Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

Not so long ago just about every company manufacturing portable computers seemed to offer a whole raft of options with the basic model so you could have one or two batteries, or you could have a CD drive (’twas pre-DVD then) instead of one of the batteries or you could have…. well, loads of different things that probably served to seriously complicate the buying decision for most people.

However, these days the portable is very much a standard issue device with not a whole lot of uniqueness to really distinguish the products from different manufacturers. There still remains some specialism of course but mainly that’s severely limited so, for example, Sony tend to specialise in expensive multimedia models and, as always, Apple plough their own furrow in the marketplace. A year ago I’d have added that for a mini portable it was Asus but that marketplace is now totally swamped by offerings from the other manufacturers.

What’s missing from that sameness are the little things. For instance, I’m looking for a portable right now and would like to have an AV socket on it yet there doesn’t seem to be such a beastie these days and instead some have HDMI connections which are handy but it would have been nice to have been able to connect camcorders and whatnot that are only a few years old and don’t have HDMI. Likewise, I’d have liked to have been able to continue to use some PCMCIA devices but everyone seems to have moved on to ExpressCard slots now.

On the software front it’s nice to see that several flavours of Unix are on offer these days, notably on the netbooks of course in that it would seem pretty ridiculous to be spending far more to buy the wordprocessing software than it did to buy the computer.

Now that we’ve really started to ramp up the exercise aspect of our weight-loss programme we’re at the point where we’re hitting the buffers on the actual weight loss since the muscle that we’re building is heavier than the fat that we’re losing.

Now you might think that there can’t be a whole lot of difference in the density of muscle and the density of fat but in fact the difference is around 18% which is pretty substantial obviously. In reality though it’s probably going to hit us most in the early stages of our more intensive exercise programme, the thinking being that presumably there’ll be a much higher percentage gain in muscle in those early stages than later on. Thus whilst my weight seems to have stopped dropping over the last week or so, there is definitely less of me hanging out than there was a week earlier.

Later on it should be different in that maintaining the diet plan whilst simultaneously upping the ante with the exercise programme should eventually (within a week or two given the programme we’re following) reach the point where the gain in muscle levels off whilst the fat continues to disappear. I suspect that the weight would go down relatively quickly at that point but we’ll see in a few weeks time.

One wonders how many people who’d like to “lose weight” pack in their exercise programmes in the early stages due to their gaining weight from all that extra muscle that they’re building?

Incidently, one other trend that we’ve noticed in the gym this time around compared to our experience five years back is that there seems to be a massive growth in the use of personal trainers. Previously you’d have seen one every couple of days but now there are three or four going round with people every day. We’re starting to feel left out as we don’t have one but Wendy says I can’t have the blonde one that promises “great one on one fun” 🙂

This seems to have been one of the most widely discussed trials around the world to date and it seems certain that the discussion has a ways to go with an appeal seeming quite likely if not yet certain.

The grounds for the appeal seem to be coming from two basic angles namely that the child’s evidence was unreliable because she was so young and that the defendant didn’t get a fair trial because of all the discussion that’s been going on by way of the Internet around the world and particularly because said discussion could hardly be missed in the UK by the jurors. I’m calling him “the defendant” to avoid legal issues but if you want to know his name, it takes a few seconds to find it courtesy of google as he’s named on loads of non-UK sites.

The “fair trial” argument will likely hinge on article 6 of the Human Rights Convention of which entitles everyone to a “fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law”. The problem being that had the jurors seen some of the discussion knocking around the Internet over the last few months then it would be quite possible that they would not meet the requirement that they be impartial. That’s a particular problem in the British court system as it starts from the premise that the jurors know nothing about the case that they are concerned with other than the information which they acquire in the course of the trial itself. Were the appeal for this case to be upheld for this reason it seems certain that the presumption of ignorance would need to be changed; doing so wouldn’t mean jail time for this defendant but would at least sort out what is becoming a serious problem for high profile cases that will come up in the years to come.

The age of the child is an interesting argument from a psychological perspective. Can a 4 year old be relied on to accurately recount events that occurred when they were 2? Early childhood memories are quite a big issue in psychology and it’s very, very difficult to avoid implanting memories in young children of events that just didn’t happen. At the trivial level this can be as simple as asking leading questions rather than open questions but even open questions need to be carefully phrased with young children. It is fortunate that her recollection came from a time when she could speak as few people can recall anything before that and little in any detail. Quite why that should be so is something of a mystery but suggests that memory is either dependent on speech or requires developments in the brain that happen to coincide with occur at the same time as speech development. Actually implanting false memories was one of the assignments set by a Yale psychology course so it’s surprisingly easy to do even for those of university age never mind young children.

Although this is one guy who needs the key thrown away, if his appeal does succeed on the article 6 grounds, let’s hope that the British legal system learns from the experience and abandons the presumption of ignorance on the part of the jury. Should it succeed on the grounds of the competence of a child to testify then that’s potentially a very serious problem for any children in similar circumstances in the future.

Although our sites collect a whole bunch of statistics about the people who drop by, most of the time we pay next to no attention to it other than keeping a vague eye on what’s most popular.

However, in light of our recent contempt of court action we’ve been a little more paranoid about things and were wondering if the hits from Manchester were a prelude to something similar in the same way as all the hits from London turned out to be. So we thought we’d do a little digging…

First off, the Feedjit widget showed up the series of hits from Manchester using a variety of searches but all related to the topic of the above court action. Was that a fan or something else?

Next step was to look at our StatCounter records for one of those searches.We picked a recent one from Feedjit so it was towards the top of the searches recorded. One click on the drill-down icon which brings up the IP address, their ISP, that they’d made 127 visits to our site amounting to over 2 hours of viewing.

Popping the IP address into one of the reverse IP lookup sites which gave us the specific entry for their server. In this case it turned out to be someone’s Sky router so ’tis unlikely to be related to the court action.

Now, whilst we can’t track down the actual physical address of our fan, it is more than enough information to allow that person to be found by the authorities which is probably worth bearing mind….

Now that I’ve started thinking about going down the pill route to jump start the transition to a trimmer me, I’m all confused!

OK, so fat burners are presumably about speeding up the use of fat within your body. Easy, though sometimes with side-effects, of course, as obviously it’s not, yet, quite that easy.

Metabolism enhancers are there to turn up the knob on your body so to speak. Thus they’re very similar in effect to fat burners though I suspect that they’d be more likely to make you a bit hyperactive if you overdid it.

But, what do you make of the likes of Orovo? It’s billed as a super supplement and contains a whole bunch of natural but somewhat offbeat ingredients. To be quite honest with stuff like alfalfa and wheatgrass it sounds very new-age to me which isn’t really my problem: it’s just that I don’t know where it would fit in my diet regime.