I find myself annoyed by the fiasco of the Indianapolis Grand Prix for reasons which I think are quite different from a lot of the other people.
The situation is pretty clear – Michelin failed to provide tyres that were suitable to run for race distance at the speedway. As such safety was compromised, and it was absolutely the right decision that these tyres should not have been used under race conditions. I don’t think anyone would disagree with this.
The problem comes with the response. Michelin and the seven michelin running teams on the grid felt like the rules of the sport should have been changed. The race stewards and bosses of Formula 1 didn’t. You have to ask yourself if Ferrari had found a problem with their rear-wing that compromised safety in the high speed straight, if they’d had asked for the circuit to be changed to accomodate this they’d have been laughed out of the paddock. Quite rightly.
It seems to me that there were plenty of options for the Michelin cars to race, if only amoungst themselves, and these were spelled out by Charlie Whiting:
They could run with the tyres they used for qualifying (which the rules require, of course), but “tip-toe” around the corner in question to prevent the dangerous loads going onto the tyre.
They could do (1), but at full race speed, and change the tyres at a pit stop every 10 laps (the tyres were considered safe for up to ten laps) – and probably attract no penalty beyond the time of the pit-stops. The probably is because it’s against the rules to do a tyre change during the race for any reason other than safety.
They could change the tyres to a different spec from those used in qualifiying, which were safe for the race – but this is breaking the rules and would attract a penalty of some form or another, probably stripping any points gained.
It seems clear to me that there’s some politiks going on here. The team bosses and Michelin are playing all innocent, saying “Put the chicane in so we can race, and we’ll quite happily accept a penalty of stripped championship points”, when actually that were several options for them racing, if only amoungst themselves – some of which that would have attracted no championship penalty. The ITV commenters were asking if it’s a sport or a business – the answer is it’s a sport, it has rules that are abundently clear and diligently adhered to.
Quite aside from anything else, it seems like madness to me to be changing the circuit on the morning of the race!
Sometimes, when you search for a specific phrase, Google will return a few small images on it’s main search result. It seems pretty random which ones will or won’t – hey, time for a table (most not found by me!)
What on earth is the logic here? I can only presume that they count the number of image hits, and if it’s above a certain threshold then they return the first few! Incidently, the safe search setting does have an effect – mine is set to moderate.
Saw the rabbit again last night – was wandering around our front garden, and I even managed to get off a couple of photos. Changed my mind about it being carefree – whenever there was any noise, or a car went past, it scarpered straight away, and as I discovered yesterday it can disappear very effectively into a nearby bush. Haven’t got a great photo yet; still holding out for that!
Put my Batman review up, and enough said about the film itself – but a funny thing happened on the way home – I walked past a newspaper display board and it had a banner across the top saying “Batman is back” (or something – can’t remember exactly what), and I did a double take, as it looked exactly like the Gotham Times (or whatever the paper is called)! For a moment I was confused over whether I was still in the cinema, or had been transported to Gotham, or something like that. I thought Metro’s review was a bit harsh, incidently – ok so it wasn’t an “edge of your seat” film, but I don’t think it was intended to be.
Oh yes, and the Beeb have commissioned series 3 of Dr Who (hoorah), and Billie Piper is going to be in series 2 after all, despite what the rumour mill was saying. The last episode of this series is tommorow, and then we’ve got to wait until Christmas!!
