lemon garden

Gordon Brown, Member of Parliament for Dunfermline East, is now Prime Minister of England. As this post carries with it responsibility for some few matters applying to the rest of the UK, he will be known formally as Prime Minister of the UK.

Upon entering No 10, Brown said:

I have listened and I have learnt from the British people - and as Prime Minister I will continue to listen and learn from the British people - I have heard the need for change. Change in our NHS, change in our schools, change with affordable housing, change to build trust in government, change to protect and extend the British way of life.

Of course, by “our NHS”, he means “England’s NHS”. By “our schools”, he means “England’s schools”. By “affordable housing”, he means “affordable housing in England”. For his own constituents, all these matters have been devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

I’m finding this rather irksome.

Finally, with a rare touch of irony, US President George Bush has sent former PM Tony Blair to the Middle East as peace envoy.

It happened as I watched BBC News 24 showing a wobbly aerial view of the train crash in Cumbria. The screen flickered and changed to show a different report, with presenters unfamiliar to me.

A headline scrolled across the bottom of the screen: Elderly woman dies in road accident

The camera cut to a reporter standing in a narrow lane. Behind her, a police cordon cut off the road.

“It seems”, she said, “that the, ah, Volkswagon Polo driven by the dead woman’s daughter was proceeding along Tykes Lane, towards the village of Little Sledhill, at 10 o’clock this morning when it was in collision with a white van. Police have cordoned off a large area around the site of the accident and, as you can probably see behind me, accident investigators have arrived and are beginning to examine the scene. Earlier I spoke to Detective Bagshaw of the West Yorkshire Police Highways Division”

A tired looking policeman leant towards the camera.

“All we can say, at this point, is that we are looking at the condition of the tarmac on the road.”

Back in the studio, the presenter paused a moment to look at a sheet of paper lying on his desk, then looked up at the camera.

“We have reports that Highways Engineers are studying the condition of the road surface on thousands of roads throughout Britain. We can now speak to- Ah, hang on, we have reports coming in of another accident in North London. It seems that a young man, a pedestrian, was killed when he was hit by a Rover 400. We’ll bring you more on that as it comes in. Oh wait, we have yet more reports of traffic accidents. Two people have been seriously injured in an accident on the M4 and a car has left the road outside Stevenage killing three people. Ah, it appears that the Prime Minister is making a statement. We can go to Downing Street live right now.”

The screen cut to a crowded Downing Street. The Prime Minister was answering a question.

“Look, the road network will stay closed for as long as it takes to make it safe. You know, I’m sure that, like me, you have all been shocked by this terrible death toll today. Clearly we must do all we can to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Safety has to be our first priority.”

The television showed a reporter standing on the deserted carriageway of the M1 when the image flickered again, and went dark. I stared at the blank screen a moment, then got up and made a cup of tea.

The road outside was unusually quiet. I could hear birdsong.

I bought a power meter recently. It’s an excellent device. You plug it into the mains power supply, then plug an electrical device into the meter and it shows you the power consumption of that device.

Using this meter, I’ve discovered that a single wash at 40°C in my washing machine uses 0.59KwH of electricity. My electricity supplier charges me £0.1526 per Kilowatt Hour (KwH). So that wash cost me £0.09.

I’ve also discovered that many electrical devices are shockingly inefficient. It’s astonishing how much power is drawn by many devices when they are ostensibly turned off. For example, my computer monitor (a 17 inch CRT monitor) draws about 67 watts when turned on and displaying an image. When the monitor is turned on, but receiving no signal, it draws 4 watts of electricity. However, when turned off, it still draws about 3.5 watts!

I reckon that I use my computer, on average, for about an hour a day. The rest of the time the monitor is turned off. So I’m spending about £4.47 a year for my computer monitor to do absolutely nothing. No wonder I never have any money. No wonder we have global warming.

Turning the power off at the mains socket stops this shameful waste of power.

For reference, I have also discovered that:

• My computer speakers draw 3 watts when turned “off”
• My Mac Mini draws 1 watt when turned “off”
• My Epson C62 printer draws zero watts when turned off (yay!)
• My washing machine draws 0.5 watts when turned “off”
• My kitchen radio/cd player draws 1 watt when turned “off”
• My DVD player draws 1 watt when turned “off”
• My TV draws zero watts when turned off (yay!) but 4 watts when on standby (boo!)
• My Xbox draws 6 watts when turned “off” (what is it doing?)

That’s everything I’ve tested so far. Scary, isn’t it?

The Hubble space telescope recently photographed a beautiful planetary nebula. The European Space Agency have taken this, and a series of other images from Hubble, and produced a wonderful video. You begin with a view of the night sky pretty much as seen from Earth, then zoom in on the tiny patch of sky where the planetary nebula can be found. Just like falling into the sky.

Am I the only man in the UK who thinks Valentine’s Day has become a disreputable orgy of capitalist excess that’s about as romantic as being hit in the face with a wet herring?

Oh. Just me then.

