The Crow's Nest

One day back in early March I was gazing out of the kitchen window while doing the washing-up, when I noticed a pair of carrion crows (Corvus corone) building a nest in a tree in the grounds of Reading School.  At about 30m tall, the tree is the tallest in the area, and the crows had built their nest in the thin branches right at the top.  On March 10th and 11th both of the crows were visiting the nest frequently and presumably they were still building it.  Here are a few photos I took of them from that period:

Later in March I saw them visiting the nest much less often and at some times I even thought they must have abandoned the nest.  However, in early April I realised that a dark shape on the top of the nest must be one of the birds sitting on eggs.  This is a photo from April 6th:

Then today, April 9th, neither of the birds was sitting on the nest but they were still occasionally returning to it and poking their heads into it.  Presumably the eggs have hatched and the pair are now feeding their young.  One final photo, from today:

Atheistic Librarians

Yesterday morning, Easter Sunday, I was out taking taking photos in sunshine when I happened to look through the window of the local library (which, of course was closed). The above sight greeted my eyes. I felt sure that the copy of The God Delusion must have been left there deliberately, maybe by some atheistic librarian trying to subvert Easter.

Oh Joy! Installing MinGW and MSYS on Windows XP

MinGW (Minimalistic GNU for Windows) and MSYS (Mimimal System) are software packages that enable Unix and Linux programs to be built and run on Windows.  I rely on them quite a lot and try to ensure that they are installed on any Windows PCs that I use regularly. 

However, the installation of these packages is rather complex and I always seem to take me several attempts to get right.  First of all, it is not at all obvious from the download page which files you are supposed to download.  Then some of them are .exe files and others are .tar.gz's.  I suspect that there might be some historical reason behind this, but really, why not just package the whole lot in an .exe file?  There can't be many people nowadays who begrudge the few megabytes of disc space that this might waste.  Then there is the totally unnecessary fuss over whether you should have the MinGW directory as a subdirectory of the MSYS one or beside it at the top of the C: drive ( I always eventually choose the latter).  And finally, there is the almost comical tussle over different versions of the 'make' program  as revealed by this message displayed at the end of a sucessful MSYS install:

Installing Blender on a Multi-user Windows XP Computer

I have recently been using the open source 3D-modelling tool Blender at work and I thought it would be nice to have a copy to play with on my home computer.  However, when I installed it there, many of the options were missing from the menus. 

I had installed the program from an administrator account but was using it from a limited account.  When installing it, I had selected the option to put the Blender data in the Application Data directory thinking that this meant that each user would get copy of the Blender data in their own application data directory.  Not so!  Only the administrator's Blender data was being set up during installation.  

I was able to fix this by logging back in as administrator and manually copying the Blender data directories from the administrator's application data area into the application data area of each user who was going to use the program.

The reason that this problem did not arise at work was because the account I was using for day-to-day work was an administrator one.  Oops! 

Get a Degree in Evasion and Deception

While I am sticking the boot in on homeopathy, here is a Nature special report on pseudoscience teaching posing as real science degree courses at British universities (link via The Island of Doubt).  How can you have a science in which you cannot afford to ask awkward questions (ie: subject it to randomised double-blind tests) without it collapsing?