I have come to the conclusion that anyone who talks about how easy it’s going to be to simulate a human brain in a computer either understands computers but doesn’t understand biology, or doesn’t understand computers but understands biology. I’m currently studying for a Master’s in Bioinformatics, so I have an equal lack of understanding of both subjects.

The argument seems to be “the genome is like a computer program – it contains all the information needed to build a person. The genome’s only a few gigabytes long, so the Kolmogrov complexity of the ‘create a brain’ program must be less than that. We have computers that can run programs that long, so it’s only a matter of time before we can run a ‘create a brain’ program on our computers”.

Now, firstly, I simply don’t believe that one can reduce the problem in this way. Intuitively, it doesn’t make much sense. I have a little over 20GB of Beach Boys MP3s/FLACs on my hard drive. They couldn’t be compressed much more than that without loss of information. The human brain is supposed to be the most complex known object in the universe. I simply don’t believe that the most complex known object in the universe has a lower Kolmogrov complexity than the surf-pop harmony stylings of the Wilson brothers. I mean, I’ve not even counted my Jan and Dean MP3s in there!

But let’s ignore the intuitive problems, and also ignore various practical issues like epigenetic inheritance, and assume for the moment that the human genetic code is a computer program, and this 3GB (or “3/4 of the size of the directory which just contains my very favourite Beach Boys live bootlegs” in human terms) program will, if run on the correct hardware, produce a human body, including the brain. Here is where we hit the problem with the concept of Kolmogrov complexity, so freely bandied around by a lot of these people.

Basically, Kolmogrov complexity is a measure of how small the smallest computer program that can produce a given output is. For example, say we want to run a program that outputs “Hello World!” and a line break. In Perl (the language with which I’m most familiar) this would be:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print “Hello World!\n”;

That’s 39 bytes long. This means that we know the Kolmogrov complexity of a Hello, World program must be 39 bytes or less. It might be possible to do it in fewer bytes in some other programming language, but we know that any program more than 39 bytes long isn’t the shortest possible program that does that.

Now, the reason Kolmogrov complexity is a useful measure is that it doesn’t vary *much* between languages and platforms. Say you have a program written in perl, but for some reason you want to run it in Java. ‘All’ you need to do is wrap it in another program, which converts perl to Java, so if your ‘convert perl to Java’ program is, say, 1.2 megabytes (that’s the size of the /usr/bin/perl program on my GNU/Linux system, which converts perl to machine code, so that’s a reasonable size), the length of the shortest Java program to do that thing must be at most the length of the perl program plus 1.2 megabytes.

As program size gets bigger, that ‘plus 1.2 megabytes’ gets swamped by the size of the program, so Kolmogrov complexity is a very good measure of the complexity of *getting a particular computer to perform a task*.

But the problem is that it doesn’t take into account the complexity of *the hardware performing the task*, so it’s not very good when moving between vastly different types of hardware.

Take a jukebox as an example. If you want it to play, say, Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys, you look for the code for that (say, A11) and punch that into the jukebox, which executes that ‘program’. Now, that proves that the Kolmogrov complexity of the ‘play Good Vibrations’ program is a couple of bytes long.

But if I want my computer to play Good Vibrations, the simplest program that will do it is ‘playsound /media/disk/Beach\ Boys/Smiley\ Smile/Good\ Vibrations.mp3′ – that’s thirty-five times the length of the jukebox ‘program’. But that’s not all – you have to count the size of the ‘playsound’ program (15 kilobytes) and the MP3 file (3.8 megabytes). Moving our ‘program’ from the jukebox to my computer has made it several million times as long, because we’ve had to take information that was previously in hardware (the physical Beach Boys CD within the jukebox and the ability of the jukebox to play music) and convert it into software (the MP3 file and the playsound program).