Being in touch with the spirit of the times, as I am, I created an online petition at 10 Downing Street’s website (you may have heard about another, far less important, petition in the news of late). I am petitioning the Prime Minister to do something about the light pollution that fouls our night sky.

I used to live on the coast, and revelled in the beauty of a star strewn sky overhead. Half the night sky lay over the North Sea, so there was little light pollution. Since I moved inland, this glorious sight is the thing I miss most. I miss it even more than walking along the sea shore after a day’s work. That’s how much I miss it.

The night sky over Harrogate is naught but a dull orange glow. You can just about make out the brightest constellations (Orion, the Plough), the brightest stars (well, Sirius, at least) and the odd passing planet. You would scarcely know there are any stars out there at all.

So far my petition has garnered a rather decent 776 signatures. It reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ensure that all exterior lights are shaded to direct their light downwards, so as to prevent light pollution obscuring the beauty of the night sky.

To see what I mean, consider these two photographs, taken of neighbouring street lights earlier this evening:

The first photograph shows a shaded street light. See how the light is directed downwards, whilst above it there is only darkness. Contrast this with the great globe of light blaring out in all directions in the second picture. See what I mean?

If you could find it within your heart to join with me, and sign my petition, I will be eternally in your debt.

I am increasingly of the opinion that Wikipedia has rather undermined Google’s usefulness as a search engine.

Once upon a time, you could rely upon Google to have the most relevant and useful results appear right at the very top of your search results. I can remember the feeling of astonishment when I first discovered Google (in about 1999, I think) after having wasted so much time struggling to sort the wheat from the chaff in Altavista or Yahoo’s results. Here was a search engine that actually found what you were looking for. It was a revelation.

Now, it is not so revealing. For example, in my quest to better understand particle physics (and who doesn’t want to do that?) I search for “bottom quark“. The first result is a wikipedia article about quarks. But particle physics is a complex subject, so I’d expect the best sites to find out about quarks would be run by the physics department of a university, or similar.

Any website that’s run by an actual particle physicist is rather further down the list. In fact, looking down the list of results, it’s difficult to pick out the relevant sites from the noise. It’s like the bad old days of search engines.

In fact, I don’t find a decent link about quarks until I reach page two of the search results - a site run by Manchester University’s High Energy Particle Physics Group.

Now I want to pursue my interest in astronomy, but I’m a bit hazy on all these different astronomical phenomena. So I search for “quasar“. Guess what the first search result is - yes, a wikipedia entry. The first decent page about quasars isn’t found until page three of the results.

Here we have a page created by the astrophysics department of a university. That is, by people we can be reasonably sure know their stuff when it comes to quasars. Plus, as the site was created by people running a course on astrophysics, there’s a lot of other good stuff there about astronomy.

I can’t help but think that the people of wikipedia have rather missed the point of the world wide web. They’ve created an encyclopedia on the web. But the web is rather like an encyclopedia itself. Save that it is one where you can actually go to source to find out about something.

Want to know about particle accelerators? Well, thanks to the internet, you can go to CERN’s own website and read about their own particle accelerators! That’s the glory of the internet.

But then I wonder I wonder if this is a problem that just affects searches of a scientific bent. Can I think of a search that is as far from reason and science as humanly possible? Ah, yes. Paris Whitney Hilton. Bugger.

Taken from an occasional series of amusing google searches:

site:*.gov.uk “strictly private and confidential”

It’s nice to see that open government is proceeding apace in the UK.

Today I received a call from the people at Computing magazine. This magazine is quite a good read and, rather splendidly, they send it to me for nowt because I work in IT. Unfortunately, to continue getting the freebie, I have to put up with a regular conversation with a call centre worker full of questions about my job and the organisation. The questions are a bit silly, e.g:

Which of the following networking technologies do you use: TCP/IP; LAN; WAN?

Can a local area network really be described as a “networking technology”?

Anyway, after all this silliness comes the final question where I’m asked something more personal. Today it was, “what is the name of the last school you attended?”. In the past I’ve had various questions, for example: “what size shoe do you wear?” or “where were you born?”. They claim to need this information, to prove to their advertisers that they have truly spoken to me.

I really don’t like being asked these questions. Firstly, I don’t see how it proves in any way that they have spoken to me. Secondly, this is just the sort of information that fraudsters use to steal your identity. After answering several such phone calls to get assorted free magazines, someone consolidating the responses could discover a myriad of useful little nuggets of information about me. Presumably, shortly afterwards, I would start to receive strange bills and find my credit rating plummeting. It all seems rather irresponsible.

Anyway, I always grill them over why they want such personal information and then, because they insist on some sort of answer, I lie.

So for the future reference of any fraudsters out there reading this, here is my personal information:

Can I have my free magazine now?

For those interested in building accessible web applications, there is an interesting article over on Juicy Studio describing how screen readers cope with ajax applications.

I lot of my development work makes extensive use of javascript and XML, so it is interesting to read detailed descriptions of how screen readers handle such things. It raises some interesting issues. Often we use javascript to update content on the page, but a user of a screen reader must be alerted to the fact that the content has changed. It makes you realise how often we rely upon visual feedback in our applications.