What's most surprising to me about the 20 most-watched TV programmes in the UK in 2008 …

1. Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death (25/12/08, BBC1) 16.15m
2. The X Factor: Results (13/12/08, ITV1) 14.06m
3. Britain's Got Talent Final: Results (31/05/08, ITV1) 13.88m
4. Doctor Who (25/12/08, BBC1) 13.10m
5. Coronation Street (18/01/08, ITV1) 13.02m
6. Strictly Come Dancing (20/12/08, BBC1) 12.97m
7. Dancing On Ice (16/03/08, ITV1) 12.08m
8. EastEnders (24/03/08, BBC1) 11.73m
9. The Royle Family (25/12/08, BBC1) 10.60m
10. I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! (29/11/08, ITV1) 10.19m
11. Antiques Roadshow (16/11/08, BBC1) 10.11m
12. Champions League Final (21/05/08, ITV1) 10.05m
13. Children In Need 2008 (14/11/08, BBC1) 9.83m
14. New Tricks (18/08/08, BBC1) 9.36m
15. BBC News (25/12/08, BBC1) 9.34m
16. The Apprentice (11/06/08, BBC1) 9.29m
17. Match Of The Day Live: England v Switzerland (06/02/08, BBC1) 9.18m
18. Brazilian Grand Prix (02/11/08, ITV1) 9.08m
19. Lewis (24/02/08, ITV1) 8.90m
20. Emmerdale (02/01/08, ITV1) 8.85m

… is that I saw just one of them.

Had the Brazilian GP not been on TV in the background while I was pottering around on the computer that Sunday afternoon I'd have had a clean sweep.¹

1. In fairness, I do have Doctor Who and Wallace & Gromit on my PVR, waiting to be watched. Then again, if it's been almost a month since they were broadcast and I still haven't felt the urge to watch either one there's every chance that they'll be deleted unseen next time I need to free up some space. ↩

Am I still under oath?

[Via orbyn@tumblr]

As you may have noticed, the site has been offline quite a bit over the last 48 hours. This is due to what I can only describe as a horribly botched server migration by my web host. Although they are now claiming to have fixed the most immediate problems and to have plans to reconfigure their infrastructure to prevent a recurrence of the problems of the last couple of days, I'll believe it when I see it.

All of which is to say: normal posting will resume once my web host can keep this site up for more than a couple of hours at a time. If the site goes down again, please be patient and try again in a few hours.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden compiled The true history of the Bush years, courtesy of America's Finest News Source:

WASHINGTON, DC–Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.

My fellow Americans, Bush said, at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us. [...]

Blogging the Origin:

Hi! My name is John. I've got a PhD in evolutionary biology, and I've spent much of the past decade writing about evolutionary ideas, as applied to everything from literary criticism, to language, to anti-terror policy, and even on occasion to biology. And I've got a confession – I've never read the Origin of Species.

He's reading The Origin of Species for the first time, and blogging about it as he goes. Looks well worth following.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

The job of Chancellor of the Exchequer is not always a happy one. Just ask Denis Healey:

Aside from a brief upswing in 1978, his time at the Treasury was one long firefight. The insanity of it all is captured by an occasion in 1976 when Healey was en route to Heathrow, to fly to Hong Kong for a meeting of Commonwealth finance ministers. That day, the pound was falling fast and, rather than be out of contact for 17 hours, he had his ministerial car turned round and went back to work. He awoke the next morning to hear that the British workforce of Ford had gone on strike, and – to quote from his memoirs – for the first and last time in my life, for about 12 hours, I was close to demoralisation.

I suggest that he must have lost a lot of sleep.

Yes, I did. Not only that, but I went to bed, as I always wrote in my diary, dog tired.

You also think the job made you ill.

Yes, he says. I got shingles.

And that being chancellor made you deaf.

Yes. A little bit.

There was also arthritis.

Yes.

And you got colds and flu a lot more.

That's right.

You also say the job affected your teeth.

Well, I can now put my teeth on my nose. Just to prove it, he calmly removes his false front teeth and does exactly that. I found it physically exhausting and very worrying, he says. Shingles was the best example of that, because it's a nervous illness.