Great film – go see. There, broken all the rules of reviews and started with the bottom line! Think of it like Spiderman, only better. This is the first film since Spidey that I’ve come out of thinking ‘can’t wait for the next one’ (and you just know there’s gonna be one). The film starts with young (8ish?) Bruce being good friends with Rachael (who grows up to be a most watchable Katie Holmes), gaining his fear of bats, losing his parents, and them himself in anonymous Asian countries – although not necessarily in that order. Enter mentor in mountain-top monastry to teach our Bruce everything he knows. Before long Bruce is back in Gotham, and Batman is born… The pacing is perfect – the story unfolds quickly enough to keep interest, while lingering enough to involve and create bonds with the characters. Incidently the casting is also spot on. Katie Holmes was an unexpected delight, and Gary Oldman, Liam Fox, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman were as solid as ever. Christian Bale himself was more than equal to the task, and made a highly sympathetic Bruce. This was also by far the most realistic interpretation of Batman – his toys were pleasingly understated and explained (Morgan Freeman filling this Q-like role to a tee), and I personally liked the car! However one huge bug-bear regarded the microwave emitter, that could vapourise water at 2 km, yet apparantly have no ill effect on humans walking in front of it. Probably worth a small qualification on the realism – this is no gorefest, indeed the body count is tiny, and the representation of the fighting is pretty comic book. But hey – it’s a 12, and I don’t want blood and guts anyway. Make no mistake, this is a dark film. Bruce is mighty angry and mighty hurting. It’s not entirely devoid of humour, but these are minor lightenings of mood, not the comic relief of, say, Keaton’s Bat. It probably is worth catching on the big screen, although more for mood than art, and I will definitly watch it again, althouqh probably not at the cinema. Bottom line (again) – almost certainly the best Batman film so far. Watch and enjoy. Seen at Ster Century, Leeds
We’ve got a feral rabbit living in our street – hopped along the pavement while we were eating our dinner, and A has come across it before in our front garden. I grabbed my camera to get a photo, but it saw me coming and jumped into a hedge. 20 minutes of standing still some distance from said hedge failed to result in another bunny sighting. I must say I wouldn’t generally give a rabbit very long in a suburban street, but this one seems to be growing up quite well, and certainly does a runner if anything disturbs it. The only worrying thing is it seems to be fairly carefree about the road itself – that might just have been because there were no cars (and ours is a very quiet road), but when the cars do come they often are a bit speedy…
Mr & Mrs Smith is the latest high-octance-action-romance fare from over the pond, staring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as the eponymous couple, married for 5 (or 6) years and, unbeknownst to each other, each one of the world’s top assassins. This is a rather unlikely premise, and the film doesn’t really get going until they realise this fact, and are given each other as targets to take out. They proceed to utterly destroy their house, before realising that seriously beating each other up is assassin foreplay… Thereafter it’s a by-the-numbers shoot ’em up really. I found Mrs Smith to be a very unsympathetic character, only once showing an approximation of a human side in a rather contrived fish-out-of water scenario when handed a baby. Mr Smith was more convincing as a character, but still was about as deep as the screen the film was projected on. And a remarkable suspension of disbelief was required on several occasions as we were required to swallow absurd comic book violence – case in point is when a 6″ kitchen knife gets embedded to the hilt in Mr Smith’s thigh by an off-aim Mrs Smith during the climatic shoot-out – result, the stocial Mr Smith pulls it out, says “We’ll talk about this later”, and walks on as if nothing’s happened. But that does bring me nicely on to the film’s strongest point, which is it’s humour. Once you accept the idea that this married couple have basically said nothing true to each other for the whole time they’ve known each other, the unpicking of these lies is actually quite amusing. For instance, in the middle of a rather unbelievable car chase, Mrs Smith: I’m an orphan. My parent’s died when I was 5. Mr Smith (pause): So who were those people at our wedding? Mrs Smith: Paid actors Mr Smith: Arrgg – I said I’d seen your Father on Fantasy Island Then at some point later: Mr Smith: I can’t believe I took my real parents to our wedding. If that sort of humour tickles you, you’d probably enjoy the film. If not, it’s not really worth going to see.. Catch it on the telly with some friends. Seen at Ster Century, Leeds
I’m wondering if perhaps going down the DIY route when I built Letters from Leeds was perhaps not the best idea, and maybe I would have been better with off-the-shelf blogging software. I very much enjoyed the process of building this website and LfL, and learnt more about perl, PHP, RSS, and so on, but there’s lots of facilities which standard blogs have which I don’t, the main one probably being commenting.
Don’t get me wrong – I do like the way this site looks and works (obviously, othrewise I’d change it!), and think that it probably presents the information I’m wanting to present in a way that I’d want to present it, but the whole LfL thing is a bit.. well.. clunky. So, for instance, I have to open a login shell to my server in order to do an entry (I tried doing an e-mail based thingy, but never actually used it), whereas I should probably write a webby type front end. H’mmm, come to think of it I believe I started a web based front end – wonder what happened to it!
