Nick Robinson’s second question to Alex Salmond in the video clips I embedded yesterday was (in full) “…on a more general point, John Lewis’s boss says prices could go up, Standard Life’s boss says money will move out of Scotland, BP’s boss says oil will run out; why should a Scottish voter believe you, a politician, against men who are responsible for billions of pounds of profit?”

Some people, including Nick Robinson, are claiming that he answered the first question (about RBS), but not the question I’ve transcribed above. Here’s the clip again, followed by my breakdown of the answer with regards to Nick’s second question:

Alex starts addressing the second question, at 1:50, making it clear that that’s what he’s doing by saying he’s moving on “to the generality” – the same sort of language Nick used when describing it as “a more general point”. He doesn't say why we should trust him more than the businessmen, which was the literal question (would anyone believe it if he did?), but he sets out a couple of reasons why the businessmen's announcements might be seen in the same light as claims from a politician:

• He suggests they were coordinated by David Cameron's business advisor.
• He states that the "new" announcements from two of Nick Robinson's three examples (BP, Standard Life) were repeating things they'd already said months ago. (He doesn’t mention John Lewis.)

He then goes on to make a detailed comparison with RBS (not one of Nick's examples in the second question, although it’s relevant to the first) where the reporting was substantially more alarmist than the Chief Executive of RBS's portrayal to his staff, leading in to his criticism of the Treasury's (and the BBC's) role in the reporting.

In fact, he spends nearly four minutes working on reducing the relative credibility of the announcements from business and their leaking and reporting before he first tries to move on to the next question, which is pretty much (if not literally) what Nick asked him to do.

Finally, at 7:00 he mentions two witnesses from the business world (Martin Gilbert and Sir Angus Grossart) who've made statements more favourable to the case for independence, thereby introducing a positive argument as well as the preceding negative ones.

It wasn't a soundbite answer to the soundbite question, but (IMHO, obviously) it was as reasonable an answer as any politician in that situation could give.

The BBC’s has published a response to complaints.

This article started out as a comment on andrewducker’s post. Both videos were captured by Wings over Scotland.

Compare this:

With this:

...and draw your own conclusions.

As a supporter of Scottish independence, even I sometimes get frustrated that the SNP don't explicitly say what their "Plan B" is (implicitly it's always seemed fairly clear - a currency union isn't the only way of keeping the pound).

Whatever you may think of Alex Salmond, he's not daft, so there had to be a reason for him consistently failing to give the clarification that obviously many people want. I would have guessed that it was something to do with maintaining the strength of his negotiation position after a "Yes". That wasn't a million miles off, but it wasn't wholly right. Here's Alex Salmond giving the clearest explanation I've seen of why the SNP are taking the position they are:

I went to the cinema a couple of weeks ago, and on coming out noticed something odd about my ticket:

Apparently I needn’t wait another 20 years to reap the benefits of retirement, I look sufficiently wise and mature to pass as a senior citizen right now! I was tempted to go back and assert my youth at young “Cashier #1100”, but on the other hand it did save me $6…

On closer inspection of the cinema’s definition of “Senior”, I’m only nine years short, but still something of a milestone…

Well, I already knew I was an extremist, as Nick Clegg was kind enough to inform me of it a couple of years ago.

What I hadn’t realised was that I’m practically one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse. According to George Robertson – sorry, Baron Robertson of Port Ellen – Scottish independence would be “cataclysmic in geo-political terms”. Gosh, nice to know we count for so much.

There’s a lot of inflated language going round about the independence campaign and it’s daft. Really, if a measly 8.4% of the UK’s population peacefully vote to govern themselves, that’s going to cause the fall of Western civilisation is it? Particularly when what’s being proposed actually sounds a bit like a loose confederation with the rest of the UK? There’s a lot of good will there, if folk are prepared to stop caricaturing independence for a small country as a global catastrophe, and comparing the Unionist cause to that of Lincoln in the American Civil War.

George Robertson’s a coof – if you don’t believe me, watch him comprehensively lose this debate in Dundee last year, turning a 38% margin in his favour into a 13% lead against him. And remember he was involved in determining the Scottish Parliament’s electoral system that was going to help devolution “kill Nationalism stone dead”.

