robot-alert!

Giuseppe Cannella had a big surprise for his mother-in-law when he put a jet engine on the back of her wheelchair.

Mr Cannella says the chair can now do top speeds of more than 60mph and has proved the star of a model plane championship during the Bank Holiday. A model plane enthusiast himself, Mr Cannella has been putting on shows at Barkston Heath near Grantham, Lincs. "It is just the wheelchair with the engine bolted on the back and steering on the front," he said. "I have done it for fun, I just like going up and down in it," said Mr Cannella.

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Today's topic is Revenge. According to the New York Times scientists have expensively proved yet another obvious thing, this time that revenge is pleasurable. Things to note:
-The part of the brain that takes pleasure from revenge is located just behind the bridge of the nose. Perhaps then, punching someone on the nose hard enough will deprive them of the ability to take pleasure in avenging themselves.
-One of the people involved in the experiments is an economist. Presumably revenge, like everything else, is an economic activity. Nike could offer revenge opportunities as part of its line-up.
-Could the scientists have derived pleasure from this useless experiment, partly because it was a way of settling some old score in the scientific community?

The evidence is increasing that revenge in fact brings pleasure. In the latest study, players who were unfairly treated in a game involving money, trust and cooperation got a measurable kick out of punishing their partners.

The study, by researchers at the University of Zurich, was published in the Aug. 27 issue of Science. In the game, two male participants who did not know each other were each given 10 units of money. Player A could either give his money to Player B or keep it. If he gave it away, the amount would be quadrupled, so that Player B would end up with 50 units (his own units plus the 40 from Player A). Then Player B was told to decide whether to share his bounty with Player A.

In almost all trials, Player A gave away his money, trusting Player B to share. But often Player B did not share, in which case Player A was given time to decide how to react - by doing nothing or reducing Player B's payoff by anywhere from 2 to 40 units.

Using positron emission tomography (PET) scans, the researchers saw that as players came to a decision to punish greedy partners, the striatum, a part of the brain involved in processing rewards, was activated.

That part of the brain - located a short distance behind the bridge of the nose - is involved in reward processing. It is activated, for example, when a person is in love and sees a photograph of his beloved, when someone thinks he will soon be paid money, or when someone takes cocaine, said Dr. Ernst Fehr, an economist and co-author of the study.

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Also in recent press is an interview in the Independent with Shah Mohammed, a bookseller in Kabul who was profiled as a barbarian in a recent book. One of the book's shocking revelations was that Shah M's family had carried out a revenge killing and had covered it up. Shah M waxes eloquent about revenge.

"These are dangerous things," he says. "Afghan families are very large and revenge is very important to us. There are cousins who did not know these things. Now she has told the world. We fear what may happen if people find out."

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I've done a sketchbook cartoon and put it online as a PDF. I don't have a direct link right now, you'll have to get it off my Web site by going to mattmatt.com/downloads or clicking on the following link. When you get to the downloads page it will be listed in the sidebar as "Adjustments". link


Update: here is the direct link: link

Krispy Kreme makes its profits entirely from donuts and coffee. They happen to be rather nice. Apparently this led them to make a huge amount of money, get lots of investors and have a stock market flotation. Now they're in trouble and are under a SEC investigation because... people aren't eating as many donuts. They're under intense pressure to make more and more money... that is, to get people to eat more donuts. Financial people are criminally out of touch with reality, and their perverse greed distorts the most basic aspects of our world, things like donuts.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Once the darling of Wall Street, doughnut-maker Krispy Kreme reported second-quarter profits Thursday that were less than half what the company earned a year ago, widely missing analysts' expectations. Shares of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Inc. fell nearly 10 percent on the news.

In years past, meeting or surpassing Wall Street's expectations was nearly a foregone conclusion for the folks at Krispy Kreme, which went public amid much fanfare in 2000 and posted quarter after quarter of ever-increasing profits.

However, on Thursday the Winston-Salem-based company said it expects slower sales for the remainder of the year. And it declined to project its earnings for the third quarter or for 2005.

Krispy Kreme also has been hurt by the nation's ``lifestyle changes,'' in which more Americans are trying low-carb diets, Clark said.

``I think management has essentially done all they can to maintain the growth rate at high level,'' he said. ``In some extent, its a combination of a saturated market and demographics.''

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Good:
-ingenious plot
-humour including good set pieces
-characters were interesting
-references to obscure movies
-atmosphere redolent of cheap horror movies

Bad:
-plotted like a thriller, which always makes me obsessively read until I get to the end - not a pleasant experience
-literary pretensions

Let me explain what I mean by literary pretensions.

