Apathy Sketchpad

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This is just one sketch, but I can do more if it’s required.

Last night, Derren Brown did a rather excellent stunt where he appeared to have predicted the results of the National Lottery draw.

I can’t tell you how he did it, but I can tell you how I’d do it. If you don’t want to know, don’t read. Bear in mind I’ve never tried this, so I’ve not had that chance to work out the fine details.

The whole thing was shot with no audience and two cameras, which is one more camera and one fewer audience than I’d use if it was real, and one of the cameras (which I’ll call ‘camera 2′) was needlessly far away. (The camera that follows Derren into the studio I shall obviously call ‘camera 1′.)

So. Derren walks in, followed by camera 1. He gives his spiel, pointing out camera 2, strides over to the podium and TV, waves to camera 2, which gets some nice wide-shots of the setup. Then everyone breaks for tea.

Next, top-secret camera 3 is mounted on a tracking device, similar to the ones that power those ever-so-precise spotlights that spin around so impressively on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. It films the podium of balls for 10 minutes while nothing happens. (You could reuse camera 2, but for clarity I’m invoking a third.)

At precisely the same moment, shortly before broadcast, the video of the balls camera 3 took starts rolling in the editing room, and the same sequence of moves is started on the live camera so that the two feeds perfectly match up. This means the editor can cut between the pre-recorded balls and the live feed seamlessly.

When broadcast starts, camera 1 and Derren are in the next room. He then walks in, and camera 1 follows him. You cut in a shot taken with camera 2 earlier in the day (with live sound), which falsely establishes that (a) there is a second camera at the back of the room, and (b) there are no other cameras, and no clever moving camera mounts. You can’t tell camera 2 isn’t live because it’s too brief and far away to show lip-sync in detail. Now you have to get from the live camera 1 feed to the live camera 3 feed without an obvious cut. So camera 1 is held next to the mounting device, and Derren waves to the back of the room, where camera 2 used to be. This is an excuse to cut to another pre-recorded wide-shot. Partway through the wave (nice touch) you cut ‘back’ to the live camera 3 feed. From here on, the camera rotates and zooms slightly, but never moves, and the whole thing can go out live until the draw starts.

At this point, while all eyes are fixed on Derren or the podium, Andy Nyman robs a bank. Remember that this was billed as a feat of misdirection.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, Derren moves round to the other side of the TV, so nothing is anywhere near the podium with the balls. This allows the editor to cut in the left hand side of the image from the pre-recorded footage, masking somebody quietly taking out the dummy balls and putting in the correct ones, as they’re drawn. The edge of this mask is smooth, because a crisp join is obvious even when it’s perfectly done. When the balls are in place, you quickly fade out the pre-recorded mask. (With luck, camera motion will mask this.) Once you’re back totally live, Derren triumphantly walks over to the podium, and the program on camera 3 switches to a predefined ‘zoom in on the balls’ sequence.

I’m pretty convinced this is how he did it too, because the whole broadcast plays out how I’d expect it to. But I obviously wanted to get this out there before tomorrow’s show.

On other hands, I’ve heard a theory that camera 3 was fixed and the motion is a computer effect, which is equally plausible. It’d be more robust to things going wrong but probably less convincing if they don’t. I’m told if you look carefully you can see the screen-left ball jump slightly, but I don’t think the YouTube version above shows that clearly. I’ve also heard a lot of people whine about freezes and balls with ambiguous numbers (including, at one stage, a ball 59) and so forth. I’ve even seen one person complain that the camera motion froze momentarily who believed it was a computer effect.

It’s fascinating to me that the same fallacious ‘flaws’ people imagine in the moon landing videos are also applied to this kind of thing, which genuinely is fake and is therefore by definition already plausibly fake without inventing extra reasons. You want proof it’s fake? It’s a video of a man predicting a lottery draw. If that’s not enough for you then there’s something wrong.

