Apathy Sketchpad

Today I integrated my Facebook events into my Google Calendar. My blog is integrated into my Facebook profile, and my Facebook account is integrated into my Google Reader account, as are a host of other sites. My Google Reader account (which also takes data from my Simpy account) then plugs neatly back into my blog. This is achieved despite no apparent cooperation between Facebook and Google. In fact, there’s very little evidence that they’ve ever heard of each other, much less spoken.

It’s all done using standardised formats. Facebook outputs its events in iCal format that Google can parse. My blog produces an RSS feed Facebook can read, and Facebook and Simpy both produce RSS feeds Google can also parse. Then that produces an HTML snippet that sits nicely in my blog.

And because this is all done in simple, easy to read ASCII files, it means I can produce my own RSS feeds — the CMS I created for RealVG, for example, has literally an RSS feed for every contingency. I think this kind of thing is one of the best innovations the Internet has made in a long time. Simple, universal, text-based file formats that can be parsed by anyone with a decent programming ability make it very, very easy for disparate websites to work together almost seamlessly. That’s led to a massive increase in the number of interesting things on the internet. The whole “social bookmarking” thing, for example. Sites like Simpy and del.icio.us have made it easier than ever to find interesting things to read online — if Ben Goldacre reads a webpage and thinks “that’s interesting” then with two clicks of his mouse he can put it on his del.icio.us site, and then Google will automatically grab that for me and show me it the next time I log in. In much the same way I can click a couple of buttons while reading an interesting site and it will appear on the right hand side of my blog for anyone to read. If you use the RSS feed attached to this feature, then sites I find interesting could start automatically appearing in your email, your Google Reader, or your vBulletin forum.

The internet is becoming far more efficient thanks to this kind of thing. What annoys me now is sites that don’t bother with this kind of feature. It’s very easy to add and it makes your site hundreds of times more useful. It also means that it’s easier to make it work with screen readers and other disability-friendly applications, or mobile phones, or whatever. These formats have been very well adopted, and that’s good. xHTML is a similar thing; if standards are used properly and consistently then making good browsers for small-screen devices or low-bandwidth devices, or screen-readers, or whatever is easy.

But it’ll only work if people use it. So do please use these things.

Yesterday, as I walked from Leeds Station to my house at about twenty past six in the evening, I passed a large group of bikes. These were being ridden a little faster than walking pace in a large group, taking up all three lanes of the City Centre Loop*. They also had a banner, which said “we are not stopping traffic; we are traffic”. All in all, I thought, a nice protest against the way cyclists are treated by motorists, especially since we really ought to be encouraging them, rather than just trying to scare motorists away with labyrinthine one-way systems.

(Really; if the City Centre Loop doesn’t form the shape of the dread sigil Odegra then it had damn well better have David Bowie in the middle lording over all the goblins (read: the city council. I have no guilt about referring to the council as goblins — honestly, you leave for one year and suddenly you end up with a BNP guy in the council. Blasted public, can’t take them anywhere. Not really sure what the BNP guy think’s he’ll achieve; city councillors have very little input into national immigration law and the BNP have no other policies…)

The cyclists were also ringing their little bells which was really a rather feeble bit of protest, but it did sound exactly like the shitty ‘instrumental’ bit towards the end of Queen’s Bicycle Race. But my favourite bit was the guy stuck behind them in the Toyota Almeira (not the character from 24) who wastrying to make his own political statement, which I think was “I’ve got a bigger vehicle than you so I’m just going to barge through”. The cyclists just boxed him in and talked at him. Really there’s a fine line, though, between trying to squeeze through traffic and attempted murder, so in the end he backed down and turned off the Loop at the next opportunity.

I thought the whole thing was great. I like protests, I do. I like them in general, even when I have no strong feelings about the subject of the protest. I think it shows that peope think about stuff and care about things, and I like a well-done protest like I like a well written song or a well made film. There’s work goes into them, and imagination, and if they’re done well, that shines through.

It made me smile.