Coe is kind of a traditionalist to the degree that his books have plot, characters, suspense, etc., which are kind of looked down upon nowadays. In fact this book was quite fun to read. It's basically a satire about modern Britain along with a sort of mystery/thriller side of it that is actually entertaining, as opposed to in some postmodernist type books (including one of my favourites, Thomas Pynchon's V) where this is more of a device or a reference than something that actually makes you turn the pages.

However, I get the feeling that in order to be taken seriously nowadays, writers can't be seen to be revelling too much in this kind of stuff - they'd just be mystery or thriller writers instead of literary writers who are indulging in certain narrative strategies. So, the book uses various postmodernist techniques to make sure you're aware that ironic distance is involved. Texts within texts, working other texts (and films) into the fabric of the narrative (e.g. the first paragraph of one chapter is taken, word for word, from the first paragraph of another book), lots of author and filmmaker figures (problematising the idea of authorship and voyeurism etc) and an unhappy ending. To me, this has the effect of cheapening the basic pleasures of the book, which are very traditional: some screamingly funny and interesting characters, an absorbing family saga/murder mystery plot, critique of postwar Britain, and many others. It's like saying, "I will write this funny and interesting novel, but also tack on artistic things so that it will be literary." Great book, shame about the writing.

Another note: this book is a kind of UK version of The Corrections, though it came out nearly 10 years earlier than the American novel (in 1994). Both books are written by literary authors who, in this case, used the traditional structure of a family saga, though with ironic distance. In each book, the lives of different members of the family are intended to make points about the evolution of political and social life in the author's country from the second world war through to the present day. Both have a figure representing the traditional leftist critique of society, a filmmaker making an exposé of an arms dealer in Coe and a creative writing teacher in Corrections. Both have a failed writer whose career makes a statement about contemporary literature. Both have intricate plots where the most disparate and seemingly anecdotal elements turn out to be closely related, which is intended to be symbolic of the connections between people, in defiance of modern trends which are shown to be tearing society apart. Both have a strong vein of comedy, including long comic set-pieces, but are ultimately at pains to make it clear they are serious works of literary fiction.

Both authors come from outside their country's literary centre and work the place they come from into their novels - Coe is from the Midlands and lives in London, and Jonathan Franzen (same first name!), author of The Corrections, comes from the mid-west (St Louis, which appears under a fictional name in the book) and lives in New York City. The Midlands/mid-west appears in both books as a sort of home of "everyman" and what happens to the place is symbolic of the fate of ordinary people in the country - the destruction of the railways in the American mid-west has a similar symbolism to the closure and gutting of industry in the Midlands, and both trends affect the father of the "failed author" character, who in both books serves, as you'd expect, as a vehicle for autobiographical material.

These similarities aren't just coincidences; the projects of the two books are very similar, namely using the satirical pseudo-realistic postmodern novel to dissect modern society and how it got that way. The main difference is that Coe's book is ultimately angrier while Franzen's is almost heartwarming at the end. In Coe, the family concerned is basically a collection of two-dimensional monsters which you're supposed to dispise and see as symbolic of a type, while Franzen's family is supposed to be represent the typical American family and ultimately you're supposed to sympathise with them.

Interestingly, while Coe separates out and analyses a "ruling class" of super-rich, privileged people who are running everything and making life harder for regular Joes, Franzen never represents such a class, even though this type of character is probably more important nowadays in American society and politics than in British. In Corrections, the forces tearing society apart are represented as impersonal economic tides rather than attributable to the actions of individuals; Franzen is ultimately more interested in his fictional family than in society, and his main theme is how each generation "corrects" the faults of the previous. The heart of Coe's book really is Thatcherism, personified in the evil Winshaw family, and the more "normal" everyday characters are depicted as being at the mercy of the forces set into motion by Winshaw-types.

I found Corrections unsatisfying because it seemed ultimately kind of sentimental; also while there were hilarious parts there were also bits I skimmed over because they were so boring. I found Coe's book unsatisfying for the opposite reason - because it seemed at such pains to be "literary". Ironically, I would be more likely to read another book by Coe because they generally seem to be centred around interesting plots and characters, while Franzen's other books are said to be so literary as to be unreadable.

So, the quest for a contemporary author to admire goes on. Coe has a new book out in a week or so, I might read it to find out how he satirises the 1990s - but on the other hand I'd better wait until I have a spare couple of days, given that I was up half the night reading Carve Up.