According to the Guardian, Bristol council have taken to allowing the public to vote on which graffiti gets removed and which is good enough to be left as ’street art’. I think that’s pretty excellent. I love art when you least expect it. I think that’s exactly where art should be. Seeing it in a gallery makes it a bit clinical for my tastes, like seeing a gorilla in a zoo just sitting there doing nothing. Like it’s been put there with an implicit instruction saying ‘appreciate this or you’re an uncultured pleb’. It’s like trying to piss on demand.

photo credit: Daquella manera

No, I like my art to be out in the wild. I love Slinkachu’s tiny figures left in city centres. I love the paving slab outside Leeds Gallery with the phrase ‘YOU ARE A ROCK’ carved into it for no clear reason. I thoroughly enjoyed the melting writing someone did on one of Manchester University’s shoe bins with insulation tape. And I love the huge, elaborate murals randomly spray-painted on walls. The one on New Wakefield Street was amazing until it was heartlessly painted over earlier this year. That’s proper art — you can’t sell a mural, so what else could it be?

And I utterly object to anyone who says something isn’t art just because it’s spray-painted on a wall. I think that’s the most awful, pretentious snobbishness.

“The two words ‘graffiti’ and ‘art’ should never be put together,” said the art critic Brian Sewell. He added the council were “bonkers”. “The public doesn’t know good from bad.”

Now. Normally, of course, I’m the first person to berate the general public for their godawful taste in just about everything. Chart-topping bands are mostly dross, the top-rated TV shows are generally dreadful, and then there’s Peter Kay. But these are majority-popular things. They come out on top because they’re widely accessible and heavily promoted. Very few people, I think, genuinely consider The X-Factor or The Sound Of Laughter to be art. They just enjoy them and consume them on that basis.

“For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don’t know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn’t matter if they like it. It will result in a proliferation of entirely random decoration, for want of a better word.”

Oh, I do hope so.

My point is that ‘art’ is an impossible concept to pin down, and in attempting to solve that problem I think Sewell has decided that, as an expert on art, he gets to decide what’s art and what isn’t. From there it follows logically that he’s an expert in it. It’s circular reasoning, and it’s true only if you agree to his definition of, by which I mean ‘taste in’, art. Essentially, Brian Sewell is an expert in the kind of thing that Brian Sewell is interested in, just like everyone else, only he has the audacity to base his definition of the word ‘art’ around it.

…for Sewell, the [Banksy] exhibition’s popularity was another sign that “the art world has gone absolutely crazy”.

“Any fool who can put paint on canvas or turn a cardboard box into a sculpture is lauded. Banksy should have been put down at birth. It’s no good as art, drawing or painting. His work has no virtue. It’s merely the sheer scale of his impudence that has given him so much publicity.”

That, Brian, is part of the art.

Art only exists as a construct of the people who create and consume it. If all humans vanished overnight then art, like money, would cease to exist as such. The deserted world would just be littered with pointless canvases and engraved metal discs which would confuse the hell out of any visiting lifeforms. What wouldn’t happen is the aliens saying (in alien) ‘well, the haphazard spray-paint pattern on the wall of this building we can’t fathom out at all, but this colourful piece of fabric in a wooden rectangle inside… well, that I feel compelled to exchange a lot of these engraved metal discs for’.

But in Sewell’s world, it sounds like only his kind of people are allowed to be the creators or consumers of art. If anyone else does it, well, that’s just not art. And I really hate to put words like that into his mouth, because I suspect they’re unfair, but ultimately I can’t understand how deriding an entire movement like street art can ever be anything more than bigotry.

And I fully realise that I’ve been guilty of similar ways of thinking in the past, and as much as I like to think I’ve matured since then, very possibly I still am. And if so, I really hope you’ll all call me on it.

I am reading a thing in the Guardian about people’s opinions of TV stars’ pay. Or rather, I have read it, and now am writing a thing on Apathy Sketchpad about people’s opinions of TV stars’ pay.

Four out of five people thought the huge salaries paid to top TV stars were excessive, a YouGov poll of 2,000 people found. And Britain’s Got Talent judge Piers Morgan least deserved his high earnings, it found.

