Sunday, June 13, 2010
Colonial adventures
Another aspect of brit bashing in the US, is reminding us about our awful colonial record. Not the sort of thing that the freedom loving folk of the US went in for at all. The freedom loving folk conveniently forgetting the none too glorious colonial and land-grabbing adventures of their own. This morning I read of one that I had not known about before. It seems that at about the time the Panama Canal was being mooted, the US worked out that it would be quite a good wheeze if they detached what is now Panama from Columbia, of which it formed a part at that time. This way they would wind up in charge of the canal zone, something that Columbia, a far bigger and more serious country than Panama, might not have tolerated. So they backed the local insurgents, Panama was split off from Columbia, and the canal zone was split off from Panama as a quid-pro-quo. Well maybe. Smacks a bit of yank bashing. Has the TLS reviewer got this one right? Michael Gorra from Smith College. Maybe a yank himself - so presumably one of those bleeding heart liberals from the east coast. See http://www.smith.edu/.
Some snippets from the geek front. First, I think that the Google unified login does not work quite as one might like it to. The good bit is that the same login sequence and the same login credentials get you into both email and blogging. The bad bit is that if you are logged into both email and blogging and then log out of one of them, the other can go a bit wobbly. A legacy of the incorporation of pre-existing but exotic blogging into a pre-existing Google world?
Second, as part of the FIL heritage activity, I have been investigating turning ancient family snaps into digital images. So I take a sample of four snaps (from my own family archive) down to Boots to see what they can do. Pleasant young lady drives what is intended to be the self-service scanner for me and the next day I wind up with 4 images on a disc for £2. The pleasant young lady had observed in passing that I might need to do a bit of fiddling around with the result. I didn't pay much attention at the time. What she had not said was that the images would be whole page images with the snap nestling in the corner, with each image occupying around 20Kb on disc. So more or less useless. Even if I knew how to fiddle with the things the resolution was not going to be there.
Take the same four snaps to Jessops, just around the corner. Much the same story from a pleasant young man who confiscates the snaps for processing later. The next day I get the second disc for the rather heftier £3.50. But this disc contains 4 images, each one of just the snap itself and occupying around 1Mb on disc. So it looks as if I am getting a lot more pixels to the pound. Pictures look OK on the screen.
Then move onto embedding images - these particular ones from a digital camera - into a Word document. All fine and dandy and I learn that Word actually incorporates a few bits and pieces for playing with images. Cropping, shrinking, contrast. More than enough for me I should think. The only problem being that when I go to print the resultant 12Mb Word document, the printer gives up in disgust and went into a 12 hour sulk. Maybe my £90 HP printer can't cope with such things. Hopefully the helpful print shop down the road can.
After all this exertion, retire to the sofa with the Saturday Guardian. Where I learn that I could apply for the post of Scientific Expert Member of the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food Consumer Products and the Environment (COT). I am advised in very loud letters that this post does not constitute employment. And in quieter letters that it is not paid although reasonable expenses are repaid; that there is a full blown application and selection procedure (PhDs and other such things would be helpful); that my performance, if I get the post, will be subject to annual review; and, that COT is fully signed up to all the PC stuff on diversity and speciality. So who on earth is going to apply for such a thing? All that pack drill for no reward? I am not sure that we did not get a better result when such posts were filled by nods and winks on the establishment network.
# posted by Jim @ 3:21 AM 
