Obama orders Guantanamo closure

| | General

This is brilliant news. Obama promised it on the campaign trail but it’s good to see it happen. This does not mean that all the people in the prison will just be turfed out the gates. Nor should it. It means that those that have charges to answer will be tried in proper courts with proper evidence. Guantanamo Bay, or what has gone on there, rather than the physical place, is a stain on the ideals that the USA used to stand for. Proper due process of the inmates will go a long way to restoring the reputation of the USA.

US President Barack Obama has ordered the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to be closed within one year.

More details at: BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Obama orders Guantanamo closure

New stuff from Macworld Expo 2009

| | Technology

This entry will be a place to find the new hardware and software that gets released this week to coincide with Macworld 2009 and CES 09. Check back over the next week or so as this page gets updated with stuff that catches my eye.

Productivity Applications

Apple iLife ’09 – Latest version of the best available consumer media suite.

Apple iWork ’09 – Update to Apple’s productivity suite. Nice additions to Keynote and Pages. Endnote and MathType integration with Pages is a nice addition. I’ll be using Endnote and Mathtype a lot for courses I’m doing. This might mean I don’t have to use Microsoft Word.

Microsoft announce that they will make it easier for Office for Macintosh 2008 to connect to and use SharePoint services.

Music Creation

Toontrack Drumtracker – Convert audio drum recordings into drum midi data.

Development Tools

Widget Press ModelBaker – Web development app to quickly build web apps, iPhone & iPod touch web apps and Android web apps.

FileMaker Pro 10 – latest iteration of the easy to use database application.

Odds and Sods

Xsilva Lightspeed – Mac based Point-of-sale system. Run your retail business on Mac!

Plastic Logic eReader – Upcoming ebook device. Loots very nice.

Happy 2009

| | General, Science

Just want to wish everyone who stumbles upon this blog a Happy 2009. If you want to be where the action is online in 2009 joint Twitter.

I think 2009 is going to be very historic for several reasons. Number 1 being the inauguration of Barack Obama. The fact that he is African American is an incidental in my opinion. The best thing about Barack Obama is that he is an intellectual. He gets that it is okay to listen to experts in various fields and that empirical evidence isn’t a taboo.

Other highlights in 2009 will be the 200 year anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150 year anniversary of the publication of his seminal work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

The world has been on a path to a a better place after the work of Darwin, and Wallace it should be said.

It’s like finding water after years in the desert

| | Science, Technology

Barack Obama talked about science and introduced his science team in his weekly address. See video below. Could we be about to witness a new mini enlightenment after the regression of the Bush years. I think so. It is incumbent on all of us who value rationality, both in the USA and also the wider world, to step up to the plate and advance rational evidenced based thinking and policy.

I wonder how much complaining we’ll hear from the war on Christmas crowd for the Happy Holiday’s closing remark!

A new dawn

| | General

Like a lot of other people I was really happy to see Barack Obama get elected the 44th President of the USA. I’ve been following Obama’s speeches and policy positions for the last 6 months or so and had come to the conclusion that he would be a breath of fresh air for the USA and the wider world. Hopefully he will be able to manoeuvre as he wants in the current economic crisis, and that he gets the full 2 terms. Heck I hope he is so successful that there is a popular uprising to set aside the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution that limits Presidents to 2 terms.

Looks like my Electoral College vote prediction was right on the mark 🙂 That prediction was built on the excellent information posted on the 538 site in the weeks running up the to the election.

Apple grabs 2nd place in Smartphone market

| | Technology

Bests both BlackBerry (and the hardware front) and Microsoft (on the software front). Microsoft is now 4th in the mobile OS vendor table. Which is nice given that Windows Mobile is an abomination to use!

Apple swiftly jumped in second place, grabbing a 17.3 percent share with the iPhone 3G. Apple even bested sales of RIM’s popular BlackBerry models, but the firm is not far behind, taking 15.2 percent of the smartphone market.

More at: Apple leapfrogs RIM for #2 slot on smartphone sales list

Apple donates $100,000 to fight Prop. 8

| | General

Apple comes out publicly to oppose the Proposition 8 vote in California on November 4th. Prop 8 seeks to overturn the Californian Supreme Court ruling on same sex partnerships.

