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25 June 2017 at 20:45 #59667
Then link to the original link (which is always good practice anyway, rather than let a 3rd party harvest clicks), because the Express is worthless.
25 June 2017 at 19:34 #59663Not clicked the link, but it is The Express so can be almost entirely disregarded.
25 June 2017 at 16:22 #5963150th Special, the War Doctor (and Ecclestone Doctor) should have always known what happened when the Moment wasnt used.
Except that it was clearly explained in-text.
25 June 2017 at 14:06 #59625@thane15
But it’s a really hard thing to balance for me -and Mum?
The threats of violence and rape are obvious and in the open.
The really tough problem is the low grade harassment of dissenting voices and the niggly disruption in the less obvious corners of internet discourse. This can be in the form of person digs, short and punctuation-free brain farts or longwinded rambles with no clear point other than to buff the ego of the poster.
They don’t go away and simply get more emboldened at lack of action. It is a coarsening of discourse that needs to be challenged at every turn. That does not mean that genuine, heartfelt anger needs to be suppressed (a full-on internet ding-dong can be great fun), but I have seen too many once-great places reduced to a cabal of circle-jerkers because of poor moderation, as reasonable people just lose interest. And then the trolls have won.
25 June 2017 at 13:38 #59624Don’t lose track of where spoilers should go. Even Moff-approved spoilers.
I read a comment elsewhere about how a viewer’s kids are heartbroken by Bill becoming a Cyberman.
Good. That is Who doing its job. If it isn’t traumatising 7-year-olds it is failing.
25 June 2017 at 13:37 #59623If I were a young kid I’d have trouble sleeping tonight after this.
Excellent Doctor Who still has its mojo.
25 June 2017 at 13:29 #59621That because it is using British terminology (being a British show ). Series = US season. Series finale = US season finale.
25 June 2017 at 01:00 #59581Dabbing is some kind of reference to smoking Cannabis. Moffat pleads ignorance…
That would appear to be a minority view…
25 June 2017 at 00:34 #59578^^^^^^ See above from @devilishrobby – the fuckwit police are needed.
@thane15
An alternative take of the seductive myth of “don’t deed the trolls“.
25 June 2017 at 00:28 #59576@whisht @thane15
So, the definitive song about time, and may as well got right back to the beginning:
24 June 2017 at 21:11 #5955324 June 2017 at 20:32 #59547For a moment, when they were walking through the “town” I thought I caught s glimpse of Heather in a window.
24 June 2017 at 20:31 #59546In one of your early post you said you take pride in being a grown up Doctor Who fan. Feel free to start.
Also, capitalisation and complete sentences are your friend.
21 June 2017 at 13:05 #59441I suspect it may be my IT chaps grey listing getting over enthusiastic. But he’s in a meeting…
21 June 2017 at 10:05 #59429@thane15
It’s like this great Moffat experiment suddenly turned into something people hated
It didn’t – it’s just that the gobshites can’t and won’t accept that they may be wrong and will not discuss with civility (and cry like toddlers if anyone pops back), so eventually reasonable people fuck off somewhere else and enjoy their day.
I’m sure there’s a metaphor there somewhere…
20 June 2017 at 15:19 #59355I referred very specifically to the Labour leadership which is still fighting a war that was lost 30 years ago. They managed to effectively mask that they (the leadership, not the party at large) are firmly anti-EU (‘cos capitalist conspiracy, innit?) and this got them the overwhelming bulk of the Remain vote along with nearly all of those who wanted to vote “anyone but May”. Corbyn has show signs of learning, but the problem is McDonnell who if he were made of chocolate would eat himself, and who is wholly unreconstructed.
Labour – even New Labour – has never been “neo-liberal” (a term 90% of users do not understand) and have always been what most other countries would recognise as social democratic (in the sense used in Germany).
Blair’s government gave us:
-A National Minimum Wage;
-The Human Rights Act (which, among other things, give the UK a legal right to privacy for the first time ever);
-Unprecedented investment in the NHS;
-Unprecedented investment on education;
-The outlines of an ethical foreign policy (eg Sierra Leone) before he pissed it all way backing GWB’s adventurism).
-And Brown was nicely pulling us out of the post-credit crunch recession when the election was lost and Osborne’s slash-and-burn austerity turned it into the longest recession ever.
But the 600,000 or so Corbynites don’t know any of that, they just call anyone who questions the Dear Leader a Red Tory (they call Tom Watson – another chocolate self-consumer – a Blairite and he tried to overthrow Blair!).
