FIA penalty system needs a re-think

Lewis Hamilton drove recklessly in last weekend's grand prix, colliding with both Felipe Massa and Pastor Maldonado and taking both of them out of the competition.

Autosport.com: Hamilton handed post-race penalty

Lewis Hamilton has been given a penalty for having caused a collision with Pastor Maldonado in the Monaco Grand Prix.

The Briton, who got his qualifying time deleted on Saturday and got a drive-through penalty for causing a collision with Felipe Massa during the race, was handed another drive-through post-race after his crash with Williams driver Maldonado.

The McLaren star was given the penalty after the race, which means 20 seconds were added to his final time. Hamilton keeps his sixth place despite the penalty.

Hamilton was very critical of the stewards after the race, labelling their decisions as a "joke".

"Out of six races, I've been to the stewards five times. It's a joke," Hamilton told the BBC. "It's an absolute frickin' joke."

He went on to blame the other drivers for his collisions with them. Once again, whatever happens to Lewis Hamilton is someone else's fault. For what it's worth, both penalties were well deserved: in neither case did Hamilton have a real shot at overtaking, but he tried to force his way through and caused a crash. If that isn't clearly against the rules, I don't know what is, but it isn't surprising that Hamilton, a hypocrite and long-time beneficiary of special treatment by the FIA, can't seem to understand that. I agree that this is a joke, but probably not the way he intended.

That isn't my point here, though. This has annoyed me before and it continues to do so now: Hamilton's drive-through penalty was converted, post-race, into a twenty second time penalty that didn't affect how he finished. I still can't grasp the thinking behind this. The stewards decided on the penalty after the race, knowing full well that it wouldn't affect the standings, because the seventh-place finisher was well over 20 seconds behind. This isn't the first time it's happened, either.

A penalty that doesn't have any effect isn't a penalty. In this case, as they've done before, the stewards are effectively choosing to not penalize Hamilton at all. I have a problem with this in general, no matter which driver it is, because effectively this means that if you commit a rule violation worthy of a drive-through penalty late enough in the race, there are no consequences. If the penalty is given early enough that it has to be served on the track, at least there's a chance that it'll affect the standings and the race; this way, nothing is accomplished.

These situations need to be handled differently; if a driver breaks the rules, they need to be penalized properly, not by changing a meaningless statistic. In this particular case, considering the reckless driving Hamilton was engaging in throughout the race, it's appalling that he won't be further penalized. Over the last few years, grid penalties have been handed down for much less. But not, of course, to Lewis Hamilton.

Happy birthday Marie Fredriksson!

Today I get to say happy birthday, if only through the medium of a blog, to a woman who shaped my sexuality when I was growing up by being damn hot and fronting one of my all-time favorite rock bands: Roxette's Marie Fredriksson.

Several decades later, I'll be damned if she doesn't still look pretty good. (What's the polite way of saying "for a woman of her age"?)

Roxette are actually in the middle of a comeback, with a new album coming out and a tour! In the course of putting this blog post together, I found out they're coming to Finland this summer. One of my July weekends just got booked...

Kylie Minogue: still hot

Today is Kylie Minogue's 42rd birthday. Here's some pictures of her from this year.

Still hot. Happy birthday!

Game review: Harms Way

Here's an XBox Live Arcade game that everyone needs to get. If only because it's totally free.

Harms Way is a really sweet little Live Arcade game where you play as either a shooter or a driver. There are four teams, one shooter and one driver each. The drivers race their cars around a circuit with the first one to complete three laps winning; the shooters jump from turret to turret and shoot them, with the one destroying the most cars winning. The winning shooter and winning driver get the most points, and the team with the most combined points wins.

The single player or split-screen co-op is fun enough, but when you take it online, it gets really sweet. We've spent a good part of the past week in Harms Way's online multiplayer...

Seriously, you can download the full game for free. Do that. It kicks ass.

Policing the Internet in Europe

First of all, the Matti Nikki saga continues in Finland. I wrote about it years ago, and here's a press release from Electronic Frontier Finland back in 2008 explaining the whole thing. In brief, Internet activist Matti Nikki runs a website that criticizes the Finnish and EU authorities' inefficient anti-child pornography actions. For this, his Finnish site, which doesn't contain pornography, was censored by the Finnish police under a law that allows censorship of foreign child porn websites.

