Apathy Sketchpad

The Metro has a semi-regular feature called “No Shit, Sherlock”, in which they rather snidely poke fun at scientists who have drawn conclusions which, at least when taken out of context, common sense would suggest were obvious. This is, of course, a rather foolish little section, because frequently scientists do research to check something obvious and discover it isn’t true. This is why we have to do this research: we can’t simply go arround presuming things, just because they’re obvious. That way madness lies.

Today that section was missing, leaving any readers in need of their daily fix of the patently obvious needing to read the actual articles. There’s a delightful one on page 9 about the director of Titanic, who has, impressively if true, found Jesus’ coffin.

Apparently it is engraved “Jesus, son of Joseph”, and while Jesus and Joseph weren’t particularly unusual names back then, there’s also one engraved with the Greek version of “Mary Magdalene” which apparently was the clincher. But there is a third coffin of interest in there. It is marked “Judah, son of Jesus”.

This, the film-maker claims in the Discovery Channel’s programme, The Lost Tomb, is a hint that Jesus had a son.

No shit, Sherlock?

That or he had a fucking warped sense of humour. And really, if you can’t trust Jesus…

Microsoft’s Windows Media Player has just automatically detected what CD I’m listening to and has provided me with album art, track listings and a link to buy another copy.

When I figure out why it has done this I shall be sure to let you know.

On Tuesdays, a few of us go out for pizza, and generally, as I’ve come straight from work, I arrive first. I tend to spend the wait drinking a pint of lager and reading whatever newspaper is lying around that day.

Last week, this was the Independant, which ran a delightful piece about 24. I’ve noticed this year that the show has a terribly good plotline running between a woman painted as The People’s Champion Of Freedom and a man painted as The Evil Villain Who Wants To Take Away Your Freedoms In The Name Of Security. Which is all terribly laudable, in a kind of telling-you-what-to-think kind of a way. But while all that’s going on, CTU and Jack Bauer are still randomly torturing people just in case they have any information. Quite aside from the moral implications, it sggests to me they’ve not throught the plot through properly, which I’d consider a problem. The Independant was covering this because, apparently, the US government have asked the producers of the show to maybe tone down the torture, in case people think that’s how they operate in real life.

Which of course, it basically is.

This week, I was treated to a choice between The Sun, who doubtless had a front-page headline but I honestly couldn’t tell you what it was having chosen to ignore the paper completely, and the Daily Express, which I immediately recognised on account of the picture of Princess Diana, despite it being Tuesday. But the story that really caught my eye in the Express was the main front-page headline, which was (perhaps predictably) a house-price related one.

Apparently, the government want to rejig the council tax system to take into account “287 intimate details”, which will be collected by “spies”, and will include “age, marital status, salary, children and home ownership” (imagine the nerve, basing a tax on income), through the downright fucking bizarre “who is vegetarian, who has central heating or a conservatory and which newspapers are read,” “if you have a pet,” “shoppers’ grocery choices,” “whether you do the crossword” but also, more worryingly, “details of private pension plans, charity donations, political membership, illnesses and hobbies”.

And, so the Express would have us believe, “who you vote for”.

Now I know a little about the electoral system here. I know that the vote is an anonymous ballot. (I also know that the voting slips are, theoretically, tracable, but I also know that I could walk into a polling station and pretend to be anyone and take their vote, so that’s probably not useful information.)

If anyone is interested, the best quote in the article is from Lib Dem Andrew Stunnel, who said “It takes us a hundred years past 1984, far into the world of Big Brother.” So it takes us to 2084, then? What’s happening then? The Olympics, isn’t it? I wonder where they’ll be. Not Britain, of course, because doubtless the latest Diana inquiry will have ruled that gypsies and asylum seekers have pushed up the house prices so far that nobody could afford to stage the Olympic Games here. Because you know, everything you read in the Express is true.

And that’s the point, to me: I read that article and I thought, which is more likely? That the Daily Express have essentially made something up and called it news, or that the government are openly admitting to basically bribing people with taxes to vote how they’re told and no other news source has run the story?

Because I’d looked at The Times that day, and The Metro, and the BBC’s news website, and not one of them had so much as mentioned this. The Times ran with “Letter bomber was cyclist”, which was a bit of a surprise, but hardly on a par with “government demands to know where vegitarians tend to live so they can tax them differently”.