And Corbyn still lost the election. I can think of four or five potential leaders (including at least 3 women) who would have won at a canter against the most incompetent Tory leader since Eden. And if Corbyn had been willing to enter a progressive alliance the Tories would have been slaughtered.
Attlee would never have been a Corbyn supporter. He was too interested in getting things done.
20 June 2017 at 02:02 #59333I just happened to watch it the other night. I knew the idea was there, but got lucky in my choice of which episode.
20 June 2017 at 01:58 #59331But how does that explain what happened last week on Mars, when the TARDIS was largely absent? How were Iraxxa and Friday able to understand the Brits, and vice versa?
River – Angels Take Manhattan, when the vase was translating: “Gift of the Tardis – it hangs around”.
20 June 2017 at 01:50 #59329So what, precisely, is your objection to starting Extremis in the Vatican?
Huh? I have never, at any stage, offered any objection to that. I thought it was very cool. I thought its juxtaposition with CERN made a clear and inventive illustration of the two approaches to knowledge without getting bogged down in it.
in real life, anecdotal evidence is often what you’ve got.
Anecdote is not the singular of evidence (nor is evidence the plural of anecdote). You can do the maths about anecdotal evidence. Clarity in the use of terms is not pedantry.
To suggest that any and all forms of decision making in an environment of imperfect information is ‘faith’ is at best equivocation and at worst sophistry.
The thing with bus stops is that experience depends entirely in epistemological framework:
Many (many) moons ago I lived in Shoreditch, before it got trendy, and had to get a bus from Liverpool Street Station.
I was leaning against the bus stop near midnight watching a bloke working his way up the other stops talking to people and moving on. I thought “Uh oh! Nutter alert”.
Now, had he given up before he got to me he would have had one experience of London, and I would have been none-the-wiser.
But both experiences were falsified when he got to me.
When he got to me he said, in a rather thick Geordie (Newcastle) accent: “‘Scuse me mate can you tell me how to get to Hoxton?”
“Yeah, no prob. Get the next bus here and it’s two stops”, I said.
To which he said: “Thank Christ for that. You’re the first person who’s spoken to me!”
We than had quite a fun chat about alienation and preferring a smack in the gob to being blanked (his view, not mine).
There was no faith here – just doggedly sampling and finally getting a reading with enough Geordie friends to be able to understand him. Just the same as SETI listening in the blind for evidence of alien life.
Never saw him again.
Science deals with the empirical – from the Greek empiirias: through experience. If it can’t be experienced – that is, if it can’t be measured – it is not science, nor a matter for science. Uncertainty is nearly always a factor; faith is not a factor.
19 June 2017 at 19:04 #59307Not sure if it is just me, but can you have a look to see if there is any reasons notifications have stopped coming through?
Ta muchly.
19 June 2017 at 17:56 #59305@blenkinsopthebrave @janetteb @nick
It is very easy to get sucked into a distorted perspective. I have been around the tracks enough times to remember the IRA letting off bombs without warning, including trying to assassinate Thatcher and her entire cabinet, but also detonating bombs in many places with no regard for civilians. The centre of Manchester was destroyed by an IRA bomb (and rebuilt with EU money). At the Hyde Park bombing of soldiers parading and playing music, everybody could remember the name of one of the horses – Sefton – but I bet within a month few could name his rider, whose story became unbearably, unspeakably tragic.
We see the symbolism, when we should be looking at the people. Yesterday one of the imams from Finsbury Park Mosque saved the life of the attacker, who may otherwise have been lynched.
Immigration isn’t new. It happens because the English won’t do the work and dates back at least to the Irish Navigators building our canals and then our railways; my Grandad lied about his age and travelled from Tipperary to join up in 1915, and stayed in active service until the 1950s but in my living memory you would see pubs with “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs” signs on their doors. And yes, that final insult was intentional. It is not a coincidence that Essex, where Mosley’s East End blue collar fascists moved out to after the war, is the UKIP heartland.
Our crops are gathered by immigrants and yet a pub where Portuguese workers had gathered to watch their team during the Euros was besieged by knuckle draggers would would never consider doing the back breaking work that they do.
Farmers are only now waking up to how screwed they are about to be.
