Goodbye Olympics. You were awesome.

I have a confession to make. I enjoyed the closing ceremony. It was far from perfect. There were bits I didn't like. There were bits that made me cringe and want to hide behind the sofa. But, on the whole, I remember thinking it was a pretty good spectacle and filled the brief of a celebration with plenty of songs to "sing along too".

Since then, I've seen quite a lot moans and complaints about it. One article, which I won't link to because I don't want to promote it, went as far as describing the ceremony as dangerous because it so explicitly stuck two fingers up at the multicultural celebration of modern Britain that was the Opening Ceremony. Perhaps I am naive but I find it hard to interpret the event with such cynicism. What's more, I don't want to. The Olympics was up-lifting and buoyant and I'm not ready to come down to Earth with a jolt just yet. I don't want to go back to old moany Britain. I want to put on a Union Flag T-shirt and punch the air... metaphorically, at least.

I'm not going to pretend for a moment that the whole show was fantastic. Indeed, there was one moment - when the camera showed Boris Johnson "dad dancing" to the Spice Girls - that made me feel so embarrassed that I exclaimed "Oh no! The last two minutes have undone the whole Olympics!" But, I was joking. (Mostly!) A bit of "Mr Blue Sky" by E.L.O. and the Spice Girls were quickly forgotten. Besides, the Closing Ceremony wasn't for me, it was for everyone. There were probably just as many people watching who love the Spice Girls and don't like Muse as vice versa.

Some of the other choices were a bit odd, it is true. I thought there was something slightly ironic about John Lennon singing "Imagine there's no countries" to the Olympic Games but then, maybe, I'm being too cynical. The song, at the end of the day, is about unity and a "brotherhood of man" - if that's not pro-multicultural, what is? And the giant face was pretty cool too.

I'd also be interested who decided to book Oasis without the talented one. But this was balanced out by the epic guitar solo of Anita Dobson Brian May. Elbow. Madness on the back of truck. Eric Idle (up to the uncomfortable Indian part). Take That (in their best "sans Robbie" configuration). The percussive brilliance of Stomp. Not to mention the wonderfully surreal Annie Lennox riding through the stadium on some kind of weird Gothic warship from the Apocalypse.

For me, though, the real star of the show (apart from the athletes and volunteers, who I will come to in a later post), was the stadium - and the lighting team. Although a bit gimmicky - and probably extravagantly expensive - the "pixels" were actually really cool.

I liked the way the stadium went Green and Gold for the Brazilians following the handover.

And I liked the way it ended up Red, White and Blue.

The bands (good and bad) - and the dancing (good and bad!) - are just memories by the morning but the stadium lives on to remind us that we held the Olympics in 2012 and it was awesome.

The Olympic legacy is what we make of it, not the Closing Ceremony. (Bring on the Paralympics!)

The Olympic Legacy - it's not all about the medals

Last week, the Telegraph website featured what struck me as a particularly vacuous piece of cynical journalism: "£4.6 million - the cost of an British Olympic medal". This piece annoyed me in so many ways, it's hard to know where to start. The essence of the piece - look how much we have spent per medal - is summed up by the title but it's worth having a look at what this cost translates to:

"Great Britain's impressive form at the Olympics follows a massive cash injection after London won its bid to host the Games. UK Sport's funding increased from £70 million for the 2004 Athens Games to £235 million for Beijing.

This year, it has received £264 million, largely from investment through the National Lottery."

I'm not sure about this last figure. There seems to be a bit of journalistic confusion about whether the £264 million is for one year or four years - the context (and comments) implied that it is actually £264 million over four years. A BBC article today, "Funding for Britain's Olympic sports extended to Rio 2016" has some slightly different values:

"Team GB's budget for the last four years was £313m. Providing lottery ticket sales hold up, the Rio pot will be similar."

"The level of funding from the National Lottery will be an estimated £87m per year, with around £40m coming from the Government."

Let's go with the highest value of these - £127 million per year - and put that sum in a bit of perspective.

According to a BBC article in May, "Premier League club wages climb to new highs":

"Total wages across the Premier League rose by £201m (14%), equivalent to more than 80% of the £241m increase in club revenues that season, to give a final salary bill of £1.6bn."

