Zombie Epidemiology

August 18, 2009 by 1 Comment

Confirmation, if any were needed, that zombies pose a grave threat to the future of humanity comes in the paper “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical modelling of an outbreak of zombie infection” published by Robert Smith? (sic) and his team at the University of Ottawa.

Using advanced mathematical modelling the authors come to a conclusion that will be no surprise to students of zombie behaviour; civilisation is likely to collapse rapidly in the face of the undead onslaught, with aggressive eradication the only strategy that might save mankind.

Readers will recall that I am somewhat paranoid about the risks of zombie attack, and this paper has only heightened my state of anxiety. It’s just as well that we have the internet, so that we zombie-phobes can prepare for the doomsday scenario.

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Paging Dr Galt

August 15, 2009 by Leave a comment

I’ve worked for the National Health Service in various parts of the country for just about all my adult life, and the whole time I’ve felt that I was doing a good thing, helping troubled people get better without worrying about whether or not they could pay me.

Now it turns out that all these years I have in fact been in the employ of an evil state-sponsored killing machine. Who knew? All those patients who tell me “Thanks Doctor, I feel much better now” are just spouting Orwellian Newspeak – what they really mean is “Curse you, you enervating quack! Ayn Rand was right! Your concern for my welfare is sapping the essence of my humanity!”

Well, now that I’ve been enlightened, I’m going to change my ways. No more ensnaring the unsuspecting poor in the corrupt web of socialised medicine. Only Objectivists who can pay on the nail will be getting my attention from now on.

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Deliver us from Facebook

August 14, 2009 by Leave a comment

Reading Archbishop Vincent Nichols’ thoughts on the evils of social media made me think that I should give it another go, since, generally speaking, anything that the Catholic Church is opposed to, I’m in favour of. (Though the Vatican is giving out mixed messages on this subject; the Pope himself is on Facebook).

Regular readers will recall our last dalliance with Twitter. I was reluctant to tarnish the Zen-like purity of that single-tweet feed (which, despite a six-month silence, has managed to garner 61 followers, perhaps disproving the theory that Twitter users need constant gratification), so I set up a new account in my name, and while I was at it signed up for Plurk and Friendfeed too.

I’m not intending to document all the humdrum details of my life, but just to publicise this blog by sending out tweets and plurks whenever I put up a new post. I’ve set the services up so that they all cross-post each other; the resulting feedback will hopefully get the message out. What I’d read about Friendfeed had led me to believe that there would be some way to automatically submit posts to places like Digg, reddit and Stumbleupon too, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. Maybe I need to read the instructions some more. There’s probably some other service that I haven’t heard about that will do that, since I can’t believe that no one would have thought of developing such a useful thing.

Anyway, all this took a few hours, which, on reflection, would probably have been better spent just writing something interesting. “Content is King” used to be the mantra, but in our Twitterfied world it seems that what you say is a becoming less important than how many “friends” you have to say it to, whether or not they are really listening. Maybe the good bishop had a point after all.

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Deadly therapy

August 7, 2009 by Leave a comment

In a tragic footnote to last month’s story about the use of electroshock therapy to treat internet addiction in China, the authorities in that country are investigating the death of fifteen-year-old Deng Senshan, who was allegedly beaten to death by staff at a clinic in southern Guangxi province shortly after arriving for treatment for cyberaddiction.

Excessive use of the internet is regarded as a serious public health problem in China, with some reports estimating that nearly 40% of net users show signs of addiction, leading to a proliferation of centres dedicated to treating the problem. The more reputable clinics use modern psychological treatments, but other establishments are military-style camps offering a regime of harsh discipline, of questionable therapeutic value. Whatever one thinks the best course of treatment is, the fact that parents can be so desperate that they are willing to send their children to a place that promises “necessary approaches including punishment to educate the teenager” gives some idea of the level of distress that the condition can generate.

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Sarah Palin – Secret Socialist?

August 4, 2009 by Leave a comment

While we’re on the subject of Sarah Palin, there’s an interesting article in the Washington Post today, which examines the thinking in the McCain camp ahead of his choice of Palin as his running mate. There’s nothing terribly surprising – McCain needed someone who would bolster the “maverick” credentials of the ticket while at the same time appealing to the Republican base, and Palin appeared to fit the bill. What’s perhaps more revealing are the reasons he didn’t pick Joe Lieberman, who, in retrospect, might have helped make the race a bit closer. Lieberman’s liberal position on social issues, particularly abortion, were too hard to sell to the GOP faithful, despite the appeal they might have held for the wider electorate.

McCain’s real problem was that he was the candidate of a party that was hopelessly out of touch with the sentiment of the nation. He was fighting two battles – one to convince the GOP rank and file to come out and campaign for him, and one to persuade the nation that he was fit to be President. Unfortunately (for him, not for us) winning the former doomed him to defeat in the latter, since, almost by definition, someone who was acceptable to Republican activists was never going to appeal to normal people. Palin was just the icing on the cake, a clear message that McCain cared more for placating the wingnuts in his party than selecting a running mate who had even a modicum of competence.

