If you saunter over to this page you can see my iPhone music library. I haven’t been able to find a dynamic music counter that updates this site with a played list. I will admit to not looking too much or far for one though. You may be interested to see this list which [in poor contrast] shows how often I have played certain songs on my phone since I last had to fix the library.
A couple of things to notice. The old car would start music off from the first song in the library so the top two AP songs are possibly a little high in play-count but they are good songs nonetheless.
There’s only some metal in there. :-(. I don’t recall playing Disturbed that much but I am probably wrong.
While driving on my own in the car I tend to listen to podcasts rather than music. It keeps my attention more than music and informs and teaches me at the same time.
Many of the communications within this domain are based on films I have seen or television episodes. Whenever I go to the cinema I rate the film on the IMDB website. You should see this communication which will explain my scoring rationale. A good thing about the IMDB site is that you can download your data.
So, here’s an idea of what how many times I have used each score.
Now, the odd scored films are a worry and definitely against my general rules. The film that scored 9 was The Imitation Game and the shittiest film that scored a 1 was God’s Not Dead 2.
The mean score of my ratings is 6.36 and this compares to an IMDB rating mean score of 7.05. I don’t know what this tells us.
The top of the table is here:
I’m not convinced that the TV Episode and TV Series scores should be in there, but can’t be bothered to remove those rows from my spreadsheet. Now, I know you want the list of the bottom films so here they are:
A couple of religious films at the bottom, possibly not a surprise, but then maybe they could have made good religious films instead. I’m not against religious films, they are just badly made. And then there’s the Sci-Fi. It’s a shame that some Sci-Fi is terrible, but terrible exists in all genres.
Sorry people and Fooyah fans. I’m not going to make my target for January 2017. I had hoped to publish more communications this month than in any other previous month and I thought the total I had to beat was 32 [August 2011].
My current aim is to write more communications for Fooyah this month that I have in any past month. Quality may be affected.
I am aware that in some places on the internet caturday is a thing. I do not care for this. Nor do I care for cute dog picture stuff. It’s quite boring, especially when associated with a meme [a word now misused]. There is a smaller, some might say darker, part of the internet where comparing the range of an ADS-B receiver is a thing. These are called “splats” and so here is my Splaturday picture.
There are other communications cover this sort of thing here and here.
This is just a quick one really. You grow up knowing that certain bands are very influential. You hear about them and then you listen to them. For me The Doors were meant to be really good but I just don’t like their material, I mean I understand how and why they were such an influence but I just don’t like their stuff. The Beatles are another band who pretty much leave me cold!
The Rolling Stones are a little bit different. I like their music. But then, I don’t have all their albums, just this. And, this is meant to be the best of all their stuff covering seven years. So it’s not really surprising that it is full of very good music.
All of the songs on this album are very good. It should really be in every collection, much like the White album, which I don’t have.
A particular favourite here is Sympathy For The Devil. It builds brilliantly and is crafted so very well [unlike the Guns N Roses version which is shit in comparison]. Whenever I hear this song it reminds me of a couple of overnight parties we had next to the river Stort in Pishiobury Park in Hertfordshire. We pretty much stayed up all night drinking, playing cricket and generally having a laugh and I remember putting this song on the music player just as the sun was rising and a mist was settling over the river. It’s a very atmospheric song and this was the perfect use for it.
Since getting rid of the Beast and buying a new car I have missed using a gear stick and doing things with my feet and left hand. I now have a hybrid car which has a stick I move into Drive position and then into Park position. That’s it. My left foot operates the manual parking brake. I really like the car. It’s comfy and drives really smooth. But I need my fix of gear stick work.
Fortunately I have a decent steering wheel for the PlayStation and I can use the gears on that. It’s not the same but it keeps the coordination going a little bit I guess.
There are a few things to note. I have the gear stick set up on the right of the steering wheel to mimic racing cars.
G29 Driving Force Wheel
I will say that without really thinking about it I was heel-and-toeing the game and doing it quite well while using the clutch and steering. I’ve been playing Drive Club and while the game play and feedback about handling isn’t as good as Gran Turismo it will have to do until the PS4 version of GT comes out, which given that they said 2016 is quite likely to be 2025 knowing Polyphony.
