Holiday Snaps

Not mine, you’ll be pleased to hear. No. These are from the Rosetta holiday mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about these photos, save for the fact that they were ever even taken at all.

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You can surf through a couple of hundred pics, all the while marvelling that you’re looking at images taken on a piece of space rock moving at thousands of kilometres an hour, some half a billion kilometres from Earth.

It’s all rather humbling.

Ken Block is back

And this time, he’s in an 845hp, custom built 1965 Ford Mustang. It growls. And he’s taking it for a spin around LA.

Set to HD, turn it up loud and enjoy.

I’m no expert on cars, but I can appreciate the beauty of the machine and the skill and the sounds of this hyperbolic, crazy show.
Look past the endless sponsorships, enjoy the tyre smoke and the subtle nod to OJ Simpson. And the Jane’s Addiction track at the end.

Gymkhana Eight needs to be set in Cape Town – can you even imagine?

(h/t El Presidenté)

Heaton on Evans

Paul Heaton is the latest (first?) big name to disassociate himself with Sheffield United over the Ched Evans affair, and his statement hits home best for me right now.

It is with great regret that I announce my resignation as patron of Sheffield United Community Foundation.

I firmly believe that Ched Evans has the right to rebuild his career in football but rebuilding a career should not involve walking straight out of prison and into the shirt of the club he so badly let down. I believe he needs to move away and move on, and the club itself needs to lift its reputation out of the gutter.

He’s the fourth Blades patron to part company with the club, the others being TV personality Charlie Webster, 1960s pop star Dave Berry and school food and health adviser Lindsay Graham.
Oh, and Jessica Ennis wants her name taken off our away end. I think we’ll survive.

But Heaton is the first one to say anything meaningful about his decision.

United need to make a choice now. If they’re going to re-employ Evans, they must do so; if not, they need to end his training agreement with them and move on – quickly. Dragging their feet on this is dragging the club down – it makes the Board look weak and indecisive, and Heaton is right about the damage to the club’s reputation – it’s happening already, so something needs to be done.
But I like his reasoning on Evans not coming back to United. He did let the club down and while I still believe that he is fully within his rights to ply his trade again, maybe that’s the reason that it shouldn’t be at Bramall Lane.

BoJo on Taylor

Boris Johnson’s Telegraph column on the so-called “#shirtstorm” episode is spot on. It’s also full of those fantastic soundbites we’ve come to know and love from BoJo :

I watched that clip of Dr Taylor’s apology – at the moment of his supreme professional triumph – and I felt the red mist come down. It was like something from the show trials of Stalin, or from the sobbing testimony of the enemies of Kim Il-sung, before they were taken away and shot. It was like a scene from Mao’s cultural revolution when weeping intellectuals were forced to confess their crimes against the people.

Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.

I’m quite willing to accept that all too often in everyday life, we see examples of misogyny. I’m also quite willing to accept that the scientific workplace is male-dominated. But neither of these things are the fault of Dr Taylor. Or his shirt. He was just a guy who landed a spacecraft on a comet half a billion kilometres away. Anyone thinking that he has time for anything else – especially attempting to make wimmin angry – simply doesn’t understand. And this tweet, from a person who works in “communications”, summed it all up:

I have no idea how Dr Taylor dresses usually, but that was a very strange choice when he knew he’d be seen around the world.

Yes. That might seem a bit of a no-brainer to you as a communications strategist, but I can assure you, it was something which Dr Taylor gave absolutely no thought to whatsoever. His thoughts were 300 million miles away, they weren’t worrying about the design of his shirt. If he was in any way concerned with daily trivia like that, he wouldn’t just have landed a probe on a comet.

This is one of the greatest scientific achievements of man… er… “personkind”… and people are more bothered about the guy’s shirt.
Something is wrong here.

It seems that we have come to the point in society – fuelled by the ‘speak now, think later’ culture of social media – where people are actively looking for things to be offended by. If you’re going to do that, you’re surely going to find them: but the outrage over Dr Taylor’s shirt is a good example of taking offence for offence’s sake.
Not only does that irritate people like Boris and me, it also devalues the genuine disgust at the truly unacceptable actions or words that deserve to be called out. But stick your (privileged, cis, white, hetero, male) head above the parapet and you’re going to get it shot off.

This is the 21st century, for goodness’ sake. And if you ask yourself why so few have come to the defence of the scientist, the answer is that no one dares.

No one wants to take on the rage of the web – by which people use social media to externalise their own resentments and anxieties, often anonymously and with far more vehemence than they really intend. No one wants to dissent – and no wonder our politics sometimes feels so sterilised and homogenised.

Like I said: spot on.

Where Is My Mind?

It’s a question that I have asked myself for years, pretty much on a daily basis. Often more than once daily as well.

It was also a question that The Pixies asked in the late 80s. And one that Placebo covered on their album Covers. Here is Brian et al performing that very same song, live:

And with them, Frank Black, the writer of Where Is My Mind? and lead singer of The Pixies.

It’s rough, seemingly unrehearsed, and just brilliant.