Now, I never normally talk about my day job here, because I don’t want to give anyone an excuse to confuse my views with those of my employers, but it’s almost impossible not to, here. The lab in which I work produces a piece of software which allows you to run programs compiled for one kind of computer on another kind. The product I work on allows you to take programs which are compiled for computers with x86 processors (such as, almost certainly, the one you’re using to read this) that run GNU/Linux, and run them on machines which have POWER chips, which also run GNU/Linux.

Now, this program took many person-decades of work by some very, very bright people, and a huge amount of money, to develop. It’s a very complex, sophisticated piece of software. Every time even something relatively small is changed, it has to go through a huge battery of tests because something put in to make, say, Java run faster might make, for example, the Apache web server break. (This is lucky for me as it means I have a job). Even given this, it’s still not perfect – programs run slower on it than they would on an x86 box (sometimes not very much slower, but usually at least a bit slower), and there are some programs that can’t work properly with it (not many, but some). It’s astonishingly good at what it does, but what it does is, by necessity, limited. (To the extent that, for example, the programs still have to be for the same GNU/Linux distro the POWER machine is running – you can’t use it to run, for example, a Red Hat 5 program on a Red Hat 4 box).

Now, this hugely complex, sophisticated, expensive-to-create program converts from one chip type to another. But both chips are Von Neumann architectures. Both use the same peripheral devices, and the same interfaces to those devices. Both are designed by human beings. And the people writing that program have access to information about the design of both types of chip, and can test their program by running the same program on an x86 box and on a POWER box with their program and seeing what the result is.

Now, when it comes to the ‘program’ that is the genetic code, none of that’s true. In this case, the hardware+operating system is the cell in which the genetic code is embedded, plus the womb in which that cell gets embedded, the umbilical cord that brings it nutrients, the systems that keep the mother’s body temperature regulated, the hormone levels that change at different times… basically, instead of having two chips, both of which you can examine, and leaving everything else the same and trying to get your three gig program to run (which I know from experience is in itself a massive problem), you have to simulate an entire human being (or near as dammit) in software in order to run the genetic code program – which we’re running, remember, *in order to simulate part of a human being!*

And you have to do that with no access to source code, with no way of testing like-for-like (unless there are women who are lining up to be impregnated with randomly-altered genetic material to see what happens), and with the knowledge that the thing you’re creating isn’t just a computer program, but at least potentially a sentient being, so a coding error isn’t going to just cause someone to lose a day’s work because of a crash, but it’ll give this sentient being some kind of hideous genetic illness.

And what are you left with, at the end of that effort? A baby. One that can’t interact with the physical world, and that is many, many times slower than a real baby. And that will undoubtedly have bugs in (any computer program longer than about thirty lines has bugs in). And that requires huge amounts of energy to run.

I can think of more fun, more reliable ways of making a baby, should I happen to want one.

But the point is, that even that would be a phenomenal, incredible achievement. It would dwarf the Manhattan Project and the moon landings and the Human Genome Project. It would require billions in funding, thousands of people working on it, many decades of work, and several huge conceptual breakthroughs in both computer science and biology.

Which is not to say that it’s impossible. I’ve never seen a good argument against it being theoretically possible to create artificial general intelligence, and I’ve not seen any convincing ones against the possibility of uploading and emulating a particular person’s brain state. And assuming that technology continues to improve and civilisation doesn’t collapse, it may well happen one day. But people like Kurzweil arguing that the relatively small size of the genome makes it a trivial problem, one that will be solved in the next couple of decades, are like those people who drew graphs in 1950 showing that if top speeds achieved by humanity carried on increasing we’d be at the speed of light in the 1990s. The first example of that I saw was in Heinlein’s essay Pandora’s Box. The retro-futurology page has an examination of some of the other predictions Heinlein made in that essay. Suffice it to say, he didn’t do well. And Heinlein was far more intelligent and knowledgeable than Kurzweil.

And of course, hidden in that paragraph above is a huge assumption – “assuming that technology continues to improve and civilisation doesn’t collapse”. It’s that, in part, that I want to talk about in the next part of this, coming up in a few hours.