It’s possible that not coordinating feet and hands in a real car anymore means I am going to get better at it on this gaming device. I will still get to drive manual vehicles, most likely minibuses at work for taking people places. I feel slightly sorry for them as I remember how to use a clutch!
I had a nice day in London on Thursday past. I was attending a course which should give me decent information to help people at work. It was interesting and also quite difficult at the same time. It was good to be challenged and made to do new things. I had to walk down Marylebone High Street to get to the venue and it looked quite a nice place with small independent shops that were selling stuff way more expensive than I could afford.
I had a spare ninety minutes in the day before meeting Smith and so I went for a walk, mostly to help work off the flap jacks I had eaten. London is nice and calm, as long as you stay away from the main tourist routes. Don’t walk down Oxford Street use Wigmore Street instead.
This gives you an idea of my activity through the day. The red bars are when I was doing maths. The other bits show me walking around. I walked 20km that day compared to an average 12.4km.
This chart shows total steps per month over the last year. Quite clearly we can see that when the weather is warmer and daylight lasts longer I walk more. That’s not really a surprise.
I bought this on vinyl originally. The cover of the Devil chaining a priest and drowning him was probably quite shocking for the time. I probably bought it because of the cover and it was in the heavy metal section of the record shop. Back in those days we couldn’t pre-listen or try a song, only the posh shops did that. I bought records on the cover and recommendations of friends.
Ronnie James Dio’s voice is strange, I wasn’t aware of his history with Black Sabbath and I still haven’t listened to any of his stuff with them, but I can see how he could follow Ozzy. I’ve just looked up that the guitarist was Vivian Campbell which explains a lot. I first heard of him when he worked for Whitesnake and the 1987 album.
Holy Diver has lyrics, but I don’t really pay attention to the lyrics. For me music is the riff, rhythm and tune of the vocals. This is an excellent 80s rock album with a perfect combination of sound and feel. It’s great. I can imagine a crowd of 80,000 all jumping in time to the heavy crunching riffs.
I can remember once being on Imperial College Radio and commenting that I thought Rainbow In The Dark sounded a lot like Living On Video. I had phone calls objecting but I maintain I was correct, or at least correct about the keyboard riff.
Rainbow In The Dark
Living On Video
Do you know what? I was right! Yes, for some reason I have both. I think I bought Living On Video as a single before I developed my love for screaming loud guitars.
I first thought about doing this as a joke. We will see. It distresses me so much that Trump will be President of USA. I’m not sure I’ve talked a great deal about it here. Perhaps I will over time, however, I am trying to avoid news.
It doesn’t seem fair to leave this to three words but seriously, that’s all that is necessary. This album contains my favourite AC/DC song – If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It), the heavy metal clashing of the opening riff makes my spine shiver. That and Night Prowler, the creepiest song ever, and this is just . . .
I’ve been having a bit of an Anime resurgence. I’ve started watching some on Netflix and it made me think about my “collection”. Now, I don’t collect films any more. I went through
Anime
a phase of wanting DVDs, just wanting to own them. I have quite a few I’ve never watched.
Apart from Dark City and Serenity on the far left the others are all Anime. I really like the bold colours and stories. I like reading cartoons too. There’s something about the simplicity of the drawings, the lack of chaos in the colours. I just like it.
Looking at that list I know I own Urotsukidōji parts one and two but they don’t seem to be in the family cabinet. Well, that makes perfect sense, they are borderline porn.
I’m trying to monitor my car’s efficiency. It’s not the easiest to compare to the Beast because I didn’t really keep records of fuel consumption for that car. From memory I could get about 50mpg on a motorway and about 35mpg through the week when I’d be driving in and around town a lot.
This display shows that over 72 miles of driving which included motorway, dual carriage way, town and country I got around 56mpg.
I will do a big run one day and see what I get.
The main thing about this car is that it makes you very aware of how efficiently you are driving and so your driving behaviour changes.
I’m not sure if I’ve gone into my relationship with AC/DC before. My attention to them was first awakened by the song “That’s The Way I Wanna Rock n Roll” off the Blow Up Your Video album. When I found out there was a back catalogue of about 12 albums I was so excited. All that music to be consumed.
