I was a huge fan of pinball machines back in the mid-nineties when I was a university student. I even had a rivaly with a guy I never ever met as we would hold the top spots on the high score tables of the various tables in the university bar and try to best the other's scores.
But it was not to last. The machines were played less and less often and eventually started to disappear from the bars and pubs that I used to frequent until they were no more.

The documentary The Future of Pinball explores the demise of the pinball machine and how the management of manufacturer Williams Electronic Games instructed their pinball designers to come up with something new in order to save the company.

Management said, "we need to make pinball profitable. The world has changed; nobody wants what you guys are doing. Invent something new. We've put layer upon layer of ramps, we have convoluted rule sets, we have video modes, we have all this stuff, and guess what? It's not making a difference!" And management says we've got to come up with something or pinball is done.

— George Gomez, Pinball Designer, Williams Electronic Games

This resulted in a startling innovation that was controversial amongst pinball purists but was a hit until the plug was pulled on production of the machines. A trailer for the documentary is available here.

BBC News: Nintendo unveil the official name of their new console

The console that had been codenamed Revolution until now has been offically announced as being named Wii. A name that has inevitably caused people appropriately enough to take the piss out of it.

BBC Sport: Luiz Felipe Scolari will not be next England manager.

His decision, which he said stemmed from media pressure, has led to severe criticism of the Football Association's handling of the search for a new coach.

Scolari said: "The English FA is going to choose a name. My name isn't one of them because I'm closing this matter."

The Brazilian, the coach of Portugal, said he had been shocked by intrusion into his life by the English media.

"There are 20 reporters outside my house now," said Scolari, who had been strongly tipped in this week's media to become Sven-Goran Eriksson's successor.

Looks like the FA have dropped the ball on this one and fucked the whole process up completly. I thought that it was almost definitely going to be Scolari that would take over after Sven-Goran Eriksson. But it is not to be.

Can't say that I'm too disappointed though, I've had my doubts that he was really suited for the job. Not that his nationality is a problem for me, Sven being Swedish was never an issue for me, but the style of play of his previous jobs with Brazil and Portugal is very different to that of England.

It might have worked out but it really seems now that it won't be happening.

Just finished watching the third episode of The Street on BBC One that I'd recorded from earlier. This was a truly gut-wrenchingly powerful piece of drama.

The tension was built so well that I was having my emotional insides being ripped raw along with the characters to the point near the end where I felt that Neil Dudgeon's character Brian was on the point of topping himself only to be saved by the call on his mobile from his wife with the news that the truth had come out.

Brian has returned home having left becuase his wife Ann (Lindsey Coulson)didn't believe him, but these events will have altered things between he and his wife. There's no going back now they only can move on from here and hope to build a new trust.

I'm annoyed I missed last week's episode because on the evidence of tonight's and the first episode which starred Jane Horrocks this series is shaping up to be the best drama of the year.

Sydney Morning Herald: New penicillin found in wallaby milk

Scientists have discovered a bacteria-fighting compound 100 times more effective than penicillin - in wallaby milk.

Researchers found the highly-potent compound, tagged AGG01, was active against a wide variety of fungi and bacteria including antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Research team leader Dr Ben Cocks said the discovery could have a profound impact on both human and animal health.

"This compound has the potential to be commercially synthesised and may prove vital in the war against increasingly resistant human and animal diseases," Dr Cocks said.

It's great news to hear that new antibiotic compounds like this are being discovered. Lets hope that society has reached the point where we can use it correctly and not give it out like candy for any old illness or we'll have just yet another antibiotic that superbugs have become resistant to.

Still there are always Bacteriophages should we run out of effective antibiotics. Research into the therapeutic use of phages is really in it's infancy even though some research has been carried out for decades it was far more practical to use antibiotic compounds.

CTV.ca News: Canadian creates cigarette with vitamin C

A Quebec company is producing a cigarette it claims does not stain teeth, has less of an odour than regular brands and contains beneficial ingredients like vitamin C.

