Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

When I said the other day that I’d be offline next week, I didn’t realise that this was the week that Plok was coming to visit, so I won’t have time to write for the next couple of days. Since we’re going away on Saturday morning, and I won’t have net access for a week, don’t expect any more blog posts for the next nine days or so.

Have some links to tide you over:

The IPPR argue that Labour needs to plan for coalition with the Lib Dems

Jennie has some useful ideas about cutting red tape for businesses.

Jazz Hands, Serious Business on social mobility and public schools — I come from one or two notches down the social ladder from JHSB, and went to private, rather than public, school, but this is pretty much my experience too.

Caron Lindsay has a good roundup of the Lib Dem bloggers’ responses to the pusillanimous, illiberal, craven decision by Lib Dem FCC to allow the police to decide we no longer have the right to free assembly even at our own conference. You can take it that I agree with all the posts she links, and with her own comments.

And Power Pop Criminals links to a recording of a concert of solo Paul McCartney songs performed by powerpop greats. I’ve not listened to it yet, but given that it features people like Jeff Foskett, Probyn Gregory, Stew, Morley from Cosmo Topper, P. Hux, Baby Lemonade, Andrew Sandoval, Randell Kirsch, PF Sloan and Darian Sahanaja, I imagine it’s about as good as music gets.

I’ll be back, at the latest, on the second of June. I’ll get a lot of writing done while I’m in Cornwall, with any luck.

Sorry for the lack of recent posts — I’ve been incredibly busy the last few days (in fact for the last few weeks — I’m more than a month behind with my comics reading). I normally try to get a MindlessWho post up on a Saturday night, but I spent Friday night at the theatre and then all day yesterday in Liverpool, attending both the International Pop Overthrow (the best powerpop festival in the world) and a Beach Boys fan convention.

I’ve nearly finished the post on The Deadly Assassin that was meant to go up on Mindless Ones yesterday, so that’ll be up tomorrow, and then there’ll be Peculiar Branch and Kinks posts in the couple of days after that.

From the 26th through the 2nd I’m on holiday with no net access, though I’ll *try* to get some posts queued up for while I’m gone. The plan is that I’ll use that time to finish the Kinks book, and maybe finish the Peculiar Branch novel up too, but no matter what I’ll get a lot of writing done while I’m away.

But for now, links:

Gavin Burrows on an exhibition about the Hajj at the British Museum

Bronchia on what Blue Peter meant to her as a child

Police call for public to be vigilant as hunt for Gambaccini intensifies — I found this hilarious, especially the bit about Gambaccini’s radio appearances after Davy Jones’ death. I remember that when I did a radio appearance talking about Davy myself, the producer who asked me to do it said “we want someone who isn’t Paul Gambaccini”…

How the Citizens United decision was orchestrated by John Roberts

Romance University on turning backstory into characterisation

An introduction to Objectivist-C

And finally, though I was never a huge Bee Gees fan, I was sad to hear about Robin Gibb’s death. I love his unreleased solo album Sing Slowly Sisters, which I linked here a few weeks back, but of the Bee Gees’ released work, by far the best is the deeply strange double album Odessa, which stands up well against Odessey And Oracle, Forever Changes and other albums that straddle the borders of psychedelia and soft-pop, of mainstream cheesiness and disturbance.

You can listen to the 3CD deluxe edition of the album, legally, on Spotify here. For those who don’t have or can’t get Spotify, I’ve embedded a youtube video which contains the entire original album below. I’ve no idea if it’s on youtube with permission or not though, so it could disappear at any time.

No MindlessWho today as The Beast Must Die has a post up on Mindless Ones for today already. I’ll try to get it up on Monday (this is why I give myself some free days in the new schedule).

Incidentally, my slightly lowered price on my Kindle books seems to have boosted sales to the point where it’s more than paid for the price difference. Maybe I’ll leave them at the lower price when the week’s up, so long as it doesn’t look like they’re cannibalising print sales too much…

Gavin B starts a series of posts on why Doctor Who and Jesus are different people.

Chris Dillow on why Labour never seem actually to help the poor.

Alex Wilcock on Judge Dredd

Colin Smith on Dan Dare

This is pretty much my attitude to so-called ‘piracy’ of my books (which I’ve never seen happen, but then I don’t go looking for it)

And the Lib Dems in Europe are going to kill ACTA.