P.S. I just discovered this really bad review of What a Carve UP from the US, which is most excellent because it confirms my theory that American reviewers (not to say readers) don't "get" really good and imaginative books. I had been getting a bit worried because other American reviews seemed to quite like the book. Basically this guy concludes that the book should have been more realistic. Extracts below are from Publishers Weekly.

...patchily entertaining...

Coe's contemporary vile bodies are not only utterly unprincipled, greedy and philistine, but their presentation is uninspired and unamusing as well, contracting these issues down to a distinctly parochial dimension...

Coe's dry, deflating Midlands sense of humor infrequently rises above the episodes of scrupulously didactic satire...

...A story closer to this mundane Britain of post-Thatcher disaffection would have been more welcome for his American debut than agitprop Waugh-mongering.

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By the way robotalert.com no longer seems to work... best to just use robotalert.blogspot.com. I changed the link on Marv's site to point to the working URL.

Hi folks we are back from hols now. Saw the Welsh coast from Aberystwyth to Caernarfon, ate lots of nice dinners, camped, had a lunch party for Marv's friends. Time to unpack and get back to work now. Probably we will put pics online at some point.

This is way more surreal than anything in the local papers here in Birmingham.

She lived in filth, so large she couldn't move from her sofa, even to use the bathroom.

Early Wednesday, still fused to the couch, Gayle Laverne Grinds died following a six-hour effort by rescue workers who struggled to lift the 480-pound woman and get her to a Martin County hospital.

Unable to separate the skin of the 39-year-old woman from her sofa, 12 Martin County Fire-Rescue workers slid both onto a trailer and hauled her behind a pickup to Martin Memorial Hospital South. She died a short time later.
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Sheriff's investigators questioned how Grinds lived in such conditions without more help from family or authorities.

"We're not treating her death as suspicious at this point, but we do have an investigation started because the circumstances surrounding her death are so unusual," Martin Sheriff's Sgt. Jenell Atlas said.

The Treasure Coast medical examiner performed an autopsy of the 4-foot-10 woman and listed her cause of death as "morbid obesity," officials said. Results of toxicology tests will take several weeks.

"I tried to take care of her the best I could," said 54-year-old Herman Thomas, who lived with Grinds in the duplex apartment in Golden Gate, south of Stuart. "I tried to get her to get up, but it wouldn't do no good."

He said the woman that he called his wife hadn't been off the couch for six years. No record of their marriage could be found.

"I wish I could have pulled her off the couch, but she wouldn't let me," he said, covering his face and sobbing.

Inside the home, the floor and walls were matted with feces, and trash was strewn across the floors, some which were bare concrete. Furniture was toppled, and pictures were knocked off walls.

Atlas said sheriff's detectives will look for potential "negligence issues" related to her care and death.

"We want to know what happened to her, how she ended up this way, and is she supposed to have been receiving any care," she said.

Rescue workers were called to the home at 8:44 p.m. Tuesday by Grinds' brother and his girlfriend, who reported the woman had trouble breathing and "emphysema problems." The crew initially tried to remove her from the couch, but the pain was too excruciating.

Workers wore protective clothing and installed large air handling hoses to ventilate the horrendous odor emitting from the home while trying to figure out how to get the woman and her couch to the hospital.

The street in front of the row of duplex apartments turned into a makeshift construction site as rescue crews used hammers and chain saws to build a large wooden stretcher with handles cut around the perimeter so firefighters could lift the woman and the couch, Martin County Fire-Rescue District Chief Jim Loffredo said.

After several failed attempts, including building one plywood plank that was too small to hold her, workers removed sliding glass patio doors at the back of the home, leaving a 6-foot opening large enough to get her out.

They slid the couch with her on it onto the larger wooden plank supported by 2-by-4 boards, which were slid onto a utility trailer.

"We couldn't get her in the ambulance," Loffredo said.

The trailer was hooked to the back of a pickup, leaving the scene sometime after 2 a.m., witnesses said. Grinds died at 3:12 a.m., still attached to the couch, officials said.

Neighbors who watched the lengthy rescue effort said they had never seen Grinds out of the home.

Jerry Thomas, who lives across the street for six years, said he has seen young girls at the home on occasion but never knew Grinds was inside.

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I don't really know what's going on here but, essentially, this is some sort of robot fighting contest. There are some very nice videos of robots kicking the shit out of each other and trying not to fall over too much.

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Texan computer geeks are making a rocket. but it crashed.

