Status-Q

Some people have been asking how my jury service (which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago) was going.

The answer is that it didn’t!

I duly turned up at Cambridge Crown Court for the first two days, sat in the jurors’ waiting room for a few hours each day and then was allowed to go home at lunchtime. On the second day, they told my group we wouldn’t be needed until the following Monday and we had the rest of the week off for good behaviour.

On Monday, I returned, to spend another morning waiting, before the clerk said that they just didn’t have as many trials as expected, and were there any volunteers who would like to be excused further service at this point? My hand was up before she’d finished speaking, and so it was that I spent three long mornings inside the Crown Court without ever actually seeing a courtroom.

Some people might have been annoyed at this unnecessary disruption to their life, but I wasn’t, for three reasons:

• First, I rather liked most of my fellow jurors-in-waiting and the court staff, and there was a generally cheery atmosphere.
• Second, having my laptop and a 3G connection meant that I could do quite a lot of real work, and I had podcasts to listen to and watch, as well as a good book. I carry my office in my backpack and can work almost anywhere now.
• Lastly, and most importantly, I remembered John telling me what Gerard, a mutual friend, had said when John complained about the inefficiencies in his jury service experience. I probably won’t do Gerard’s argument justice (pun intended!) but it was along the lines of the following: There are inefficiencies in the justice system. It’s a nuisance. But it’s a price we need to pay. The most efficient way to deal with criminals is to round them up and shoot them. But if we want a better system than that, we have to be prepared for some inconvenience.

Michael Dales has found a new way to make your grubby old keyboard all clean and shiny. As long as you’re not in a hurry.

The YouTube player that appears in a web page has a button in the bottom right hand corner that I hadn’t previously tried:

It switches the little in-window player into something approaching full-screen mode. Now, most videos on YouTube are short enough and of low-enough quality that there’s not much point in doing this. But those who have a ‘director’ account can upload videos of greater length; things for which you may prefer to retire to a comfy chair and watch from a distance.

And so it was that I spent an hour and three quarters this morning watching YouTube because somebody has uploaded the talk that Richard Dawkins gave at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia in October.

There are two parts to the video. The first is Dawkins reading extracts from The God Delusion. The second, longer clip is the Q&A from the audience afterwards, which is, as he predicts, generally more interesting. What adds a certain frisson to some of the discussions is the fact that the other academic institution in Lynchburg is the contraversial Baptist college, Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell.

If you’re interested in the subject from either side of the fence, or are sitting on it, this is worth watching.

• The readings
• The questions

Follow-up: Dave Hill points out that you can get the whole thing as a Quicktime download here. Similar quality, but you can right-click on the link and save the file to your machine if you want to keep a copy.

My friend Martin pointed me at a rather unusual and rather delightful web page.
Take a look…

Davina Bristow has a few nice optical illusions in this Telegraph article.

Here’s one.

The faces of this cube are, in fact, the same colour. Davina suggests a way to confirm this by cutting holes in a bit of paper which hides the surroundings – on my Mac I used the Digital Color Meter utility which shows the top actually to be slightly lighter in this rendition. It’s the edges of the faces, and the appearance of a shadow, which causes us to deduce that the top is grey and the bottom white.

Thanks to Claes-Frederik for the link.