The musician, comedian, cartoonist, record company owner, animator and computer programmer Chris Sievey died on Monday night, and with him died his most famous creation Frank Sidebottom.

If you were a kid in the eighties, you knew Frank Sidebottom from his appearances on Number 73, but Sidebottom was far more than just a children’s entertainer. Along with his puppet sidekick/antagonist Little Frank, the man with the giant papier-mache head had dreams of pop stardom, mixing his own songs (“Space is ace”, “Christmas Is Really Fantastic”) with cover versions of classic hits given a new twist (“Panic! In The Streets Of Timperley”, “Anarchy In Timperley”, “Timperley Sunset”, “Born In Timperley”) and indie or ‘underground’ classics (the Beefheart cover Mirror Man, Mirror Puppet/Give Me That Harp Little Frank, or covers of The Fall).

While his act was more-or-less stolen by Graham Fellows for his character John Shuttleworth, and Caroline Aherne took a character he created as a Radio Timperley sidekick, Mrs Merton, to her own TV show, Frank Sidebottom was far more original than the low-rent Alan-Bennetisms of those two, combining that basic Northerner-trying-to-be-a-star-despite-lack-of-both-talent-and-self-awareness thing with an altogether more surreal worldview, especially in his interactions with Little Frank.

You can see this especially in his brief career as a comic character, in the children’s comic OINK!, in a strip written and drawn by Frank himself. The great Lew Stringer, one of the other OINK! contributors, writes about his work on the comic here.

Little Frank Goes On A Date (Click For Fantastic Fullness)

I must admit to not having paid a *huge* amount of attention to Sidebottom’s work over the years – just being delighted when his big papier-mache head would turn up unexpectedly, whether it be on Channel M (the Manchester local TV channel) presenting his Proper Telly Show In Black & White (so you don’t have to turn the colour down) or as a presenter on local TV news.

I only discovered a few months ago, in fact, that Sidebottom was originally created as a side-project. He was meant to be the biggest fan of Chris Sievey’s band The Freshies, who did some genuinely fantastic punk-pop songs, of which probably the best was the minor hit I’m In Love With The Girl From The Virgin Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk (presented here in the slightly-rerecorded version with Virgin replaced with Certain):

I should have realised the link earlier, really – the combination of songs about mundane incidents and buying records ( I Can’t Get Bouncing Babies By The Teardrop Explodes) and spaceships (Let’s Go Space City) with lo-fi production values and simple three-chord melodies clearly points the way to Sidebottom’s later career.

And not only was Sievey/Sidebottom a musician and comedian, he was also a pioneer in multimedia. He wrote two computer games – The Biz (a game about becoming a rock star) and Flying Train (in which you have to put a train together before flying it to the moon to view a supernova) – for the ZX81, both of which were released on tape along with Freshies songs.They can be played online – flying train and The Biz – if you have a Java browser plugin.

Sievey also worked as a stop-motion animator, not only working a day job at HOT animation (who produce among other things Pingu and Bob The Builder) but making his own animated film, Franksworld:

Frank Sidebottom kept going right to the end – he was tweeting in character mere hours before Sievey died, and his Twitter stream was where we could hear about the progress of the bobbins cancer that he seemed convinced he was going to beat, though one of his last tweets was about how he was ‘still feeling very poorly’. Only last week he premiered his World Cup anthem Three Shirts On My Line.

I’ve heard from a couple of people that Chris Sievey wasn’t a particularly nice man ‘in real life’ (whatever that is). Be that as it may, Frank Sidebottom was a silly man who made us laugh with his silly songs, and it is absolute bobbins that he’s dead. You know it is. It really is.

Unfortunately, it’s also a day when I’m getting over a bad case of the ‘flu, and not really coherent enough to write well, and I was seriously considering not doing this at all – after all, earlier this year when my work were after nominations of names of computer scientists to name their meeting rooms after, I’d named Ada Lovelace there, so I could have done my bit. But I’ve decided to go ahead with a post about Emily Short.

