Poor Gordon

The Economist has done a particularly good cover this week. One of those times where a picture does say a good number of words!

Bye Bye Blair

One of the (few) advantages of working in Victoria is that it's relatively close to Westminster. That's why there's never much tube traffic on a Monday as the civil servants take advantage of flexi-time...

Therefore, when I read the itinerary of Blair's final day, I realised it was more than possible to wander up to Downing Street to see the final moments in person. A short walk and I was outside the center of power.

There was a definite mood that this was an 'event'. Ugly protesters tried to disturb the solemnity of the occasion. They were by no means only protesting the war, there was a wide range of causes displaying their badly made placards. Strangely enough, people still seem to blame Blair personally for the war in Iraq. Do they really think he could have stopped the war?

The event, for the general public, was made much more difficult by the police. They pushed everyone a LONG way back from the gates of Downing Street, under the pretext that they had to swing the gates back. They pushed us back about fifteen meters from the entrance of Downing St, which was much further than made sense from the opening.

It's a shame that security considerations now mean that such distance must be kept from 'important' people. Hopefully at some point we will try and have a little trust that the public won't try and kill famous people too often!

Anyway, the police stopped me from having a good view. But I managed to be among the few people cheering and applauding Blair as he finished his ten years in office. He gave a little wave from his car. I can imagine that he's got the BEST feeling in the entire world this morning. Nothing at all to worry about for a couple of days.

Well done Tony Blair. He will be missed (at least by me)

The Gillette Fusion War on Terror

Beautiful skit by Stephen Colbert. Love the idea of sponsoring the War on Terror.

Nuclear Nations

Was reading an article about how Iran is a couple of years away from creating a nuclear weapon.

There seems to be large amounts of contradictory information about Nuclear Weapons. If a 'rogue state' is involved, the sources talk about how difficult it is to make a nuclear weapon - they seem to need to build nuclear power plants first.

When they're talking about terrorism, it suddenly becomes very easy. There's this article from the BBC telling us that basically anyone can make a nuclear bomb, with a couple of important caveats.

Which one is true? How can Iran be two - three years away from a nuclear weapon if all someone needs is a bit of nuclear waste and a bit of chemistry training?

Personally I think the danger from nuclear weapons is exaggerated. If we set off many across the world, there would be a huge disaster. However, one or two bombs wouldn't cause much damage (on a global scale).

Also, why bother keeping them. It may all be a cunning trick. As the important people tell us, we need nuclear weapons so that we can credibly threaen to use them. In order to acheive this goal, all we need to do is convince people we have a nuclear weapon. Convincing people we have a nuclear weapon would be a good use of £10bn...

The next deputy PM

A very rare example of a Lib Dem being able to use numbers well.

Amusingly, Stephen Tall (random Lib Dem from Oxfordshire) has managed to twist a press release supporting Harriet Harman for deputy PM into a case for Hillary Benn.

I think everyone is convinced Hillary Benn is a nice guy, but he still seems a little obscure to me.

The other question many people must be asking is "What does the deputy PM actually do?"

It always seemed to be a job for someone who couldn't be trusted with a 'proper' cabinet position. Michael Heseltine needed something grand without too much potential to mess things up. John Prescott needed to the same treatment.

We'll see if Hillary Benn can manage to achieve anything in the position.

Gates Goes Green

Microsoft, the company geeks love to hate, is going to make itself eligible for the award of greenest company on Earth. It would be churlish to ask why they haven't done this before - energy inefficiency is mainly a product of computer manufacturers rather than Microsoft.

It's an interesting idea that it's possible to save that much energy without putting too much effort in. 100 million computers seems to be quite a low estimate for the number of computers in the world - I seem to remember seeing a stat that there were almost a billion computers in the world.

Anyway - we'll see if this actually adds something to the computer or if it just makes the computer constantly try to turn itself off when you're not looking.

Why is this man now Minister for Science?

'pioneering work on hypothermia, Old and Cold: hypothermia and social policy'

Now that sounds like good science.

Admittedly Lord Sainsbury wasn't much better, but at least he'd been in a position before government to appreciate how important Science is to modern life.

I don't believe a sociology lecturer is the right person to be in charge of Britain's research budget.

New degree reflects music's digital direction

Coventry University is setting up an 'e-music degree' - a degree in how to distribute and promote music online.

How can you do a degree in how to upload stuff to MySpace?

Where do the teachers come from - the internet has been a mainstream medium for around six years, maximum. Who can claim to know more than the people who have grown up through the system?

I doubt the contacts that Coventry University offer their prospective students are very strong - MySpace UK has about thirty staff, up from one at the beginning of the year.

Looks to me like a waste of time for whoever does it. Their best option is to ignore the course and use the student loan to fund their time making music.

The internet is a good distribution option for good music . Student's time would be best spent learning how to make good music rather than learning how to distribute the end product. I also think it will be tough for any university or teacher to show people how to make good music. If you're composing, you've either got it or you don't (in my opinion)