Just last week, the Helsinki administrative court decided that the police were wrong to censor Nikki's site and ordered it removed from the block list. Bizarrely, they maintained that while the intent of the law was clearly to censor foreign websites that contain child pornography, the police couldn't have understood the law, and are therefore not to blame. In my Finnish-language post on the topic, I linked to Radley Balko's summation:

When I’ve written about the arrests of citizens who record or photograph cops over the last couple years, I’ve repeatedly pointed out the double standard that exists when it comes to ignorance of the law. Citizens are expected to know every law. Break one, and you suffer the consequences. Ignorance is no defense, even when it comes to vague, obscure, or densely-written laws. But when law enforcement officials—the people we pay to enforce the criminal code—when they prove to be ignorant of the law, when they illegally detain, arrest, and jail someone based on a mistaken understanding of the law, they rarely if ever suffer any consequences.

The same standard operates here, as we now have a decision from our administrative court that effectively releases the police from any culpability for misinterpreting a law. The court entirely failed to address the fact that the censorship constitutes an attack on Nikki's constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. In my opinion, the sole reason Nikki's website was extralegally censored was his criticism of the Finnish authorities. The cops have just been let off the hook for that.

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Meanwhile, in Germany, the police are taking a hand in the general elections:

Falkvinge.net: German Pirate Party’s Servers Confiscated In Police Raid — Two Days Before Election

Around lunch today, the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei) sent out an alarming tweet that spread like wildfire. “Our servers are offline due to police intervention. Do not panic, this is our turn. More information to follow.” The German police had taken the Piratenpartei out — two days before general elections in a state in Germany.

Apparently, the French police force had asked its German counterpart to secure evidence in an investigation that was not related to the Piratenpartei, and some of this information was on one of the Piratenpartei’s servers. Rather than accepting assistance from the Piratenpartei in securing this particular piece of information, the police instead chose to seize the entire server farm and take it offline.

Doing this to a democratic party — Germany’s sixth largest, actually — two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage.

I have nothing to add. You'd think that in Germany, of all countries, they'd be a little leery of sending in the storm troopers to suppress a political party, but I guess not.

Happy birthday Ruslana!

By a curious coincidence, today is Eurovision Song Contest winner Ruslana Stepanivna Lyzhychko's birthday! By our verdict, Lena's Satellite is the best Eurovision Song Contest winner ever, and Ruslana's Wild Dances comes in second:

She's a Eurovision winner, and a former member of parliament for Ukraine who participated in the Orange Revolution which successfully overturned a rigged election. Not to mention the fact that she's hot, and along with Sage from GTA:SA, she's our favorite Grand Theft Auto radio host.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday Lena!

It's German singer Lena Meyer-Landrut's birthday, but we love her so she gets first-name privileges on our blog.

We all fell in love with her last year because she was so darn cute, and this year, she's grown up to be hot:

Sadly, her entry at the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest didn't do nearly as well:

For what it's worth, I think it's a good, clever pop song, but in the Eurovision environment I suppose one expects a bit more bombast, and we found ourselves waiting for the song to take off. When it didn't, it felt a bit anticlimactic. Also, I think most of Europe fell in love with her happy, quirky stage personality, and when that was missing, it sort of contributed to the anticlimax.

But anyway, not only is she the most beautiful ESC winner from this millennium, she also won with the best song. Happy birthday Lena!

A question for Zionists

Playboy interviewed veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who recently lost her job because of her comments on Israel. Unsurprisingly, Playboy's interview generated some disgustingly vitriolic feedback, one piece of which reiterated an old Zionist argument: Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews, which they have continuously occupied for millennia. The Palestinians, as most famously put by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, are a made-up people.

I'm quite deliberately leaving out the Biblical part, because it's the same thing as saying that Israel belongs to the Jews because God said so, a position also put forward by Golda Meir. Anyone who thinks they are privy to information from God qualifies as insane and isn't someone that can be reasoned with.