(I feel quite embarrassed writing about her as she’s someone I don’t know – at all – but who blogs and whose blog I’ve commented on, and so she may well read this. I just wanted to write about a programmer who’s actually one of those responsible for something I actually use on a regular basis).

Short is the writer of a series of games, all of them ‘interactive fiction’ – the kind of thing that used to be called text adventure games. And while I don’t know as much about the genre as I should, I do know that her games are among the best I’ve played, and are regarded as such by the small community of people who are still interested in these things. Rather than be Zork-esque ‘GET LAMP, KILL TROLL’, her stuff is actual art, its sophistication limited more by the relatively crude tools at her disposal than by her imagination or writing ability – a classicist, she often uses figures from Greek and Roman history and myth (I’ll have to replay Damnatio Memoriae soon, as I’ve recently been rewatching I, Clavdivs), and manages to get quite an astonishing level of characterisation and interaction from her NPCs.

But more important than her games, as far as this goes, is her work on Inform 7, a programming language I’ve written a little about before ( here and here ).

The basic concept behind Inform 7 – and the bulk of its implementation – are the work of Graham Nelson, a mathematician. But Short is the co-maintainer of the project (and increasingly its public ‘face’) , and wrote many of the built-in ‘extensions’ (what most programmers would probably refer to as libraries) to the language – as well as providing more than thirty further extensions on the Inform Extensions Page. She also wrote the vast bulk of the 300+ example programs in the Inform documentation, and the regression test suite used on every release (and as someone whose day job involves, in large part, regression testing software, I can tell you what a tedious, thankless, but necessary job that is).

And on top of that, she’s put in this huge amount of work on a community software project (albeit one not yet fully under a Free license, though getting released that way piecemeal) not for any cash, and not even (as far as I can tell) for ‘real-life’ credit – according to Wikipedia, ‘Emily Short’ is a pseudonym.

No doubt there are better candidates for celebration on Ada Lovelace Day, but I’m assuming you all know about Grace Hopper and Rosalind Franklin, so someone doing good work in a tiny niche, but work I for one appreciate, deserves writing about as much as anyone else…

Jennie writes more about where all the female bloggers are… good discussion in the comments, too.

Millennium writes about the Dalek War box set.

How to get a Windows refund if you’re buying a new (not second-hand) computer.

Tim at The Hurting writes about the presumption of changelessness in the business plans of the Big Two comics companies.

And Terence Eden bought a newspaper for the first time in a decade

One of the big stories at the moment is Andrew Marr asking the Prime Minister if he’s mentally ill on TV. Anton Vowl says all there is to say about this, although Jennie has a good go, partly in response to Mark Reckons getting it very, very wrong…

Charlotte states what she thinks is our most important policy.

Jazzhandsseriousbusiness continues hir look at Lib Dem activism.

Eddie Campbell responds to James Robinson attacking Alan Moore.

Charlie Brooker hates both Mac Users and the Windows OS (yet strangely won’t consider any other options…)

And Lesswrong have a post on The Anthropic Trilemma

In other news – Charlotte Gore isn’t a witch, she’s a nutter.

A good post on women in free software, asking among other things what can be learned from the experiences of Dreamwidth.

I don’t know why I haven’t linked it before, but I hope you’ve all been reading RIck Veitch’s Subtleman strip…

And Bruce Schneier has a good post on risk intuition.

Some actual content tomorrow – probably comics-based – as well as my return to Twitter (I hope). Been a very busy week at work…

Before I start, I’d better explain what GNU/Linux is, since many people won’t know what it is. About 25 years ago, a computer programmer and political activist called Richard Stallman decided that he didn’t agree with copyright restrictions, End User License Agreements and other things that stopped him sharing computer programs that he liked with his friends – he’d been brought up to think of sharing as a good thing, and also came from a scientific background and valued the free sharing of information. He also liked to play around with computers and disliked being unable to improve programs due to lack of source code (the human-readable form of computer programs which is how they’re written and modified).

