, but I’m not sure whether that’s a fairly recent development. And what about Gordon Brown – is he a neocon as well?
Honda and the euro
The Independent had an interesting piece today about Honda ruling out further expansion in the UK while the countries stays outwith the eurozone.
As they say, “We thought that the UK was Europe but they are reluctant to join the euro, which was something we hadn’t expected.”
Even more interesting than the article itself is the fact that no other media seem to be reporting this. Is there an unwritten consensus to keep the euro off the agenda for the moment? If so, who is that helping?