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*For those outside the city, the City Centre Loop is the one way system in Leeds city centre. It forces all traffic to go round the city clockwise. If you’re going that way it’s great because you get anywhere up to four lanes to choose from, but if you want to get to anywhere in the other direction it forces you to drive right round and make a long trip to go a short distance. This was done to reduce traffic.

A while ago I was bullied into joining Facebook. And I’m glad I did, because it’s fantastic.

Facebook, for those who aren’t members, is a “social networking” site. You make a page for yourself, then you add friends to your list. In that sense, it’s just like MySpace, but the difference is that MySpace is shit and Facebook is fantastic. MySpace gives you a little page to write on and a way to send messages, and a contact list, and that really is it. That’s just called “the Internet”. Google give me all that, with nicer layouts, and don’t try to play Slipknot at me every time I visit a page.

Facebook is more for Real Life Friends. If you tell Facebook you’ve got a new girlfriend then it’ll tell all your friends for you. And you can put your address and phone number on it and be sure only your friends can see them. It’s very useful, and it’s been great for my social life because I get invited to more things through Facebook. Mostly I think this is because it gives you a list of all your friends when you make an event and lets you choose who to invite. My last party I invited people I’d never have thought (or been able) to invite without it, and consequently had a fantastic time.

Some people say Facebook is a privacy concern. Some people are idiots. They’re mostly the same people who say Google are a privacy concern. (Not really sure why I’m hyperlinking Google, but it seems polite since I did MySpace and I hate them.)

I can see why people might be concerned about Google. They have all my emails, via Google Mail. Doubtless these contain my address, bank details and so forth somewhere. (They know my bank details anyway because I use AdWords, but let’s pretend I don’t.) They also know what things I’ve been searching for, my favourite websites (via Google Reader), my web history (if not by Google Web History then by AdWords tracking cookies), and so forth. And that concerns people.

I’ve never understood the problem with tracking cookies. They don’t know who you are; they just know that this particular computer has visited website A and website B, and if that lets them know that the person sat in front of it is more likely to want product A than product X then that’s good, surely? It means I’m more likely to see adverts for things I want, which is good for me as it lets me know about awesome things I might want to buy, and it’s good for the advertisers as it means they get more clicks, and it’s good for me as it means I have to see fewer adverts to keep my favourite sites in profit. Everyone wins, and nobody has any significant privacy concerns.

And sure, Google index all my emails, but all email providers do that. And sure, a computer scans them for advert-inspiring words, but it’s a computer. It can’t read; it just executes its little programme. The only valid concerns with any of Google’s services are what happens if they get hacked, and that they have the capability, just like all search engines, browser plugins, ISPs and email providers, to monitor your Internet use. But really, don’t you think they have better things to do than spy on strangers?

Much the same is true of Facebook. People say it’s creepy having all that information about yourself on the Internet, but it’s not really “on the Internet”, is it? It’s on one server, which nobody can access without your express permission. And Facebook only knows what you tell it, and only shares what you let it. If you know what you’re doing with Facebook then it’s of no concern, and if you don’t know what you’re doing with something, learn before you use it.

And of course that meant I had no taskbar.

Thankyou, Microsoft, most helpful.

Original (11th April 2007):

The other day I read that some areas of England were planning a trial run of a variation of Megan’s Law (or Sarah’s Law, depending on which poor innocent girl you want to slander by attaching her name to this monstrously awful idea). The day after I read that no, actually, they weren’t, because (as I mentioned) it is a monstrously awful idea. This proves The Sun dead wrong, but then, most things that happen do.

Largely on the chance that some of you have been mad, in a coma, or back in time for the last few years, I should probably explain that Megan’s Law is the law the American government brought in (after a large amount of public pressure) which allows people to find out details of sex offenders living nearby. It is named after a young girl who was murdered, and the British variant spelling “Sarah’s Law” was named after a broadly similar case here. In some cases it tells you a limited amount of information (say, how many live near you and roughly where) and in some cases it will give you a name and an address and loan you a crowbar, a shovel and a flaming torch just in case you’re feeling up to a little vigilante violence.

That is, of course, the Unnervingly Massive Drawback with the idea, but it is still all worthwhile if the advantages outweigh the Unnervingly Massive Drawback. So, for the sake of balance, the advantages are…

There are no advantages.

