Sometimes it just gets too weird

Cheese-maker warned against supplying Gloucester cheese-rolling

Apparently it went off okay though.

Kenny Rackers, 27, travelled more than 4,000 miles from Colorado Springs to a steep hill in Gloucestershire to take part in the world-famous event. 

"I came over specially for this and I did what I had to do to win," he said afterwards.

"It feels great, I trained a long time for this and got hurt on the hill practising. I came three days early and I took a bad spill, but I came to win and that's what I did.

"I came 3,000 or 4,000 miles just for this race. I put it on my bucket list and today it was to win and that's what I did."

The fourth men's race was won by Tomoaki Tanaka, 39, from Japan, who dressed as a ninja to race down the hill.

The Dangers of Aggregation

 What's wrong with this Visualisation?

Look at the top level geographical presentation (i.e. all of the USA).

Pretty shocking!

Now drill down by increasing the resolution, looking say at the quite big patch of "most hate" tweets just west of Wyoming.

The dangers of aggregation!

One could also look at the U.S. East Coast for a similar effect.

Brief Round-Up

Lots of interesting stuff around at the moment...

• Over at Mike Flynn's blog, a very nice post which ties together bats, birds, linguistic evolution, the philosophy of chemistry and dinosaurs.
• Over at Siris, Brandon Watson has an interesting post about edutainment. Given the current trend for "gamification" of educational resources in HE and the fact that research is fairly consistent in, at least, casting doubt on the fact that students always actually recognise when they have learnt something, this is something that should concern most educators.
• At The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie looks at Galileo's Theory of Tides and draws lessons for today's scientists.

Liz Losh and Henry Jenkins - Mobility Shifts

From mobilityshifts.org

Glacial Activity in North America

I seem to recall an old science fiction story about the return of the glaciers. Anyway, this from Mike Flynn's blog...

Yes, I know this is not really glaciation (in any shape or form).

What is the plural of "Genius"?

Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler - LAYLA

Endeavour

I was always a big fan of "Morse", the TV series based on Colin Dexter's books rather than the books themselves, and I enjoy the reruns on TV when they appear. The characterisation and the partnership between John Thaw, who played Morse and Kevin Whately, who played Lewis, had a touching realism about it and, based as they were on the novels, you rarely felt that you got shortchanged by the script. Indeed, there are some episodes that are immensely good. My favourite, "Masonic Mysteries"which also starred Ian McDiarmid, with it's Magic Flute motif is a fantastic story and "The Day of the Devil" was genuinely disturbing, but there are others that come to mind:  "Twilight of the Gods" with John Geilguid, and "Death is now my Neighbour" in which Richard Briers captured a little of the essence of evil in his portrayal of the retiring Master of Morse's old college.

This was in contrast to the sequel series, "Lewis", which while having many of the right elements never came up to the mark and continually disappointed due mainly to the superficial writing and very, very poor scripts. Kevin Whately reprising the Lewis role and Lawrence Fox, playing Hathaway, did their best with substandard material but after the first half a dozen episodes, you knew that, whatever the merits of their on-screen partnership, the denouement would be a disappointment.

Now we have "Endeavour", a prequel series in which Shaun Evans takes up the mantle of the detective (constable at this time), under the watchful eye of DI Fred Thursday played by Roger Allam. The first set of episodes written by Russell Lewis had none of the gaping plot holes that afflict the Lewis episodes and the performances by Evans as Morse and Allam as Thursday are thoroughly believable and strike just the right note. It's not yet the Thaw/Whately partnership but there's real promise and, after the last episode of Series 1,  I for one have an emotional investment in the characters. Hopefully, series 2 is on its way.

Another Conspiracy

I don't know what it is about commenters in the blogs I read but the weird ones seem to be be acting a little bit too amenable lately. First there was James Chastek in his blog talking about Science (TM) and Religion, and this guy shows up in the combox and promptly exhibits almost all of the bizarre raving new atheist tropes at which point we were treated to a rousing dismemberment of his arguments by the likes of Brandon Watson and Crude. Now, in his blog, Ed Feser has written a post on Conspiracy Theories and, right on cue, we have another commenter who appears and exhibits all of the tropes associated with that particular subculture. And we are again treated to another thorough takedown by the likes of Mr Watson and other members of the AT crowd.