Just a few links for now — hope to have another Kinks post up today. If not it’ll be chapter 3 of the Peculiar Branch story.

Expo, a band featuring some of my friends, have released a benefit single for the Trayvon Martin justice campaign. It’s on the honour system — it’s a free download, and if you like it, then you donate what you can afford. Expo are good musicians and good people (Tilt, who did the cover design, is a regular commenter here and my songwriting partner in the National Pep, and Christian who co-wrote the song helped proofread my Beach Boys book.), and it’s a very good cause.

The Newlyn Research Group (a research group into medical cybernetics I’ve done some work with) have announced the Cargo-Cult Prize for Medical Informatics — one hundred trillion Zimbabwean dollars to anyone who can show that the criteria for the so-called ‘gold standard’ Cochrane reviews make any sense at all.

In much the same way, the Health At Every Size blog pulls apart a piece of ‘research’ into the effectiveness of a commercial weight-loss package that was published in JAMA. If you ever want to see just how bad the state of medical ‘science’ actually is, just look at the average paper in JAMA or Cochrane…

The great DVD company GoFasterStripe , who do budget-priced DVDs of good comedians whose stuff isn’t considered commercial enough for the big companies, have started offering some of their older older titles as even-more-budget-priced, DRM-free, downloads, which you can download multiple times, starting with some of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring’s stuff from the middle of last decade. Herring’s Someone Likes Yoghurt is one of the most astonishing displays of technical virtuosity as a stand-up I’ve ever seen.

The Marx Brothers Research Council on why he doesn’t like A Day At The Races. Personally, I have much the same mixed feelings about the post-Paramount Marx Brothers as I do about the post-1977 Beach Boys — it’s a horrible shame to see such talent wasted on such rubbish, but what I wouldn’t give to have that much talent to waste…

And Rudy Rucker explains how he’s going about creating ebooks to self-publish. Unlike me, he appears to be using the horrible Microsoft monstrosities most people use, so this might be more use than my posts to those who have limited computer experience.

I’m hoping to get the next Kinks post up tonight, but in the meantime here’s some links:

Bloated website code drains smartphone batteries. Obvious, of course, but nice to have some numbers on it. Look at those numbers, web designers, and think of just how much energy that javascript and flash monstrosity you’re coding is actually using. There’s a reason why I keep this site as plain as you can get with wordpress, and for the most part stick to just text.

Playing D&D With Porn Stars has a great piece jumping off from a letter from William Burroughs to Truman Capote, and using that as a springboard for a talk about the nature of art and of fandom. The article is safe for work, but the site, as you would expect from the name, isn’t.

David Brothers, who seems to improve as a writer every time I look away for a nanosecond, has been doing a great series of pieces on the moral failing behind the new Watchmen prequels DC is putting out. Unlike David, I cannot quite bring myself, yet, to stop buying DC comics as a result of this. Unlike the people who he’s arguing with (all of whom are the bad type of fan D&D With Porn Stars excoriates) I see this as a moral failing in myself, rather than something to be proud of (I make moral choices all the time to boycott various forms of entertainment. I have to compromise my principles somewhat if I want to live anything other than the most ascetic life. But it is still a compromise.) Rather amazingly, the comic writer Chris Roberson feels so strongly about this, in part because of David’s pieces, that he’s quit DC for good.

And we’ve seen recently that Racist UKIP have started to pick up a lot of protest voters. This shows why that is very worrying — a councillor who’s a member of Racist UKIP and wants people on benefits to lose the right to vote. I can understand people not liking the current government and wanting to ‘send a signal’, but that signal shouldn’t be “we want to take the franchise away from poor people”.

In (I hope) better news, the new Beach Boys single has announced cover art. No release date yet, but sometime this month. Then we’ll know if the reunion was a great, or a terrible,idea.

I’ll have some proper posts up later this week, but for now, links:

A really nice post on Cosmic Variance talking about something I’d somehow missed, even though it’s research from 13 years ago and quite widely known — David Deutsch showed that you can derive the Born rule by using the Many Worlds Interpretation and Decision Theory. I’m sure it’s old news to everyone else, but having not come across it before (the perils of being an autodidact) I was quite staggered by how beautifully neat a line of reasoning it is, doing the crucial thing and replacing concepts of probability (which have no meaning in a deterministic multiverse) with those of information. Just lovely.