There is nothing — nothing — to be gained from such a law. Supporters of the law will tell you that it helps protect people, but this is patently untrue. For one thing, there is the repeated claim on the news that the law simply “drives paedophiles underground”. That’s not to say that they were ever terribly open about it, but it means that they just stop telling the police where they live and then the police can’t pass the information on. There’s no real evidence that the law has this effect (although the amount of sex offenders who cooperate with the police is about 97% in the UK and while figures vary between states in the US, it’s uniformly far lower than ours), but nor is there any evidence that it doesn’t, nor indeed is there any evidence that is achieves anything very much at all, with the possible exception of making a few people feel safer.

Here is a report from the NSPCC on the subject, and they — and please bear in mind when I tell you this that the NSPCC is an organisation whose sole agenda is to protect children and therefore probably don’t care that much about the rights of paedophiles — say this:

There is currently insufficient proof that the community notification practices of Megan’s Law makes children safer [sic]. … Policy-makers should ensure that sex offender management policies are based on objective evidence of what makes children safer and not on popular responses to high-profile sex crimes such as Megan’s Law, however tempting it is.

And I can see how it’d be tempting. A lot of people seem to want the law, probably because of mindless tabloid pap like The Sun endorsing it, but also because of news stories like this ‘news’ story about things a victim’s mother said after the event, in which people whose opinions are obviously biased are paraded as news — with the implication presumably being that their closeness to the case in question lends their opinions some kind of experience and hence authority, when in fact it makes their judgement clouded and their opinions predictable and irrelevant. Nor does it help that most people, including myself up until I started writing this, are wholly ignorant of existing legislation to disclose information about paedophiles to communities, on a discretionary case-by-case basis. They hear about Megan’s Law and assume that the current situation is the other extreme. And nobody corrects them.

For their part, the Tories seized upon the opportunity to ask, almost Have I Got News For You style:

Could the Home Office be trusted to correctly identify paedophiles?

A terribly clever bit of satire, yes, but hardly intelligent debate. I think the general consensus is that the government should probably fix the Home Office rather than legislate around it.

But to my mind, all of this misses the key point. (The key point, by the way, having nothing to be with paediatricians.) Say I go into Subway hoping to have a footlong Chicken Teriyaki with sweet onion sauce, lettuce, tomato, (trust me; I’m going somewhere with this) peppers and onions, on Honey Oat bread. Say then that the probably-Chinese girl serving me tells me that they have run out of Honey Oat bread and only have Italian Herb And Cheese. Do I then say “oh, never mind, then” and walk out?

No. Not unless I’m in a very unusual mood. I went in there because I was hungry, not because I wanted that particular bread.

So why should we imagine that when a suburban single mother, trying to do the best for her children, discovers via some new law that there is a paedophile living near her house and locks her young daughter away from the world, that the paedophile in question will do anything other than pick on someone else? These people have to live somewhere, and I don’t honestly believe there’s a community in the country where someone could live in peace if people knew they were a convicted paedophile (and if there is I wouldn’t fancy living there after a few years of Megan’s Law; they’d flock to it — it’d probably end up having more paedophiles than streetlights). And then you still have someone being abused, only you also have a load of other poor girls trapped in their homes 24/7, house prices constantly bouncing up and down as the paedophiles move about*, random mob attacks on anyone who lives near or walks past the paedophile’s house, and the illusion of safety. How is that better?

The only answer I can see to that (rhetorical) question is that, from the point of view of a parent (which from a democratic standpoint is a pretty important point of view given the number of parents around), it’s easy to feel that if Megan’s Law were implemented, you could at least make your children safer, and honestly, I would never criticise a parent for wanting to protect their own children, even if it did mean just spreading the danger around everyone else’s. It’s not exactly socially responsible, but I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t do the same.

But that’s a basis for deciding where to let your kids play, who they can see, and what time they have to come home. It is not a basis for lawmakers to legislate on.

