Philobiblon

The Uncertainty Principle poses an interesting question: which was the worst century to live in? He’s talking Britain; it would be interesting to do an international listing.

TUP agrees with Channel Four that it was the 14th century, with that nasty little visit by the Black Death, but I suspect it might have been the 5th or 6th AD – when the glories of the Roman empire were still a near memory, and everything was falling apart.

(Either pretty well puts hysteria about bird flu, al-Qa’ida and similar in perspective.)

That’s within recorded history – most of the millennia of human existence before that must have been pretty equal in misery. I know they say the early farmers were worse of in terms of nutrition etc, but given the fear and uncertainty that we lived in during our hunter-gatherer existence, that couldn’t have been a ball of laughs either.

The planned new British ID cards have scraped through the Commons, although with a bit of luck the Lords will block them. Even the experts don’t think they’ll be sufficiently reliable, the Guardian reports today:

Mr Tavano also noted the shortcomings of biometric data. “If you play the guitar, if you’re a mason, or when you grow old, your fingerprints can change so they do not match biometric data already stored,” he told Guardian Unlimited. Under the scheme, face, iris and fingerprint scans will be used to identify people.

Just imagine – you get to the airport after the London-Sydney flight, and The Computer decides your iris scan means you’re not you. Maybe the failure rate is only one in 10,000, but look at the queue at Heathrow and imagine how many that means every day.

Getting even darker, an image of America as a threatened rabbit warren, ala Watership Down. (A book I confess I’ve never read, but given its seemingly essential place in the English psyche I probably should.

Finally, the ad man who is happy to dismiss more than half of the human race as ‘crap’. Yes, it is the usual, female, half.

Actually, I bet if you pinned him down, he’d say anyone who wasn’t a carbon copy of himself was “crap”, so probably in his world view there are half a dozen people aren’t. We all know the type – they only promote people who are identikit pictures of themselves, because that’s all they can manage to deal with. If you’ve got breasts, by definition you’re not like them. (No, I haven’t known any women like that, although I have dealt with women who were the opposite – only unthreatening young males need apply.)

My Lady of Quality is, I’m afraid, being rather un-PC today, telling Sir Walter Scott stories.

Australia plans to take away even more human rights – the right to life of anyone who’s known a terrorist, however, innocently. (That’s not me saying that, but the Law Society of NSW, hardly a radical group). From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Mr McIntyre told ABC Radio that police would be able to obtain a preventative detention order “without a person being reasonably suspected of committing of an offence”.
The orders may only have been granted on the basis that the person is an associate of someone suspected of possible involvement in terrorist activities, he said.
“If the [police] are armed with one of these [orders] … and if this person attempts to flee the arrest, he can be shot and fatally shot,” Mr McIntyre said.
“The police might knock on the door and [the person] might leg it out the back door without even being told why the police are there, and under these provisions they can be called on to stop and if they don’t stop, they can be shot.”

But that’s enough depressing news for the day. Instead, you might prefer an interesting read, a psychologist’s conclusions about religion, or the wonderful story of the rat that, despite being fitted with a radio-tracker, managed to give “a whole team of expert rat-catchers” the run-around for 18 months.

They used to say that cockroaches would take over the world, but I think my money might be on order rodentia.

Miss Williams Wynn has some lovely tales of revolutionary narrow escapes and poignant tragedy in today’s diary entry. I particularly liked her image of the pathetic, poor aritocratic emigrée in London:

In 1814 I saw Madame de Sirent, a little hump-backed old woman, a stray lady of the bed chamber to the Duchesse d’Angouleme, at the reception or sad mock drawing-room, which she held in South Audley Street, in a small two-roomed house which the Comte d’Artois had hired. A few days after they departed for Paris.

(As you’d expect, Miss Williams Wynn is distinctly on the side of the aristos.)

But if you’d prefer a bit of action, check out today’s full post. It is long and has lots of French in it (but still easily comprehensible). If I get time later tonight I’ll attempt to add a translation in the comments and to find out a bit more about the Sirents.

Interesting new use for a blog: direct reports from a union picket line. (Found via an Alternet story.)

Still in media, Alastair Campbell, Blair’s ex-spin doctor, is to take over the news for a week. Talk about poacher turned game-keeper. Still, two interesting women, an athlete, Dame Kelly Holmes, and the singer Ms Dynamite, are also going to get a go. Newspapers are increasingly having to focus on celebrities – interesting television is going the same way.

Finally, in a small sign of the sort of complications that will arise as this increasingly becomes “one world”, gmail is going to have to become googlemail for new addresses in the UK, because someone already claims the name.

When you think about it, it is amazing this worldwide network doesn’t have more of these sorts of clashes. I’ve just bought a domain name for what will be my professional site, nataliebennett.co.uk (yes, not very imaginative, but easy to remember) and the whole process was remarkably simple. (At the moment I’ve still got it directed to my personal site.) And I couldn’t get .com as well, which I probably would have done, because it has already been taken by a three-year-old in America.