John Harris talked to several past holders of the position, but only Denis Healey owned up to being physically affected by the stresses of the post. None of the others – all Conservatives, as it happens – would own up to so much as losing a night's sleep while living at No 11 Downing Street. I suspect that's about as honest as Messrs Lawson, Clarke and Lamond's claims that the current financial crisis had nothing at all to do with 18 years of deregulation.

I've never heard of the phenomenon known as the frozen circle until today:

Roy Jefferies was walking his dog along the River Otter, near Honiton during last week's sub-zero temperatures when he made the startling find. Mr Jefferies was so amazed by what he saw that he called friend Graham Blissett, who has a keen interest in phenomena of this kind.

Both men were amazed by the slowly-rotating 10ft-wide and perfectly circular phenomenon which was stationary in the current. It was about 6ft from the bank near where a stream joined the river.

Mr Blissett said such discs were 'very, very rare' and he had never heard of one forming in England before.

I wonder if this isn't just the cold-weather equivalent of a crop circle.

[Via Seed Daily Zeitgeist]

The latest trailer for Henry Selick's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline looks highly encouraging.

John Dvorak bemoans the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet. Nonsense on stilts from beginning to end:

2009 marks the 30-year anniversary of the now-ubiquitous spreadsheet program. And society as a whole has deteriorated ever since its invention. It was the spreadsheet that triggered the PC revolution, with VisiCalc the original culprit. Can anyone say that we've actually benefited from its invention? Look around: I think we've suffered.

For one thing, the spreadsheet created the "what if" society. Instead of moving forward and progressing normally, the what-if society questions each and every move we make. It second-guesses everything. Because of the spreadsheet we've been forced to "do the numbers" whenever possible; once the numbers are in the spreadsheet, the what-if process can begin.

So it would be better not to calculate the effects of decisions? A lack of precision in financial decision-making is a good thing?

The what-if society has marched forward with little actual regard for the customer. If the customer has a complaint, she can call someone in India—someone doing customer support there because the spreadsheet told the company it could save 1 cent a year on phone costs. There's no way this idea would have evolved without spreadsheets.

Yes, I'm sure than in the 1960s if you'd suggested to a manufacturer that thanks to advances in global transportation networks and the lowering of tariff barriers they could use skilled, non-unionised labour in a far-off country who could be paid 10% of what you paid you local workforce they'd have refused to consider the idea because they couldn't figure out to the last penny how much money they could save.

This is what caused the mortgage crisis: Spreadsheets instead of people were making decisions on loans. Soon these loans were wrapped up into neat financial packages all based on spreadsheet accounting. Brokers gave these packages high, triple-A financial ratings because the spreadsheet told them to. All spreadsheets, except the most mundane, are flawed in one way or another. You guess what the growth rate might be. You guess at the future cost of goods. You play what-if until you get what you want. There's a lot of guessing games played with spreadsheets. This is a flaw.

Garbage in, garbage out. The problem isn't that decisions were being made using a spreadsheet¹, it's that wildly optimistic statements about income were accepted without question because it was worth the commission to sign up a client regardless of their long-term prospects, and besides we all knew that house prices were going to keep on rising forever – or at least, for long enough to allow the broker to make their fortune and get out. It's not the tools used by brokers, it's the assumptions they made.

There's lots more in this vein in Dvorak's article. The bottom line is that spreadsheets, in the hands of knowledgeable users, allow them to pull together large quantities of data and play around with it in a flexible, user friendly manner. To be sure, sometimes the ease of use causes people to use a spreadsheet where a proper database would be more appropriate. No doubt, sometimes people don't understand that bad assumptions or inaccurate data can't be fixed by a computer, any more than they could by a calculator in the days before spreadsheets. Even so, for my money Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin and their successors are owed a huge vote of thanks by millions of people in offices who have to play around with numbers for a living.

