Chris Worfolk's Blog

For the March meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Professor Barry Cooper from the University of Leeds presented a talk entitled “Alan Turing: The Building of a Brain”.

Seems like no time at all since we started the 2012 Grand Pix season, yet here we are, back at Albert Park for the start of the 2013 season. Indeed, by the time this is actually published we’ll probably be a few races in!

As a Jenson Button you would think I would be used to constant disappointment by now, but unfortunately not, as I watched him cruise home to 9th place, beaten by fellow Brit Paul Di Resta in his Force India, while Lewis Hamilton led the way for British drivers, finishing 5th.

Luckily, as an adopted Finn (I assume, Elina’s mum seems to like me), I can of course now legitimately support both nations and luckily for me, Formula One, along with rally driving and ice hockey, is one of the few sports that Finns are really good at. Kimi Raikkonen might be the only Finn in the sport at the moment, but what does that matter when he leads the world championship.

I was only four years old when Margaret Thatcher stepped down as Prime Minister. But to say that I, or any of us in my peer group where after Thatcher’s time is naive – we were born to a generation entangled with Thatcherism and grew up in a landscape that had been radically altered by her eleven years in the post.

My interest in the debate is greater provoked by the outpouring of vile and hatred that has spewed forth since Baroness Thatcher’s passing. This is of course different from the calm and rational discourse surrounding her policies and impact that should, indeed must be had.

But if you are unable to separate a discussion on ideas, from a personal attack designed only to draw offense, I am going to treat you with the same contempt that the simple minded religious bigot deserves. In fact, I’m going to argue against you, to take up arms I don’t even believe in, to provide Devil’s Advocacy against your arguments.

As Norm points out, it seems you are refused permission to have a balanced argument on Thatcher. You must hate her with every cell in your body, or prostrate your unworthy self at her feet in admiration – god help you if you were to think some of the things she did were good and some of the things she did were bad.

This black and white vision of reality, insisting she is the Devil himself in female form (by the way, we had a female head of government 34 years ago, is nobody else proud of that?) has no place intelligent conversation. A debate on the evils (or otherwise) of the 1980’s Conservative government however, is very much welcome.

…every day is pancake day!

Gijsbert has published a new video based on his latest research findings.

For better, or for worse, she will never be forgotten. Still Britain’s only female prime minister, and the most successful prime minster of the twentieth century.

Sometimes, you might find that when you try and SSH into another server, it seems to hang, but then after around 30 seconds or so, will suddenly start working again. You can diagnose where it is stopping by using verbose mode.

ssh -vv user@example-server

If you find it is to do with GSS API, you can disable this in your SSH configuration.

cd ~/.ssh/
vim config

Add the following to it.

GSSAPIAuthentication no

This should then speed the login up.

Listen to these Canadian lunatics, suggesting that men should be treated like human beings. It’s political correctness gone mad.

Tweeted by Rich.

I’ve been continuing through Philip Pullman’s triology, His Dark Materials, and recently finished the second book, The Subtle Knife.

I found it slow to get started – I was just bored at first, as the story saw the protagonists running round ordinary Oxford with no fantasy to add some spice to the story. But eventually the stumbled back into the other worlds and the story picked up, it eventually became entertaining and ultimately worth baring through the early chapters.

It’s also clear that this isn’t really a trilogy of books, it’s one book split into three parts – reading one and not the others wouldn’t make much sense, or provide any conclusion to the stories.