Called the "VitaCig," it was invented by non-smoker Roger Ouellette for his wife, who has smoked a pack of cigarettes every day since the age of 14.

"We give you all the vitamins you lose, plus some vitamins to help you," he told CTV News...

Quebecers will be able to try the new cigarettes for themselves at one of 2,000 stores across the province, and it could soon reach more locations outside the province.

Smoker Heidi Miller tried the VitaCig and said it does have less of an odour than her regular brand, although she was highly skeptical of the added ingredients.

"I don't think any cigarette can be healthy for you, and I'm a smoker," she said. "No, I wouldn't smoke for health reasons."

Meanwhile, Oullete's wife is pleased with her husband's product.

"I am happy, because I don't have to quit any more," Gisele Tremblay said.

Da fug!

So instead of trying to help his wife quit he invents a 'healthier' cigarette.

Honey you're gonna die of lung cancer but at least you'll never get scurvy with these vitamin C enhanced cigarettes.

I posted a short animation a while ago by Paul Robertson, but now a full short film by him is available titled Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006.

It can be downloaded from http://www.selectparks.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=442 and is 112mb of pure fried gold.

I just bought the book Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book by Robert Hamburger.

Book Description
Dear Stupid Idiots,

A lot of you have been saying that I don’t know anything about REAL ninjas. But that’s a bunch of bull crap! You dummies don’t know anything. And maybe YOU should get a life. I bet a lot of you have never even seen a girl naked! You idiots believe that ninjas had some "code of honor." Yeah right! If by "code of honor," you mean "code to flip out and go nuts for absolutely no reason at all even if it means that people might think you are totally insane or sweet," then you are right. But if you mean a "code to be nice and speak nicely while sharing and not cutting off heads," then you’re the biggest idiot ever!!!!!! So if you have any brains, you will shut up and get a life. So go shut up, you stupid idiot.

No thank you,

Robert Hamburger

Anyone who knows anything about ninjas knows that this book is totally sweet. And by sweet I mean awesome. I shall read it immediately.

Edit: 20:43:37 22/04/06 I have read it and it is indeed sweet.

I forgot to take some dinner with me to the cinema and as the takeaway options are limited and even more limited when you only have two quid in your pocket I opted to go to McDonalds.

I ordered a Quarterpounder with Cheese or for non-British European readers a Royale with Cheese. But I did not get a Quarterpounder with Cheese, no I did not. I in fact got a Double Quarterpounder with Cheese which is one of this month's specials or something.

I should be happy paying for only a quarterpounder but getting what I guess would be a halfpounder. But I discovered this is just too much McDonalds for a regular person to be eating. Although I did eat it all, never again.

Watched Romance and Cigarettes this afternoon.

Odd film, a comedy musical starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi and Christopher Walken amongst others. It didn't completely work but the acting and characterisations were great. Some laugh out loud moments particularly some of Buscemi's and Walken's lines.

I'd recommend people see if they get the chance but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it, particularly if like me you have a crush on Mary-Louise Parker she's dead sexy in it.

The cinema hosted Michael Eavis on monday for a screening of the documentary movie Glastonbury which he introduced for us. To advertise this screening the following photo featured in the Bath Chronicle newspaper.



We look bored as hell but that's how the photographer wanted us.

The Guardian reports that a cross-party select committee is to recommend that the UK should adopt a US-style terror alert system.

A cross-party committee investigating the background to the July 7 bombings is expected to recommend a transparent official public warning system for the threat posed by terrorist attacks. It would be similar to the kind that has proved controversial in America.

The idea, which is likely to be one of the conclusions in the intelligence and security committee's annual report next month, has caused consternation among the security services. The issue is at the heart of an intense debate involving MI5, the Home Office, and the committee, in the wake of the attacks on London.

Of course such a system has worked so very well in the US to date and US citizens know exactly what each level of alert actually means and how their behaviour should change accordingly. Well actually no that isn't true at all and so obviously we should adopt such a clearly useless system here also.

