Archive for January, 2005

Know any nice spaceships? The sort you'd invite to a wedding?

Posted on in My Life.

One of the ideas we have for the wedding (I’ll leave it to you to decide which half of ‘we’ actually came up with this idea) is to name all the tables at the reception after famous spaceships from TV and film. Here’s a partial list:

  • Enterprise (from Star Trek)
  • Defiant (Star Trek Deep Space Nine)
  • Voyager (Star Trek Voyager)
  • Serenity (Firefly)
  • Liberator (Blake’s 7)
  • Scorpio (Blake’s 7)
  • Moya (Farscape)
  • Lexx (Lexx)
  • Andromeda Ascendent (Andromeda)
  • White Star (Babylon 5)
  • Excalibur (Crusade)
  • TARDIS (Doctor Who)
  • Discovery (2001)
  • Leonov (2010)
  • Galactica (Battlestar Galactica)
  • Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)
  • Heart of Gold (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)
  • Valley Forge (Silent Running)
  • Saratoga (Space: Above and Beyond)
  • Prometheus (Stargate SG1)
  • Roger Young (Starship Troopers)
  • Nostromo (Alien)
  • Narcissus (Alien)
  • Sulaco (Aliens – yes, all the ship names in the Aliens films are Conrad references)

Some of these are great names but not really suitable for a wedding, some of these are really terrible names. We won’t know how many we’ll need until we work out the seating plan. Anyone got any other suggestions? I’m sure I’ve missed loads.

It would be fun to come up with wedding themed names along the lines of those used by ships from Iain Banks’ Culture.

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Lies, damn lies and train times

Posted on in The World.

The Post, the free local paper that gets shoved through my letter box every week, contains an article about a rail users group who want the local train services to run with tube-like frequency. They seem to have overlooked the fact that most tube lines have very few branches and junctions whilst many different rail lines join together and use the same tracks in South London. The train operators showed admirable restraint when they said “it is difficult to say whether their demands are reasonable or unreasonable until we sit down and look at the timetable.”

Elsewhere in the article there was a survey of “almost 200 commuters” which found that:

  • ninety-five per cent of them used the service four or five days a week

They’re commuters, of course they use the service four or five days a week!

  • sixty-four per cent were dissatisfied with the service
  • 98 per cent thought it was unreliable

In the spirit of Josh from The West Wing, taken literally that means that 34% think that the service is unreliable but are still satisfied with it.

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A good week for science?

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Science, The World.

Highlight of the week is the landing of the Huygens probe on Titan and the amazing pictures it sent back. This is a world a billion kilometers from Earth with a surface temperature of -180°C; but whilst the wind and rain may be composed of ammonia and methane, the patterns of erosion and drainage are remarkably similar to those found here on Earth.

And back on Earth the discovery of dino-swallowing cretaceous mammals adds a new twist to our picture of the mesozoic. No longer were mammals timid creatures scurrying in the dinosaurs’ shadows. At the risk of sounding trite, that is the truly amazing thing about science, even the science of the distant past – we are always discovering new parts of the big picture.

Which is something that’s totally lost on the proponents of Intelligent Design. This, as Richard Dawkins once wrote, is how creationism has been “excitingly rebranded”. The rebranding is necessary in the USA because the first amendment prohibits using state funds to promote religion, so teaching creationism is banned in state schools. A judge in Georgia has ruled that the addition of stickers stating that evolution is ‘just a theory’ to biology textbooks is religiously motivated and hence illegal. The judge’s ruling is somewhat rambling and no doubt there will be interminable appeals, but this is a blow to the ID movements ‘wedge strategy’ of sneaking creationism into schools via the back door. Read more at The Panda’s Thumb.

Meanwhile in the UK we have the Vardy Foundation whose academies are funded by the state and have replaced comprehensives. In these creationism is taught alongside evolution (and if evolution wasn’t on the national curriculum I bet they wouldn’t teach it) and the government seems to see nothing wrong with that. In contrast with the US the issue has hardly registered with the press or public over here.

The US has separation of state and religion, is one of the most Christian countries in the world and has a very public battle between neo-creationists and science. The UK has the Church of England, is for all practical purposes a secular state and is allowing openly creationist organisations to run state schools. I don’t know which is worse.

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