Blair’s vision
I’m currently reading Alastair Campbell’s “The Blair Years”.
Lots of the really juicy stuff has been edited out, of course, but there’s still quite a lot of interesting details here and there.
For instance, on page 249 (5/10/97) it says this about Tony Blair’s thoughts on the political parties:
Second, Lib Dems. He was now moving towards an April reshuffle in which he would like to bring two Liberals into the Cabinet, with some kind of full-scale merger after the next election, with an electoral commission on AV for this time, ‘proper’ PR afterwards, at which point the Tories would be wiped out.
Apart from the problem that Blair seems not to have realised that many (most?) Libdems don’t consider themselves some kind of lost Labour members to be integrated at the behest of the Labour leader, he seems to have beeen incredibly naïve about how a multi-party democracy works.
If proportional representation is used, there is no need for big, broad parties, because smaller parties can get elected, too. So under PR, the Tories would never be wiped out, and there would be no point in merging Labour and the Libdems. The only point in merging those parties would be to increase their number of seats under first-past-the-post.
Also, no party can rule forever in a democracy. At some point, people will tire of it, and they’ll vote for alternatives. So although merging Labour and the Libdems might have prolonged the years in the wilderness for the Tories, people would have tired of the Labdems eventually, too.
The only way to wipe out a party is to give its voters something else to vote for.
Probably the best chance in recent decades for wiping out the Tories would have been for the Libdems to have overtaken the Tories under IDS in 2003, thus replacing the Tory-Labour system with a Labour-Libdem one.
Merging Labour and the Libdems would ultimately have strengthened the Tories, not wiped them out.
CueCat
Inspireret af Trine kom jeg til at købe en CueCat, da jeg så en til en rimelig pris ($15) på LibraryThing.
Den er nem at bruge: Man kører den frem og tilbage over en stregkode, og den genererer så en streng af ASCII-tegn.
Fx vil en scanning af bogen Essentials of Cooking generere “.C3nZC3nZC3n2CxjXCxr7DxnY.cGf2.ENr7CNz0ENv2CNfZDxz3C3nZ.”
Noget software i LibraryThing omsætter det så til et ISBN-nummer og finder den på nettet. Nemt!
Og den virker fint under Linux. 
Altædende baby
Nu har jeg jo godt nok aldrig haft en datter før, men er seks måneder ikke ret tidligt at begynde at spise pizza?
Hvad man ikke kan se på billedet, er, at hun ikke bare suttede på slicen, men rent faktisk klarede at fortære en god del af den, helt uden tænder!
Og som sædvanligt fik hun ikke noget galt i halsen – hvorfor anbefaler de dog at purere babymad? 
Stærkest
Jeg ser, at Naser Khader efter eksklusionen af Jørgen Poulsen har udtalt, at “nu er vi tilbage til drømmepositionen”.
Han uddyber, at “vi har måttet gå på kompromis med de ting, vi gerne ville, fordi der var så mange, der koblede sig til projektet”.
Det lader til, at Khader og Samuelsen er Ibsen-fans – i hvert fald er Khaders udtalelse jo nærmest identisk med konklusionen i En Folkefiende, nemlig at “den stærkeste mand i verden, det er han, som står mest alene”.
Jeg er ikke helt overbevist om, at man bør starte politiske partier, hvis man har den holdning…
I saw this on Flickr…
The context of this photo is not shown, so I guess I can’t rule out it was created for the occasion.
But if it’s genuine, I really wonder what they were thinking about.
“Collide here if followed by giant eels below”?
Last chance to see Bangladesh
There is a scary article about Bangladesh in The Independent. (The first half is much better, so feel free to stop reading when you’re halfway through.)
Basically, Bangladesh seems to be drowning already:
The seas are rising, so land is being claimed from the outside. (The largest island in the country, Bhola, has lost half its land in the past decade.) The rivers are super-charged, becoming wider and wider, so land is being claimed from within. (Erosion is up by 40 per cent). Cyclones are becoming more intense and more violent (2007 was the worst year on record for intense hurricanes here). And salt water is rendering the land barren. (The rate of saline inundation has trebled in the past 20 years.) “There is no question,” Dr Rahman said, “that this is being caused primarily by human action. This is way outside natural variation. If you really want people in the West to understand the effect they are having here, it’s simple. From now on, we need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility.”
Stor pige
I dag fik vi en dejlig rogan josh-karryret til aftensmad.
Anna insisterede på at smage, og hun så ret glad ud, så vi blendede lidt ris, mælk og karrysovs til hende.
Det kunne hun vældig godt li’ (ikke lige så godt som øllebrød, skal det siges), men hun blev tørstig, så vi gav hende en kop vand med appelsinjuice.
Hun er allerede dygtig til at drikke af kopper – det er kun sutteflasker, hun ikke kan finde ud af – og hun kan også selv holde koppen.
I betragtning af, at hun kun er seks måneder gammel, synes jeg, hun er stor og dygtig!
Firefox 3
I’ve just upgraded to Firefox 3.
It seems to work well, and many of my extensions have survived.
The main casualty seems to be Google Browser Sync which I tend to rely heavily on. 
I’ll write more once I’ve had more time to test it out.
Transfat
There’s an excellent article in The Independent today about transfat.
I knew Denmark had outlawed transfat altogether, but I didn’t realise so few countries had followed suit so far (only Switzerland in Europe).
Also, I didn’t realise the results were so staggering. According to the article, “the rate of heart disease among Danes has dropped by a staggering 40 per cent” since the ban was introduced five years ago.
I think there should be an EU-wide ban, but until that happens, I definitely think Scotland (or the UK if it’s not devolved) should introduce a complete ban, the sooner the better!
Linguistic sophistication
Léon has for some time known that dragons and kites are called the same in Danish (en drage).
Today Phyllis decided to test whether he would calque this into English.
She showed him a picture of a kite (knowing that he’s very familiar with dragons already) and asked him what it was:
– What’s that, Léon?
– What’s that?
– What’s it called?
– A flying box? [sounding uncertain]
– Is it a dragon?
– Yes, it’s a dragon! [sounding relieved]
This shows that’s he’s analysed that Danish drage and drage are homonyms, not just senses of the same word, and that he therefore can’t assume that the two drager will be called the same in English.
Also, he’s clearly keeping track of the words he knows in each language, and he won’t just use the Danish word for something when he’s speaking English. He used to do this, but he’s clearly realised that doesn’t work.