I'm Rory Parle, an Irish software engineer living in London.
I’m happy to live in a world where I can read a blog post about two extraordinarily large stars in orbit around each other; think, “that orbital period makes it sound like they must be pretty close to each other”; and within moments have Google presenting me with the answer that these two stars are a mere 42,000,000km apart. We truly live in the future, but what we’ve got down here is like nothing compared to what’s happening up there.
Gawker reports on the introduction of a sarcasm punctuation mark. Well that’s a real useful idea.
Apparently the Writer’s Guild of America has nominated Avatar for an award for Best Original Screenplay. This is surprising news. I had no idea Avatar even had a screenplay. I thought James Cameron had just organized a big game of charades and Sam Worthington took three hours to mime Ferngully before anyone in the cast or crew was able to guess it.
Also, for reference, here’s a definition of “original”:
Fresh, different, pioneering
I do not think it means what they think it means.
While we’re still celebrating milestones, I have one of my own. I started this blog seven years ago, on January 7, 2003. Back then it was made of hand-coded HTML that lived on the servers of my university’s Internet Society.
I soon moved it to a self-made blogging platform on those same servers. From there it moved to a professional web host, on yet another custom blogging platform, and with its own domain. Most recently it moved to a new domain, and I finally gave up on maintaining my own software and migrated all the content to WordPress.
I’m quite happy that through all those software changes and server moves I still have every post I’ve ever written for this blog, right back to the very first one.
That first post was about the result of a little Web quiz that took details of my physical fitness, intelligence, education, and lifestyle and, through the twin magics of mathematics and making shit up, informed me that I was worth exactly $2,320,314. I would have hoped my organs alone could fetch that much or more, but I’m not the expert here.
Looking back on my first post I decided to see if that quiz was still online and, more importantly, if my value had changed at all. You’ll be delighted to hear that not only is the quiz still happily digesting humanity into currency, but I’ve gone up in value to an amazing $3,061,316. That’s an increase of nearly 32%. Maybe that’s not the biggest possible return over seven years, but at least it’s going up.
I dearly hope that the newly announced (at CES) Panasonic 3D camcorder comes to be known as Johnny 5.
No disassemble!
Any time you spend reading what I write is time you’re not spending watching Dara O’Briain skewer pseudoscience.
For the sake of “balance”, we must now turn to Barry, who thinks the sky is a carpet painted by God.
Over the few days since my recent post about my hopes for 2020, I’ve come up with a few more ways in which I hope we can collectively improve our situation before this new decade is spent. Just like last time, these aren’t things that I necessarily expect to be fixed by 2020, but they are all things I am still idealistic enough to hope for.
The UK Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, recently dismissed David Nutt from his position as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) because Professor Nutt had the audacity to quote scientific evidence that contradicted the government’s invented ideas about the dangers of certain illegal drugs. It spawned a movement to impress upon public officials what you would imagine to be the obvious importance of paying attention to what’s actually true when determining public policy.
I hope that governments of 2020 will be more evidence-based in their approach to drug laws. I hope they create laws that actually serve to decrease the danger from recreational use, but which also allow for the use of drugs by informed adults, especially in a medical context.
Related to my hope that the Earth’s climate will continue to support human life in a comfortable manner, I hope that the public will have overcome its irrational fear of nuclear energy and will be willing to switch from dangerous, polluting, climate-altering fossil fuels to cleaner, safer, more sustainable nuclear power. Research and development in this area has been dreadfully lacking in recent decades due to an exaggerated negative public perception. Maybe one positive outcome of the climate crisis will be a public willingness to reevaluate nuclear energy.
I’m Irish. My family is Irish. Many of my friends are Irish, and I lived most of my life in Ireland. In years past I would have lived my whole life there, and would have been unlikely to have many non-Irish acquaintances. Not so now.
Now I live in the UK, with an American girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, none of my immediate colleagues are Irish; but the majority aren’t even from the UK. I have good friends from several continents, and living all over the world. With the Internet, I read about and talk about the thoughts and ideas and lives of people as geographically disparate as people have ever been.
International travel is cheap and widely available. It’s easier now for me to get to know people half way around the world than it was for my parents to meet people in the next county over.
This change has been rapid, and laws have not caught up. Gaining the right to live and work in another country can be ridiculously difficult, even for highly qualified and intelligent young people. Australia evicts travelers after a year. Ireland erects hurdles for hopeful Americans even as it begs the USA to make the tens of thousands of illegal Irish immigrants to that country legal. The UK has backlogs of tens of thousands of applications from prospective university students.
The level of restriction on immigration between first-world democracies is incongruent with the free flow of tourism and communication. I hope that permanent or semi-permanent movement between economically similar countries becomes significantly easier by 2020. The world is now too small to bear so many walls.
This piece by Bruce Schneier, on the perils of security theatre and the short-sightedness of anti-terrorism tactics in airports and elsewhere, carries a disclaimer at the bottom:
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bruce Schneier.
Not so. It’s a pretty accurate expression of a great many people’s opinions.
The best defenses against terrorism are largely invisible: investigation, intelligence, and emergency response. But even these are less effective at keeping us safe than our social and political policies, both at home and abroad. However, our elected leaders don’t think this way: They are far more likely to implement security theater against movie-plot threats.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my debut work of stop-motion animation, Man Hears Noise: