I find it incredibly annoying that Amazon has started inserting advertising (or ‘sponsored links’ as they prefer to call it) in your search results. I accept that large chunks of the web can only survive because free services are paid for with advertising, and that seems fair. But Amazon is a shop. It’s trying to sell stuff to me. I’ve already spent more money there than I care to remember. Why the fuck should I have to scroll past extra advertising while I’m shopping?
The pick of the search engine queries used to find this site during September:
nelson cricket anecdote
chipotles canned sainsbury
england cricket jerusalem listen
pseudo-ku
banana shallot photo
rik auden
maradona gastric bypass
richard gere films
dead land
kedgeree
maskless diving
poetry perfidious albion
old american pinup
what are the kennings in the seafarer poem.
processions that lack high stilts
What a lot of disappointed punters.
I just downloaded The Gimp as a substitute for Photoshop. And so far it looks pretty damn impressive. The interface is a bit Windows-y (Unix-y?) for my liking – not because there’s anything wrong with that, but because I’d prefer all my software to be consistent. And it’s a tad geeky (a menu called ‘Script-Fu’? Puh-lease).
But as an alternative to ordering £500 worth of Photoshop from Apple, a five-minute free download takes a lot of beating.
I thought this article by Daniel Finkelstein about the differing rhetorical styles of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair was surprisingly interesting, given the subject matter.
Ben Goldacre says (full article here):
There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well – it’s a small middle-class world after all – and I know that until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon. Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely – since they’ll be the ones interested in reading the stuff – people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it’s edited by a whole team of people who don’t understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given “science communication” chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.
Amen, brother.
Of course, it’s not just science reporting. Any time you read an article in the paper on a subject where you have some specialist knowledge – Anglo-Saxon poetry, or birdwatching, or husky racing – it’s always riddled with inaccuracies and misleading phrasing. But inaccurate reporting on Anglo-Saxon poetry is pretty harmless, whereas inaccurate reporting of, say, research into the MMR jab can scare a lot of people, undermine confidence in medicine and potentially cost people their lives.
I vaguely assume that in the core news subjects (politics, business and sport, especially) the reporters have enough real expertise to know what the important stories are and how to present them accurately, even if they don’t choose to do so. But perhaps they’re floundering around in the same fog of ignorance that seems to afflict science journalists.
I went to see the ‘Stubbs and the horse‘ exhibition at the National. But first things first; the Alison Lapper statue works much better in the flesh then I expected.
For those of you who don’t know, at the corners of Trafalgar Square are four plinths to hold large statues. Three of them are occupied (by George IV, General Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock). But the fourth plinth remained empty from when it was built in 1841 until 1999, when campaigners from the Fourth Plinth project managed to persuade everyone involved to use it as a site for temporary artworks. Its position in front of the National Gallery gives it a natural connection to the world of art, but it’s also in an automatic dialogue with all the other statues in the Square – including Nelson, of course. The new occupant is a marble statue by Marc Quinn of disabled artist Alison Lapper pregnant. I haven’t got a photo of the actual statue in situ, but this is a model from the commissioning process:
What you don’t appreciate from that is the scale – 3.55m tall, apparently. That immediately ties it in with the other statues in the Square. It feels like a piece of official public art; it has something of that heavy blandness to it. But because of the unusual subject matter, that depersonalisation actually works in its favour; it makes it seem natural to have a huge marble statue of a pregnant naked woman with no arms.
The Stubbs on the other hand was less interesting. Horses, horses and more horses. What I liked most about them – a kind of stillness, a posed, statuesque simplicity – was, I suspect, due to Stubbs’s technical limitations rather than an aesthetic choice, because late in his career he did some action pictures of horses being attacked by lions, and they’re terrible.
There was something quite democratic about the paintings, though; it doesn’t matter if you’re the Duke of Portland or a stablehand, you’re still going to play second fiddle to the horse.