Rather than break the law by sharing these programs without the permission of the copyright holders, Stallman, who seems to be rigorously principled to a fault, decided to make it unnecessary for anyone else to ever have to face this choice, by creating an entire operating system (an operating system is the set of programs that allows you to run your computer, like Microsoft Windows) and all the programs you might want to run on it, and make it all free (as in freedom) – anyone who wanted could share it with anyone else, and could make any changes to the source code they wanted. Stallman used something he called ‘copyleft’ (a term that originally came from Discordianism) to ensure that the programs would always be available freely – he copyrighted the programs, then released them under a license which says that you can redistribute modified versions, but only if you distribute the source code for your changes and let anyone else do the same. Stallman founded a charity, the Free Software Foundation, which was used to promote the creation of an operating system called GNU (which stands for GNU’s Not UNIX – UNIX being a popular operating system for business and academic use – GNU was designed to be as much like UNIX as possible, so people who knew one system could use the other, and so bits of GNU could replace the equivalent bits of UNIX and be used before the complete system was created).

Over the years the GNU project has managed to create pretty much everything one could need to run on a computer, ranging from compilers (the programs that you use to turn source code into programs you run) right through to web browsers or programs for typesetting music scores. However, one part of the GNU operating system remained unfinished. This part was the kernel – the part that communicates between the software and hardware. Ten years after Stallman announced the GNU project, a Finnish student called Linus Torvalds produced one. His kernel was called ‘Linux’ , and soon many people started referring to the whole system as that, as I do in speech, but the GNU project, who after all wrote the majority of the system, prefer the term GNU/Linux.

Anyway, what we have is a whole system of free software (which some people also call Open Source Software) – everything from web browsers to office suites to graphics software to games. All these are free to download, and you’re free to share them and, if you’re a programmer, to modify them and share your changes.

But why should Liberals, specifically, use Free Software and the GNU/Linux system?

Most people who argue for GNU/Linux do so on the basis of technical superiority, and as far as that goes it is a far better system, technically, than Microsoft Windows (I don’t know enough about Mac OSX to judge it, but that *seems* to be about equal to GNU/Linux technically – I could be very wrong though) , in terms of security (you don’t get viruses on GNU/Linux), speed, reliability and so on. But most people don’t really care about that – they care about playing their music, browsing the web, IMing with friends, playing solitaire, and you can do all those things equally well using any modern operating system.

Other people argue that all proprietary software is evil. I’m hardly likely to do that – I work for a proprietary software company myself, and I use a *very* small number of proprietary programs (the proprietary version of unrar for reading cbr files, a proprietary piece of firmware needed for my laptop to function, and Spotify until Jotify gets better playlist support) at home. If someone wants to use proprietary software and is willing to accept restrictions in order to get something they want, that’s fine by me.

But what I *do* think matters is the issue of freedom – and the issue of trust, When you are running proprietary programs you are essentially trusting the vendor that the program does what they say it does and only what they say it does. You are also giving up a lot of control over your own machine.

Apple, for example, will only allow programs sold through its own store to be run on the iPhone, and have absurd restrictions on what they sell there – such as cutting all the swear words out of a dictionary, and still only allowing it to be sold to adults. Now, you *could* always jailbreak the iPhone and install what you want on it – except that Apple are currently fighting in court to have that ruled illegal. Apple are actually one of the worst companies for this kind of thing, trying to make it illegal to run software you want to run on your own machine. They’ve tried the same thing to try to stop people being able to use an iPod without their iTunes software.

More disturbing, and more widely reported, is Amazon’s deletion of copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from their Kindle ebook reader – along with any notes the users had made.

Now, in all these cases you can argue that the people who bought those items entered into an agreement, and they know the risks – and that’s true to an extent. Certainly I wouldn’t suggest that what Amazon, for example, did was illegal. But almost *every* proprietary software license contains clauses that allow this sort of thing, and many programs have the technical ability to do these things too. Whenever you run a proprietary program, you’re ceding control of your machine and your data to another individual or corporation.

Which, I repeat, is fine if you trust them. But it does raise the all-too-real possibility of digital book-burning. Imagine that you buy a book to read on the Kindle, and the government, as is its occasional wont, decides that that book is naughty and should be banned. They can take out a court order to force Amazon to delete every single copy of that book in existence, knowing they have the technical means to do it. If a book is published only as an ebook – as increasing numbers are – then removing every single copy of that work in existence becomes a real possibility, realer than it ever has been before.

Or the government could get, say, Microsoft, to agree that any time anyone uses encryption software on its operating system, a decrypted copy of the encrypted data is stored on a government database – just to fight terrorism, you understand…

These things are real threats when you cede control of your machine to anyone else. By running free software, you have absolute control of your machine and your data – even if you don’t choose to take that control (as most of us won’t) in most ways, you know you have it and therefore others don’t.

In other words, GNU/Linux is based on the principles of free speech, is developed as a mutual, co-operative international project, adding value to the commons (and it is valuable – companies like IBM, Novell and Red Hat make billions from GNU/Linux while still giving back code which others can use freely) and protects the individual (to an extent) both against an overbearing state *and* against monopolistic corporations – could you really get anything more Liberal than that?

Now, even five years ago I wouldn’t have recommended any casual users use GNU/Linux. Back then it was very difficult to install software and get it working – it could take several hours’ struggle to be able to, for example, listen to a RealAudio stream. These days it couldn’t be simpler to install software – it’s certainly *much* simpler on GNU/Linux than on Windows. Say you want to install a program to calculate your menstrual cycle. You open ‘Synaptic Package Manager’ from the menu, click ‘search’, type ‘menstruation’ and you’ll be given a list of programs to choose from. Click one of them, click ‘mark for installation’, click ‘apply’ and voila, your menstruation calendar is now on your computer. Same goes for adventure games, databases, MP3 playing software, word processors, screensavers, video software, ham radio programs, Atari emulators, statistics packages, or anything else you could want for a home computer.

It’s so easy that my (completely non-technical) mum has been using GNU/Linux exclusively for a year now with no problems, as have my six-year old nephew and eleven-year-old niece when they visit my parents (my nephew loves playing Pingus). None of them have had the slightest difficulty doing anything they want on it (well, that’s a lie – I had to give my mum a little telephone tech support to get Yahoo! Chess working for my dad a week or two after she started using it).

There isn’t one standard version of GNU/Linux – rather it comes in ‘distributions’, which are collections of software put together either by companies or by groups of volunteers. Each distribution exists for a different purpose, because anyone can change the software to fit what they want. My personal favourite distribution is Debian , but some people seem for some reason to find that a little difficult. On the other hand a Debian-based distribution called Ubuntu is generally regarded as the best for beginners (this is the one my parents use) but is still perfectly good for more experienced users (my wife uses it, and she used to use Slackware, which is generally regarded as only for the most seriously technical people out there).

There’s also an Ubuntu-based distribution called gNewSense which contains only absolutely free software (Debian and Ubuntu both let you install non-free bits if there’s no free option and they’re needed to run your hardware). That might not work on some hardware , especially laptops, but if it’ll work on your system then you can be sure you’re running an *absolutely* free system (rather than just a 99.7% free version like mine).

Download an Ubuntu CD and give it a go – you can install it on your computer and leave Windows on there as well. It’s the Liberal thing to do…

As far as I can see there has been no substantive change in policy here. Originally, it was going to be compulsory to go on the ID database when you applied for or renewed a passport, but otherwise ‘voluntary’, at least at first, but you’d definitely get an ID card when you got your passport. Now, you’ll only get the card if you ask for it, but everything else is unchanged.

