<insert crazy ramblings here>

{ETA: Oops you can't you edit polls for speeling.}

[Poll #1458768]

Since 2006 thelondonpaper (sic) has published Em, the semi-autobiographical comic strip of a twenty something woman growing up in London by Maria Smedstad. The paper is shutting down now, and Friday will be the final issue.

I'm not a regular reader of the free evening papers (generally I take a book with me for the evening commute), but occasionally picked it, and always turn to Em first (followed by the columns, stopping before I get to the "news" and celebrities).

When I first saw Em, I must admit I wasn't hugely impressed with the cut'n'paste art, or punchlines. But after running across an early strip in the Cartoon Museum in with the Young Cartoonist of the Year entries IIRC), I decided to look again, and remember that this is more like a blog/column, than a daily humour strip. While I'm not the biggest fan of Em, I have to say that the art has got more expressive, and I was enjoying the ones I saw.

If you're quick you can catch the double page spread on pages 12 and 13 of yesteday's e-edition, which is devoted to an interview with the creator.

{ETA: Missed the obvious final ticky box: No medium is sacred, change away!}

[Poll #1454361]

Aside: I tend to give my polls male names concept (stolen from offensive_mango) with extremely tenuous connections to the subject matter. Bet you can't figure this one out.
In this case Poll about conversations, so needs someone who talks a lot, maybe a politician who filibusters. Ooh, that's good. Phil I Buster.

The Pinnacle of SF - A site that collects together the ultimate SF bibliography of Talking Squids in Outer Space!

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Instructions for Cookie dough and Ice Cream Gyoza!

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Mostly for my own amusement a comic featuring Clango saying "Science"!

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And finally I'm growing a tache for the good of mankind the hell of it charity.

Here's the rules: everything you donate before midnight on the 7th will determine what sort of 'tache I'll grow: a) Thin top lipper b) Handlebar c) Goatee d) Plain 'tache.
Any donations without comment will be assumed to be for d) (as I'm a wuss). Until then, I'll be growing a full beard!

Bit late for a What I Did At The Weekend (Went to Caption (Oxford small press comics convention) on Saturday, and down south to visit parental units on the Sunday) post, but one of the things I did was clear some of my junk out of a parental loft.

[Poll #1446736]

I found that I had 3 cardboard boxes of "school stuff" and 2 plastic crates of "University stuff". I didn't have much time to go through it, but managed to sling a few bits (such as all my sixth form era invites to University open days). While I do like the odd doodle in the margin, and in joke scrawled on the cover of a notebook, I'm really not sure I need to keep quite this volume of stuff.

Given that I haven't looked at it in years, and am unlikely to do so in the near future, I probably should just sling most of it. But it's so final. This stuff, as useless as it is, is literally irreplaceable. I managed to avoid picking up a "bargin" in IKEA the other day on the basis that I'd rather pay full price when I need it, than hang onto something that just takes up space. But this stuff is my own hand.

At a recent BSFA interview I asked Jaine Fenn if she had heard about Charles Stross applying Bechdel test to his books, as her first novel was one of the few I had read recently that did have women talking to each other about something besides a man. She said at the time that she hadn't heard of that test, but hadn't written a strong female lead by accident. She's just realised that her next two novels don't pass.

I need to update my reading list for the year. It's tempting to apply the test to all the books as I do so.

I see you've moved house Lewis, how is 125.14.255.209?

Spell casting! L-e-e-e-e-w-i-s.

<snip>

{ETA: Yep 13:02 two anon Japanese comments from that IP}

Or I am teh l33t.
Or What I did at the Weekend.

This weekend I( played a lot of games, most of them new to me, and won the more complicated ones )

What? It was raining, and there's only so many times you can climb Glastonbury Tor.

Joking aside, thanks for inviting me ool272. I had a great time.

( Aren't you supposed to start a report with the journey there? )

Googleblog posted a list of all the Google Twitter accounts, which included something I'd not run across before.

A team working towards data portability. Twitter seems to be their main public presence; they don't have a central website.

Their goals are:

• Liberate data across web services.
• Make that data portable across cooperating web services.
• Allow users to own their own data which is submitted to the Cloud.
• Do anything else to allow users to have fine-grained, easy access, and control of their data.

To that end they have been pushing for existing data in Google to get import/export functionality, and building tools to make it easier to transfer entire blogs between providers.

andrewducker's hosting another conversation on the nature of changing belief. Well trying to. I hijaked one thread to argue for Agnosticism again. I wasn't joking when I set my religion to "Evangelical Strong Agnostic" of facebook. (I am somewhat tongue in cheek now having set it to match an equivalent from one of paulcornell2's stories)

There's a couple of famous arguements for Atheism: {ETA not Agnostism}

Bertrand Russell uses the example of the celestial teapot. He argues that although it is impossible to know that the teapot does not exist, most people would not believe in it.

I often argue against strong atheism. For instance the argument that you can assert anything, even the existance a teapot orbiting the Sun too far away to see with a telescope. Or: "I am an agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden." Richard Dawkins

Both of those things, are things I'm happy to assign negligible probabilities of existence.

Gardens are seen all the time, and there is not the slightest evidence of fairies. While it may be argued that it's impossible to prove a negative (as I have done previously), I'm happy enough to say that the overwhelming lack of evidence is enough that on the balance of probability I don't beleive in fairies. cdave claps his hands.

The contents of solar space on the other hand is not so thoroughly known. However there's no reasonable way an implicitly human made teapot could placed into a solar orbit without more finance that I be prepared to believe would be spent in secret on such a daft project. {ETA} Therefore I believe that such a teapot does not exist, although I cannot prove it.

However as most gods are defined, there's not a similar argument that can be made. Their existence is beyond the realms human experience, so cannot logically be dismissed {ETA} as their existence would be beyond our experience.