Now and again

Its been a hectic year so far and one marked by personal loss (of my aunt followed by her sister and my mother a few weeks apart), so Ive not been inclined to blog. Add to that the fact that my youngest children are shortly celebrating their first and third birthdays, life is a little squeezed for blogdulgence.

However, I've been tracking this and and have been very impressed with it. I'm a big fan of sqlite and for many small GIS use cases this may just be a killer app. Now, just need pysqlite wrappers updated ...

Obsolescence

Not very inclined to blog of late, but I thought this seemed sufficiently apposite to put digit to keypad for.

A radioactive new year

Partly due to new year ennui and of course, indolence, posts have been few and far between. As this is the first of '08 and I've not been particularly inspired of late I thought Id start the year with a rant about the stupidity of the UK governments stance on nuclear power.

Really! So its sensible to put short term economic issues ahead of long (very!) term pollution risks. Well, if thats so then let the chairman of BNF or indeed the Cabinet or at least Mr Darling bury all the radioactive shit in their back gardens.

Of course, theres a business opportunity here. If the waste lasts for hundreds of thousands of years this could be your chance to immortality. Hows about a trade in personalized radioactive waste then those in 30,000 AD will be able to irradiate themselves and point a finger and say - gee that G. Brown, what a tosser!!!

On second thoughts, China probably already has an industry doing just that.

Geo on a stick

This is (sadly)work related but Ive not seen any of the usual geobloggers mention this before.

I think this is kinda neat and I can think of many personal uses for it (and with my warped sense of civic duty, they mainly involve intelligence gathering to berate the local authorities)...if I do ever get one I shall be spearheading a campaign or two!!

Round and round and round we go...

40 solar orbits and counting.

I remain unconvinced by how we measure age. Calender and chronological age seem to have little relationship to biochemical and experiential age which is surely more significant than how many times you have orbited the sun?

Or perhaps I'm just getting old...

A Thankyou to Violet

Its been a while since my last post for a variety of reasons. One has been a personal reflective period occasioned by a trip home and some subsequent unearthing of the past.

Consider a woman who after a decade of trying conceives a child. Consider that same woman on discovering that what she wants most will kill her. Consider the woman who regardless of peril to self takes the child to term and nurses him as her own mortality closes in. Consider that she was of an age that her only child is now approaching and consider that her grandson is now as old as her own son when she died. Consider the injustice. Consider the sacrifice.

Thank you mother. Thank you on behalf of your grandchildren and your son who never got to know you except by deed. Those deeds say it all really. Consider.

Gods own language

There are times when the cupidity of humankind is beyond words. From belief in the holiness of images on toast, to the bastard philosophies of HandsomeLake and the Cargo Cults (and if you don’t know what these are I suggest you make quick with a search engine – which raises an interesting question. Are there religiously motivated search engines that will sanitize query results in order to espouse a particular moral view? Is this what Google did/does in China (elsewhere?). What is the consensus on pluralism and secularism? Answers on a postcard please).

Okay, I’m wandering off topic again. My point was the futility of much human endeavor – its simply wasted by the pious and self serving agendas purporting to be about the ONE TRUTH. Phah!! In the 21st century how can we succumb to such distortion and perversion of thought? Was the Enlightenment for nothing? Is scientific method so arcane and difficult that we need to resort to hide behind the skirts of tin gods and do millions die in ignorance for want of asking ‘Why?’. Surely a benevolent and caring God is hardly so egotistical (!) to demand unquestioning obedience (I seem to recall that that led to Nazism), or is the almighty so insecure that he (sexist so and so too!) needs to have mortals to bully?

Sorry. Dismount. Off hobby horse now, but I think what we need in this digital age is a new markup language:

The eXtensible Deity Markup Language (XDML).

Need a new saint? Mark it up in XDML. Have a particular sect your down on? Mark it up in XDML. What to swell the coffers of Jimmy Baker/Jimmy Swaggert? Mark it up brother.

XDML – your W3C compliant passport to heaven.