The Farmstead

On the BBC: [ETA: or at least it was when I posted this; they seem to have edited it out of the article now]

The prime minister will say that too much of the debate about the alternative vote (AV) has so far been dominated by "scientific" evaluation of the two systems' merits.

"But for me, politics shouldn't be some mind-bending exercise. It's about what you feel in your gut - about the values you hold dear and the beliefs you instinctively have," he will say.

"And I just feel it, in my gut, that AV is wrong."

Getting past the question of how you can value or believe in writing an X instead of a 1 with any sort of dearness or instinct, that is some seriously offensive bullshit you're spinning. Fear change! Fear science! (Never mind the government's continual argument that science is the only valuable academic discipline anyway; I can see where this is going...) This is even worse than your mindless modelling of an economy on a household budget. (Most households I know don't pay themselves; you're not our daddy working down the office.)

Grumble.

(I have another post about some fic I wrote for sb_fag_ends, but the plan is to write a bit more, and it doesn't really belong in this post anyway. But I'll write that at some point.)

I still haven't managed to make myself watch the video gillo posted about yesterday, but as the Cambridge occupation enters its sixth day in town, I thought it was worth posting some links for balance. :D

PennyRed on Twitter has a great account of yesterday's protest in London, including amusing comments such as "Morning at UCL occupation. Scramble to clean up before the Guardian arriv. Are the Guardian now the strict parents of the British left?" [ETA: and this video, BTW, is what the Guardian made], "Protesters yell to hurry up: 'run,close the gap!' Two schoolgirls: 'close the pay gap while you're at it!' Amazing", "To the tune of 'coming round the mountain'- 'you can stick your big society up your arse!'" and "It's sleeting, I'm drinking tea in trafalgar square watching 3000 kids screaming to overthrow the state. Never felt more British in my life."

And, from the day before, a video of a UCL-organised flashmob having a protest outside Topshop (ah, rhetoric):



Students are not against 'Big Government' - 'Big Society', which they are against, is a daft Cameronian concept where services are increasingly decentralised into the private sector and 'volunteers' (because obviously the type of health and education services you receive should depend on where you (can afford to) live). They are against the increased levels of debt that will be pushed upon future generations of (possibly only) English students (Scottish students do not pay tuition fees) and the move towards a supply-and-demand model of funding in arts and humanities education.

This is the sort of news I like to read: Brazil's women voters campaign to be heard. (Be sure to check out the slideshow!)

Emma Thompson... I really don't think you thought through what you were saying. Saying slang send you "insane" is still slang (and, hey, more offensive than 'innit', so well done there...). Though I think the article points out quite well that slang is all about (group) identity and adapting from one setting to another can carry you forward in places, so there you go.

Related to that, I LOVE THE VIDEO ON THIS PAGE. Not that I have a clue about Derry slang, but the 'translation into English' at the end CRACKS ME UP. Oh, school; sometimes I miss it.

ETA: Oh, schoolchildren...

I think I've mentioned several times that I'm not a very good Museum Classicist, because I find pots and the like extremely dull. This sort of thing, however, I think is pretty much the coolest thing ever:

This particular cess-pit serves a three-storey apartment block in Herculaneum and it is now famous because underneath the settled volcanic deposit Andrew's team discovered loads and loads of the Roman shit remaining -- almost 800 large bags of it to be precise. And in this shit (which I can testify is well and truly composted, as I shoved my hand into one of the bags and found it the constituency of rather fine soil) was found precious traces of what had passed through the digestive tracts of the people living in the block. Not to mention all the other things that they chose to throw down their loos -- which seem to have functioned as waste disposal units/dustbins. A lot of the sieved organic remains are now being studied in Oxford, and they certainly show that the residents were consuming eggs, nuts, figs and sea-urchins.

I hadn't expected to be able to see the chutes coming down from the top storey of the apartment block, nor the smears of calcified Roman shit still clinging to the walls down which it had fallen. Nor had I expected the whole thing to be quite so well built.

Oh yes, we can say, the Romans in the Bay of Naples ate sea-urchins and built very good sewers. BEAT THAT.

I find this kind of disgusting.

He clearly wasn't running a file sharing website - why has only he been brought to trial? Reading another article on it to day it seems there is a base fine for distributing copyrighted music (it was in the jury's hands to see how much higher than that he would have to pay) - why is it so disproportionate to the revenue that this man would have cost them? Say an mp3 download is 80p, then that means nearly 17,000 people would have had to download each of his thirty songs for that amount of revenue to be lost (oh, the name and the value, I suppose, which is such a joke). Maybe that many people did download them, I don't know, but frankly, at the very least, this guy is being made the scapegoat for a collective activity between tens, hundreds, possibly thousands of people.

Copyright theft = bad, wrong, nasty. But I've argued before and I will continue to argue that if the music industry intends digs its heels in and pretends internet culture doesn't exist things are only going to get worse. Somehow they've got to innovate around the fact that music no longer exists in objects, but in data. People have always let friends listen to records/tapes/cds; trying to stop all forms of sharing music over the internet and make people only listen to the music that they themselves have personally bought (or has been conveyed to them through specific, sanctioned channels) is madness. That would kill music far faster than BitTorrent is doing.

I don't use file-sharing networks, but I've got quite a few tracks that people have sent me over the internet. You know what else I've got? Albums I never would have bought if it hadn't been for being sent those tracks and getting into them. They're probably the majority of the library on my laptop (which is about two years old), considering all the other albums I've bought after getting into the other albums which I bought because of those tracks I didn't pay for. Maybe I'm not the norm, but I don't see why I shouldn't be.

In less ranty news(!), I'm going on holiday tomorrow afternoon/evening for a week. I'm not entirely sure what LJ access will be like, so I'll see you when I see you! Will definitely respond to comments as and when I can.

ETA: One more rant before I go, considering I really shouldn't make another post about it - YOU CUT AHRC FUNDING BACK TO PITTANCE AND THEN YOU BRING IN *THIS* USELESS-BUT-SPINNABLE SCHEME?? WHAT THE HELL, GOVERNMENT??