Optimistic conservatives may argue that Palin has the potential to be a 21st century version of Barry Goldwater, who, despite his crushing defeat in the 1964 Presidential election is widely seen as the architect of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party, a process that gave us Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bushes Sr & Jr.

This ignores two important points. Firstly, the GOP in Goldwater’s day was run by a relatively liberal East-coast establishment, whereas the Republicans today are so far down the neoconservative rabbit-hole that there is no room for a further move to the right. Secondly, while Goldwater certainly ticked conservative boxes with his militarism, belief in small government and hostility to civil rights, his libertarian support for abortion and gay rights, anathema to present-day Republicans, provided some counterbalance.

Anyone hoping that Sarah Palin will reinvigorate the conservative cause is likely to be severely disappointed. If her time on the national stage is to have any long-lasting effect, other than providing stand-up comedians with an almost inexhaustible source of material, it will be to prove that the Republican Party must escape from the clutches of the extreme right if it ever hopes to win back the White House. Palin may go down in history as the woman who put the final nail in the coffin of the Republican Party as we know it, and in so doing shifted the whole of US politics to the left. Who knows? Maybe that was her secret plan all along.

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Forward to the past

July 28, 2009 by Leave a comment

This time last year I was just starting to rekindle my interest in the US presidential elections, having gone off the process a bit after my favoured candidate, Hillary Clinton, failed to clinch the Democratic nomination. At that time it looked as though the race could be uncomfortably close, but that was before the Republicans unveiled their secret weapon, VP-nominee Sarah Palin, and the world breathed a sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that Obama had it in the bag.

Ms Palin has been back in the news this month, having decided that staying on to complete the job she was elected to do in Alaska would be the “quitter’s way out”, and that she would show she was no quitter by, er, quitting. Now that she no longer has the tiresome responsibility of looking after the wellbeing of her constituents, she is free to start building her campaign for 2012.

It amazes me that anyone in the US, even those on the right, could think that Palin is the best shot the GOP has at regaining the White House, especially after the drubbing they received back in November. The one thing sure to keep the coalition that swept Obama to power together is the sort of intolerant social conservatism that may play well to the ever-shrinking right-wing base, but just alienates the rest of the population.

The Democrats would be much more vulnerable to the sort of fiscally conservative/socially liberal approach that’s being peddled by David Cameron and the Conservatives here in the UK. In a depression no one cares too much about gay marriage or abortion; they’re too busy worrying about losing their jobs and their homes.

I guess the Democratic and Republican strategists will be waiting to see how the election here works out, when it finally comes. It seems sure to be fought on economic rather than social issues. I think that there will be a real divide between the main parties this time around, with Labour proposing a continuation of deficit-funded government spending, which will, theoreticaly, kick-start the growth that will eventually pay off the national debt, while the Conservatives will be offering painful public sector cuts now with the promise of better times in the future. It’s difficult to see a Labour victory though, since the mood of the country, like the US last year, is for change, unsurprising when one considers the economic mess we are in.

Obama doesn’t seem to be making much headway in tackling the financial crisis; there’s every chance that come 2012 he could lose to a Republican candidate promising small goverment and a balanced budget. With Cameron in charge over here it will be the Reagan/Thatcher years all over again.

On second thoughts, maybe a Palin candidacy wouldn’t be so bad…

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Fly me to the moon

July 20, 2009 by Leave a comment

40 years ago today Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot upon the moon. I was alive at the time, but too young to have any memories of the actual event. I do remember that when I was growing up in the ’70’s, watching TV shows like UFO and Space:1999, reading comics like 2000AD and lots of pulpy sci-fi novels (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein is one that especially sticks in my mind), and of course seeing Star Wars at the cinema, I just took it for granted that by the time I was an adult there would be widely-available space travel, permanent bases on the moon and regular trips to Mars and beyond.

Whole books have been written about my generation’s disappointment when these visions of the 21st Century failed to materialise. What we got was the internet, with virtual worlds to explore instead of alien planets. It is possible to visit a the SL version of Tranquility Base:

moon01

and numerous other lunar-themed sims, like this somewhat gloomy moonbase:

moon02

or this rather cooler one:

moon03

but I can’t help feeling a bit cheated.

The disillusionment isn’t just a generational thing though. It reflects my internal dissatisfaction with the course that my life has taken, as I age and am forced to acknowledge that there are some opportunities that will never come my way. It’s not that I’m unhappy with the decisions that I have taken over the years, just that every path that one chooses means leaving many more untrodden.

And anyway, I’m still hopeful that NASA will get their act together and make space travel available to the masses before I die. I just want to see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars…

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(Don’t) Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment

July 16, 2009 by 1 Comment

Asia is far ahead of the West in the recognition and treatment of internet addiction. While we agonise over whether the condition exists at all, the authorities in the East are already taking action; the South Korean government has made tackling cyberaddiction a national health priority, and the splendidly-named Chinese Teenager Mental Growth Base of the General Hospital of the Beijing Military Area Command of the PLA has issued guidelines on “Preventing Network Addiction at Home” (to be read in conjunction with “Basic Principles for A Harmonious Family”).