The very well respected security consultant Bruce Schneier wrote an excellent analysis of the US alert system in October of 2004. The most telling passage of his analysis is below.

In theory, the warnings are supposed to cultivate an atmosphere of preparedness. If Americans are vigilant against the terrorist threat, then maybe the terrorists will be caught and their plots foiled. And repeated warnings brace Americans for the aftermath of another attack.

The problem is that the warnings don't do any of this. Because they are so vague and so frequent, and because they don't recommend any useful actions that people can take, terror threat warnings don't prevent terrorist attacks. They might force a terrorist to delay his plan temporarily, or change his target. But in general, professional security experts like me are not particularly impressed by systems that merely force the bad guys to make minor modifications in their tactics.

I really don't think that the public really need to be informed of every alert as without any guidance as to how they should respond once they have been alerted it just causes a state of anxiety.

It makes sense to inform people to evacuate a building when there has been a specific threat against that building. But to issue an alert when intelligence has revealed a few scant details about a vague threat to a building in the London area clearly helps no one especially if the advice is to continue about your daily business as usual.

If the government is causing terror to it's citizens then they are doing the job of the terrorist for them. The terrorist would never need to ever follow through with any of their threats to achieve the same effect in this scenario.

Labels: Security

I'm on the look out for suitable dogs to pressgang into service as part of my pirate navy. This is to battle the hordes of Beki's ninja cats. I have found no pirate dogs as of yet nor any ninja cats but I have found some Samurai Kittens

This is a very funny brutal game. The 'Furtalities are' hilariously horrendous.

Labels: Games

New Scientist: Print me a heart and a set of arteries

SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was "printed", using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.

Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his "bioprinting" technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of "bioink", clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid.

This is amazing that it works and yet it seems like such a simple idea. It is probably many years off but with the advancements in 3D printing techniques couple with this technology then we could almost literally have new organs on demand.

Bird flu could kill 100,000 British children: report

There are so many ifs and buts with the bird flu thing that it really isn't something people should be worrying about. It's totally irrelevant that there has been this one case in an isolated part of Scotland, it doesn't mean that Britain is any more peril than it was 2 weeks ago.

Plus the headline talking about deaths of children but a pandemic is likely to affect all ages in fact if a pandemic was to occur that's anything like the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic then fit and healthy adults will be just as likely to be killed by it.

If this H5N1 strain of Avian flu ever does cross over and become infectious from human to human then would be the time that people might be justified to feel a little panic, but at the moment it is just sensationalist bollocks.

Viewable here http://www.flickr.com/photos/hyc/sets/72057594097798552/.

Beautiful but sorry looking cat.

BBC News: Malcolm in the Middle star Frankie Muniz is taking a break from acting to pursue a career as a professional race car driver.

I shall avoid the obvious joke about him not looking old enough to drive.

London's High Court has ruled that The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown did not infringe the copyright of an earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.

The claim was clearly without merit as copyright law only protects the expression of an idea not the idea itself. Also if the idea itself is one which the authors claim is historical fact that would surely undermine their case further, but whether or not that is truly the case is pretty irrelevant.

Worryingly Jon Silverman a BBC legal affairs analyst does not think that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom.

But to suggest, as Gail Rebuck, the chief executive of Random House, did outside court, that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom, is probably going too far.

The judge himself acknowledged that nothing in the plaintiffs' case would have stultified creative endeavour or extended the boundaries of copyright protection.

I wasn't at the court so I don't precisely know what the plaintiffs' case actually hung on. Was it just idea theft as was portrayed in the media or was there claims that passages of their book appeared in virtually the same form in The Da Vinci Code?

I think that if the judgement had come down on the side of the plaintiffs and extended copyright law to cover ideas as well as the expression of those ideas then creativity would have been stifled. Corporations would start a landgrab of ideas and we'd find ourselves in a situation where every single new literary work would have to license the basic ideas from the corporate owners of those ideas.

But this is a nightmare situation that I believe is unlikely to come to pass as even corporations that otherwise lobby for extension to copyright protection could see that this would be an extension too far, it would be damaging to their own interests.