…

The TV personality whom the survey found most justified their pay was travelogue host Michael Palin, with 30% of respondents saying he was worth his salary. He was followed by QI host Stephen Fry, with 27% support, and Question Time host David Dimbleby, with 22%.

I’m not convinced of the relevance of this.

It seems to me that if 6% of the population think Piers Morgan is worth a million pounds a year, that’s still 3.6 million people. If they each watch 40 pence’ worth of adverts, that more than covers Morgan’s salary, and it’s clear that a large fraction of the remainder aren’t principled enough to boycott his output on those grounds.

photo credit: rhett maxwell

These figures are compared to Premiership footballers, of whose wages it is claimed that 93% disapprove. This is not true. What we know is that 93% of people will say in a survey that they disapprove, but their actions betray them. I’m pretty certain that between Premiership Plus, match tickets, replica strips and other assorted tat that Premiership clubs flog to their respective acolytes, far more than 7% of the population actively pay the wages that they claim not to condone. (7% of the population is 4.3 million people, and here is Wolfram|Alpha’s useful graph of how ‘7% of the population’ has changed with time.) I know they’ll say that they don’t approve of how the money is spent, but what the hell else do they expect the club to do with it? If it’s worth millions of people paying £973 a year to their chosen team, plus the ad revenue from everyone watching on TV, that dictates what the players who can draw those people in are worth paying. They may not deserve it, if for some reason your criteria for salary decisions is acts of great moral worth, but the fact is that they earn more than that for their employers and everyone who watches the matches is complicit in that. Were I a TV star I’d be rightly miffed if I reliably brought in millions for the station and earned some paltry normal-person wage. I’d want a company speedboat. All this tells us is that 93% of people earn less than Premiership footballers, and we already knew that.

Who cares if 79% of people think Jeremy Clarkson is overpaid? He’s not expected to appeal to everyone. If 21% of the population like someone then I should consider them very popular and well worth paying to hold on to. Who, come to that, cares if 74% of people think bankers are overpaid? I’m certain 74% of people don’t understand or care what bankers actually do. Their reckonings as to their entitlement to the lifestyle their profession still mostly affords them should be dismissed out of hand along with their post-pub theories about who would win in a fight between Chuck Norris and a rhinoceros. The rhino would kill him. Because it’s a rhino.

Ultimately, it matters not a jot what people think of TV stars’ salaries: anyone who will ever be in a position to decide them will be so because they understand that, pragmatically, the stars will work for whoever offers them most, so you should offer them as much as you can before it makes the profit margin too small to be worth the bother. (Obviously the mechanics are different with the BBC but the principle is the same.) Sure, it’d be lovely if doctors earned more than footballers and nobody watched shit TV shows presented by attractive and enthusiastic but otherwise loathsome simpletons, but the world doesn’t, won’t, and can’t ever work that way. You might as well conduct a survey and ask people if they approve of cancer or death or the eventual heat death of the universe. We have literally zero chance of eradicating any of these things, so what the hell is the use in YouGov pestering 2,000 people for their opinions of them?

How is the world a better place for the inclusion of this knowledge?

You probably already know this, but the science writer Simon Singh is currently being sued by the British Chiropractic Association for referring to chiropractic treatments of some conditions as ‘bogus’. You probably know that British libel law perversely assumes guilt until innocence is proven. (Sign this petition to change that.) You probably know that Judge Eady ruled in a preliminary hearing that ‘bogus’ means ‘deliberately fraudulent’, even though this is not what Singh meant, and that unless he can get this changed on appeal he has little hope of winning the case. This is, of course, roughly the same as if someone sued you for calling them a bitch and the judge ruled that you had to pay £100,000 if you couldn’t prove the plaintiff was of the genus canis.

I assume that you know all this because you are reading a blog, and at that a blog which frequently mentions science and political issues. You are exactly the kind of person I would expect to know exactly this kind of thing. Let’s take a step back and see what you’d know if you got your news from newspapers and TV.