And the Express didn’t happen to mention where exactly they’d got this story, and nor did they interview any Labour party members for right-of-reply. So I think it’s pretty safe to assume this story is almost pure fabrication. Probably there’s a grain of truth in the middle, wrapped in layer upon layer of protective bullshit.

So here’s a couple of pointers for The Daily Express. First, if you’re going to make stuff up, make it convincing and if you’re going to publish genuine news, then make that convincing too because if you don’t I’ll assume it’s made up. Secondly, change your slogan.

Currently, the Express’ website runs with the slogan “The World’s Greatest Newspaper”, for which I think they could easily be sued. They’re not the world’s greatest newspaper. They are the world’s greatest source of dodgy conspiracy theories about dead princesses. They’re not even a newspaper by any reasonable defintion. They’re a propaganda sheet for what appears to be a cabal of morons intent on signing up their intellectual peers to their own rather scary viewpoint. (See, now we’re back on the telling-you-what-to-think routine.)

But well done to Wikipedia for finding the world’s most stereotypical Express front page.

As you can no doubt see, I have not only changed hosts, but also switched over to WordPress. I have managed, somehow, to import every single old post and comment from the old version of the site and categorise them automatically, except for the comments on the comics, because they were mostly spam anyway.

This was a pretty big job but I did it using my immense brain. Also, I used my less immense hands.

I’m going to customise the theme a bit, and tidy it up, and drag across the rest of the content. Also, a few things seem to have broken along the way, so if you spot any, please point them out to me, ideally by email, so I can fix them. Also, while I’ve put in a few categories and added some entries to them, do please let me know what categories you think should be added (i.e., anything I talk about a lot or anything that’s normally amusing when I do talk about it), or if there’s n entry that clearly belongs in a category but isn’t listed there then send me an email with the post’s URL and I’ll fix it. I might even give a couple of people the power to do this themselves, if I can figure out how. I’m a bit new at this WordPress malarkey.

Everybody in the world is a cretin.

Alright, not perhaps everybody. But 90% of them are. I can prove this simply by citing Sturgeon’s Law, but that would blow off no steam at all, so instead I shall type a long rant about them and then I shall go through it and remove every second instance of the word “fucking” and post it on my website.

It’s something I touched upon a few days ago, but I think it needs reiterating in more detail because apparently nobody listened: the BBC’s Have Your Say website.

This site purportedly allows users to have a debate on whatever subject the BBC feels we should discuss, but what actually happens is a moronic bickering match between ill-informed idiots with some of the most poorly hidden agendas I have ever seen. So you can imagine what happens when you combine it with that other great lightning rod of stupidity, debates about the dangers of passive smoking…

As the BBC have (wisely) closed the debate, I shall respond to some of the stupider comments here: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve complained about the post office before on this site. I mean, I think it’s pretty impressive that they run the service they do, but really, some of the things they get wrong are just shocking. In November, they delivered me a pile of mail for nextdoor. I went nextdoor to see if they’d got ours, as I was expecting some mail. They hadn’t. They’d got a pile of mail for the next house along (I can’t imagine what happened to any mail for them, as there would be no more houses left. Presumably it was dropped in the street where the next house would be), so I went to the other side, who’d apparently recieved no mail at all. I more or less gave up on ever getting that mail and had all my important documents redirected to my parents’ address where things usually arrive.

Look what landed on the area of floor where there was probably once a doormat:

This morning, this arrived. In case you’re reading this some time from now and there’s no date on this page, that’s February 14th, 2007. Slightly over fifteen weeks late.

Perhaps not that impressive, then.

An old fable that has been passed down for generations tells about an elderly man who was traveling with a boy and a donkey. As they walked through a village, the man was leading the donkey and the boy was walking behind. The townspeople said the old man was a fool for not riding, so to please them he climbed up on the animal’s back. When they came to the next village, the people said the old man was cruel to let the child walk while he enjoyed the ride. So, to please them, he got off and set the boy on the animal’s back and continued on his way. In the third village, people accused the child of being lazy for making the old man walk, and the suggestion was made that they both ride. So the man climbed on and they set off again. In the fourth village, the townspeople were indignant at the cruelty to the donkey because he was made to carry two people. The frustrated man was last seen carrying the donkey down the road.

Above text from: benjaminshell.com
Listen to audio version:
http://www.kidsavenueonline.com/farmer.html

However you choose to read the old fable, the point is this:

I just saw a man pushing what appeared to be an electric wheelchair along Lloyd Street North.