In a follow up to yesterday's piece about John Reid's comments concerning whether the Geneva conventions are still adequate to cover all eventualities in today's world he offers this rebuttal.

I am relieved by this clarification of his motivation. Or at least I would be more relieved if his words in today's rebuttal more fully covered what he actually said in his speech and if I believed that the threats posed by terrorism or rogue states as outlined in his speech were as significant as he would have us believe.

He expresses the need for intervention to prevent mass killings or genocide - illustrated by Rwanda and Sudan among others. But then appears to go to say that such things are already covered under the conventions. The only problem then surely is the political will then to actually intervene in such situations.

John Reid's original speech, which was given to the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies is available here at the MOD's website.

I am still concerned by the issue of 'imminence' and under what conditions does he believe the British military should be allowed to pre-emptively strike against another nation.

Labels: Security

Whilst John Reid seems to be further widening the gulf that exists between Britain and the Middle East there are those who are seeking to reach out to the younger generation in a shared interest of Welsh sheep.

Or to be more specific the Welsh children's TV series The Baaas, which concerns a multiracial Welsh sheep family, and which has just been bought by the TV Station Al-Jazeera. It is to be broadcast on the station's Children's Channel, which can be seen in countries including Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Not to mention Iraq.

"The important thing is that the programme is about how we get on with each other and although there is some bickering in the Baaas' household, they always work things out in the end," said the show's producer Nia Ceidiog when the series was announced.

A valuable lesson indeed.

Richard Norton-Taylor and Clare Dyer report for The Guardian on Defence Secretary John Reid's comments about how The Geneva Conventions are hindering the ability of British troops in the War on Terror.

John Reid demanded sweeping changes to international law yesterday to free British soldiers from the restraints of the Geneva conventions and make it easier for the west to mount military actions against other states.

In his speech, the defence secretary addressed three key issues: the treatment of prisoners, when to mount a pre-emptive strikes, and when to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis. In all these areas, he indicated that the UK and west was being hamstrung by existing inadequate law.

I have to say that I'm very troubled by this, true laws need to change with the times if they are now out of step with the needs of society. But I really cannot see the case for any changes needing to be made to the Geneva Conventions. In fact John Reid has made no case at all and has not outlined in any way what changes he envisions are necessary.

What John Reid has done is to yet again raise the boogeyman of the 21st century that of 'barbaric terrorism' as he phrased it. Plus also straying into the game of I can imagine a worse imaginary threat than you.

"But what if another threat develops?", Mr Reid asked. "Not al-Qaida. Not Muslim extremism. Something none of us are thinking about at the moment." Terrorist groups were trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, he said.

We can all play the 'what if' game but surely it is only realistic to legislate for known threats or else there's no end to it. Should we legislate for any movie threat that the defence secretary has seen such as zombificating viral infections, invasion by hostile extra-terrestrial beings or marauding gigantic creatures. Of course terrorist organisations are seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction, but how realistic is it that they could actually acquire them. We live in a world where even nation states with all their resources are facing huge technical hurdles let alone political ones in their struggle to acquire them.

I have a struggle to understand what John Reid is actually advocating here in terms of changes to the Geneva conventions. Is he advocating the torture and mistreatment of prisoners? Does he seek the right for the UK to launch pre-emptive attacks on sovereign nations based on the mere belief that they pose a threat to Britain?

At a time when we're told by the industry that the average gamers are pushing 30 rather than 13 how is it that a pair of bare naked breasts and the thought of hardcore sex got more people riled up about Grand Theft Auto than the fact that is one of the most reprehensively violent games out there?

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Labels: Sex

You know you can't live without a Gunnery Sgt. R. Lee Ermey talking action figure.

But if you can the you certainly can't live without Dragon Skin body armour especially if you are planning to be hit with 250 bullet strikes.

Now that the House of Lords have stopped their opposition to the National Identity Card having forced the Government to make some meaningless concessions it looks like nothing can prevent the bill being passed. Chicken Yoghurt asserts that our list of allies has grown very thin and our only hope is that this massive IT project goes as badly wrong as all previous huge government IT projects.

