I’ve been listening to the free Librivox audiobook of this for fun and I was surprised given that it was written in 1905 at how liberal its politics are – it contains often sympathetic references to most of the better known people’s revolts. I was also struck that although it was aimed at children it has in several places explanations of the Greek and Roman derivations of some of the vocabulary.

Finally as a late birthday present went to see Avatar with my other 1/2 – the first chance I had to see a movie with her in at least 4 years. I was not surprised or disappointed at the wooden acting in Avatar having read the reviews but I hadn’t realised that battle sequences would be quite as dominant a part of the film as they were – not really a very peace and love-y experience. And I thought from the reviews I would have a chance to see an alternative world beautifully realised but I found (perhaps again unsurprisingly) that the ‘alternative’ was only lightly alien-ized with faux horses, rhinoceroses and dragons rather than anything dramatically different.

It was my first experience of the ‘new’ 3D and while I wanted to like it I concur with Mark Kermode – when it was noticeable it was annoying, it seemed to encourage the director to play to it with lots of things exploding into my face and once I stopped noticing it I am convinced I had the same sense of depth as I would have had had I watched the film in 2D. The human brain does a lot of filling in by itself – that’s why it’s perfectly possible to enjoy a film on one’s iPod Touch.

Lastly, all the exploding gave my wife (who is more sensitive to noise and sitting in a chair for 2 3/4 hours) a splitting headache and thanks to living in one of the world’s most expensive cities the whole experience set us back in the neighbourhood of £50/$75 each. Next time I will just go to the opera…

Realtime UK train timetables have been around for a while but I have long wished the same were available for buses. Turns out that it has been for a while – Traveline NextBuses either gives you the next scheduled time or the next estimated time of arrival for buses near you across much of the UK. Excellent!

This article, “What is the Good of the ‘Examined Life’? Some Thoughts on the Apology and Liberal Education” is to my mind the essence of an academic article. It’s thought-provoking, on an important subject (perhaps, the author argues, the most important – the need for each of us not just to live ethically but to reflect on what it means to live ethically), it’s written clearly and concisely and it’s open access so anyone can read it. I wish there were some way to make it a required reading for what I teach…

Thanks to the ever excellent Book Forum blog for bringing it to my attention.

I thought I would check out the top 100 most popular free audiobooks downloaded via Books Should Be Free and alongside the Swiss Family Robinson and other likely suspects I noted this:

I wonder how many extra copies of Beowulf this ludicrous book cover sold?

I wouldn’t have expected the EU to have anything as sexy as a map-based visualisation tool but Eurostat‘s is not bad at all and lets me generate all kinds of infographics (like the one below) for teaching use.

Percentages of households with broadband in Europe 2009

I would like to give my students a web-based way to book appointments to see me which would then sync with my calendar. Features needed:

• They should be able to request a booking without registering and see my calendar with busy parts greyed out.
• I should be able to approve, modify or deny appointment requests and have the approval or denial notification sent to them.

I have been struggling with Timebridge for a while now which does much of this but it doesn’t let me modify students’ appointment requests – it only lets me approve them (if I want to suggest another time I have to do so by hand). It also doesn’t seem to check to see whether I am actually available when people try to book times.

With Google Calendar I can display my availability but as far as I can tell I would need to have students all register with GCal to add appointments and I would have to make each of them my ‘friend’. Same with Yahoo (which seems to have invented a new category called “special friends” who can edit calendar entries!). Calgoo seems not to be working and Doodle seems to require users to register and to require me to suggest times instead of the student.

Any ideas? Surely this is not too unusual a requirement?

I have been using tweetdeck for a while but have a few issues with it:

• I can’t do a keyword search across my twitter feeds so if I want to find a tweet from several days ago I am out of luck.
• If I clear the tweets I have read I can’t then see how to get them back (but conversely they seem to re-appear when I restart)
• There are several people who I follow but who also show up in a twitter list I follow (@nancybaym/internetresearchers). I would like their posts to be set to “read” when I read them in another column.
• I would like to be able to say “mark this and all previous tweets as read” so I don’t have to read all the way to the “top” of my tweets before I mark them all read.

Surely these are not un-feasable features? Does anyone know a decent twitter client which can deliver on some or all of these?

I was listening to the most recent This American Life about long shots. It was explained that in California, when prisoners who are committed for life eligible for parole are deemed by the parole board to be safe for release, the governor has the right to review their cases. Presently Schwarzenegger turns down 75% of these, and the previous governor turned down 99%.

What I found really shocking though was the opinion expressed by the judge who advised the governor between 2003 and 2005, Justice Peter Siggins. When it was suggested that these decisions were not made on merits but were rather based on political criteria (ie the potential embarrassment if a governor released someone who then went on to commit a crime). He said:

Part of a governor’s job is to be responsive to the constituents who elected him. The fact that the governor would think that a lot of people would be upset that this person got out of prison… it is the governor paying attention to the preference of a large constituency in California.

So essentially, yes – whether a prisoner is released depends not on whether an extensive examination of his character and conduct suggests he would be a risk to the public but whether the public (who knows nothing of him save his crime) would be happy for him to be released. How can a judge think this is right?