I hope the latest “ruling out” of Megan’s Law sees an end to all this stupidity. Unfortunately, it appears that it probably isn’t, at least, not in the eyes of the tabloid-reading, ITV Play-phoning, semi-lobotomised C2DE types. There is, right now, a petition on the government’s new e-petitions website in favour of the ridiculous law. The text of the petition (which at present seems to have run for a little over a month and gained a rather sad 28 signatories) reads as follows:

We are fed up with the threat of paedophiles having the protection of the law as they do at present. We demand that you allow the public the fundamental right to feel protected and safe. The government has a duty to afford this to us and are currently failing spectacularly in this by allowing Paedophiles to integrate freely and anonymously in our neighbourhoods. We can legally have ASBOS publicised and are made aware of petty criminals who may damage our cars and windows, but when it comes to protecting the most precious thing that we all have we are forced to live in ignorance and danger. GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER MR BLAIR/BROWN/REID .WE WANT SARAH’S LAW NOW. THIS WILL NOT GO AWAY.

Aside from the shaky grasp of punctuation (which I know I over-react to, but I do feel these things are important if you’re petitioning a world leader), this demonstrates several brain defects, most notably that as ASBO is a short-term punishment given to young minor offenders. It will not trigger vigilante action. The publication does not continue for the rest of the offender’s life. It is superficially similar, but not actually similar. Alas, a large portion of people operate on a purely superficial level and so these arguments can carry a lot of weight.

The bottom line, to me, is that if you think that someone who has been convicted of child abuse can ever re-enter society then you cannot support Megan’s Law, and if you thing that someone who has been convicted of child abuse cannot ever re-enter society, then surely you think they should be dead, castrate or in prison, in which case Megan’s Law is pointless.

At no point on the spectrum does Megan’s Law become a good idea.

Update (24th April 2007):

Look, see, this is just what I’m talking about. How does this add to our understanding of the case? The father just wants to see someone punished, and as much as he won’t admit or realise it himself, I can’t imagine he really cares who it is. I think the same thing is true in court; whenever you see a trial on TV (or more usually a dramatised trial since cameras aren’t allowed in UK courtrooms, at least, not while there’s a trial going on) you always see the prosecution lawyer impressing on the jury how horrible the crime was; how inhuman the actions; how important it is that the jury prosecute the perpetrator. This is a cruel and intellectually offensive tactic; they’re implicitly equating “the perpetrator” with “the defendant” and they’re trying to instill in the jury the same feelings as Lucie’s father has: that someone has to be punished. They’re trying to make the jury angry, and they know full well the jury only has one possible outlet for that, short of a punch-up in a sequestered hotel. I don’t think that kind of argument should be allowed in court.

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*Presumably they would eventually set up a sort of insider property trading racket this way, whereby people buy houses near paedophiles, then sell them when they move away and the local property prices recover, although the paedophiles themselves would necessarily be buying high and selling low and would probably start demanding a cut. Could be a nice little earner, especially since they’d be exempt from capital gains tax. Sometimes I worry about the way my mind is wired up.

I work, ultimately, for Colgate. I’m part of a research group whose task is to find new ways to diagnose various tooth ailments and run clinical trials to test new Colgate products’ abilities to prevent or treat them (or sometimes, to debunk similar research done by rival toothpaste companies, since that’s how science works these days, apparently). The aim is to make sure Colgate always has some new thing to sell you to make your teeth better. And I think we’re fairly good at that. And not just us; all the companies are — people’s teeth are far better now than they were in the middle ages. But sometimes I wonder if we’re onto a loser here, as a society.

Capitalism is good, of course, in general. It seems to keep most people alive and gets most of them contributing. And those that don’t are forced to wear hoodies and populate the next generation with ridiculously named children (as is my understanding). But here we are pumping millions into developing incrementally better toothpastes and other companies spend just as much slightly improving shampoos and cosmetics and what-have-you, and I can’t help feel that if the money and equipment and scientific knowledge mankind currently pours into the quest to discover the absolute best moisturising cream had been put towards research into, say, curing cancer, we might well have cracked it by now.