[Via Yoz Grahame]

1. Though in many cases it wouldn't have been a spreadsheet, so much as a custom-written database that pulled together data from umpteen sources and led the user through a series of questions in order to produce a credit score. ↩

Barack Obama's new car is pretty rugged:

Obama's Cadillac has several high tech features, including

• It can withstand rocket impacts and it's perfectly sealed against biochemical attacks.
• Petrol tank: Can withstand a direct hit thanks to a special foam and armor-plating.
• Bodywork: made of dual hardness steel, aluminum, titanium, and ceramics to "break up posible projectiles".
• Tyres: Kevlar-reinforced with steel rims underneath so it can run away no matter what.
• Accessories include: Night vision cameras, pump-action shotguns, tear gas cannons.
• Comes with bottles of blood compatible with the President's blood.

I hope that a matching blood supply is being carried in one of the cars following the presidential limousine; by the sound of things any attack capable of getting past all that armour and drawing blood from the president would probably shake up the presidential vehicle's mobile blood bank up to and beyond breaking point along the way.

John Naughton observes that, given the car's poor performance, This is one the Top Gear headbangers won't be reviewing. I beg to differ: I'm sure Messrs Clarkson, May and Hammond would love to play with it. First they'd play Car Darts with it, then they'd try to cross the Channel, and finally they'd drive it in the wake of a Boeing 747 at full throttle to find out whether it'd roll more times than a Citroën 2CV. Unlike most of the cars they play with, it'd probably survive the experience in one piece.

[Via Memex 1.1]

Greg Beato ponders the enduring popularity of the calendar:

According to Publishers Weekly, there were fewer than 200 calendars for sale in 1976. Today, there are more than 6,500 from which to choose. Part of this proliferation is due to the fact that we once got the bulk of our calendars for free, from banks, insurance companies, and other businesses eager to keep their phone numbers in front of their customers' eyes throughout the year. But it's not as if those businesses were giving away more than one copy to each customer, or offering them in multiple formats. And yet, as we shift gears from 2008 to 2009, how many among us are not tacking up a Sarah Palin 2009 calendar in our kitchen, and clearing off a space on our desk at work for the Insult-a-Day 2009 calendar, and jotting down the year's first doctor appointment in our New Yorker Cat Cartoons weekly engagement calendar? Clearly, we are far more concerned about the passing of each day, each week, each month, than our carefree, calendar-lite counterparts in the 1970s.

I never buy calendars myself,¹ but it seems to me that as often as not the primary function of the modern calendar is to serve as a collection of posters (Be it of images of the buyer's favourite musician, actor or movie series, or of a sequence of works by their favourite artist.)), with the use of the calendar to mark the passing of time of at best secondary significance.

1. I've been carrying round some form of electronic device that serves as my calendar for longer than I care to remember. ↩

I wish I had dreams like James Nicoll has dreams:

I dreamed I came across the secret original run of Marvel comics about Thor, the issues where Lee, Lieber and Kirby had him act just as one would expect from the Norse legends. The other Avengers spent a lot of their time being appalled.

I absolutely would buy that comic.

There's no denying that Microsoft's Songsmith is a clever bit of software, but they desperately need to come up with a promotional video that's not excruciating to listen to and watch.

No doubt somewhere deep in the bowels of Microsoft's HQ, footage exists of Steve Ballmer demonstrating Songsmith. If so, we can only hope that some benefactor of humanity deletes it before it gets anywhere near YouTube…

Woody Allen on shooting Vicky Cristina Barcelona:

15 June

Work finally under way. Shot a torrid love scene today between Scarlett and Javier. If this were a scant few years ago, I would have played Javier's part. When I mentioned that to Scarlett, she said, Uh-huh, with an enigmatic intonation. Scarlett came late to the set. I lectured her rather sternly, explaining I do not tolerate tardiness from my cast. She listened respectfully, although as I spoke I thought I noticed her turning up her iPod.

