iPhone gives nasty shock

I was reading the iPhone review from Newsweek by the veteran journalist Steven Levy. He wrote:

It took me a couple of days to get used to hitting the right keys using a single finger. Maybe I’m a spaz, but I’m only beginning to get the hang of two-thumb typing.

and I was stopped in my tracks. In UK English spaz is an offensive insult meaning spastic, i.e. someone with cerebral palsy. In US English it is a slightly rude word for a clumsy person. Interestingly the first usage quoted by the OED is in Pauline Kael's 1965 I Lost It at the Movies:

The term that American teen-agers now use as the opposite of ‘tough’ is ‘spaz’. A spaz is a person who is courteous to teachers, plans for a career.. and believes in official values. A spaz is something like what adults still call a square.

This predates the first (written) British use, in Martin Amis's Dead Babies:

I know how long, you little spaz.

So it's clear that the American usage is pretty established. Even so I think Newsweek's subeditors should have caught this and removed it.

iPhone

I don't have a cell phone, so I am probably not the target for the new iPhone. Now that a few proper reviews of the iPhone have appeared I can see that I do want one. Well I don't want the iPhone but I do want the wonderful iPod that you could make using the same technologies. Apple can keep the phone functionality (and the $60 a month minimum fee). What I really want is the Safari browser, the high resolution display and the roaming wi-fi connection. Even better, the iPhone's version of Safari does not support Flash and so there will be less use of that in the world (yes I do like YouTube). The only feature I need to add to the iPhone is a hard drive, and how hard can that be?

In the second release I'd also like Sonic Screwdriver functionality.

Pete Townshend blogs

Pete Townshend has two blogs (as far as I know). The really good one is where he is publishing pieces of his memoirs. The other one is more of your regular "Mrs. Blogger and all those at Blogger mansions" everyday stuff.

How to build a Cathedral, part 5

This is a view from the opposite side. This will eventually be the main entrance to the cathedral. I work in the building on the left of the picture. When I took this I was standing by Lake Merritt.

A better view of the structural support for the organ pipes. This part was designed by Studio Under Manufacture of Oakland.

A view of the ceiling of the cathedral. Eventually the wooden platform will be removed and the ceiling will be an Oculus. Nearly all the 26 curved Douglas fir ribs are now in place.

Marble driven binary adder

Best Premiership vistory

As already discussed by Andy C we must consider which of Manchester United's premiership victories was the best. An interesting article in the Grauniad gives us statistics on how much each club that won the Premiership spent in the preceding Summer. As you can see below, in 95-96 United spent nothing. In fact they sold Paul Ince, Mark Hughes and Andrei Kanchelskis and still won. This year was a triumph, but that was the most impressive.

Season	Champions	Spent	Players Bought
1995-96	Manchester United	0
1992-93	Manchester United	£1.1m	Pat McGibbon, Dion Dublin
1999-2000	Manchester United	£1.5m	Quinton Fortune
2003-04	Arsenal	£2.5m	Cesc Fábregas, Phillipe Senderos, Jens Lehmann , Gaël Clichy
1993-94	Manchester United	£3.75m	Roy Keane
1994-95	Blackburn	£5.3m	Chris Sutton, Robbie Slater
1996-97	Manchester United	£7.5m	Raimond van der Gouw, Ronny Johnsen, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Karel Poborsky, Jordi Cruyff
2000-01	Manchester United	£7.8m	Fabien Barthez
1997-98	Arsenal	£14.55m	Alex Manninger, Manu Petit, Giles Grimandi, Luis Boa Morte, Alberto Mendez, Marc Overmars, Lee Canoville, Christopher Wreh
2006-07	Manchester United	£18.6m	Michael Carrick
2001-02	Arsenal	£22.25m	Francis Jeffers, Giovanni van Bronckhorst, Sol Campbell, Richard Wright
1998-99	Manchester United	£27.75m	Jaap Stam, Jesper Blomqvist, Dwight Yorke
2002-03	Manchester United	£30m	Rio Ferdinand
2005-06	Chelsea	£53.4m	Asier del Horno, Scott Sinclair, Lassana Diarra, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Michael Essien
2004-05	Chelsea	£89.05m	Petr Cech, Arjen Robben, Paulo Ferreira, Mateja Kezman, Didier Drogba, Tiago, Ricardo Carvalho

An arrest

When I came back from my run this morning there were two cop cars at the end of our street. One was from the San Francisco police and the other was the Colma police. There isn’t anything in Colma except shopping malls and graveyards, so I started concocting a theory involving San Francisco zombies going to Colma to go grave robbing.

After my shower it became apparent that the police had moved and were now outside our house. Fortunately the RIAA had not found out about the two Lulu mp3s I downloaded yesterday. Actually they were arresting someone from next door. We tried to see and hear what was going on without being too obvious. Looks like it was a friend of the teenage boy neighbour, whose car was observed at the crime scene. The cops photographed the car. The friend was put in the back of the black and white/panda car. The cops put some boxes of sneakers and some bags of clothing in their trunk and then went through it all, carefully, taking notes. Eventually they took the kid away, but I was late for work.

Lucy, RIP

Our chicken Lucy seemed unwell today and Amy took her to the vet. She turned out to be quite sick and we had her put to sleep. She was four years old, which is old for a chicken - most chickens are killed when they stop laying prolifically. She was the last of our two original chickens. Lucy is the pale chick in the picture. Natalie, the dark one, got taken at an early age by some unknown predator animal.

Anyone need a job?

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Tuesday called for applications for one of the most demanding human experiments in space history: a simulated trip to Mars in which six "astronauts" will spend 17 months in an isolation tank on Earth.

The main selection criteria are as follows:

• Aged 25-50 years
• Good health
• High motivation
• Height up to 185cm
• Background and work experience in one of the following fields: medicine, biology, life support systems engineering, computer engineering, electronic engineering, mechanical engineering
• The working languages during the studies will be English and Russian, therefore fluency in one and working knowledge of the other language is highly desired.
• Availability for the whole duration of the study
• Non-smoker, no addictions (alcohol, illicit drugs, etc.)
• Candidates must be willing to volunteer for medical and psychological investigations.
• The candidate’s nationality and residence is restricted to ESA member states participating in the ELIPS and/or Aurora core programs (Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Norway, The Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, United Kingdom or Canada).