Nothing is impossible for an engineer

Oh dear. How SF dates. After 40 years, Emley Moor ceased its analogue television transmissions last night. This morning, on power up, all our televisions were showing the colour of a dead channel.

It's generally a very, very bright blue!

I don't think this was what William Gibson had in mind at all... :-)

Hearing that someone out there thinks 'V' is a feminine initial in a name, I was quite intrigued. Time to Do Some (Very Vague) Science!

Hunting about on the internet, I found this page:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Product.asp?vlnk=15282

with "Historic Baby Name Ranks":

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_population/historic-names.xls

Taking a quick look at this, some things pop out.

There really are only two traditional boy names beginning with V in the lists:

VICTOR
VINCENT

Vincent was only the 72nd most popular name in 1964, three years before I was born. It then completely disappears from these tables. Victor was quite popular in the earlier years of last century, declining to 93 in 1954 and then dropping out of the list too.

So at least we can say that since at least 1974 a boy's name beginning with 'V' has been very unpopular.

Whereas there are seven traditional girl names in the lists:

VALERIE
VANESSA
VERA
VERONICA
VICTORIA
VIOLET
VIVIENNE

Victoria has really picked up in recent years. It's not even in the lists prior to 1974, then goes:

1974: 23
1984: 12!
1994: 32

So since at least 1974 a girl name beginning with 'V' has been much more popular than a boy name.

I'm curious now. What happened in the early 70s? I can vaguely remember them. Was there some amazing TV series featuring a Victoria? Were Vincent and Victor the villains? Nothing obvious springs to mind.

Completely unrelated, but you can clearly see the massive peak and decline in my wife's name (Tracey):

1964: 11
1974: 31
1984: 80

Then it no longer appears. Curiously, I was in Tesco's cafe a couple of days ago and I'm sure I heard a woman calling a child in there Tracey! I've never yet me a child called Tracey since Evie came into my life.

Someone I am aware of doesn't always show up for work on time. His varied excuses have actually been recorded on a web page, which can be found here:

http://toybox.twisted.org.uk/~vincent/excuses.htm

It's worth a read. It's 100% true!

I believe we may now have an interesting new definition of wanker entering the zeitgeist :-)

As noted here:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/03/wanker.html

If you in possession of web pages that can contain links that may be picked up by popular search engines, you may wish to use your freedom of expression to note a similar opinion...

Logistical issues mean I've got a spare ticket for the gig in Leeds on Thursday evening (17th), if anyone wants it. The ticket has £25 on the face of it (although I think I paid something like £4_000_000 in booking fees), but make me an offer and we'll see what we can do.

Ancient affection for LJ means I'm posting it here first. And yes, I realise some of you would want *me* to pay *you* to watch the Sisters of Mercy :-P

From mister_ed. I don't think I've seen one of these for AGES on LJ, so I was curious. Interesting result... I'm not sure I want to *be* Beverley Crusher. Being found in a Jefferies tube *with* her doing something naughty would be more interesting ;-)

Your results:
You are Beverly Crusher

Beverly Crusher 60% James T. Kirk (Captain) 55% Chekov 55% Geordi LaForge 55% Will Riker 55% Jean-Luc Picard 50% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 45% Spock 44% Mr. Scott 40% Worf 40% Deanna Troi 35% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 35% Data 34% Uhura 25% Mr. Sulu 20%

A good physician and a caring parent. You are devoted to your children and to your occupation.

Click here to take the "Which Star Trek character are you?" quiz...

Ice Age was on earlier this evening. Evie loves this film (although she did cry at the end) and she's probably watched it several million times over the last few years. As films my daughter has subjected me, it's one of the more bearable.

However, there's one thing that worries me. A few times, when she's heard the 20th Century Fox fanfare at the start of other films, she's muttered something about Ice Age. The two are clearly connected in her mind! This is all wrong!

Whenever I hear the 20th Century Fox fanfare, I expect the screen to darken partway through, and the words "Lucasfilm Ltd" to appear. It then ends, and during the silence that follows the words "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." appear (in blue). Then *BANG* John Williams Star Wars theme kicks in, and "STAR WARS" appears in yellow and zooms away.

All other uses are a pale comparison.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcF67oBklIo

It struck me recently that Wikileaks now represents another Science Fiction idea I read years starting to form in real life.

John Brunner's 1975 book The Shockwave Rider contains something very similar. Allow me to copy and paste a small amount of Wikipedia:

"The worm is eventually activated, and the details of all the government's dark secrets (clandestine genetic experimentation that produces crippled children, bribes and kickbacks from corporations, concealed crimes of high public officials) now become accessible from anywhere on the network"

The book was written in 1975, but I seem to recall reading shortly after the first ever Internet worm got loose in 1988. I have a memory of reading it in the library of the Computer Science department at University, probably when I should actually have been doing some studying for something more relevant to getting a good grade in my CompSci degree :-)

OK, so wikileaks still relies on humans to leak the files to it, but it's getting there.

It's interesting that in the book this revolution does lead to social change, and the book ends optimistically. We shall see...

In 1990, at around 3.8 billion miles from Earth, the Voyager spacecraft pointed its camera back at Earth and took a picture of our homeworld. Our planet didn't even fill one pixel of that image.

On the anniversary of Carl Sagan's birth, if you've never heard him read from "Pale Blue Dot", please spend three and a half minutes of your life on this video:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_blue_dot

Further to my attempts to impress upon some clueless Scandinavians that planet Earth has more than one timezone, and that some locales use daylight savings time, they've sent me an email. I can sum it up thus:

"We have looked at our EPG data. It says that live cricket is on from 09:30 to 18:30 today. At 14:00 we looked at the television and cricket was on. Therefore our EPG data is 100% definitely, totally accurate! What's your problem?!"

*sigh*