Well, that's my birthdays sorted for the next thousand years...!

US Army Robot Suits Tested

If enough of you club together, you could all get me one, right? Pretty please? I promise I'll fight crime on my day off...

Giant Steps

Rumour has it that someone once transcribed one of Coltrane's solos and presented him with it. When asked to play it, Coltrane said he couldn't - it was too difficult. That may or may not be true, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Musicians On Call

Ever heard a song on the radio that's just made you smile? Ever had a piece of music remind you of a friend or loved one? Ever been moved to tears by a melody?

Musicians On Call, a nonprofit organization formed in 1999, brings live and recorded music to the bedsides of patients in healthcare facilities. Musicians On Call uses music to promote and complement the healing process for patients, families and caregivers.

Musicians On Call was originally founded by Michael Solomon and Vivek Tiwary in the course of their volunteer work with The Kristen Ann Carr Fund at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

After a concert sponsored by the Kristen Ann Carr Fund, a hospital staff member raised the issue that some of the patients had been unable to attend the performance either because they were in treatment or too sick to leave their rooms. In response, Michael, Vivek and the musician went from room to room to play for those patients who had been unable to attend the concert. The one-on-one interaction of patient and musician created a crucial intimacy; the expressions on the faces of friends and family members at the patients' bedsides revealed a deep sense of connection and release. Musicians On Call was born!

Unfortunately Musicians On Call currently only operates in the United States, and the Republic of Ireland. In the UK, Radio 3 ran a similar scheme for a brief period, but to my knowledge there's nothing in place right now.

If you want to make a donation, follow the links on the main Musicians On Call website. If you'd like to show your support at the same time, t-shirts can be purchased here. All takings above base costs will go directly to support the Musicians On Call program.

Where y'all at?

And other such attempts to be cool and "down with the kids". In all seriousness though...

This blog gets hits from all over the world (following some quite disturbing searches on Google, I have to say!) but hardly anyone ever comments. How come?

Burn, baby, burn. Or not, as the case may be.

So the Olypmic Flame was extinguished at least five times whilst being paraded through Paris, so as to allow its transportation via bus amidst protests against Chinese foreign policy. This has caused outrage. Why?

The Olympic Flame was never actually extinguished. At all points during the relay there is a back-up of the flame, carried in what I can only assume is some kind of windproof lantern. This is used to keep the flame overnight and whilst it is being transported on airplanes, and is taken from the original ceremonial flame at Olympia. It is therefore quite common for the flame that is carried in the torch to be extinguished, but the Olympic Flame never is.

Paula Radcliffe is an athlete who, as a sometime runner myself, I have enormous respect for in most cases. She's a phenomenal long distance runner, and does a lot of work promoting sport and healthy living.

"A peaceful protest on the sidelines - fine. But don't try to stop the torch, because the torch is about more than the Beijing Olympics. It's about the Olympic spirit and the importance of the Olympics in teaching youth, and teaching the world, what sport can do - how sport can bring people together, how it can overcome suffering, how it has overcome even wars in the past. It's a very powerful thing, and trying to stop the torch was trying to stop that message, so that was wrong." - BBC News

I agree with her point about the Olympic spirit, but the torch is not about the Olympic spirit. The relay was introduced in at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister for Public Enlightenment and Proaganda. Captured in Leni Riefenstahl's film 'Olympia', this was an attempt to glorify the Third Reich - the link with the ancient Games was the perfect way to illustrate Hitler's belief that classical Greece was a fore-runner to the Nazi regime.

Even if the relay was not a relic from a totalitarian regime with an horrific human rights record, and the Flame did symbolise what Paula Radcliffe claims it does, which I accept for some people is now the case - it is at the end of the day simply a symbol. Human rights abuses are real, and if disrupting the progress of the Olympic Flame draws even a little bit of extra attention to what is taking place, then that can only be a good thing, surely?

Never smile at a paedophile

Sex offenders face website ban

So the e-mail addresses of sex offenders are to be passed to networking sites like Facebook and Bebo, in an effort to stop paedophiles contacting children. Any paedophile found guilty of not registering their e-mail address, or giving a false one, will face up to five years in prison.

Now. Sex crimes involving children already carry a pretty hefty penalty. Possession of pornographic images of children does too. Guess what? It's not acted as a deterrant... Any paedophile is just going to set up a hotmail account or similar and take his or her chances with the law. The great majority of criminals are, I have no doubt, perfectly aware that they are breaking the law, and do so anyway. This will be no different.

A slightly more effective means of managing this would be to (ignoring the legal implications, which I'll touch upon briefly later) block the paedophile's IP address. This would not, admittedly, prevent them from accessing the sites on public computers at libraries, for instance, but then neither would registering an e-mail address.

On to the legal stuff (as I said, briefly, as I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure the far more legally minded brother-in-law will post a comment before too long!). Facebook and MySpace are both actually based in California, which is obviously outside of UK jurisdiction. Whilst the UK can ask them to comply, there can be no actual legal enforcement, so far as I understand it. This also raises issues of censorship on the internet: China would, I'm sure, very much like us to comply with their laws with regards to what they consider subversive information and have, as was reasonably well publicised here, managed to have some success with this. It met with fierce opposition though (myself included). Whilst it is, of course, incredibly important to protect our children and ensure their safety at all times, this is still an example of one country asking another country to aid it in limiting the information that certain citizens have access to. The internet by its very nature is next to impossible to police, and that is a double edged sword, as I'm sure we can all understand.

I think it's extremely interesting that the viewpoint appears to be that children have an almost God-given right to use these networking sites. I wasn't allowed to use the internet unsupervised when I was younger, for exactly this reason, amongst others. I was at least 16 before that was allowed. Why are children as young as 8 being allowed to use Facebook? What need do they have for that? Most of my Facebook usage, and most of that of my friends too, revolves around keeping in touch with people who have moved away, and embarassing the hell out of each other with photos from nights out on the ale. Neither of these are things that the average 8 year old will be doing! Therefore, if you want to protect your children from being groomed online by paedophiles, the answer is simple: don't let them use chat rooms or social networking sites. If you absolutely must, make sure they are supervised at all times.

Donald Findlater, from the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, does make a very good point at the end of that BBC News report: paedophiles need to be encouraged to live as normal, or as good, a life as possible. Preventing them from having contact with "normal" adults (though, what is "normal"?), through networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, may actually compound the issue, making them more likely to reoffend.

It's an issue that's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with effectively. I don't see this latest proposal as being one that will work though.