The card itself has never been the primary issue for No2ID and the other civil libertarian organisations that have opposed the ID card scheme. Which is not to say it’s a *good* thing, by any stretch of the imagination – as far as I’m concerned the idea of a compulsory ID card would effectively make everyone criminal by default for the ‘crime’ of not wanting to pay a regressive tax in order to have the ‘privilege’ of proving your identity to people who don’t have any business asking for such proof in the first place.

But the problem has always been the national ID register itself. The idea of storing what amounts to someone’s entire life history – biological data, health records, financial data, records of all dealings with any government department, records of any dealings with authorised private contractors, address, marital status, income and much more – on a single, central database accessible by anyone working in government – has some slight problems.

Firstly, of course, there’s the fact that it can’t possibly work, but that’s hardly a new thing with multi-billion-pound government IT contracts. Oh, they can store the data, it just won’t be useful for anything…

Then there’s the fact that you will be obliged – for the rest of your life – to keep this data up to date, or face £1000 in fines. They’re not even having the decency to employ spies to watch over us all – we’re meant to do it ourselves!

Then there’s the matter of access. Work in a company that has a government IT contract but don’t want your boss to know about your visit to the STD clinic? Have a stalkerish ex who works at the Job Centre who you’d rather not know your new address? Well, you’d better trust to their sense of duty and professional ethics, then, hadn’t you? Because nothing else will stop them having that information…

And of course it’s going to stop benefit fraud, because nothing makes identity theft harder than having every single piece of information about everyone in the country collected onto one centralised system to which millions of people will have access…

So the very slight scaling back (for now) (and all I can see that has actually changed is that Manchester airport workers won’t be forced to have a card yet) of the obligation to have the card means nothing if the obligation to be on the database is kept. So once again this month (having skipped last month to see old horror films in Bradford – I’m not a very good activist really), I’ll be out campaigning with OpenID – Saturday 11th July 2009, 2pm-4pm, St Ann’s Square, Manchester.

But remember – the fact that they’re trying to make it *look* like we’ve won means they know they’ve lost. We’ve just got to back them down all the way…

Found via Douglas Wolk on Twitter – WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog have 11 CDs worth of rockabilly, garage rock and exotica, as chosen by Lux and Ivy of the Cramps, for download. Everything from Ersel Hickey to Jack Nitzsche to the Stooges to Jan & Arnie. I’m fairly up on this kind of music, but even I’d only heard of half the stuff there. Well worth getting hold of (but remember, kids, home taping is killing music…)

A great article on how the new Dalek War boxset was colourised – using BBC BASIC!

The Mindless Ones have moved on from pants, and are now discussing Spider-Man socks

It’s not often I have much in common with jet pilots, but for once I do – they’re refusing to take part in the next step of the stealth rollout of ID cards. Notice how yet again Manchester is the first place to suffer under a Labour regulation, yet we keep electing the bastards…

And in case I haven’t mentioned it, though I’m sure I have, we have a government that colludes in slicing men’s genitals with scalpels (and of course the US government actually *did* it, rather than just helping with the coverup). Even had this been the only thing that had been done wrong, it would still make the British government accessories to war crimes after the fact. If anyone reading this actually voted for this gang of torturers and murderers, how do you continue to live with yourselves? There are things that can be a matter of respectful disagreement between people of goodwill – you can argue for tougher or more lenient sentencing in prisons, higher or lower rates of income tax and so on and mean well. But *slashing at a bloke’s cock with a scalpel*?

Mark Waid has a good post on the difference between writing for comics and for film.

Charlie Brooker writes about the sad death of Oliver Postgate.

Mark Dominus’ book Higher Order Perl, which apparently teaches you to write Perl as if it was Lisp, is now available for free download. I’m no fan of either Perl or Lisp, but the book still looks very interesting…

And Kevin Church has some great redesigns for graphic novels/trade collections of comics, which really show up the lack of imagination of most publishers in that market…