Bedazzled has a link to Sing Slowly Sisters, an unreleased Robin Gibb album from the late 60s. Normally you wouldn’t expect me to be linking to bootlegs of solo albums by the third-most-talented Bee Gee, but this has been a favourite of mine for ages. It’s a strange, odd album that’s actually improved by being sourced from third- or fourth-generation cassette copies, and has a lot of the same feel as the Bee Gees’ own Odessa, or the Four Seasons’ Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, or some of Jimmy Webb’s work around that time.

The National Library Of Ireland are slowly making digital copies of Joyce’s manuscripts and drafts and putting them online.

Dave Page on the Lib Dem FCC’s repeated attempts to force accreditation on an unwilling party. and Millennium Elephant on the same subject

Tobias Buckell has a roundup of various posts from people who should know, about the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the major publishers. All are worth reading.

The Beach Boys’ new album is available for pre-order on US Amazon, with a release date of June 5.

Just a quickie today. Also, I’ve not been receiving email notifications for some of the comments that have been being posted here, recently — I only noticed Jennie’s comment on the story the other day because I was doing some blog admin stuff and it was at the top of the list. If I’ve not replied to your comment and I should have, that’s probably why.

Power Pop Criminals has a live recording of the Wondermints from 2000

Orange Crate Art on the anti-digit dialing league – an early example of the fight against bad user interfaces

Journeys With Autism on the portrayal of mothers who murder their disabled children

Heresy Corner on Demos’ claim that religious people are ‘more left wing’

And Millennium on Labour’s claims about new changes in taxes and what’s actually going on.

Finally, for the Beach Boys fans among you who are in two minds about the upcoming tour (which is alas not going to hit the UK — anyone have any advice about travelling in Rome and Milan for me?), two interesting facts: Al Jardine has said they’ve discussed singing Our Prayer as part of the show, and the official Brian Wilson Facebook page posted today (the day after rehearsals for the tour started) the lyrics to the first chorus of Busy Doin’ Nothin’. This could be interesting…

Apologies for the continued radio silence. I’ve been too tired and stressed this week from work stuff to get any writing done other than half the next Kinks piece and 800 words of the second Peculiar Branch short story. I should have the Kinks post done by tomorrow, but if nothing else there’s a four-day weekend next week so I should be able to get some stuff done then.

My writing this year has been pretty pitiful, but I tend to have a cycle of about five months good stuff/five months rubbish with my writing, and I’m overdue to get out of the ‘rubbish’ part of the cycle, so bear with me. I’ll soon be producing more stuff along the lines of Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! or An Incomprehensible Condition when my brain slips into that mode again.

Meanwhile, links:

I normally loathe April Fools’ Day, and I think the geek obsession with Lovecraft is overdone, but this still made me laugh.

After all the fuss Labour made about the Health & Social Care Act supposedly bringing in all sorts of charges (it doesn’t) and screaming that the LiberaTor coalition are destroying the NHS, Labour in Manchester are trying to bring in charges for A&E visits. Luckily, the Health & Social Care Act that supposedly destroyed the NHS (it went into force a little while ago – note the totally undestroyed NHS) makes that illegal, though that doesn’t seem to be stopping Labour from trying. But then, the Labour party were never very big on the rule of law…

Terence Eden wants tech companies to stop trying to give him an erection.

The BBC have on iPlayer a documentary on the Monkees narrated by Mark Radcliffe, until Thursday.

Jonathan Calder links to a piece from last year on why Nick Clegg should be trusted on civil liberties, and says correctly that we need to be vigilant against the home office trying to push the government back.

And Alex Wilcock on Doctor Who, The Daemons, Barry Letts and Tim Farron.

What bastard stole my hour in bed this morning? I want it back!

The Canadian entrant for Miss Universe has apparently been disqualified for being trans. Gail Simone links to a petition to get her reinstated. (I don’t do online petitions myself, but you might).

Leonard Pierce talks about racism in America today, with reference to the Trayvon Martin case, while Brad Hicks talks about the law that made it possible – one that effectively legalises murder.

What you can do about the Tory cash-for-access scandal.

Millennium Elephant on who is actually worse off under the so-called ‘granny tax’.

And John Leech on the latest roadblock thrown up by the Lords in the campaign to pardon Alan Turing (and all the other gay and bi men convicted of consensual homosexual activity).