In other words, the total UK Sport's funding is approx. half the increase in revenue of Premier League football clubs and less than 10% of their salary bill. The same article also reports the top wage bills per club:

TOP PREMIER LEAGUE WAGE BILLS 2010-11

☐ Chelsea - £191m (up from £174m in 2009-10)
☐ Manchester City - £174m (£133m)
☐ Manchester United - £153m (£132m)
☐ Liverpool - £135m (£121m)
☐ Arsenal - £124m (£111m)

So, the top 4 clubs spend more on their team wages than UK Sport spends on everything. It doesn't look like quite such bad value for money now, does it?

The other thing, of course, is that the medal tally is surely one of the least important of all the outcomes of sports funding. The motto of the Games is, after all, "Inspire a Generation". As a number of people have pointed out - including previous multi-medal-winner Ian Thorpe, who was a (fantastic) pundit for the BBC - inspiring and encouraging young people to do more sport can be seen as an investment in the health of the nation. Obesity is a big problem in this country (ironically, thanks in part to some of the Olympic sponsors), and it's a no-brainer that a more active lifestyle will help. The Department of Health reports

"a significant burden on the NHS - direct costs caused by obesity are now estimated to be £5.1 billion per year."

And that's just the NHS. In other words, obesity annually costs the UK at least 40 times more than Olympic sports (ignoring the one-off costs of hosting the Games this time, of course).

Coming back to the Telegraph article, I think that one of the crucial things here is that the most inspirational athletes are not always the ones that win the medals. The athlete that comes eighth with a Personal Best and is (rightly) pleased at being eighth best in the world can be far more inspiring that the athlete that gets in a grump at coming second (and winning a medal) because they were expecting to win. Indeed, one thing that has impressed me about TeamGB is that we have had far more of the former that the latter. The pride of athletes like these - and proud family members such the now legendary Bert le Clos - certainly inspire me a lot more than the Usain Bolt's of this world. After all, not everyone can be Usain Bolt, but everyone can do their best and give their all.

Of course, the inspiration generated by sporting success does not stop at sport itself. I count myself among those who have been inspired and seen my cynicism thoroughly quashed - both at the Olympics itself but also the will and ability of Britain to make a good job of it.

In contrast to the Telegraph piece above, one of my favourite Olympics articles so far was an item in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland, "London 2012: we've glimpsed another kind of Britain, so let's fight for it" captures my own view of the Games quite nicely:

For we got a glimpse of another kind of Britain. A place which succeeds brilliantly, not least by drawing equally on all its talents, black and white, male and female. A place where money and profit are not the only values, exemplified by the 70,000 volunteers who made the Games work and showed the world a smiling face while they were at it. A place that reveres not achievement-free celebrity, but astonishing skill, granite determination and good grace, the land not of TOWIE but of Bradley Wiggins, Nicola Adams and Laura Trott. A place where patriotism is heartfelt, but of the soft and civic rather than naked and aggressive variety; a place that welcomes visitors from abroad and cheers louder for the Turkish woman who came last in a 3,000m steeplechase heat than it did for the winner.

This is the Britain we let ourselves see these past two weeks. It will slip from view as time passes, but we are not condemned to forget it. We don't have to be like the long-ago poet who once wrote: "Did you exist? Or did I dream a dream?"

Well said, Jonathan. I, for one, will try not to forget it.

Mac Links and Shortcuts

The biggest problem of moving from PC to Mac is that all the shortcuts are different. Maybe it's just because I have been a PC user for so many years but, generally, I find the PC shortcuts to be much more intuitive. For example, to take a screen grab to the clipboard on a PC you hit "Print Screen", on a Mac you press Command+Control+Shift+3. (Obviously, duh!)

The flip-spide is that hunting down the basic shortcuts reveals a host of other shortcuts of related functions. I am not sure if PCs have so many or not but here are the screen grab options from MacRumors:

• Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop
  
• Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop
  
• Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop
  
• Command-Control-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the clipboard
  
• Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it to the clipboard
  
• Command-Control-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it to the clipboard
  

In Leopard and later, the following keys can be held down while selecting an area (via Command-Shift-4 or Command-Control-Shift-4):

• Space, to lock the size of the selected region and instead move it when the mouse moves
  
• Shift, to resize only one edge of the selected region
  
• Option (Alt), to resize the selected region with its center as the anchor point

I've decided to start keeping track of the shortcuts (and links to lists of shortcuts) useful to me personally here. Although Google works pretty well, suggestions of good resources are welcome. Now, if only we could convince Apple and PC laptop manufacturers to come up with a universal standard for where to put the shift, function, control, alt and command keys, life for the shortcut-user would be good. (Of course, you would want the Apple command key where the windows control key lives.)