This album is their first major release. I believe that the track listing is different in Australia along with the cover. I have owned this on cassette tape, CD and now digitally. I didn’t buy much AC/DC on vinyl because I couldn’t carry around a record with me to listen as I moved.
AC/DC are masters of riff driven rock with a dirty guitar sound, perfectly crafted rude lyrics and brilliant accompaniment to balance out the sound.
It’s A Long Way To The Top If You Wanna (rock and roll) – fucking bagpipes.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Singer – includes the lyric “yes I are”, which I maintain is lyrical genius.
The Jack – better live as the lyrics are truer.
Live Wire – AC/DC Live video opens with this song. It’s a great sing along tune.
T.N.T. – riff-tastic.
Can I Sit Next To You Girl – pace change in the rhythm guitars is great.
Little Lover – “Killed me when I saw, The wet patch on your seat, Was it Coca Cola?”
She’s Got Balls – Opening riff just floors me. Lovely bass work. Beautiful.
High Voltage – Still played. Still loved. Like every song here.
This is an album to horrify the elders. To rip fear into grown ups. The lyrics are rude without being offensive [kind of] and the sound is pure dirt. Put it on. Play It Loud. Really Loud.
I went to see Assassin’s Creed at Rochester Cineworld. As is customary I have rated this film on IMDB and shared it via Twitter. For a discussion of my rating system please read this communication.
I honestly don’t know where to start. It was shit. Terrible. Really bad. There are places and times for a good old discussion about “The Problem Of Evil” and how freewill is involved [but not] but this film is not one of those places.
But then it was based on a game. Which I haven’t really played. Which, as far as I know, is quite good.
This is the second album released by Def Leppard and the first by them to be reviewed in these communications. Of the four albums by Def Leppard that I know this is probably the weakest. It does have a lot of reasonable songs and the sound of the guitars is a decent 1980s sound which I like. I’m not quite sure what’s missing.
All the songs have good energy [apart form the ballads]. The beat is up tempo. It is well produced. But it lacks. Especially when comparing to the albums either side in release order. It’s probably the Def leppard last album I would choose to play unless I really want some quality 80s rock. You’ll have to wait for my review of On Through The Night but given how anthemic it is this album leaves me wanting.
Here we go again. Another BBC News Headline and Fooyah goes off on one to deride the state of news. But first let me tell you where my biases lie.
I have recently decided to stop scanning my general Twitter feed. I follow about a thousand feeds on that account and a lot of them revolve around my interests of religion, airplanes aeroplanes, science and politics. Given what Donald Trump says and could possibly do after the 20th along with how that affects my interests you can imagine that my twitter feed is filled with horror. Even last year during the post-Brexit week I found that twitter was feeding the news I wanted while the traditional BBC site and radio news wasn’t giving me the detail I wanted. I felt I wanted to know everything that happened when it happened.
I have started to recognise that this was becoming an obsession. Constantly wanting to check Twitter. Missing parts of TV shows programmes because I was looking at my feed. I was starting to miss out on peace, on enjoying concentrating. I have now stopped looking at that particular feed. I use my normal account highlighted down the right hand side of this site because that feed has only friends and twitter is one of the methods I stay in touch with some friends. I don’t officially do Faceshit so that doesn’t really matter.
From now on I am going to get my news in manageable chunks by listening to the radio and occasionally browsing the BBC website. I gave up TV news a long time ago as I couldn’t cope with the forced human interest narrative they assigned to every story. The human interest of news didn’t affect me, I want to know the news behind the story, not the “this made Chloe from Bakersfield miss her train”.
I watched this video after my decision, it was sent to me by a friend and while I have some criticisms of the things said in the video I felt some of it applied to me and I am far from a millennial.
I do have some issues with some of the things he says and I am definitely not convinced he is right about everything but it is very interesting. I could see some of these behaviours in myself and so decided to change my behaviour to be more positive to my life. One of my current issues was feeling anger at all the Trump tweets or news items and being powerless to affect them in any way. By ignoring them I hope to gain some sense of control and happiness over those parts of my life. I can get on with my life largely as it is and just calmly wait for the end-times.