Rocket crash deals
setback to Texas team
Armadillo out of running
for X Prize, but will go on
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
Updated: 8:33 p.m. ET Aug. 10, 2004

Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Texas, has reported a crash last weekend of their prototype X Prize rocket.

The launch took place in a 100-acre test site, with high expectations of seeing another successful boosted hop. The vehicle had been operating perfectly on all tests prior to the mishap.

The unpiloted vehicle shot up to nearly 600 feet in Saturday's test, but then ran out of fuel, crashing to the ground. Telemetry from the vehicle was received from the rocket all the way to the time of impact, not too distant from its takeoff point.

“The vehicle hit the ground basically sideways, a little tail first,” reported John Carmack, leader of the group. He is co-founder and chief technical engineer of id Software, responsible for the highly successful Doom computer game, among others.

“$35,000 of rocket is now a whole lot of primo Armadillo Droppings,” Carmack reported on the Armadillo Web site. “It’s a good thing Doom 3 is selling very well,” he added.

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This was what I wrote on my Web site back in 1999 when I got my job offer in the UK.

(07.17.99) It's official: I'll be moving to London, England at the beginning of August, to work for the United Kingdom branch of ZDNet. I understand they have the Internet there too, so I'll be keeping this site going. It's an exciting move and getting settled in the UK will be great -- maybe I'll even be able to appreciate it, once the endless packing, selling off belongings, paying bills, saying farewells, and settling of affairs is all through.

That's right, it's all fish and chips and bacon sandwiches for me from here on out, God save the Queen, Hail Brittania and Bob's your uncle. Why exactly am I moving to a country that makes its judges wear little rugs on their heads? Well... why not?

In other news, Brett Warnock of Top Shelf Productions (only the best!) tells me he's going to publish a one-page story of mine called "Twilight" in a future volume of their cool flagship anthology. Check out Top Shelf, they're one of the most interesting publishers I know of.

By the way, visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area this season are encouraged to hang out in shorts and T-shirts to experience the entertaining effects of what we here call "San Francisco Summer Frostbite."

(06.09.99) I have arrived, as they say... sort of. At any rate, I'm more or less in one piece and have a flat in London, which at the moment is strewn with empty boxes from all the junk I've bought to furnish the place... if you can call a cheap radio and some framed postcards furnishings. I even have a silly photograph (see left) in the latest edition of the employee newsletter at my new job, which must mean something. Oh, and the dates are in British mode now. Earth-shattering isn't it?

I can report that it's true, Gosh! is one of the greatest comics shops in London, and perhaps the English-speaking world, and it's fittingly located right next to the British Museum. There's even a comic serial in the paper here -- The Late Gemma Bovery, by Posy Simmonds -- though it ends this week. Now if only I could find some used bookshops...

Five years ago last Thursday, on 5 August, 1999, I arrived in Heathrow. I had a fair amount of luggage with me, having packed everything I could into two big plastic trunks and a backpack.

Two weeks earlier I had received a message from the editor of a London-based technology news Web site, offering me a job as a subeditor... I still have the email and carry it around with my in my handheld computer. The high-tech boom was nearing its height and it was a royal pain finding a London-based subeditor. I had offered to pay all my own relocation costs and could relocate at two weeks' notice - that's standard in the US, while in the UK it's a month. All they had to do was sort out a work visa for me, something that took six weeks. Until the work visa came through, I couldn't allow myself to think that the job was really happening. I told no one about it, not even my mom or Anna, my future wife. I went on as usual.

Once the visa was cleared, however, I had two weeks to shift my entire life from Berkeley, in the San Francisco Bay Area, to London. I phoned Anna. I handed in my notice at work. I bought a plane ticket. I started selling off everything I could - in the end I couldn't get rid of my futon bed, and I had to rely on the invaluable assistance of my pal Chip Buchanan to flog off my car. I packed my books into about 15 cardboard boxes and took them down to the Berkeley post office, where I shipped them to my friend Merion's house in Notting Hill, using a special rate that costs a lot less but takes six months for the boxes to get where they're going, probably on a ship via the Panama Canal. I went out for a drink with my surprised colleagues. Then the day came and a van took me and my trunks to the San Francisco Airport.

At customs they put a special stamp in my passport and, miraculously, let me through. Anna and her dad, Mike, were there to meet me - Mike drove me back to West Hendred, with a stop off for a cup of terrible coffee at a roadside services off the motorway. It had been a dry summer and the hills were very brown. It was the first time I'd seen England in the summer - my university days had only spanned the academic year, and when I'd visited, I'd always avoided the peak tourism season. That night, oddly, I stayed in the house next door to Mike and Mary's - their friends were out of town and had offered me a bed there.