Let’s take his words as seriously as they deserve, at this, the dawn of the Apocalypse. If the world says it’s time to go, tell me, will you freak out? No; with fires in New York, locusts in Detroit, and zombies in Atlanta, you’ve gotta laugh at the zombie in the front yard:

And I really, really want to thank you for reading to the end. ;-)

Today marks my (first?) decade on LiveJournal. Quite a few of the people who may read this will have been here a bit longer than that, but I thought it was worth marking anyway. It’s over two decades now since I set up my first web presence – a links site for Doctor Who, also called the Temporal Nexus. (There was a gap of several years in between.) The web’s been around so long now that people have grown up with it, and kids who weren’t around when I started this blog are now learning to code!

I originally set this blog up with the intention of writing more about software development, as we were starting on a significant project at the time. As it turned out, there wasn’t as much to write about on that front as I’d hoped, so I’ve touched on a variety of other things over the years. Hopefully they’ve mostly been of some interest!

LiveJournal’s popularity has dropped over the years, but I’m still here for two main reasons. I like to read blog entries of a decent size; and my friends are here. I don’t do Twitter much (though I am there @ggreig) because how much can you really say that’s worth saying in 140 characters? And I don’t do Facebook at all because I disapprove of their utter lack of concern for personal privacy; not so much for my own sake as for the way I feel they’re exploiting people’s ignorance. I’m sure my personal boycott’ll be bringing them to their knees any day now! LiveJournal has its limitations, but it’s good enough for me.

So if you’ve read me for all ten years, or for nearly as long – as I think most of you have – thank you. And if we’ve not been friends for quite that long, thanks to you too, for making me think I might have the occasional thing to say worth hearing!

Look forward to hearing you all from time to time, and hope you still enjoy hearing from me.

Cheers,
Gavin.

Taken on the way in to work; sunrise over Discovery Point, Dundee.

For Christmas, my sister gave me a Royal Navy 50 foot Picket Boat (from HLBS) in 28mm scale, and I spent time over the New Year period painting and assembling it.

The boat is a steam pinnace. “Pinnace” has a couple of possible meanings but in this case means a smaller boat carried by a larger ship for use as patrol boats, for ship-to-shore operations and as a defence against torpedo boats – the pinnace would be fast enough to respond to a torpedo boat, and was armed with one or more gun (a Hotchkiss 3 pounder in this case) that would allow it to respond at range. The other gun, not present on my model, might be a Nordenfeldt or Maxim machine gun mounted on the roof of the rear cabin.

This type of pinnace was in use from 1880 right up until the Second World War, with 620 in service during the Great War, so excellent for a steampunk setting.

The kit mouldings are very crisp and clean, mainly in resin with white metal for the finer details and fine plastic rod for the hand rails. The main thing required for painting it was a steady hand (never really got the hang of masking tape), though patience came in handy too while applying several layers of white paint to get a decent solid finish. The only thing I’m a little dissatisfied with is the rear cabin, which is a bit dark in colour and I feel I could maybe have done better there. Good enough though, and I’ll leave it.

I had a few minor issues with the parts. The shoulder rest on the Hotchkiss 3 pounder doesn’t have an obvious place to attach it. I checked images of similar guns on the Internet and settled on a location to fix it; I then had to break it off and try again when I discovered the gun couldn’t pivot due to the shoulder rest hitting the top of the engine house. One of the stanchions for the handrails broke (recoverably). One of the cowl vents doesn’t sit comfortably in the space left for it, and some of the instructions could have been clearer.

Finally, I wondered whether the scale was quite right everywhere, as the spaces to be occupied by anyone operating the gun or steering the vessel seemed extremely cramped.  This might be just economy of space on an efficient working vessel, but in particular the space at the wheel is very restricted. Over all the issues were all relatively minor though, and didn’t distract from a very satisfactory model.

As far as colour schemes are concerned, I aimed to make it look more Victorian than 20th Century (which would have featured more light grey). I also went for black rather than blue, so it’s a perfectly normal pinnace; blue would have identified it as an Admiral’s barge. Picket boats such as this don’t seem to have had a lot in the way of individual markings – not even a name – so that helped to keep the paint job simple. If I ever feel brave enough, I may add a bit of coal dust around the coaling holes (the black circles on the deck amidships) using weathering powder, but as a working navy vessel I’m assuming it would be kept pretty spick and span most of the time.