If you accept this argument in favor of Israel's unquestioned right to its territories, are you also in favor of abolishing the United States of America? After all, the Native Americans have inhabite their ancestral homelands continuously for millennia, and certainly the Americans are a made-up people. They're just a bunch of Europeans who showed up a couple of hundred years ago and conquered America for themselves. At least the Arab conquest happened well over 1,000 years ago; by those standards, the people who call themselves Americans today are newcomers. So if the Arabs living in Palestine have no right to be there, surely the Americans of European, African or Asian descent who form the vast majority of the population of North America have even less right to their current homes. Obviously, if over 1,400 years of living in Palestine doesn't make Palestinian Arabs a "real people", then how can a few hundred years in North America mysteriously create the "Americans"?

Certainly the same must go for the European and African-descended populations of Latin America and the Caribbean as well: if Arab Palestine isn't a real country and a real people, then there's no way something like Brazil or Peru is.

Where, in fact, do we draw the line? Will most of Britain have to be vacated? After all, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes only showed up in what is now England slightly before the Arabs took over Palestine. The English, as a made-up people, will be forced to leave, and the Welsh, Scots and Irish can divide up the islands among themselves. Can the Germans and French stay, or will they need to head back east as well? The question of the Slavs is even trickier, because no-one's quite sure where to count that from.

So if you accept the Zionist argument referenced here, you really have to be in favor of a very large-scale rearrangement of the Earth's population. Resetting everything to the criteria given will involve moving around a billion people, because if the Arabs had no right to be living in Palestine in 1948, there's no way in hell today's Americans have any right to be living where they are now. In short, this is an unworkable and monumentally stupid argument that no-one can seriously advocate as a justification for territorial claims. We simply cannot accept the idea that if a people were living on a certain territory c. 600 CE, their descendants, or people who claim to be their descendants, have a right to that territory over everyone else. Also, to maintain that a people who have lived on a certain territory for over a millennium aren't a real nation is to maintain that many other nations aren't real, either; most explicitly, if there are no such people as the Palestinians, then it's clear that there are no such people as the Americans, either.

That this argument can be put forward at all is testimony to the sheer idiocy of the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No reasonable person should stand for it.

World champions 2011

Here's some pictures I took of the world championship celebrations in Helsinki on Monday. Unlike most pictures on my blog, these ones I actually took myself, so they're covered by the same CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license as the text. Enjoy!

Even Helsinki's biggest department store got in on the act:

The flood of people started on Aleksanterinkatu...

...watched over by black helicopters:

For any foreign readers, I should explain that Finnish people don't do this kind of thing. In my lifetime, I only remember two other times like this: the previous world championship in 1995 and when GWAR won the Eurovision Song Contest.

They must have done pretty well on those Finnish flags.

Like I said, this isn't exactly normal for us. There were people on top of tram stops:

Kappeli restaurant:

Kauppahalli:

Traffic signs:

And traffic lights!

You could easily pass this one off as a picture from a revolution in Helsinki.

We're being told that there were nearly 100,000 people present.

Despite appearances, I don't think that's actually a neo-Nazi rally on top of a collapsing roof.

There were fireworks, somewhat pointless in the bright sunlight...

...which did cover the Orthodox cathedral in St. Paulesque smoke.

Even the crane operator got in on the celebrations.

And here it is: the world championship trophy. That's as good a look at it as we got!

And finally, on what could be construed as a nauseatingly patriotic note, a powered paraglider. It isn't; that just happens to be a perfect picture to end this post with.

Winning!

First of all, the divine Maria Sharapova won at Rome:



But more importantly, there was the hockey world champs in Slovakia. Luckily Mats Sundin explained to Aftonbladet that it's absolutely impossible for Finland to defeat Sweden in the finals.

The Swedish media agreed, with Aftonbladet posting a cute picture of a baby lion on their front page, to highlight just how "child's play" it would be to defeat Finland.

Good thing that didn't happen.

I mean, gosh, that would be embarrassing.

Here's a Swedish hockey song from the last time it was impossible for Sweden to lose to Finland in the finals.

One of a kind

Last friday 2011-05-13 Finland's Mikael Granlund scored a nifty goal against Team Russia at the Ice Hockey World Championship:



The goal has caught the attention of hockey fans around the world. TSN, Canada's sports leader, has an article on the goal.

TSN: FINLAND'S GRANLUND SCORES POSSIBLE GOAL OF THE YEAR

Early in the second period of Finland's semifinal win against Russia, Granland gathered the puck deep along the end boards in the Russian zone, stick-handled past a defender and behind the net, flipped the puck onto the blade of his stick, and flung it into the Russian's net, lacrosse style, to give the Fins a 1-0 lead.