The one thing really noticeable about both the Brexit vote and UKIP’s support was that – those rural areas aside – it concentrated almost exclusively in areas without large scale immigrant populations(1). Those areas where people have actually met and lived and worked with immigrants – Asian, East European, Jewish, South American – invariably vote of openness and inclusion.
That is London, that is Manchester.
And scumbag obscurantists of all kinds know this and are trying to destroy it.
But they are trying to do it in the face of a government of truly breathtaking ineptitude and an opposition leadership that is only now trying to break out of it 1970s socialist straightjacket. This is what you get when the angry mob is allowed to hijack both of our to major parties.
And so we have Theresa May declaring today “we have been tolerant of extremism for too long”. That would be the May who spent 6 years as Home Secretary (interior minister, for non-UKers) before becoming PM.
I would give almost anything to have a grown up back in charge.
(1) An exception, narrowly: Birmingham where a large Bangladeshi community we outright lied to by Leave and are now pretty damned angry.
17 June 2017 at 23:52 #59203Of course, had they really been trying they would have included a sight gag with a three-eyed crow.
But I did rather admire the Just So… version of how the crow got its call.
So Missy and the Doctor becoming friends means tragedy, then.
17 June 2017 at 19:33 #59191That was a hoot.
And also, quality lampshading about lip sync.
17 June 2017 at 11:39 #5917116 June 2017 at 19:06 #59148@thane15
Christ my typing has gone to shit (two deadlines i a week will do that). Try again.
I know. Genuinely playing her age, yet there are a couple of moments when Those Eyes shine through and I get all unnecessary.
16 June 2017 at 18:19 #59147@thane15
I know. Genuinely playing age, yet there are a complete of moments when Those Eyes shine through and I get all unnecessary.
16 June 2017 at 14:32 #59145Babylon 5 was not axed, but always conceived as a 5 series story. Doubt about whether it would get the last season, and JMS falling out with Claudia Christian, badly compromised season 5, but it was always intend to end then.
16 June 2017 at 14:29 #59144@thane15
*strokes chin* 😉
16 June 2017 at 11:49 #5913416 June 2017 at 00:12 #59122Bloody hell, give this girl a scholarship for anywhere she wants to go.
Polly Neate, the CEO of a charity which campaigns against domestic violence called Women’s Aid, said other girls from the tower block had also turned up to sit their exams.
“Girls from my 13 year old’s school who lived in #GrenfellTower lost everything and still turned up for GCSEs next day in night clothes,” she wrote on Twitter.
15 June 2017 at 16:11 #59113@thane15
“very unique”, eh? 😉
15 June 2017 at 12:01 #59107@thane15
Not new – from an album of previously unrecorded Sandy Denny (of Fairport Convention) that were never recorded before she died. Gilmore wrote the music and recorded them (this). The BBC used London to wrap up its 2012 Olympic coverage.
15 June 2017 at 00:55 #59093I’m sure I’ve put this up before, but fuck it.
15 June 2017 at 00:36 #59090Yep. Still burning after 24 hours. Utterly, disgracefully appalling – but as you say, simply everybody stepped up (except the dude from KCTMO who would have been better advised not to do the interview).
London Fire Brigade. Just bloody magnificent.
14 June 2017 at 17:35 #59084@thane15
As, Misfits is ridiculous fun. Tell your mum not to censor!
13 June 2017 at 21:06 #59053All will be revealed.
13 June 2017 at 15:14 #59041(move t’pub)
@bluesqueakpip @thane15 @tradigrade
but that doesn’t stop your hypothesis testing also being an act of faith.
See the answer I gave some moments ago (and it is one that no amount of verbiage overturns).
If it’s important that you get somewhere else quickly, you will not have time for repeat testing.
And you will know that you had inadequate information and will know better next time. Whether right or wrong, at no time is faith a factor.
Limitations on choice are not acts of faith. Appeal to anecdote doesn’t change that. Nor does hasty generalisation from that anecdote.
See, science as an approach knows that information is imperfect, that measuring things can be darned tricky and that new data will probably confound our most convincing theories. And it knows that sometimes it has to act on *assumption* – which again, is not an act of faith.
The bendy bridge happened because Arup didn’t do its literature search well enough. Two major papers described exactly the problem that happened. It was an error.
Errors aren’t acts of faith either and nor in imperfect information.
Although faith, like hubris, can lead to error – and hubris isn’t faith either.
Both Kepler and Newton were profoundly religious
As was Ibn al-Haytham and William of Occam, who came up with the best axiom about not making assumptions.