Unfortunately I have been unable to track down a translated version of the Chinese guidelines, so I don’t know what they recommend, but apparently the treatment options don’t include electroshock therapy, since the Chinese Ministry of Health has just ordered a clinic in Shandong province to stop using the method to discourage teenagers from spending too much time on the net. As a report in the Wall Street Journal notes, the efficacy of the treatment was called into question by the fact that disgruntled ex-patients had chosen to register their dissatisfaction with the clinic by setting up an online protest group.

I do believe that internet addiction exists, though I think it is more useful to conceptualise it as an impulse control disorder than an addiction as such. In my, fairly limited, experience of managing the condition CBT is the treatment of choice, along with pharmacological therapy for any co-morbid mood or anxiety disorder.

I’m not sure that everyone would agree with that though…

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Wind of Change

July 8, 2009 by Leave a comment

When Second Life Shrink was placed at 108 in ArminasX’s list of SL blogs a few months ago, I posted an entry that claimed that we were the blogging equivalent of tennis player Virginia Ruano Pascual. The implication was that we were, like Ms Pascual, relatively low-profile, but heavy hitters. The analogy was misleading in two regards however. We only made 108 on the list thanks to ArminasX’s idiosyncratic numbering scheme, which disregarded ties (so instead of 1st, 2nd equal, 2nd equal, 4th, it went 1st, 2nd equal, 2nd equal, 3rd and so on, even when there were hundreds of blogs on the same rank); a more conventional system was have put us at about 1200. Ms Pascual’s ranking of 108 referred to singles, but her grand-slam titles have all been in doubles, where she is the world number 4.

Despite this, it did look for a while as if our careers were on similar trajectories; while Virginia was winning her tenth grand-slam doubles title at Roland Garros in May, we were in the middle of a run of posts that saw our traffic hit new heights and our Technorati rating finally break into the top 1 million. (We’re currently at 751,289, which puts us in the most popular 0.6% of bloggers, if you believe the figures).

Since then though, not so good. Virginia did pretty well at Wimbledon last month, getting through to the semi-final, but we managed a mere three posts, and our hit-count, while not falling off a cliff, has been disappointing compared with previous months.

The main problem is that my star correspondent has gone off on indefinite summer vacation, so we’re a bit low on virtual-world reportage right now, since I do just about all my internet browsing from my iPhone these days, and they’ve not released a Second Life app yet.

I was beginning to think that we’d mined the Second Life seam to exhaustion anyhow. Sigmund Leominster posted a piece on moribund SL blogs last month, which made me think that everything that has been written about Second Life was some variation on one of two themes: “Look at this cool thing I found” or “Look how the anonymity of the metaverse allows people to delude themselves/behave badly/expose their unconscious”. We were definitely starting to repeat ourselves; it may well be worth taking a break from SL discourse until we think of something new to say.

I will try to fit in a visit to Zindra some time in the not-too-distant future, since we would have to turn in our SL blogging licence if we failed to form an opinion on that development, but I think that SLS will be taking a turn towards more general cultural commentary over the next few months.

And if that’s not a development on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall, then I don’t know what is…

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Nothing to do with your Vorsprung durch Technik

July 2, 2009 by Leave a comment

As I mentioned before, I’m not really in the festival-going demographic any more, so when Glastonbury rolled around this weekend I settled down in my comfy chair to watch it on the TV.

It’s getting on for a decade since I last attended the festival in person, and, fun though it was, I can’t say that I miss the authentic outdoor experience all that much. It’s not that I have any bad memories of Glasto – every time I went the weather was pretty good, and I was never ripped off or anything – but latterly it began to feel like a lot of hard work, trudging around huge fields packed with alarmingly young-looking people, all for the sake of a distant glimpse of an indifferent performance by a band I was only half-interested in to start with.

I can count the festival performances that I remember with real excitement on one hand – Nirvana at Reading, the Pixies at T in the Park and the Flaming Lips at Glastonbury. There were plenty of other festivals that were fun at the time, but stick in my mind for reasons other than the music, like the people I was with, or the drugs we were taking.

So having my friends round to get stoned in the comfort of my own house is how I get the festival vibe these days. The BBC coverage of Glasto was pretty good, and when it got dull we could always put on a record. Watching Blur play their greatest hits on Sunday night was pleasantly nostalgic, a trip back to the great summer of ’95. I was never hugely into Britpop, to be honest. I did buy all the albums – Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Suede and the rest, even Sleeper, god help me – but I was more of an American alt-rock fan at the time. (I was deeply in love with Tanya Donelly for a greater part of the ’90’s). Parklife has aged pretty well though, and we all got up to dance around when Phil Daniels came on to do the title track. Know what I mean?

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