As Longrider says over at Europhobia: “incompetence is now our most valuable ally“. We must now hope that the procurement and implementation of the National Identity Register is as cack-handed, expensive and late as the rest of the technocratic turds this Government has to seen fit to foist on us in its rudderless quest for a subjugated Utopia.

In that, at least, the odds are in our favour. We democrats grudgingly placed our faith in the hands of the unelected Lords. We must now, reluctantly yet with hope, put it in the hands of big business.

Can a Home Office that apparently cannot do their accounts properly be trusted with the massive funds needed for procurment and implementation of a National Identity Card System.

Tom of Blairwatch and Charlie Stross have done the maths on the time needed for the registration of the entire adult population of Britain and have calculated given the number of people divided by the number of regional registration centres each registration needs to completed in an unworkably short 72 seconds.

Given the technical problems people are predicting perhaps Perfect.co.uk is truly prescient with these two pieces of news from the future, more news from the future.

I forsee the biggest practical problem will be the failures due to the use of biometric data as a way of preventing a person getting multiple cards for different fake identities. I wrote about this a couple of years ago in my analysis of the national identity card scheme in the subsection Is biometrics a silver bullet?

Labels: ID Cards

would mess with the honor of a mouse! Or a mouse's tail!

NarniaWeb.com: Mr. T Will Voice Reepicheep

Just got back from watching the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta. I have mixed feelings but it was enjoyable and a lot better than I had feared it might be especially given my feelings for the previous adaptation of a comic that was close to my heart Hellblazer which became the painful Constantine.

I thought that Hugo Weaving was very powerful as V and Stephen Rea did a great job as Inspector Finch. Natalie Portman was merely adequate as Evey and her accent was not as awful as some have written but she was a little wooden in her performance. I thought Stephen Fry was remarkably good also, other characters such as Chancellor Sutler were too poorly written to allow much from the other actors in the cast.

The movie lasted two hours and yet it felt like a lot had been edited out. There was very little characterisation outside of the central few main characters all the others seemed like stereotypes painted in broad strokes. Some events such as what happened that night at Larkhill which enabled V to escape were glossed over as was Finch's visit to the derelict Larkhill.

I think the general mood of the film was established well, it was visually stunning and there were a number of very powerful scenes especially the fingerman's shooting of the girl and the subsequent uprising of the townspeople.

In many ways the movie felt like it was set in some parallel universe version of Britain rather than a dystopic near future of our own Britain, possibly due to it being an American production. The Britain of the movie was very twee and a little off, Rupert Graves as a copper using the word "chummy" when apprehending V, eggy in a basket and the Benny Hillesque TV satirical attack on the Channcellor.

A number of things in the movie make me feel like the points of the original graphic novel were lost or misunderstood by the writers. V was too overly made to be identified with Guy Fawkes who in the introductory scene is portrayed as a freedom fighter rather than the religious nutcase that he actually was. I thought that the Guy Fawkes mask in the graphic novel was a useful disguise which was merely appropriate given the date of key events in the story and a shared interest in blowing up public buildings. But the motivations of V and Guy Fawkes are in no way the same.

In fact Guy Fawkes has more in common with the Islamic fundametalist terrorists our society is being made to fear at the moment. The character of V is different but is no hero either really he is a force for change through destruction, rebirthing society by destroying it's institutions so something better can be born out of the ashes.

The surveillance aspects were altered and there was no sight of surveillance cameras in the movie odd given their ubiquitousness in modern Britain and given the totalitarianism surely there should be even more in evidence. Plus the populace do not seem cowed by the authorities, living in constant fear of speaking out of turn. Certainly this so called dystopia is to my eyes a lot deal better than we can really hope to expect several years down the line from now once we have a National Identity Register, cameras that can scan our faces to identify us and track our movements and legislation that gives the ruling party pretty much free reign to do whatever it wishes.

Labels: Surveillance