[Via Feeling Listless]

Ursula K Le Guin on the alleged decline of reading:

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

Moneymaking entities controlled by obscenely rich executives and their anonymous accountants have acquired most previously independent publishing houses with the notion of making quick profit by selling works of art and information. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that such people get sleepy when they read. Within the corporate whales are many luckless Jonahs who were swallowed alive with their old publishing house — editors and such anachronisms — people who read wide awake. Some of them are so alert they can scent out promising new writers. Some of them have their eyes so wide open they can even proofread. But it doesn't do them much good. For years now, most editors have had to waste most of their time on an unlevel playing field, fighting Sales and Accounting.

[Via Pureland Mountain]

John Scalzi wonders what Barack Obama can learn from his counterparts in science fiction films:

President: Tom Beck of Deep Impact (Morgan Freeman)

Crisis: A comet is coming to destroy us all!

Evaluation: Very positive. First, he manages to charm an investigative reporter into keeping a blockbuster secret through sheer force of being Morgan Freeman. Second, when he announces to the country that a massive comet is coming and might kill them all, he keeps everyone calm by exuding that Morgan Freeman charm. Third, when it's clear that the comet will indeed kill them all, he gives a soothing valedictory speech that makes everyone feel okay about dying horribly, because he does it in those deep, reassuring Morgan Freeman tones. And then, when only about half of everybody dies, he tells everyone else, Well, it's time to get back to work, and they get back to work — because he's Morgan Freeman.

Lessons for the President-elect: Be Morgan Freeman.

[Via Vermillion's Brain Receptacle]

Whatever you may think of his theory of the Long Tail, you've got to give Wired editor Chris Anderson credit for being a good sport.

[Via Qwghlm]

Comment of the week, found in a MetaFilter thread about the Palm Pre:

One thing in computerland I've hated, really, really hated, was homogeneity. The conceit that there was ONLY one way to do it… when the ONE was was so obviously braindead. I saw the weird and wonderful platforms die – Atari Falcon, Commodore Amiga, Acorn, Be. I saw Apple Macintosh almost bite the big one.

But! Then! There was the Newton! And Palm! And WinCE! and Psion! and Zaurus! And then they all died.

Now, in Unixland, the mighty DEC Alpha is dead, SGI MiPS is dead (MiPS lives on in the gloriously weird, Chinese-government-backed Dragon netbook processor), PA-RISC should be dead, but isn't because IA-64 is dead, PowerPC is dead, and now POWER-based AIX workstations are dead. Sun lingers on, but it's only a matter of time before they give in and buy AMD to switch to a top-to-bottom x86 platform.

Even the Mac is just a glorified Intel PC these days.

This has depressed me no end… but wait!

Microsoft doesn't have a stranglehold on the smartphone market! And look! Apple's designed something pretty damn bad-ass that fits in the pocket, and using Power-PC, no less! Symbian's still around? Whaddya know! Google's Android is geek-chic, and liable to wind up on some seriously sexy hardware before the year is out, and Redfly wants to put a full-sized screen and keyboard at its disposal… as do various netbooks! And, now, this! Palm may not be able to rebound in this economic climate, but they sure as hell are going down swinging… and now we know why Sprint wasn't signing onto the Android bandwagon.

The Platform Wars are back, baby! Pick your deck, and bombast about it on your blog! Competition breed champions, and makes more compelling underdogs. Monopolies are for chumps.

posted by Slap*Happy at 4:04 AM on January 9

Damn straight!¹

1. My sole quibble – speaking from a British perspective – is that the first paragraph really should also have mentioned the Sinclair ZX81, the Spectrum or the QL. Preferably the QL, which was this close to being a fine personal computer. ↩

I shudder to think what the story behind this sign might have been.

I'm sure the Advertising Standards Authority was thrilled to receive a complaint about the There's probably no God campaign:

[...] Christian Voice has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority saying [the adverts on buses] break rules on substantiation and truthfulness.

[...]

The ASA's code states marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove all claims. The regulator said it would assess the complaint and decide whether to contact the advertiser.

The adverts contain the slogan: There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

But Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice, said: There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.

Humankind has spent thousands of years looking up at the vastness and variety of the universe around us and wondering who, if anyone, made it all; now we're going to get a definitive ruling on the subject from the ASA…