Game of Drones: decline of a masterpiece

If, like me, you are a fan of the TV series "Game of Thrones" and if, like me, it made you want to rush out and buy the book, I have two things to say:

1. It is a fantastic book and one of the best I have read for some time. It is full of interesting characters, plot twists, and intrigue. It is really well written and hard to put down.

2. Don't start reading it!

I finally made it to the end of "A Dance with Dragons" a couple of weeks ago and it was great. Great to finally make it to the end, that is. It's just getting so boring.

Like I said, the first book is fantastic. The second book is good two. Characters develop. Plot lines are established. Interesting possibilities are set up. It's all looking good.

Then, it all starts to go a bit wrong and I am not really sure why. I can't quite work out whether George R. R. Martin buys into the "Epic" business a bit too much, sees the success of the series as a license to print money, or just loses control of the characters.

Either way, the books get longer and longer, the plot more and more convoluted, and I find myself caring less and less about the characters. Worse, more and more of the characters that I do care about either get killed off or sidelined and forgotten about or have all of their endeavours and previous plot twists ultimately lead to nought. Ironically, it actually reminds me of an American TV series - it starts well enough to get you invested and sucked it but then gets progressively more and more pedestrian as they try and find ways to string it out long enough to reach syndication.

I still hold out some hope that (a) Martin know where the series is going, and (b) it's not all going to be some big Matrix-style let down once we get the answers, but the last couple of books do not fill me with hope. Coming full circle, what hope I have actually lies with the TV series. This has already taken a few short-cuts to avoid some of the complexity and I cannot believe that a TV audience will have the patience for all the subplots that ultimately go nowhere and unnecessary back stories for minor characters that appear in the books.

I think Martin would have benefited from learning from (still) the master of the genre, Tolkien. A complex world full of myths, legends and history is a great thing but you do not need to visit it all in the same set of books. The Lord of the Rings works so well because we follow the fates of a handful of key characters against a vast backdrop - we don't also follow the individual stories of all the important characters that appear as part of that backdrop.

A Song of Fire and Ice does have some clear heroes and villains but there is such a disproportionately small amount of the text devoted to them, it's easy to forget. Flawed heroes are all well and good but you don't want so many flawed heroes, neutrals, and bad guys with redeeming features that it's no longer clear who you should be rooting for. Perhaps, the idea is to let you choose who you want to support but, for me, that's like reading history, not fantasy.

So, if you want to read some good fantasy, read Lord of the Rings. If you want to read A Song of Fire and Ice, my advice would be to wait until the last couple of books are written and we know whether the massive investment of time is actually worth it. There are still a few directions that I could see it might go in that would end on a high. In the meantime, you can just watch the TV series!

There is no "Leader of the Free World"

Last Thursday, the BBC News magazine had an article entitled US election: How can it cost $6bn? It's an interesting piece, not least for seeing how people try to rationalise spending "more than the entire annual GDP of Malawi" on an election. (It's not just that America is bigger, they spend an order of magnitude more per head on the election than us Brits. (This is despite, as far as I can tell, having a much more restricted set of options - it's a two party system! How hard can it be?!))

That's not really what I want to rant about here, though. The thing that riles me is that oft-repeated and ill-founded superiority that many Americans seem to have:

Michael Toner has his own favourite analogy: "Americans last year spent over $7bn [£4.5bn] on potato chips - isn't the leader of the free world worth at least that?"

Ignoring the fact that perhaps is perhaps a poor reflection on how much Americans spend on potato chips rather than a good reflection on the cost of elections, (1) There is no such thing as the "Leader of the Free World" and (2) if there was I certainly wouldn't pick an American politician for the job.

I recognise that back in the Cold War days, things were a bit different. The "enemy" was the USSR and America probably really did lead the "Free World" in opposition. Today, however, the "enemy" (such as there is one) is not communism or terrorism - it is population growth and climate change. Where does the Heartland Institute and other fossil fuel lobbying organisations find most traction? Which country failed to ratify the Kyoto Treaty? America. Not the kind of leadership that I'm after, I'm afraid.