Two examples in as many weeks? On the Internet, where factual accuracy and considered argument are at their apogee?

A coincidence, I don't think so... something's definitely going on here!

However, it has to be said, pace my attempt to identify the latest manifestation of the global lizard space-alien conspiracy, we do cut to the chase fairly quickly. In response to the inevitable Conspiracy Theorist challenge: "Why don't you want to conduct such an investigation now?"

Brandon Watson replies:
"Because it's a waste of time and money clearly motivated by an attempt of people to find closure, whether for 9/11 itself or its aftermath, on the basis of speculative hypotheses and just-so stories rather than actual evidence; because its founding assumptions require us to believe that a government that repeatedly bungles much less elaborate projects somehow managed to be utterly successful here, with no means or mechanism in sight for it to do so, despite the fact that we are talking about something that occurred in one of the busiest buildings in the world; because nobody is in fact risking anything, much less reputation and livelihood, on the kind of speculation involved here and the supposedly 'compelling' arguments turn out to be purely speculative frameworks very tenuously linked to evidence here and there; because anyone who has ever actually looked at disaster reports knows that the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions show no signs of being anything other than the ordinary kind of confusion any significant disaster causes; and because when you actually look at the claims of 9/11 truthers, one finds a consistent pattern of exaggeration deviating from the actual evidence in a clearly identifiable direction."

which to me seems to sum up the best response nicely.

There's also a reference to an old but good xkcd cartoon that says something similar.

The thread is ongoing and the person in question is still digging his hole deeper and deeper. I suspect he won't stop as the situation is similar to that of the first commenter on the Just Thomism blog: there is too much emotional investment in the proponent's truth claim that no amount of reasoned argument will shift his position.

Jack's Entrance

After Notting Hill, I was thinking of single scenes that stand head an shoulders above the rest of the film. Now me and my kids quite like the first couple of Pirates of the Caribbean films so, with due respect to the critic Mark Kermode who I regard highly, I wouldn't put this in the same godforsaken class as Notting Hill, but I do think that Captain Jack's entrance is one of the best. I'm tempted to add the fight scene in the waterwheel in the second film but that relies a lot on the action whereas this one just requires Johnny Depp and immediately tells you all you need to know about the character.

The Age of the Hollow Men

Mike Flynn has a wonderful post on the "Passing of the Age of Reason".

It requires no commentary from me but it is interesting to note the difference in the presentation of argument between the scholastic method and most of the debate that takes place nowadays. The former required that you clearly counter the strongest objections first whereas the latter seems to take a perverse delight in the wilful misrepresentation of opposing views.

Notting Hill

I think that, almost without exception, the work of Richard Curtis is complete garbage - the exceptions being the second series of Blackadder, and this one scene from the film Notting Hill. I would defy anybody to come up with one redeeming feature in any of the films apart from this one and don't get me started on the Vicar of Dibley! Even the much vaunted last Blackadder scene in series 4 is really just calculated sentimentality but, most of all, I hate the film Notting Hill with a vengeance. The film surely ranks as one of the most execrable instances of cinema in existence. I used to live near Notting Hill (the Ladbroke Grove end not the Gate end) and I think I can safely say that, even at the time of release, it didn't represent any kind of landscape that most of its residents would recognise. Having said that, amid the dross (and the scene where the characters contest to appear the most unfortunate is about as bad as you can get) there is this one scene in which Hugh Grant walks down Portobello Road from season to season that is absolutely stunning. Nowhere near enough to compensate for the whole thing but it certainly deserved to be in a better film.

And the Bill Withers track is perfect, of course.

Possibly one of the best sites on the web...

... at least, one of the reasons, it was invented.

Lakes and Islands

This is so cool...