TSN then goes on to make a strange claim:

Twice before has a goal like Granlund's been scored. In 1996, the University of Michigan's Mike Legg defeated the University of Minnesota in the NCAA Tournament with a similar goal, and in 2006 Sidney Crosby scored one just like it while with the Rimouski Oceanic in the QMJHL.

Twice before? That stretches credibility, as this move is quite popular in junior leagues around the world. And indeed, a quick look on the Web yielded several more instances.

Bill Armstrong has apparently scored a goal like that several times (two examples at 1:28), and claims to have pioneered the move.



As you may have gathered, those two goals came in the same week, so for him it wasn't a one time novelty move.

Mikael Granlund himself has scored a similar goal before in Finland's junior league.



And in 2008 U18 contest, though for a reason unclear to me that one was disallowed.



His brother Markus also scored a "lacrosse-style" goal in Finnish junior league.



And it's not just junior league stuff; "Zorro" goals have been seen in professional leagues as well. Here's Jani Lajunen, also a member of 2011 Team Finland, deciding an SM-liiga game on OT.



That was in 2010. If Granlund's goal is the goal of the year in 2011, that just means 2011 was slow. There was another high-profile lacrosse goal in 2010, in the playoff finals of Swiss league by Thomas Déruns.



So, yeah, twice before. TSN didn't even qualify that number in any way. I'm afraid the claim doesn't reflect well on TSN's hockey knowledge, or counting skills.

They do give Granlund's goal one distinction over Crosby's and Legg's.

But what made Granlund's goal extra special was that while both Legg and Crosby scored their goals standing still behind the net, Granlund pulled it off at full speed.

Much like Rob Hisey in SM-liiga. That's the reason Finnish play-by-play for Lajunen's goal called it a "Rob Hisey".



It's very unfortunate that Canada's series don't boast soft hands like that. Oh, Rob Hisey did it in another professional league as well, this time in Austria.



Of course, cool lacrosse goals seem to be his thing.



You'll note the clip is from TSN, so they can't really claim to be unaware of the guy.

Frankly, I expected better from TSN. The Finnish media is, predictably, going banana over Granlund's goal, which seems a little unwarranted as it's not all that unique, but I would have thought Canada's sports leader would have a little better sense of hockey history.

Happy birthday Scotty JX!

As his calendar informs us, today is Scotty JX's birthday. He's the man behind the inimitable actiongirls.com, so as a birthday present, let's give him some traffic. After all, he brings us this stuff:

I've been meaning to post some DVD reviews of his stuff for ages, and I'll try to do that over the summer. In the meantime, though, check out the site and enjoy. It's some of the best quality stuff you can find on the Internet, and I love it.

Deeper underground

I am doing just that. First of all, though, my underground garden is coming along nicely:

And I saw a wolf! Haven't seen those before; they showed up a couple of versions ago.

Remember that rockface from my previous post? Here it is:

That is the great underground hall leading all the way to Twin Tower. Or would be, if not for one little thing:

Yeah. The ocean.

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Next on this music-themed Minecraft update: Creedence Clearwater Revival.

I have!

Weather was just one of many things Notch introduced in version 1.5 (which he stole from Goblin Camp). It looks and sounds great, but at the moment the rain rather abruptly stops at the edge of a biome:

Nonetheless, it's a great addition I've been looking forward to for a long time. The sound of the wind and rain, especially when you're inside, is incredibly atmospheric. Way to go guys!

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To get my tunnel further along toward Epic Island, I have to move deeper. Firstly, this involves deepening the chasm, which I'm working on with the aid of a chicken:

Not that it actually helps me. Because there's some lit grass at the top level (more on that later), peaceful animals spawn up there. Chickens make it down just fine by flapping their wings; the other animals occasionally take a downward trip as well. They make it, just not quite how they left:

Along the way down, I've found gold:

And had a Shelob moment:

The whole process of continuing my great underground passage requires moving down one level. So, here's the corridor through my underground base:

Through the door on the left are the stairs up to my base:

It's still unfinished, but through the next door:

Stairs to the next level!

That's something for later, though; for now, I've spent long enough underground. It's time to get back onto the surface and get started on another project...