Ireland was cool, another day trip to another country - after the meeting I managed a quick tourist trip to Trinity college and sneaked a quick look at the book of kells.

Books: Bill Bryson, A short history of nearly everything - which is good, and interesting but ignores (so far) all the science which ever happened before the 15th Century, and particularly that which occured before the Greeks. Also, Greg Egan - Permutation City - Australian computer geek writing the best hard science fiction you'll ever read. And speaking of hard science fiction I read Tau Zero by Poul Anderson which, aside from the noveltly of casting the Swedes as the guardians of the post holocaust world in the future has a really cool idea as its main story i.e. a space ship which can never slow down and goes closer and closer to the speed of light meaning, relativistically, the universe grows older than the crew.

and of course we'll never really know how much useful 'intelligence' was gained from the 'interrogation' (and the dark understudy of torture the use of this word hides) but I'm willing to bet that it is precisely zero. I remember a long time ago, when 9/11 happened, a friend of mine commented that now would be a time for the new world to truly arise and that America could take a lead in rising above the squalor of mind associated with such an attack - but no. We bombed the fuck out of Afghanistan, started an illegal war on the basis of lies and now are rattling sabres with Iran. Perhaps some of this is justified, but I just feel that there must be a better way.BBC NEWS | World | Americas | US interrogation methods cleared