I reckon this whole “sleeping through the night” thing is an urban legend, at least as it regards babies. Take Ben – now he’s a good little sleeper by anyone’s standards.. usually in bed by 7pm, and usually sleeps until 7am the next morning…
Never-the-less, he still wakes up at 2, 3, or 4 morning from time to time – I would say that he doesn’t wake up perhaps 90% of the time. This all sounds jolly good, until you work out that 90% means that 1 night out of every 10 he wakes up at 3 in the morning. Or, to put it another way, 2 our of every 3 monday nights we’ll be disturbed (it’s not always mondays – just rephrasing the stats). And this isn’t just a minor wake-up for us, this is a “get out of bed and either change nappy, fetch bottle of milk, pat of head, put on/take off layers, etc.”. Proper waking up lights on, have to reason and make decisions. 🙁
We figure that the main reason at the moment is teething, which means there may possibly be an end in sight, but I can fairly confidently say that I don’t think we’ve had a fortnight of undisturbed nights since he was born. No wonder we’re knackered!!
One of the things that has really intrigued me about the new Dr Who series is the Bad Wolf thing. For the first time it was done quite explicitly in Saturday’s episode, with the Doctor noticing and wondering what was with it.
Turns out that it has featured in just about every episode, although I have to confess the only one I really noticed was when it was graffitied on the side of the TARDIS.
Anyway, thanks to slashdot, a website speculating on such matters has been brough to my attention, appropriately enough badwolf.org.uk, and it’s got me wondering all over again.
Mild disappointment – it turns out that the BBC own said domain, and it’s even hosted on their servers. Would have been much more interesting if it had been a pundit, or indeed if they’d have taken the trouble to hide it behind A.N. Other person. Still, it was registered in November 2004, which clearly means it’s been thought about from the start.
Actually, dig just a little bit, and there’s loads of pseudo-websites associated with The Doctor! Interesting reading….
Was just thinking about other fond memories from my undergraduate days – and I actually really enjoyed my degree at Imperial. Jolly hard work, and Imperial is a bit of a degree factory as far as UGs go, but a good time none-the-less.
I had a very interesting friendship with a chap called Steve, who must of been one of my best friends at uni. I always sat next to him in lectures (when I went) and copied his notes (when I didn’t), we went climbing every lunchtime, and always ate lunch together afterwards in the JCR, every so often went out to Mile End climbing wall of an afternoon. We were project partners, always sat next to each other in the labs, collaborated on coursework – you get the picture. Indeed he was the first of my friends to get married, at the tender age of 22 odd.
The strange thing? In 4 years of doing a degree, I think I saw him twice in a social context (if you exclude climbing/lunch – which was really in the context of work). Once was in the aforementioned Southside bar, and once was at his wedding!! Perhaps you need to understand that we’d (all) often be working in the labs until they shut at 11pm, so we spent a lot of time together, yet hardly any in a formal social sense. Actually there was another occasion, when he came along to an Alpha supper with me, come to think of it.
In fact we got up to all sorts of mischief, including the best Valentine’s day ‘card’ I’ve ever sent (and I still haven’t thought of a way to beat it). Of course this was a long time before I’d met A, in one sense sadly, as it would have been very cool to have done it for her (although it was an accurate representation of my feelings for the recipient at the time, so I can’t really regret it. Plus it made her feel good <grin>). Steve did the same trick to his (now) wife, which in summary involved the ladies each receiving in the order of 10 cards over a period of a week or so (culminating on Feb 14th) sent from all over the world, that revealed a suitable message when all 10 were put together in the right order. I think we had to start in December to make sure the one from Australia would be back in time! Of course Steve’s and my cards were independent, but it was useful to share out global contacts and postage costs for at least one leg of each card’s journey. I do wonder what some our friends thought when they got a package containing a card saying “Hi. How are you? Please post the enclosed cards as near as possible to Feb 3rd, ” (or whatever). “Find enclosed an international postage coupon to cover the cost of the stamp.”). I think I gave away my identity, as I really wanted to know if it worked or not, and she said it was great getting this random card from Norway on Feb 7th that made no sense at all – then another couple on Feb 8th from Scotland and France which still made no sense but indicated a pattern emerging, and so on.. 🙂
Anyway, after graduating he went off to Cardiff to do a PhD (and subsequently a postdoc – and I believe he’s lecturer now), and I ever so nearly went with him (one of our lecturers was going there, and offered us both PhDs if we wanted to join her), but decided I wanted to stay in London and that I’d had enough of academia. I guess we kinda lost touch after that – we still send Christmas cards, and I would certainly look him up if I was in Cardiff (and I would hope he’d look me up too), but I guess that’s how it goes.
Incidently, today’s Dilbert touches on keeping on journal (link should be good for a month or two).
