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After a unanimous decision by Union council, there will be a referendum on disaffiliation from the NUS this term.

The NUS conference in Blackpool was an unmitigated disaster, and there is no benefit to Imperial staying in this shambles any longer. Next year, the NUS will cost us £46,000 if this disaffiliation doesn’t go through. £46,000 that could be spent on Imperial students, rather than going to the utterly pointless NUS.

I know you have exams, but the vote will be online, and it’ll take only 10 minutes to do. I hope as many of you as possible (who are Imperial students, naturally) will remember to vote.

It looks like the poll will take place in the second-to-last week of term.

I’ll just quickly bash out what I’ve been thinking lately, which isn’t much, all in all.

Doctor Who was on again on Saturday, so if you haven’t watch it yet, spoilers abound in the next paragraph or so. Then I’m going to talk about the finale of Skins, so if you haven’t watched that either, you might as well give up now.

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Arthur C Clarke was one of the best science fiction writers who has ever lived, and possibly ever will live. He was visionary like few people are; his vision of the future of humanity is one we can all aspire to; where men and women have reached out into the solar system, and our inventiveness and curiosity know no bounds, where science and reason and technology can take us further than any magic or superstition.

The big three of sci-fi (Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke) are all dead now. I hope the next generation of writers can take up the mantle.

So the Asus Eee is a pretty wonderful machine, all in all. In fact, I’m using it right now to type this, and apart from the occasional mistype it works pretty damn well.  The interface is easy and intuitive, it comes installed with more or less everything you need, and it plays well out of the box. It’s great.

So the other day (Friday) I took it to college as a shakedown run, I guess you could call it.

This threw up one rather major difficulty - WPA-Enterprise isn’t supported by default, and that’s what the Imperial wireless network uses. Bugger.

So support for WPA-E has to be rather hackily hacked back in. One ham-handed attempt by me has already cost me the use of the network monitor in the tray. No great loss, but kinda irritating.

Anyways, I’m right now running a specially customised version of Ubuntu Linux, which should fix the network issue, but the list of post-install tweaks on the wiki is frankly just frightening, and some of it is pretty important stuff, like fixing SD cards not mounting.

I’m starting to get the impression that Linux is an operating system designed for people who, a priori, know what the fuck they’re doing, and in the hands of these people it is an incredibly powerful tool. You can do anything you like, assuming you know how to do it.

In some ways it feels like the direct manifestation of the principle that the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time, so they’ve only done 5% of that last 10%. Most everything works, and you can fix or disable anything that doesn’t, right? Because worst case scenario, you have to delve in to the command prompt, type in some arcane commands and poof, it works.

Thing is, I really don’t want to install Windows on here. I want to get to a point where I can use Linux, but not being able to get onto the Imperial Wireless network might really be a dealbreaker.

We’ll see.

I think some of this is really funny

Holographs are created by mixing reflected laser light with a second laser beam to lay down a static image - typically a lengthy, complicated and delicate process.

Actually, an undergrad physicist can do it pretty easily. I know, because I’ve made holograms in lab this year. About 3-4 weeks ago, as a matter of fact. I feel that this is probably another science story where they’ve oversimplified it to the point of pointlessness. If that makes sense. I might see if I can dig out the original article from Nature later.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Holographic displays step closer

“A Pig. In a cage. On antibiotics”

So I’ve know they’ve been around for a while, and I’ve got a copy of The Bends, and I’ve heard a few songs here and there, and saw them at V a couple of years back, but I haven’t really got into them especially much.

Then I bought In Rainbows the other day (I thought, I’ll pay about £5, how can it go wrong?) and it’s one of the albums I’ve enjoyed most recently. Reckoner and Nude are two of the most brilliantly beautiful songs.

So when I saw OK Computer for £4 at Zavvi (Virgin Megastore, until they decided on path of Southern Comfort-style brand suicide) and again thought, what the heck, at least I’m not out much if I hate it.

But no, I’ve been listening to it more or less non-stop for the last few weeks. I think I may actually be slightly in love with it, which is slightly worrying. I’m not a music expert or journalist, so I’ll try and refrain from using phrases like “soaring soundscapes” and “constructed melodious noise”  because I have very little idea what they actually mean.

What I do know is that possibly my favourite track is the breathtakingly experimental track Fitter Happier where a computer voice recites 90s-era motivational era statements at you, getting causually and effortlessly more surreal & disturbing. The feel is bleak and Orwellian - it’s wonderful.

(This was written yesterday and posted into the Future)

I’ve been thinking about this one on & off for a few days. Something that’s vastly better about the public transport in London as opposed to Birmingham or elsewhere is the quality and quantity of the signage.

I was sitting on a London Overground train - which on a tangential point had departed from Brondesbury station, which has been very nicely refurbished and repainted following the TfL takeover - and I had a sudden realisation that I wasn’t even really sure I was on the right train, going to the right place.

On a Tube train, there’s pretty much always a map of the line somewhere in your eyeline, and the station you’re at or travelling to is clearly signposted by signs on the station platform itself, the recorded  station announcements, and the scrolling matrix displays. It’s almost impossible to lose track of where you are, so much so that you can master the Zen of Tube Travel and completely conk out on a trip back, waking up just at the right station.

On this Overground train I was totally lost - the station names weren’t announced, the stations were inadequately signed, and there were very few maps on display.

Which got me thinking about how important all this kind of stuff is.

For instance, the bus maps displayed at bus shelters are no end of useful, as they show not only the routes serving the local area, but a small street map showing the location of nearby bus stops. This is useful above and beyond simply finding buses, as it also gives the pedestrian both a map and a point of reference from which to navigate. It makes travelling around London a heck of a lot more pleasant, even when you’re going somewhere you’ve never been before.

However, travelling large distances on foot in London is still difficult. Using tube and bus maps for long-distance walks, or even short hops can be unhelpful because of the distortion of distances and positions to convey the networks in a simpler way.

So, rather handily, they’ve instituted a project called Legible London which aims to install good pedestrian signage across London to make pedestrian naviagation simpler and more intuitive, by capitalising on research into how we naturally navigate, i.e. forming mental networks of routes between landmarks. It’s very interesting stuff, and a prototype has been installed around the Bond Street Station / Oxford Street area.

Which might help certain people (who shall remain unnamed) realise that there is no actual street called Bond Street. To be fair, it’s a fairly common mistake