Apple donates $100,000 to fight Prop. 8Apple said it views Proposition 8 as a civil rights issue, not a political one and as such, is donating $100,000 to defeat the measure, it announced today. Prop. 8 is aimed at defining marriage as only between a man and a woman and preventing same-sex marriages.”Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights – including the right to marry – should not be affected by their sexual orientation,” the company said on its website today.

More at: The Technology Chronicles : Apple donates $100,000 to fight Prop. 8

Larry David: Waiting for Nov. 4th

| | Uncategorized

Larry David is cracking up waiting for the USA election to happen –

I can’t take much more of this. Two weeks to go, and I’m at the end of my rope. I can’t work. I can eat, but mostly standing up. I’m anxious all the time and taking it out on my ex-wife, which, ironically, I’m finding enjoyable. This is like waiting for the results of a biopsy. Actually, it’s worse. Biopsies only take a few days, maybe a week at the most, and if the biopsy comes back positive, there’s still a potential cure. With this, there’s no cure. The result is final. Like death.

More at: Larry David: Waiting for Nov. 4th

The Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama

| | Science

Just finished reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. It is a very good book indeed. I read it in print form (on the Sony Reader) and as an Audio book. Skipping between the formats depending on what I was doing. The audio book version is read by Obama. He could have a good career as a voice actor in 8 years after his Presidency 🙂

The book itself is a very good manifesto for a fair and tolerant society. Parts of it moved me close to tears, whilst other parts made me laugh out loud. Not at the ideas but rather at the prose and the turn of phrase used. The only part of the book I disagree with is the chapter on Faith. Obama is a Christian and he outlines why he took this path after a wide ranging exposure to many religious, spiritual and secular ideas in his youth. Whist I can understand at the intellectual level his decision to be baptised as a Christian, I find myself disappointed that he did. I’m perfectly willing to admit that this is my bias and prejudice showing through. With that bias fully acknowledged, It has to be said that Obama presents a good case for why secularists should not expect people of faith to park their beliefs at the door. He also points out however that the religious cannot base their argument on recourse to God’s Will or scripture and expect to carry the argument. Arguments in a democracy have to be open and acceptable to all members of the society, whether religious or not. UPDATE: See video below in which Obama talks about this subject. This is much like the text in the book. This book is highly recommended. Either in print or audio book form.

The world will be a shinier place on 5th November 2008 if Barack Obama is the President Elect of the USA.

Eight-month delay for LHC

| | Science, Technology

Botheration. It’s going to take at least 8 months to fix the Large Hadron Collider.

Officials at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, say that the time is needed to overhaul a sector of the 27-kilometre-long machine, after an electrical failure on 19 September caused some 6 tonnes of ultra-cold liquid helium to leak into its tunnel. A preliminary report issued on 16 October says that as many as 29 of the nearly 10,000 magnets used to guide the accelerator’s proton beam will need to be replaced. Further magnets may need to be removed and inspected, and modifications must also be made to prevent future accidents. “It’s a serious incident,” says James Gillies, a spokesman for the laboratory.

From: Eight-month delay for LHC : Nature News

Conservative Humanist Association

| | Uncategorized

A new Conservative Humanist Association has been formed for atheist and humanist Conservatives. That’d include me then 🙂 Just renewed my membership of the Conservative Party by joining the Northern Ireland Conservatives. If you want to see normal UK politics operating in Northern Ireland, and if you have Conservative leanings, then join up. If you don’t have conservative leanings then join on of the other UK wide parties NI sections.

Obama quote on schools from The Audacity of Hope

| | Uncategorized

I’m reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope at the minute. The following excerpt struck me:

Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action – a change in values and a change in policy – to promote the kind of society we want. The state of our inner-city schools is a case in point. All the money in the world won’t boost student achievement if parents make no effort to instil in their children the values of hard work and delayed gratification. But when we as a society pretend that poor children will fulfil their potential in dilapidated, unsafe schools with outdated equipment and teachers who aren’t trained in the subjects they teach, we are perpetrating a lie on these children, and on ourselves. We are betraying our values.

I work in an area related the UK Building Schools for the Future programme. I think that the money being spent modernising schools is money well spent. For the reasons outlined by Barack Obama in the quoted text above.

The book is highly recommended.

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