I choose not to judge. I choose merely to jeer at him behind his back on my blog.

This is a conversation I had a few days ago, with someone who was trying to convince me they were clever (so I’d give her back her steak knife):

“I was in all the top sets for everything at school. And I was voted post likely to grow a brain.”
I paused, unsure of what had just happened. “Sorry, most likely to what?”
“Grow a brain.”
I paused again to se if she’d figured this out, or to see if she was being ironic. Nothing. “…Meaning they didn’t think youhad one already?”

This time she paused. “That hurts.”
“Well, don’t blame me, I didn’t vote.”
“But you pointed it out!”

While I was trying to make sense of all of this a thought occurred to me, so I asked “How long ago was this?” and after a bit of probing I got an answer:

Two years ago.

I wonder how many times she’d used this story in the meantime…

There were two amusing vagina-related stories in the news lately which, were you not actively scanning the newspapers for vagina-related news as I now appear to, you may have missed.

The first was the simply brilliant Astronaut Story. Most people have read the gist of it: two female astronauts both loved the same male shuttle pilot, and one of them drove across America to, she says “talk to” the other. She was wearing a trenchcoat and carrying an air-rifle, so nobody really believes her. But those of you who read it in the broadsheets (and are probably thinking “that’s a pretty tenuous link to vaginas”, in which case you probably ought to reappraise the criteria by which you judge webpages) might not have read the best bit: in order to get there as quickly as possible, she decided that stopping for toilet breaks was impractical, so she stole a NASA-issue astronaut nappy (of the kind I think is used in shuttles when astronaut concentration is required for long periods) and wore it the whole way.

So now she’s in a trenchcoat and a nappy and brandishing a rifle. Should she be allowed is space? And if so, should she ever be allowed back from space?

The other (distinctly more vagina-related) story I noticed lately was one about the monologues of the same name.

Apparently, the story goes, an American town has forced a local theatre to change said title on their adverts (to the frankly ridiculous “The Hoo-Hah Monologues”), because a woman there was out with a small child and said child asked her what a vagina was.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say this poor child had a pretty rubbish upbringing. Partly because they’re American, but mostly because apparently the adults charged with raising the poor thing haven’t got the composure to discuss such basic matters of anatomy with their children.

Now I know it’s perhaps over the top to expect six-year-olds to be familiar with the reproductive system, but the child in question was a girl. How the hell can you raise a girl to the age where she’s asking that kind of a question and not be able to answer it in a polite and inoffensive way? She has a vagina! (Obviously.) Even if you’ve somehow managed to raise her thus far without ever referring to it, does it really matter that much if she knows what it’s called? What harm will that knowledge do? At least “vagina” is a polite term for it. Much better, surely, she learns that word than she asks someone at school what it’s called.

I think really this qualifies as overprotective, when you’re shielding your child from nouns.

Happy Valentine’s!

The following things are annoying me this week (aside from the National Express, whose long and pointless correspondance will get a Chatlog entry as soon as it’s complete, assuming it is ever complete):

1. Bad science journalism and the BBC’s Have Your Say section
2. People who sell scientific hardware solutions

First, the bad journalism thing. A rather excellent standup comedian called Matt Kirshen (who you won’t have heard of yet but I expect is headed for bigger things) recently directed me to Bad Science, a blog from the Guardian newspaper about how bad most science journalism is, which as you probably know, is something that does bother me. If you don’t believe me, look through the chatlog for The Final Straw or look up the ongoing argument on my Dave Hitt Is A Twat page. In fact, there is one item that I found on Bad Science that I’d already covered here: the Carex handwash adverts.

But the point is that we need someone like Ben Goldacre (who runs Bad Science) to roam the science debates on the BBC’s Have Your Say website and mark down all the stupid arguments, because as it is we can post comments, and recommend comments, but there’s no way to mark a comment as bad, so you end up with a load of highly recommended comments that are terribly compelling to some people but are patent gibberish to scientists or people experienced in whatever other field is relevant to the debate. And of course, once they have a few recommendations, they acquire some kind of apparent authority, as well as rising to the top of the page, and more people start recommending them, whereas rebuttals to them tend to drop off the page unnoticed. The system just doesn’t really work at all as a way of promoting debate or determining public opinion, at least, not informed public opinion.

My other science gripe this week, in case you’re genuinely that stupid that you’ve forgotten, is scientific hardware solutions you can buy, usually for thousands upon thousands of pounds.