The Guardian, whose paper carried the in-no-way-offending comment in the first place, have published precisely one follow-up that I have found:

Singh said he would like to fight it, because he is unhappy about the interpretation put on his words. “But there is a bigger issue about the state of our libel laws and how easy it is to be a science journalist or any journalist,” he said.

They elected not to mention what that wider issue is or that the interpretation put on Singh’s words was totally unreasonable, although they did mention that they bankrolled his legal defence (as they did for Ben Goldacre when Matthias Rath sued him) – frankly if newspapers do stop being able to make money then the Guardian should consider applying for charitable status. They do more good than many groups that have it.

The Times has published, as far as I can find, exactly one sentence on the subject, which was totally uncritical of the case and which they used to make Singh sound like a bad person and to put words in his mouth:

On Thursday the [Edinburgh Skeptics] society is addressed by Dr Simon Singh, the author who is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association for his dismissals of the efficacy of chiropractise.

The Telegraph have not mentioned it, nor have the Independent. BBC.co.uk has nothing on it, as does channel4.com. Bizarrely, Sky News can’t sort search results by date so I have no idea whether they’ve deigned to mention it. (The above searches were performed with the sites’ own search functions, so they’ve only themselves to blame if I’ve missed anything.)

That’s a bit crap, considering this is a story about newspapers. The Telegraph, having exhausted all the abuses of the Parliamentary expenses (which a Guardian journalist did all the legwork for), have set about listing everything else MPs have claimed for and trying to insinuate a scandal around each one where generally none exists, and yet don’t apparently have room for even one article about a genuine scandal that is representative of a massive and unwarranted threat of litigation that hangs over them every time they publish any kind of comment piece.

I’ve said before that I get my news from blogs, Twitter, friends and the Internet. I said at the time that newspapers were still a vital primary source, but they’re just not. We know about this from Nature, NewScientist, nerds on Twitter, blogs and so forth, not from newspapers — despite it being about them. The same was true of the planned law to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act — despite their willingness to cash in on the fruits of that victory.

We don’t need the newspapers any more. Clearly we can do this on our own.

Here is a useful table to aid your satirical endeavours. Just pick your topic and your aspect of pigginess, and look up the appropriate dismal pun.

I feel good that I can contribute so much to this situation, with the unwitting help of everyone on Twitter. I forget exactly who, but since it’s pig/disease puns, it seems reasonable to blame @bengoldacre, @krypto, @ArianeSherine and whichever lunatic that started #NameThatFlu hashtag.

Dear Microsoft,

I am writing in reply to your recent correspondence, reproduced below:

	Dear Windows Live User, We are contacting you regarding your communication preference settings for Windows Live and MSN. Currently, your settings do not allow Microsoft to send you promotional information or survey invitations about Windows Live and MSN. We would like to communicate important product updates to you, so if you would like to change your settings, please visit your account profile hereto change your preferences. Sincerely, The Windows Live Team Note: You can also change your Account settings by going to your browser and typing in: http://account.live.com. After logging-in to your account, look for ‘Additional options’ and click ‘Marketing preferences’. Then uncheck the top preference box and click ‘Save’. Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more, please read our online Privacy Statement. Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond WA 98052

Fuck off.

Yours faithfully,

Andrew

x

Since you are reading an internet site, I’m going to assume you know that Facebook recently changed its look a bit. It did so for several good reasons, and generally the site is better for it. That, of course, has utterly failed to stop loads of idiots crying about it purely because they think nothing should ever change. Here, for example, is a TechCrunch post claiming, falsely, that 94% of users dislike the changes. This is based on a survey Facebook did. There are a number of reasons why it’s not interesting or useful information. The most interesting is probably that polling users is actually a massively unhelpful way of finding out what they like. People will report one behaviour and actually exhibit another, or they will report one belief or preference but act on an entirely different one. The only way to test these things is to run both options and see which is most successful. A less interesting reason that the 94% figure is nonsense is the survey’s response: 800,000 people voted, but Facebook claims to have over 175,000,000 users, so it would be more accurate to say that 0.3% of users hate the new look and 99.7% of users don’t care enough to register an opinion. Certainly I didn’t vote, and I rather like the new look. Also, people have only had a few days to get used to the new design, so it’s like asking someone from Sheffield if they’d rather use chopsticks or a fork.

