Locatum

While I tend to regard myself as generally pro-technology and pro-science I find I also have a long and deeply held anti-GMO 'position'. Glyn Moody's recent post on the subject reminded me of this and stirred me to ponder this view. In essence you can take it as a given that I am as deeply suspicious of the corporatism so ably detailed in Glyn's (and Andrew Leonard's) post as they are. If you're not then pretty much any scientific/technical objections are going to fall a long way second. A very good friend of mine worked for a while in a unit within the EC that amongst other things used to test for the presence of GMOs in various crops both in field trials and on the dockside. In a purely statistical sense a negative presence (even in parts per billion) does not disprove the null hypothesis regarding whether or not the sample is 'contaminated' by GMOs. This is depressing enough as we know that field trials of GMOs always leak into the surrounding env...

Apologies for so much grammar in the title but those of you who have been following this since November 17th will know exactly whence the implied skepticism comes. In the intervening months you may have observed (as I have not been 'anon') various comments I have made to various posts and other blogs (I can't remember them all now so no links!) correcting factual errors and establishing a soap box of sorts from which to contrast and/or challenge in a "you can't prove that your emperor has any clothes" kind of way some of the statements, demands and assumptions of the 'georati' (?). Now of course you may argue that I, on behalf of emapsite, have an agenda of my own, what with being an OS Premium Partner (that's value adding reseller) and all. You may be right and I am not going to be sharing corporate information here so you'll just have to speculate but on the whole you won't find me hiding behind some smoke-screen of nobility and social g...

Well, technically, boy 2 (aged 9) and my better half. Rather a last minute decision (last week) saw the rapid creation of a team (of 2) - http://www.mysportrelief.com/jedstars?SID=118239 and a modest fund raising target. Delighted and grateful for the immediate response. And today was the day, at 1030am allegedly - I say allegedly....the school car park was home to what appeared to be an amateur motorcycle display team; happilty we did have the right day, just the letter and original website time had been wrong and the whole thing was scheduled for 3pm. Not content with running 3 miles later boy 2 then played football and tennis for over an hour. Back at the school and self consciousness took over during the 'warm up'. But come the off and boy 2 was running 4th of some 200 souls after the first 400m as they left tarmac for grass and mud. Each circuit a mile with many finishing after one circuit boy 2 strode on, revivified after 2 miles, as the picture shows, to finish the 3...

Had the iphone a month now and am a total convert - how can anything else be so difficult and lacking in intuition!? Still not done much in the way of Apps for myself - SnowReport, WindGuru, TideApp, GPSLite, Ship Finder, Eurosport, Palringo, Twitterific, Skype, Trainline, TubeMap, Tube Status and mashup ASBOromoter demonstrating a combonation of interests if nothing else. On that note, what is the excitement with the ASBO thingy? As with the bike mashup it begs the asking of more, serious questions than it can hope to answer. Perhaps that is the point, go and look at it yourself, examine the metadata (its not s**t by the way, it is just worthy and dull and, per a discussion of the use of digital signatures, vital to provenance, confidence, trust, re-use etc). All for that but in the meantime it certainly doesn't provide social value or as the contrarians might have it, create/perpetuate ghettoes. Anyway, back to the iphone.....yes, I have a password, no the boys don't know ...