I’ve been writing scientific software for a year now, and sometimes I wonder how much I could make doing it freelance. The problem is that as far as I can tell scientific hardware tends to be sold along the same business model as photocopiers, Parker fountain pens, printers, and games consoles: sell something very cheap and then sell ink or games or whatever at a massive markup. More money in the long run. The scientific hardware version of this seems to be that the hardware is sold cheaply but the software to use it or analyse the data is massively overpriced, and usually pretty shockingly poor.

Case in point being the FLIR infrared camera we’re using. I don’t know how much the camera cost, but I’m told that each copy of the analysis software costs £3000. And it’s shockingly bad, and requires we use Windows NT. I realise it’s running on a computer which I think is about 300MHz, but it does take about a minute to plot a line which I’ve managed to plot in Matlab with one command and in a short enough time that you don’t even notice the pause.

But of course, we can’t use my Matlab routine without spending two days converting the data into a format that takes up about 5 times as much disk space, then spending another week copying and converting it, so that FLIR can sell their advanced software that can do this for us — probably at the same achingly slow pace it does everything else — to any institution that doesn’t mind paying another three grand to save time.

And all this strikes me as a pretty stupid way of doing things. Partly because science is generally run on honesty and facts and I would have thought that would suggest selling each item for what it costs to build and distribute plus markup rather than following the strange and obtuse business tricks and tactics employed by people who sell videogames. Partly it’s because this means that a research institution that only uses one computer to analyse the data will pay so much less than an institution that uses many, even if they do the same experiment (or to flip that around into a more relevant concern, it means that to save money people will scrimp on the software — for example the FLIR system we use has a computer permanantly attatched to it, and therefore any time we want to use the analysis software we need to book the IR camera as well. But mostly it seems stupid because the software is so uniformly awful and the idea of paying thousands of pounds for it is pretty galling.

And that’s a problem with the way things seem to be sold in the field. I don’t know if this happens in other parts of science, but in dental research it’s very hard to buy a QLF machine, or an intraoral camera, or an IR camera. Hardly anybody seems to be interested in selling such things. They sell solutions, not products: they won’t sell you a camera, but they’ll happily sell you their latest image acquisition and archiving package, which comes with software and a camera that will often not work with any other software.

And the software they do give you is always highly incompatible, and rubbish at doing anything except following the exact procedure the manufacturers would like. The QLF software has a proprietary analysis algorithm in it, but you can’t just load an image and analyse it because it doesn’t expect anyone to do that. If the data isn’t in its own format it just can’t see it. It will only run with one particular graphics card that costs a thousand pounds apiece. And it won’t export data. Seriously. It can store data in its own impenetrable format, and it can export it as CSV, but only one record at a time. We have an entire study that’s done and uses the software and we’re actually thinking of emplying someone just to go through and get all the numbers out of it, because it’s going to be a mammoth task of repeatedly clicking the same things and none of us fancy doing it ourselves. At one stage we have the software designer round to ask him about this, and aside from accidentally revealing his master password on our projector screen we didn’t learn much. He promised to have a look at the source code and try to work out the file format so we could decode it, but he didn’t seem confident that he’d manage it and never got back to us.

And all of this is ludicrous, because science doesn’t work like that. It’s an evolving field, and what’s standard practice one year might be shown to be wrong the next year and shunned as being a bit backward the year after. It’s just not practical or useful to sell a product that can only be used in one specific way. That’s very limiting. It would seem to me far more sensible to put out a widely compatible product and give out the spec sheet for it so that we could compare them usefully and so that if we decide to do something with it slightly different to what the manufacturers were expecting we can do it directly rather than conning their software package into letting us do it. They’re far more interested in traping you into their product line than they are in helping you do research, and I think that’s a major problem. If the IR analysis software manual just had the file format of their obnoxiously opaque and bizarre SEQ files then we could do the same research five times as quickly.

The other problem, of course, with selling software rather than hardware is that if I buy the hardware, I can write my own software. I could probably go one better and sell that software. And I could undercut the official software because I’m not recouping money I lost selling expensive equipment.

I think scientists are mature enough to accept it if you’re up front about what your product costs. They know what they’re doing and they’ve done it before, and they’re not going to fall for stupid pricing tricks. Last time we looked at a camera the questions of how much the consumables cost and if it would work with our own software were asked before we even asked for a quote.

I think it’s something that really needs to change, because it seems that there’s an awful lot of time and money being wasted doing things this way.