There’s a surviving pinnace of more or less this pattern which is believed to be the last remaining naval steam boat in the UK. Steam Pinnace 199 was built in 1911 and now belongs to the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth. Steam Pinnace 199 was an Admiral's barge, so you can see the blue colour previously mentioned. There are a couple of interesting videos on YouTube:

Last week I got my certificate for completing Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology, from the University of Alberta. Like most people, the idea of dinosaurs gripped me when I was wee. I decided before getting to primary school that I wanted to be a palæontologist, and could bamboozle senior relatives with the word. (Or they were playing up to me. I couldn’t tell at the time and prefer the first version now!)

Time went by, and when I got to secondary school, I suddenly twigged that if I wanted to become a palæontologist, I'd probably have to do Biology, and that would mean cutting things up. A combination of squeamishness and conscience meant I really didn’t want to do that, so I gave up on my dream of palæontology and switched to wanting to work in electronics (also not right for me, but it took more years and a degree to reach that conclusion).

Last summer, a story on the BBC web site alerted me to Dino 101, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) starting in September, and I signed up.

Having been casually interested in dinosaurs for many years, I already knew quite a lot of material that the course covered – it is introductory, after all – but I also learned things. In the very first lesson, I learned what gastralia are, a detail of dinosaur (and crocodile) anatomy that despite all my interest had utterly passed me by.

The course is nominally a video lecture a week, over twelve weeks, with a five question quiz after the lecture.  There are also lecture notes that are worth reading as there’s some material in them that may not be covered in the lectures. You can go at your own pace, however, so some people had finished the course within a day or so of it being opened up. I took it at a lecture a week at first, but picked up pace so that I rattled through the latter part of the course and finished in early October.

The lecture titles were: Appearance and Anatomy; Eating; Moving Around; Birth, Growth and Reproduction; Attack and Defense; Death and Fossilization; What is a Species?; Evolution; Stratigraphy and Geologic Time; Paleography and Plate Tectonics; Dinosaur Origins; and Dinosaur Extinction.

The only one that I felt was not entirely successful was the lecture covering Stratigraphy and Geologic Time. It was more or less a recital of geological time periods with a small amount of detail about what characterised each one before moving on to the next. It’s difficult to think of a different way of doing this, but it didn’t make for the most thrilling or memorable of lectures. Having said that, it did hold my attention a little more than the same subject does in writing, so maybe with repeated viewing some of it will stick.

And repeated viewing is an option! Although you can watch the lectures online and get the benefit of some interactive bits, you also have the option of downloading them for offline viewing, and I did both. The lectures are presented by Betsy Kruk, a research student, rather than the nominal course-giver, Philip J. Currie. This is kind of a TV approach to lecturing, which I have mixed feelings about, ultimately but it probably was a good idea. Though Professor Currie is a recognised authority you may have seen on other programmes and a good speaker, Betsy’s better at projecting her enthusiasm on camera and, having been in quite a number of dry lectures over the years on other topics, that really does help.

The interactive bits are a bit of fun. Most are quick quiz questions (What do you think is right? A, B, C or D?) before giving the right answer, but there are also a few puzzles (reconstruct this dinosaur skeleton;lay out this phylogenetic tree of the families of dinosauria) and a fossil cabinet. The fossil cabinet is treated as though it were a highlight of the course, and makes appearances throughout, with new fossils added each time, but I’m afraid it is a bit disappointing. The fossils, which you can turn around and look at closely, are low resolution 3D models, with no texture-mapping – so they look like poor plastic mouldings. If they were high definition, with use made of colour to show their real appearance (possibly with false colour layers to highlight points of interest) then this could really be a highlight. Unfortunately, as it stands, although it holds some interest, a highlight it is not.

As far as qualifications go, honestly, I can’t take any real pride in my 100% record on the course, as there’s a chance to retake each quiz and I would have dropped a few questions without that option. I paid $69 to have my identity confirmed while taking the quizzes (by photograph and recognising my typing pattern while entering a declaration), but that was pretty much for vanity – I wanted some proof I’d done the course, in the form of my certificate, but wasn’t pursuing it as a genuine qualification.

If I’d wanted genuine course credits for it, I could have paid a bit more in the way of tuition fees ($263) and taken two proctored exams. The exams would have been a bit more challenging and traditional, as they’re overseen by an individual who can view your screen and see you through a web cam, so there’s no cheating. Although I didn’t take part in that, it was interesting to read how technology was being used to enable remote exams.

I would recommend repeats of this course for those with an interest, although it might be a bit simple for those who are already well informed on this subject. You can sign up here. The first repeat started on 6th January, and you might be able to join it.

I enjoyed my first MOOC, and would do another, though with limited free time I’ll have to be a bit careful what I sign up for.