‘cos assumptions aren’t faith.
if you want a document translated, you go to a translator, not a scientist. If you want to prove that Queen Elizabeth I owned a particular piece of jewellery, the only scientist you could ask would be a Time Lord – a physicist would be utterly useless
Actually, if you want a document translated you will look for a translator with a grounding in whatever the pertinent field is. If it is a German a paper about textiles then one of my exes is your woman. Remember “brown is the new black”? I knew about that two years before.
And science does not use the word “prove” in the sense that you are using it (which is the mathematical sense). In science it is essentially synonymous with ‘test’. As in “the proof of the pudding,”; “proving grounds”; “proof of concept” and “the exception that proves the rule” (ie shows the limit of the rule). So you can quite easily use a scientific approach to prove if Liz 1 owned the ring, but accept from the outset that it will likely not be definitive. Or test when a term is being used a a particular sense in a foreign language and see if that helps clarify the translation. Because science (to reify it for a moment) knows at the start that it not only doesn’t have all the answers, but probably cannot.
Nobody has denigrated historians, translators or theologians. But all of them would benefit from listening to scientists.
13 June 2017 at 14:34 #59033@thane15
Equally though, your personal experience of the bus stop, and the arrival of said bus or Ford Prefect, rest to some extent on faith that the hypothesis is valid and the deduction sound…
Nope. That is subject only to constant testing under threat of falsification. That is why it doesn’t get to be called a theory until it has strong evidence to support it (and why “evolution is only a theory” is such a stupid statement to use by creationists, not that they care).
A Higgs Boson walks into a church.
The priest say “We don’t allow fundamental particles in here”
And the Higgs Boson said: “You can’t have mass without me”.
There’s a reason the episode went to CERN.
13 June 2017 at 11:23 #59021@bluesqueakpip @thane15 @tardigrade
When you wait at a bus stop on someone else’s say so, it is not an act of faith, it is an act of hypothesis testing. If the bus doesn’t turn up, then you revise the hypothesis. Eventually you may have enough evidence to propose a Theory of Bus Flows, but any new piece of evidence has the potential to completely destroy that theory, sending you right back to the drawing board.
After a while you may even get to the point where the evidence on when and where the bus will turn up is so reliable that you can propose a General Law of Bus Dynamics, but that is a very high bar indeed. And even that can end up being incorporated into a much wider Theory of Public Transport Relativity. And then *that* might have to wait a long time until it can be integrated with the Quantum Theory of Travel, in which it seems the bus can both arrive and not arrive, and may become entangled with the White Van Particle.
None of it is anything to do with faith.
This episode works because the time Veritas was first translated was when Church *was* the centre of inquiry (also true of Islam at the time). But had they not hoarded it for a few centuries, they may have got there quicker by showing it to Kepler, Newton or one of Ibn al-Haytham’s students (and then the Monks probably would have just run another sim until they got the outcome they wanted, being entirely stochastic in outlook).
13 June 2017 at 02:42 #59002Do you mean that there is no such thing as “situational” depression,
No, nor anything like it.
Everybody, at some time or another, will get situational depression. The number of situations that can provoke it is too long to itemise. But then the situation changes and the problem goes away, at most a bad memory. Mostly it doesn’t need treating, other than palliatively.
But for the 4 or 5 people in any given group of 20 who suffer clinical depression the situation isn’t cause of the problem and changing the situation does not change the illness, unless the illness of treated. Think of Amy convinced that all Vincent needed to cure him was to see how loved he became.
Of course, sometimes a situation can cause so much damage that it is permanent. Abuse, extreme trauma, extreme isolation for unnatural periods and many more. But clinical depression – people who are depressives, rather than people who are depressed – don’t necessarily need a “situation”. The careless word, that 15 or 16 people brush off, strikes like a flaming arrow. But the target (intended to not) is already broken.
I don’t blame @nick for not understanding. There are few conversations more challenging than trying to explain depression to people who have never had it: good people, kind people, people who really want to understand – so many times you can see it is just not quite sticking.
The Doctor’s behaviour has changed – maybe there is a cool sci fi explanation about shared regenerations. Or maybe he is just broken, and we can see it but he can’t. As I said upthread, just who is counselling whom in the vault?
Or maybe it is both and one of the finest users of metaphor in television is doing what he is brilliant at.