This, in case you have forgotten, is what is now known as ‘The Old Facebook’ (source):

This is what the angry shouting Facebook Luddites are demanding be restored, despite the fact that when it was new, the same people hated it and demanded the return of the previous one. I don’t even remember what that one looked like.

Now that I’m used to the new look, I find the above rather cluttered. There’s a pointless separate feed for status updates, and the feed prioritises information like ‘Cassandra wrote on Dan’s wall’ when the real information is the message itself. The New Facebook prioritises that instead (unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly good to demonstrate this with on my feed at the moment):

This is, of course, just stolen wholesale from Twitter, and in some aspects too obviously so. (See also, the results page of Yahoo! Search, which looks offensively Google-like.) But it’s clean, and clear, and simple, which are important. It’s basically fine. That’s why 99.7% of people don’t apparently care about the change. But as with the last redesign, there’s a subtler change under the hood that goes along with it. Facebook was getting massively complicated. It needed simplifying, so now it’s almost like a richer version of Twitter (although the differences in implementation mean that in practice the two sites are really not much like each other).

The problem is that that’s not finished. It has to change more. The status updates are basically gone — I found that there’s now no distinction between updating your status and writing on your wall — but this means that while you can write long treatises on other peoples’ walls, you’re limited to Twitter-style bullet-points on your own. You’re expected to write a Note if you want more space, and the whole thing doesn’t feel coherent. Similarly, the ‘wall-to-wall’ thing (which has never worked in any real sense) still needs work. You can’t post the same thing to multiple walls, and while you can ‘comment’ on someone’s post on their own wall, the standard reply to their posting on your wall is to post on theirs, and that results in a limited one-to-one semi-public conversation with no clear links to tie it together. They’ve actually stolen some of Twitter’s most annoying flaws. They need to tie the whole thing together, remove the vestigal traces of the old ’status’ line (which frankly never made any sense), allow the same post to appear on multiple walls, and build a real wall-’reply’ feature. As part of that, they also need to deprecate the status-’comments’ system and tie up the ‘notifications’ thing, because I get annoyed at having two separate feeds.

Also, if Facebook are still intent on having ‘groups’, they need to make them more prominent: group discussions should appear in your home feed. Otherwise, it takes too long to check them all and conversation dies. It’s meant to be a social network — the groups are really not social. People use it as a way of endorsing statements, and there are far better ways of doing that. Lastly, the emails they send out when you get a message or a wall post are currently ‘from’ Facebook ‘re:’ John sent you a message, when they should be ‘from’ John ‘re:’ do you want to go to the cinema. This would integrate with Thunderbird and GMail’s threading features and be generally faster and easier to use. It would also blur the line slightly between email and Facebook messages — if I could reply to a Facebook message by replying to the message in GMail, that would be great. (If that happened, I’d also like to be able to have Facebook send me my own messages so that GMail would have a copy.)

The philosophy behind this design seems to be similar to a ‘rich-media Twitter’, and if they pursue that idea then Facebook could become a very friendly and easy site to use. Simple, clean, and consistent. And basically, nothing like this fucking stupid suggestion from Holy Taco:

This is a cutting satire of Facebook’s increasing clutter, which would perhaps be pretty clever were it not for the fact that there is now less stuff on the Facebook home page than there ever has been. It looks more consistent and coherent, and has clearly made steps in the direction diametrically opposite to what this alleged spoof version is attempting to parody.

In summary, if you prefer the old Facebook then that’s very probably reasonable. But if your reasons for holding it are sufficiently dumb then it absolutely is possible for an opinion to be flat out wrong. Whoever designed the above image, for example, hates the new Facebook for reasons that demonstrably make no sense, and while he (I presume he is a he) is quite entitled to do so, we would be well advised to ignore him until he starts talking sense.