Great few days – as I keep saying, they always come in clumps. Lots of things I’d like to write about properly, but I know I never will. So I’ll jot them down here, and if you’re (un)lucky I might come back to some of them later…

Wild Thyme Cafe

was excellent, mainly becuase it was full of people I haven’t talked to nearly enough. Most of them don’t have livejournals, so I can’t point and giggle. The usual Cambridge small-worldness culminated in me being asked if I knew mjg59‘s girlfriend. There was also the joy of seeing lavendersparkle for the first time in 9 months or so; I just hope it wasn’t too unpleasant being the civil servant in a roomful of anarchists

Then I went off with writinghawk and Francis and emerged four hours later with a lot to think about. In brief, so I don’t forget:

• Why so many geeks are big on civil liberties
• Faith schools + ‘
  
  modular religion
  
  ‘ –> state-funded Summerhill
• A bizarre horizontal tetris variant that I have no hope of ever describing
• Links between Intentional Communities and Social Software
• The Wireworld computer, a cellular automaton that must have taken a great deal of time for somebody to dream up. [
  
  Edit
  
  : As Gareth points out below, the people behind this were David Moore, Mark Owen, and friends]
• Collective fanboying of Chris Lightfoot, who is like Freakonomics only better, and should really be given a column somewhere
• Why web services are bad news for open-source software

Before that,

Slimelight

was also very good fun; elixir-zero has already written about it. I’m getting to understand why some people don’t like it: the druggies, the over-pushy people, the falling-apart building, the 6am exhaustion. But none of those are really downsides for me personally – ymmv.

…or at least, it is in Russia. So says Alexa.

Edit: that link doesn’t work, and I can’t figure out how to find a better one. Sorry, you’ll just need to go on blind faith!

Haven’t seen this one being propagated for a while, so I figured it was my turn to give it a little poke:

This is a picnic meme. There will be an LJ picnic on Jesus Green, Cambridge, UK on Sunday the 14th of May, from around 2pm. We’ll meet toward the town end of Jesus Green, by Lower Park Street. Nobody is organising this; it’ll just happen. Please turn up, be sensible, bring food and drink, meet new people, have fun.

Unfortunately I’m not sure I can make it – but it’ll be good despite that terrible, terrible shortcoming!

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Iraq president says deal with some rebels possible (Reuters). Talking is good, but I’m not too optimistic about the chances. As context, read [this excellent report](http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3953&l=1) from the International Crisis Group, on the nature and tactics of the insurgency. They conclude that:

Despite recurring contrary reports, there is little sign of willingness by any significant insurgent element to join the political process or negotiate with the U.S. While covert talks cannot be excluded, the publicly accessible discourse remains uniformly and relentlessly hostile to the occupation and its “collaborators”.

The problem is the insurgents can’t negotiate, because they don’t have a program. Three of the four biggest groups are held together by papering over the differences between their nationalist and their salafi support bases. If they were to start seriously negotiating, they would need to decide on policy positions, and in the process would risk breaking themselves apart.

So my guess is that the Iraqi government has been having some vague negotiations with some members of insurgent groups – but those people won’t be in a position to make any commitments. The best we can hope for out of these talks is a better understandign of the insurgency, and developing lines of communication which will doubtless be of some use later.

The US government thinksIraq accounts for 55% of people killed by terrorism last year. This is the kind of skewed statistic you get when you define everybody attacking the US as a terrorist, when you’d call them soldiers or guerillas if they were fighting anyone else.

[needless to say I’m shooting from the hip here; I’ve not actually read the [report](http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/c17689.htm) and I guess it’s not impossible that their methodology makes sense somehow]

Anybody not doing anything tomorrow evening? Want to come along to Wild Thyme Cafe, eat and chat with vaguely (not offensively) lefty types? I’m planning to be there for pretty much the whole time, 6-10. Only time I went before it was wonderful, and full of people from the nearby streets who I would never meet any other way.

bank holiday Monday, there will be a Wild Thyme Community Cafe from 6 pm til 10 pm at the Ross Street Community Centre. Last orders for food are at 8 pm.

£7, unwaged £5, kids £3

If you can afford it… pay more. If you can’t, pay less.

Wild Thyme is a community cafe run by volunteers from the Cambridge Action Network. Food is donated by Arjuna Wholefood co-operative and cooked by Mouth Music.

Any money raised will be donated to the ‘Camp for Climate Action’ which aims to take action against climate change; provide information on climate change and its causes; share and live practical solutions.

www.climatecamp.org.uk

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Things making me laugh today: Why Caesar was killed, and a very determined doorstop.

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