Trouble is, not that many people have cancer. Everyone has teeth, practically, and those that don’t can be sold Polygrip. There’s no money in bettering society. There’s lots of money in bettering society’s hair. The same goes for things like football: you can make more money spending ten million pounds on a squad of players than you will spending it on medical research.

You could probably fix that if you got all countries to agree a massive tax on all payments to sports stars, say 90%, but that would kill the small-scale game. Ultimately, though, this doesn’t concern me, because the fact is we have to die of something and cancer is as good a way as any. If we cure that, and prevent heart disease, then people’s bones will give out. If we stop that, they’ll all go mad as they approach 170. Cure that and they’ll just think of another even more ingenious way to die, like succumbing to trivial illnesses like the common cold or a bad haircut aged 234. Or their lungs will give out. Or their digestive system will pack in.

If we could keep everyone totally healthy all of the time, nobody would ever die in accidents, and accidents would be pretty rare — I’d be more careful if I was going to miss out on 500 years of life than if I’m going to miss 50. You’d have to start putting people down when they hit a certain age. And of course, everyone would get all up in arms when it was a celebrity. Imagine what would happen if the headline one day was “DAVID TENNANT APPROACHING 200, DEATH SCHEDULED SATURDAY“. No, that would never work.

Of course, the government could hand out extra life then as payment for certain things (such as services to one’s country, or inventing some wonderful new machine, or making a large anonymous donation to the Labour party). They could give an extra 25 or 50 years, or even keep all the big achievers alive forever in a vast underground bunker or special island or something. And then you could have some crazy murderer get loose there or something; that would make a great film. You could have someone a bit like Bono, and some genius inventor (for preference, played by John Rhys-Davis), and a great charitable type who was against any violence against the murderer. Oh, and you’d need to have some great psychologist or something who’d studied the murderer before. You always need that guy.

Hmm. This has rather carried itself away from my original point, whatever exactly that was.

See, this is why I never get things done. I start doing them and end up plotting great films which never get made. If one did start production I feel sure I’d go off at a tangent part-way through and end up discovering something of great scientific importance. But try telling that to a film producer. Which brings me back to my original point — how much money is spent on films (which doesn’t usually appear to make them any better) and not on important things.

I know. I’m as surprised as you are.

A couple of weeks ago, I discovered Google Reader. It is, in a nutshell, an RSS reader. It powers the little “shared links” panel on the right of my blog, but by main purpose, it collects updates from a whole bunch of sites — the BBC, Google, Facebook, Bad Science, Ben’s blog, xkcd, The Onion, The Dilbert Blog, and so forth — and gives them all to me in a big ol’ list.

This of course saves me a lot of time. There are still sites, forums mostly, that I have to check manually, and a great many of the updates it gives me do not interest me. But nevertheless, it’s a great timesaver. This has massively reduced the temptation to surf the web aimlessly at work, on account that I can now check all my regular sites in a couple of minutes, and it has also meant that I sometimes see things I’d otherwise not have seen.

Some websites let me read all their content this way and that seems odd as I never have to visit those sites any more. My visit won’t register, except as an occasional RSS query from Google’s servers, and nobody will know if a human (like myself) has read that.

But it does mean that I can’t easily kill time at home on the internet. Although this, in turn, means I venture further afield when I do and use the web properly. So it’s swings and roundabouts, really. But I’m not going to stop using Google Reader in a hurry. It’s quite marvellous. Google generally is.

Truth be told, I’m a bit of a Google addict. I use Google Search, Google Homepage, Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Documents And Spreadsheets, Google Talk, Google AdWords, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google SketchUp, Google Desktop and probably some other stuff I’ve forgotten. And they’re all great. So I’m not about to complain. I have no concerns at all for my privacy. From Google or Facebook. Because I know what I’m doing.

Privacy concerns are things that happen when you use information services you aren’t smart enough to use properly.

One thing I do really like about this format is that I can write a strip and just keep changing it until the last minute. The Health And Danger executive was never originally in this one, and honestly I don’t think it would have been funny without him (any debate as to whether it’s funny with him there notwithstanding).

As you may have gathered, I’m still experimenting with how best to produce these strips. I’ve got the production time down pretty low now.