Archive for April, 2013

I’ve just finished reading the second Discworld book, The Light Fantastic. I can’t work out whether I enjoyed it more or less than the first one.

I found it a bit slow to get doing – Rincewind and Twoflower’s adventures weren’t that interesting to me, but as the book went on, I found the tales of the wizards, and particularly the goings on of Ankh-Morpork drew me in to a to an incredibly imaginative world. I’m hoping this bodes well for the third book, which focuses on the wizards and the witches.

I also liked the increasing use of language tricks employed by Pratchett that made it an even cleverer text than the first.

They’re more difficult to do, in narrowboats.

I had only read one Terry Pratchett book since becoming an adult, which is now quite a long time ago, and I’ve never read any Discworld – so clearly that was something that needed fixing. While some people suggested the first in the series was far from the best, after careful consideration, I decided my OCD was too great not to start at the beginning, so The Colour of Magic it was.

The book starts by unloading a large amount of information at once, and I struggled to put everything together immediately, but as it went on, everything slotted into place and I found myself amerced in a wonderful world, packed with fantasy, magic and ever flowing adverbs.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I’ve already made a start on the second book in the series, The Light Fantastic.

Recently, Panorama aired a documentary looking at Sharia Courts. You can watch it online if you missed it.

It was certainly an eye opener, though the sad reality is that many of us might not be surprised. The programme contained Islamic scholars recommending to women who said they had suffered domestic abuse should go back to their partners and perhaps try improving their cooking or making more of an effort to look nice, surpassing even the most distasteful sarcastic jokes you could dream up.

Of course, the programme couldn’t point out the end conclusion – that Islam is a bad women. They extensively pushed the idea that these courts were bad for women, or at least some of them where, but never really dared to suggest that the doctrines they are interpreting might partly be at fault too.

Being a libertarian, I’m not sure exactly how we could tackle this situation even if we wanted to though. A mediation service is perfectly acceptable, and indeed encouraged by our own legal system in order to free up more court time. So given Sharia courts are not legally binding and therefore the women there voluntarily submit to them, we have no right to interfere.

In fact, it’s unclear why the women actually wanted a Sharia divorce, when they had already received a civil divorce – given you’re not actually married if you get an Islamic marriage, why would you need a divorce? Just walk away.

There are some issues that can be and do need tackling though.

Firstly and foremost, any compulsion to use the mediation system. Obviously, this needs to be stamped out. This is a difficult one though because if your entire extended family considers the courts to be the law it must be very difficult to ignore. Sure you can just walk away, but that must be like trying to leave a cult. Unfortunately, it is difficult to see how we could tackle that given it is actually the doctrine, not necessarily the system, that is the problem.

Secondly, we can stop so called Sharia marriages. If they want to have a Sharia ceremony, that is fine, we Humanists do the same thing. But marriage is an actual legal term, and if you’re not actually providing a proper legal civil marriage, then calling it a marriage is deceitful and false and ultimately leads to the kind of situations where people getting divorced have no legal protection because they weren’t actually married.

The 2013 NFL Draft starts tonight! Prior to the actual draft, a number of people produce a mock draft, showing their predictions as to what teams will draft what players, including Kiper, Scouts Inc and ESPN bloggers.

While I won’t claim to be an expert in NFL drafting, I have produced a mock of my own, showing what would happen if franchises were allowed to draft Chuck Norris. Obviously, being Chuck Norris he would be able to play every position, for all teams simultaneously, and thus this has been reflected in the mock.

If you’re trying to create an SSH tunnel, you may find that running the command just logs you into the remote server.

ssh -L 27017:somehost:27017 user@examplehost.net

To solve this, you need to use the -N flag.

ssh -L 27017:somehost:27017 -N user@examplehost.net

This will then just set up the forwarding, and not run the command.

Photos from the bedroom tax protest that took place in Leeds.

Earlier today, new figures for the UK Peace Index showed that murder and violent crime rates have fallen significantly over the last decade.

The figures, reported on BBC News, show that the murder rate has almost halved since 2003, and violent crimes have fallen by a quarter too.

Obviously this is good news. It’s easy to become demoralised about the state of society because an ever increasing global news coverage can sometimes bring out the worst. But the reality is that every year progress is made, the world gets better and people live longer and happier lives.

After an extensive hiatus, in which it was basically ended but then it turned out that none of the actors really had much to do, Red Dwarf returned with a ninth series in 2009 with Back to Earth. It was disappointing.

Thankfully, when it returned for a full six episode series in 2012, it was much improved. Instead of trying some kind of clever, existential plot, they just made six episoded of The Dwarf, as if nothing had changed. The result is that it worked! Six more classic episodes added to the series, without ruining the legacy.

The letter campaign starts here.

To Whom It May Concern:

I have long been a fan of your restaurant, which I believe to be the finest Thai restaurant in Leeds.

One of the reasons I have enjoyed your restaurant so much is that you had a dish which consisted of Thai curry sauce, in a Yorkshire pudding, on a steak. As you’re no doubt aware, this is a dish that consists of the three most awesome foods in existence, and was therefore the greatest dish ever.

However, while dining at your restaurant in February, it appeared that the item had been removed from your menu.

If indeed it has been removed, I believe this to be a grave mistake, and one that I would implore you to reconsider.

Your restaurant created what is almost certainly the greatest dish that ever has existed and ever will exist, and for it to be lost forever to the annuals of history would be a great tragedy.

Please consider reintroducing it onto your menu.

Yours faithfully,
Rev Chris Worfolk

Since sending this, I received a very nice reply from Chaophraya saying my feedback would be considered at their regular menu reviews.