I have become largely convinced that mobile devices need to be banned in schools. Not because I am a nasty bastard but because we have a SOCIAL DUTY to teach children to concentrate on tasks that last longer than a few minutes. The young need to learn to be able to delay reward. They are in a system where I want them to learn during all my lessons in a week and the pay off is years away in their examination results, in their choice on university and in the pay of their future careers. I don’t have a science study to back this up but I do think we are doing a disservice to the young because they expect reward constantly.
Oh, but they can play computer games and concentrate for hours.
Yes and no. They are constantly rewarded while playing computer games. The tasks are short term and the rewards are built in regularly to make the kids feel good. This is the equivalent of checking an answer in the back of a maths text book and seeing that you got it right. That little hit of success. One of these is “fun” and the other takes place in a structured lesson where the ultimate pay off is years away.
A student I taught a few years ago who, in the run up to his exams, took his phone, turned it off and placed it in a plastic bag which he kept on him for emergency purposes. He did this for three months. He recognised the distraction that his phone is. It doesn’t matter if you find out something has happened 2 minutes after the event or 5 hours after the event. It’s the same thing that has happened. That kid got As and A* at A Level and now studies at a top university.
Look, I love my phone and I like my console and this computer where I am currently typing. I don’t want to throw them away. But I do think there are serious sociological problems that need to be faced. We are failing the youth by not preparing them to concentrate persistently at a task with a delayed reward.
This was the headline on the BBC News website, I heard about the article from listening to the radio 4 article. I also found the same “news” item in the Daily Fucking Piece Of Shit Mail.
Now, I’m not very good at reading science papers. I have tried and find the language very dense and deliberately obscure. Given my interest in REAL THINGS learning how to read science papers is probably a good thing. I found the original paper from where these headlines derive. It is linked here. The PDF can be found here, or below.
I just want to cover some of my observations from reading the paper before writing about the news articles.
A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis: Quantifying the Relations Between Digital-Screen Use and the Mental Well-Being of Adolescents
This paper was a test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis [bullshit name making it seem acceptable or a good thing even though it’s a happy story about a fucking thief]. This paper is to test the happiness-screen time hypothesis. It doesn’t set out to find out if screen time makes teenagers happier than not having screen time. It doesn’t have a control group. All it does is see whether the youngsters have an ideal happiness-screen time relationship. It could have found out that 20 hours a a day was the ultimate happiness value.
Most of the paper talks about the regression curve they decided would fit and how they tested that. Essentially they found an upper limit in the curve.
The number of students used in the study was large. All the data was self-reported and that can cause issues of under-reporting of negative trends. This paper didn’t seek to find out how much happier students were before and after. All they looked into was the happiness of students compared to how much screen time they have. There’s no before and after. There’s no analysis of how increasing or decreasing screen time affects individuals. It could be imagined that deliberately affecting the well being of teenagers negatively would be immoral.
This study sought to confirm a previous hypothesis that a quadratic curve could be used to fit to the data and that from that there would be a maximum [inflexion in the paper]. It didn’t seek to find out anything else.
This study seeks to inform future studies and has nothing to do with optimum time to get students the most well-being. It just modelled that. There were no controls. We do NOT know from this study what happens if a student stops using their phone and does other stuff. This study wasn’t about that. It’s not a before and after study. It’s a study about now.
Interesting, but also obvious, was that different digital activities had different effects on well-being. Being on a phone has a lower time than watching TV. They are very different activities.
The study also says that they did not look into whether academic work was affected or what the possible outcomes are with high or low digital device usage. This study JUST looked at modelling the Goldilocks Hypothesis. My instinct is that the Goldilocks Hypothesis probably exists for most things. Want to eat chocolate? Have a certain amount to get most well-being feeling. Want to exercise? A certain amount will maximise your well-being score, and so on.
So, now a few quotes from the BBC article.
Moderate screen use ‘boosts teen wellbeing’
NOT what the paper says. The paper did NOT compare before and after, just what exists now. They are very different things.
They found a “Goldilocks effect” where a few hours of device-use seemed to boost mental wellbeing.