I am not saying that I think America is terrible and Britain or Europe is perfect. However, I am saying that Britain/Europe is easily as good as America in the "Free World" stakes and, in some arenas, a damn sight better. I am happy, for example, to live in a country where guns are heavily restricted, and where it is not legal to fire someone just because they are gay.

I'm not so happy with Britain's willingness to follow our American cousins into war, or the level of support and protection that the cult of Scientology gets here, or our terrible libel laws, but other (non-American) countries, happily, do much better on those counts. America is a great nation (in both senses) but it is not the great nation and non-Americans don't spend all their time wishing that they'd been born in the U.S.

Americans sometimes remind me of the medical students that I went to University with - they have been told that they are the greatest and the best so often that they cannot understand why anyone would not want to be like them. I probably could have done medicine if I'd wanted - I had the grades for it - but I didn't out of choice. I found Genetics more appealing. I didn't have the same choice about where I was born, clearly, but I am just as (or more) often thankful for being British rather than American than I am regretful that the opposite is true. (I do like American Football!) I find Britain (and several other countries) more appealing.

So, America, please stop calling your President the "Leader of the Free World". It's annoying, it's not true, and it's counter-productive if you are after respect.

No place for Creationism in state-funded UK schools

It's been a pretty good couple of weeks for a Rationalist Geek. Nerds all over the world have enhanced enjoyment of the Olympics with the Nerdlympics. Human potential, ingenuity and achievement has been promoted by the BHA and embodied by the bold landing of the Curiosity Rover. Homeopathy is on the back foot in Britain. Continuing the theme, I am happy to (somewhat optimistically) report that the British government have confirmed that the Creationism has no place in a state-funded science class.

I'm far from convinced that there is any merit in the government plans for "free schools" and "academies" - indeed, there seems to be a lot of well-founded opposition to the plans - but there is at least one bit of good news that has come out of the recent concerns over approval for Free Schools to be run by Creationist groups. In a Guardian article from a couple of weeks ago, a Dept for Education spokeswoman is quoted as saying:

"It is absolutely not true that this free school will be able to teach creationism as scientific fact. No state school is permitted to do this. We have clear guidelines about what schools can and cannot teach. Any free school found to be contravening the guidelines will be in breach of their contract and will be subject to action by the department, including prohibiting them from operating."

Happily, this position has been confirmed and strengthened in a letter from Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Education) posted on the Glasgow Skeptics Facebook page in which he states (my emphasis):

There is no place for the teaching of creationism in Free Schools. The Free School application guidance is clear: creationism, intelligent design and similar ideas cannot be taught as valid scientific theories. Furthermore, teaching creationism in science lessons is forbidden by the legal agreement that sets out the conditions by which all Free Schools receive their funding. Should there be evidence of a breach of this clause we would take swift action which would be likely to result in the termination of that funding agreement. This would mean that the organisation no longer had any role in running the school with state funding.

Now, we just need to make sure that we hold him (and his successors) to that.

What I am not so sure about is what the situation is for "Independent schools". The implication is that schools without state funding are not bound by these conditions. If this is the case then perhaps state-funded Faith schools are not such a bad thing after all - if the alternative is Independent Faith schools, that is.

Nice one NASA (and Kudos, Curiosity!)

Today, I got up at 6.30 to watch the Mars Rover, Curiosity, come in to land on Mars. Despite it's terrifying landing strategy, Curiosity made it! I've got used to tension and seeing some celebrations over the last few days with the Olympics but watching the NASA control room on NASA TV as they received signals of progress was pretty emotional.

If ever there was something that epitomises why I choose to put my trust in the accomplishments of science and the ingenuity of mankind, this has got to be right up there. To be honest, I'm not sure what blows me away most - the fact that I live in a world where science and technology enables us to remotely land a robot on Mars, or the fact that I was able to sit in my dining room and watch it live on my iPad!

The tension mean that I was a bit slow on the screen grab, but here is a shot from just after they received the first actual picture from Mars - part of Curiosity's wheel. You can see it in the background.

Well done, NASA. Well done, America. Well done, science and engineering geeks!