I didn't have a place to live or any money - all I had was a job and the support of a lot of friends, fortunately. I left the trunks in West Hendred and stayed for a few days with a friend of Anna's called Kester while I started to sort myself out at work. I found an overpriced, noisy studio flat at the top of a converted house in a run-down street in Brixton, across the street from a school. I bought Kester's old PC, a television, a futon bed (I still have it), a kettle for making tea. Anna helped me pick out a duvet cover with brown circles on it and some towels. My new boss allowed me to quietly expense some of my moving costs - this was the boom time, after all.

There was the big eclipse shortly after I arrived - an ungodly mania surrounded this event, which to me seemed unremarkable. The millennial fervour peaked with a huge New Year's Eve event featuring such nostalgic period elements as the Millennium Dome. I quickly moved from being subeditor to writing news, as I had done in the US. I was sent on press trips to Vienna, Paris, Munich, Cannes. The stock price of my company was rising, and I had lots of share options - just as well, since I also had a tremendous burden of credit card and student debt inherited from my two years as a journalism master's student. That was the idea, back in California at least - max out your credit cards in some kind of really risky move, and then it will all pay off and you'll be rich.

Well, it all seemed like a good idea at the time...

Here are my tips for writing historically considerate letters, little kakapo chicks.

Over the past few weeks, I have been listing a series of early twentieth-century letters. Gradually this has been rotting my brain. To get rid of some of the rot, I have decided to post a list of tips for people who would like their letters to be used as historical evidence in the future. I do not include myself in this category. I hope I sink without trace. Pete Ashton pointed out that Matt has very inconsiderately published two books, but as I appear in them very incidentally, I hope my tedious life will not trouble history in any way. So, here are my tips:

1 If you have children, do not name them after yourself. This makes it difficult for archivists to discover if letters are written by you or your child/parent. Otwell Binns offended me here, by having a distinctive name which should have been easy to find, then naming his child after himself. The cad.

2 Always date your letters. This makes it easy to put them in chronological order, aiding future research. If you can keep them in chronological order or encourage your executor to deposit them in chronological order, so much the better. The ex-Rector of Lincoln College deserves an honourable mention here.

3 Please try and write clearly.

4 If you do not write clearly, at the very least, please make the years on your letters legible. I spent an hour today trying to decide whether Henry Guppy wrote to James Rendel Harris in 1916 or 1918. This forced me to read all his letters.

5 Do not enclose anything in your letters. Enclosures will inevitably get separated from their letters and some luckless archivist will have to read all your correspondence looking for references to the article you sent to your great friend Bloggs.

6 If you must enclose stuff, please refer to it in the body of your letter.

7 Don't write 'Monday' on your postcards. It's aggravating.

8 If you aren't organized enough to number your pages, try not to finish a sentence at the bottom of a sheet. If you have two letters like this, written at approximately the same time, the archivist may not be able to match the right beginning to the right end.

9 Aim to maintain a consistent writing style throughout your life.

10 Signatures. This is so distressing that I can hardly bear to write about it. I spent a couple of hours last week trying to decipher the signature of the British Ambassador to Constantinople in 1906. It begins with C, I think.

11 It helps if you write different letters on different weights or colours of paper. It is not helpful to use different papers in the same letter, because it makes pages of the letter seem not to belong together. Different paper seems to affect writing styles too, which may confuse the unwary archivist further.

12 Sign your letters consistently. If you use different combinations of names/initials, the archivist may think you are several people when you are in fact one person.

13 Don't use nicknames. They confuse people. Rendel Harris has the irritating habit of addressing his best friends as 'Dear Boy' or 'Dear Man,' which may have been endearing at the time, but is very inconvenient for the cataloguing archivist.

14 If you would prefer not to be remembered, disregard everything I have said. Or to be completely sure, do the exact opposite. You will annoy potential researchers so much that they will give up trying to use your papers.

15 Do not file documents in your books.

16 When you date your letters, write the month in words. If the day and the month are both numbers, it's hard to tell whether you wrote your historically interesting letter on 4th August or 8th April. This means that the cataloguing archivist may not be able to put your letters in chronological order. So spare a thought.

Re: The new boots I've bought. They make my feet sweat so I've put them away for the moment until cooler weather arrives. As for an image, they are a bit like this one here but with a seam running around the top of the toe area.