They were testing for the Goldilocks effect. They didn’t discover it. Their aim was to model it mathematically. Again, BOOST, no it doesn’t say that. Boost implies a before and after effect which was not measured by this study.
In addition, the first hour or two of screen time was actually associated with an increase in mental wellbeing for those using computers, smartphones, video games and watching TV or films.
FFS, not an increase just what is. IF I HAVE THIS WRONG PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I am not expert in reading science papers. Have a look yourself and tell me.
The BBC article is pretty bad but there are redeeming features to the article and even they explain that this paper confirms the hypothesis. It’s good to have some science about these things but the NEWS can’t report it very well. And we wonder why there are issues with fake-news and this being a post-truth world.
I need a few deep breaths now as I take some quotes from the Daily Shit article. I can’t read the whole thing without encountering a rage so I will rely on the bullet points at the top of the article.
Researchers found there is little evidence screen time damages teenagers
NOT what they were looking for. The study was to confirm the Goldilocks Effect. We would need a CONTROL group to decide if damage is done.
The found that, in fact, 257 minutes on a computer is beneficial for them
No, it didn’t. See above.
It is the ‘sweet spot’ when teens have had enough time to develop online skills
No, it doesn’t say that. For fucks sake. If we trained teenagers in developing internet skills properly they would soon realise that the DM website is full of shit.
I’m done. If I tried I expect I could take the whole DM article and pull nearly every sentence apart. The main problem is I don’t want to. I don’t want to read that shit. It’s misleading. The BBC article was misleading but not as bad. It was still misleading.
No wonder we have problems with people trusting the news and sources. No wonder they want to listen to “news” that agrees with their own narrative about how the world works rather than challenge their own understanding. I try to be unbiased in my understanding of the world. I try to give weight to things that disagree with my perception of the world because it challenges me and because, as a human, I am incredibly unable to decide what it correct or true. That’s why science developed. It’s why there are true investigative reporters. The world should be able to cope with REALITY even if they fundamentally oppose what that reality is. We should be accepting of things that challenge us and make us think but ultimately make us more aware of what is really going on.
After all, isn’t the truth what we seek?
Addendum
Let’s have another look at that graph:
I don’t know about you but a peak happiness going from 47 to 48.5 or so doesn’t seem impressive. Also, we don’t know how many students were at each level, so we don’t know how many students were at the zero hours per day level [I was sure I read this in the paper but can’t now see it].
Also, 20% of students reported more than 12 hours a day engagement.
it was clear that many participants had reported
simultaneous screen use; approximately 20% of the sample
reported a sum of more than 12 hr of engagement on
weekdays, and 35% of the sample reported a total of
more than 12 hr on weekend days
Fuck! These poor kids. We need some serious intervention so we are able to help these people in society as a whole, so they can develop friendships, so they can function.
I know we moan about the weather all the time in this country. It’s what we do. It’s a way of forming conversation. Something we can talk about. We love headlines that ultimately just say:
Weather cold this winter.
Weather hot this summer.
Yesterday, after about a week or forecasting the snow came to the UK. It hit Maidstone at 18:00. The town ground to a slow crawl. It probably doubled the length of time for me to get home. But, I got home and there were no exciting events for me. Rather than the UK moan about:
Why aren’t we prepared for this? Why does everything go to shit when it snows, it doesn’t in Finland.
We need to accept that nowadays snow is a reasonably rare event, definitely in the south east. It’s a few days a year. We should EXPECT disruption and things to go to shit. It’s essentially a rare event.
Here’s the traffic from 18:30 last night:
A larger view of the SE.
Now on this map, apart from my favourite places, you can see the disruption. Here’s a larger view:
Lots of red roads which is indicative of severe disruption.
This is the first Rammstein album I have reviewed in these communications and I will tell you that it leaves me feeling quite excited. I was first given this album and another in the early 2000s. Listening to the heavy German sound was so different, so exciting and refreshing. The clear crispness and utter heaviness was astounding. I didn’t care that I couldn’t understand what was being said, I’ve listened to English speaking singers and not had a clue!
Rammstein are a band where you can start right at the beginning and just keep working through their albums. There isn’t a bad album.
Herzeleid came out in 1995. It doesn’t show. Buy this, give the band some of your money and enjoy.