(Thea Gilmore’s new album has a track called Slow Fade To Black which uses the metaphor of an occupying army in the mind and soul. That’s even better than Churchill’s black dog, for me)
13 June 2017 at 00:54 #58994@xad4 @thane15 and any others who were following the Dyfi ospreys…
Monty and Glensi have grandchildren! In Scotland. (As far as is known the first offspring from a Welsh nest to have chicks since repopulation began). Also, interesting question as to if this is the first time a British osprey has been followed from conception to parenting.
13 June 2017 at 00:36 #58993No, you don’t.
12 June 2017 at 23:58 #58990If you’re suggesting that he’s acting unDoctorish because of depression caused by this sequence of events,
No.
That’s not how depression works. The stressors inflame the illness, they don’t define it. Eleven understood this. Twelve is living it (and even Eleven withdrew from the world for an extended period after Angels Take Manhattan).
Your thinking on this is too mechanistic.
Actually, that does lead me to wonder exactly who is giving therapy to whom in the vault…
(I suspect he is a bit undoctorish because he is running against a clock that we have yet to see running down)
12 June 2017 at 22:39 #58986be intellectual and not physical as there are no accumulated memory.
I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark here and guess that you have never had to be treated for depression.
I have a strong suspicion that there is something we have not yet seen of events on the Chasm Forge.
I’ve generally found the Master (in the past) to be a bit of a pain
When Roger Delgado was killed, a decidedly ungracious 12 year old me was most disgruntled when they recast the role. Even then I’d start to have “Oh, no! Not The Master again!” thoughts. That’s the risk Doctor Who has always had to dance around: how not to overuse villains.
12 June 2017 at 18:35 #58975Acting outside his core principles (which he didn’t do with River, Rose, Amy/Rory or Adric in BG Who) in the way he did is undoctorish ….. The way the Doctor acted to “save” Clara was selfish
Or he was thoroughly few up with losing people and had been tortured for 4.5 billion years.
You have basically just blamed a depressive for his depression.
10 June 2017 at 20:08 #58861That was fun.
But why did the Tardis throw a hissy that needed Missy?
10 June 2017 at 20:03 #58860Call me Captain Obvious…
9 June 2017 at 23:53 #58826Prepare to be amazed. WTO isn’t a nice comfy fallback agreement, it’s a nightmare. Are you sure you want Trump (or, more likely, his successor) to have us by the short and curlies? Not that it matters. The single market was designed to eliminate non-tarrif barriers. Thatcher (quite rightly) grasped that UK business was getting screwed by them (a half million sq ft warehouse full of British exports, and one very bored and bureaucratic French customs officer to process all it it, say. And is a single unit isn’t up to scratch, the whole warehouse-full gets sent back).
Your argument is an padded-out variant of the “ZOMG! BMW NEEDS US!!!!!!” argument punted around by Leave.
a). They don’t (the electric mini will be built in Europe, not Oxford and that is just the start).
b). They tried to pressure Merkel to go easy on Russia (which is way more important to them than the UK) and failed.
We have no friends, since we have spent most of the past 100 years pissing off everybody at one time or another. We aren’t important enough to anyone to ever be high on their list of priorities. Maybe Mozambique. They joined the Commonwealth despite never being a UK possession, so they must like us.
9 June 2017 at 22:25 #58823And as pedant says, all it takes is a couple of shaky by-elections for the whole edifice to come tumbling around her ears.
Or for that matter, 4 or 5 Tory rebels. Woolaston and Soubry are still there…
9 June 2017 at 22:24 #58822It will take much more than a year to complete “the paperwork” (research how long it takes to tie up a single trade deal – take the EU-Canada deal as a marker). And we will lose 150+ of them when we leave. If you aren’t already then follow @DavidAllenGreen and @sirpauljenkins on Twitter (and in the FT).
We have no trained negotiators (most of the best work for Nick Clegg).
UK agriculture can supply about one third of demand, for about 5 months of the year. The entire profit margin of UK agriculture is made up of EU Single Payments (with Scots, Welsh and English uplands especially dependent). A third of the labour force is migrant. Many will not be able to trade.
For those that can, food will pile up at customs (customs checks generally will be a serious threat to trade, but for farming they will be a disaster in both directions). Points of entry will be overwhelmed. And we’ve fired half the border force.
There follows panic buying, making a bad situation worse.
Hello super-inflation.
The UK has not even started getting prepared, because of a stupid creation of new departments and an even more stupid election that leaves Mayhew much more a hostage of the Tory Remainers than the headbangers.
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