Spotted this on Twitter. It’s five years old, but I think it’s great!
And I liked the comment below it by Kevin Leroux:
Marty! You’ve got to get Joseph and Mary to kiss at the Bethlehem Ball tonight or it’s all ruined!
Author Archives: qsf
The best nativity scene?
A new perspective?
Like everyone else, I’ve been having a bit of a play with ChatGPT. There have been some nice examples recently of people asking it questions and getting answers that are grammatically correct, well-presented, completely plausible, and completely wrong.
That didn’t happen to me. There was one question I felt I ought to ask it, and it gave a mostly correct response, though its description of the Trojan Room wasn’t quite right. Overall, though, not bad. But it was the last sentence that took me by surprise:
Well, yes, I suppose it was a surveillance system, though no human has used that phrase to me before when describing it!
Perhaps it’s only natural, though, that a machine should think of things chiefly from the point of view of the coffee pot?
Heresy
Paul Graham is a writer I’ve long admired.
I remember hearing him speak at one of Tim O’Reilly’s original ‘Foo Camps’ in California, and, in that small group setting, he told us about some research he’d been doing, and was drawing some interesting conclusions – but he had stopped because he realised he’d never be able to publish it.
If it were true, it would have general interest, but he discovered (late in the process) that it would also apply disproportionately to certain ethnic groups and would therefore probably be branded as racist, even though he had had no knowledge of the connection with ethnicity when he started researching it. So he stopped working on it, and turned his mind to other things.
I wonder if he had this in mind when he wrote this excellent essay on the modern concept of heresy.
“A heresy”, he says, “is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime — one that makes some people feel not merely that you’re mistaken, but that you should be punished.”
Here’s an excerpt:
For example, when someone calls a statement “x-ist,” they’re also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is true or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That’s one of the reasons they’re used: to end a discussion.
If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they’re admitting to banning the truth. That’s obvious enough that I’d guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it’s easy to show that they’re mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.
The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn’t work that way. The same statement can’t be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
It’s nicely written, and he very carefully avoids mentioning any specific examples of modern ‘heresies’, because, “I want this essay to work in the future, not just now.”
Worth reading and considering carefully.
Thanks to John Naughton for the link.
Unblocked?
One of the great benefits of the internet, of course, is its ability to give you a smug sense of satisfaction when you find others who agree with your point of view. This can be further enhanced after a short period if you feel that historical events have actually proved you were right all along.
So powerful is this effect that I’ve just been to check whether the domain IToldYouSo.com was still available. But it wasn’t. “Well”, you’re probably saying, “I could have told you that…”
I can’t help wondering whether, if you added it up on a global scale, the tears shed in recent days over the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange have been balanced by all the small self-affirming boosts for those of us who always felt this cryptocurrency stuff was too good to be true, and are now experiencing emotions somewhere between Schadenfreude and “There but for the grace of God…”!
The key technology behind most cryptocurrencies is, of course, the blockchain: a distributed ledger consisting of entries that are like the laws of the Medes and Persians; once written, they cannot be changed. What’s more, this system doesn’t require you to trust Medes, Persians or anyone else to maintain it because this ledger is distributed over many tens of thousands of independent machines. It’s often described as a zero-trust system.
It’s particularly appealing to conspiracy theorists who distrust all big corporations and governments, and also to those who live in regimes that are genuinely untrustworthy, or where the rule of law is not well-established. Once your purchase, contract, will, marriage certificate, patent application or whatever is recorded on a blockchain, there’s theoretically nothing anybody can do to get rid of that record. I’m reading Nineteen Eighty-Four again at the moment, and one of the keys to The Party’s absolute power in that book is their ability to rewrite history at any time, and erase all evidence of having done so. Not so with blockchains!
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Especially if you ignore for now the fact that most implementations turned out to be phenomenally power-hungry to run. It is a clever technology, and quite apart from the ridiculous amounts of cash that have been converted to and from cryptocurrencies and similar gambles like NFTs, huge amounts have also been invested in startups that are building things using blockchain technologies.
But there’s a problem.
In its first 14 years, at least, despite vast amounts of interest and investment, it’s been very hard to identify more than a small handful of real use cases of the blockchain. (The Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits is run by very smart friends of mine, and may well prove to be an example of a great application.)
But in general, yes, there are lots of things you can build using Distributed Ledger Technologies (to give the more formal generic term), and there are many systems that would probably be better if they were built that way, but it almost always turns out to be much easier just to use a database and trust somebody! If you don’t want to trust any individual organisation, then you can create an industry-wide standards body or something similar to run your database.
Sometimes you might use an irreversible ledger, but again, if you can just trust somebody to look after it, you can avoid all that nasty messing about with the complexity and environmental impact of the proof-of-work algorithm: the normal way of avoiding the need for trust.
All of the above is a very long introduction to Tim Bray’s interesting article about how Amazon’s AWS team, providers of the largest computing facilities in the world, basically came to the same conclusion about blockchains as I did, which made me feel smug.
History, of course, may tell a different story, but I’ll have edited this blog post by then, because it’s in a database.
Thanks to John Naughton and Charles Arthur, both of whom linked to Tim’s article.
Un mot juste
I came across a pleasing but unusual usage of a common English word today:
“Mother was urgent that the marriage should take place soon.”
This is a somewhat archaic but perfectly valid sentence. If somebody urges something, they are urgent about it, in the same way that someone who hesitates is hesitant.
But you’ll have to have a pretty good dictionary to find references to that usage; my Concise OED only hints at it, and you have to go to a more substantial version, such as the Shorter OED, to get an actual example of it being used that way.
I know that one of the reasons you read Status-Q is to appear more erudite at evening parties, so I thought you might wish to impress your friends by adopting this turn of phrase.
It came, by the way, from Agatha Christie’s autobiography, which I’ve long considered to be one of her best books. Recommended.
Unit of the day
Someone on Mastodon pointed out a useful thing today:
One mile per gallon is exactly the same thing as one furlong per pint.
So if anyone quotes their fuel consumption in furlongs-per-pint, you’ll now know what it means. Pleasingly, this works even in America.
Once you’ve impressed your friends at the pub with that one, you can point out that one mile per gallon is about 3 leagues per firkin.
Proboscidea
I’ve started playing a bit more with Mastodon.
For some of you, Mastodon will be old news — I’ve had a Mastodon account for four years, but haven’t really used it before — but many more, I imagine, will be saying, “Mastodon? Never heard of it!” I think you probably will be hearing a lot more about it, though, very soon, so I wanted to make sure you heard it here first!
At its simplest, Mastodon is a social network/microblogging platform rather like Twitter. And it’s getting a lot of attention at present as people are leaving Twitter, or at least exploring alternatives, because they don’t like what Elon Musk is doing with it or what they fear he might do in the future. I’m reserving judgement on that for the moment, but Mastodon has apparently gained about a million users in the last couple of weeks.
So what does Mastodon have going for it, apart from not being under Elon’s control? Well, a proper answer to that would be really quite long, but here are a few key points:
-
Mastodon is not run by any single company. It is not driven by profit as its primary motivation.
-
The feed(s) you see are based purely on whom you follow, and not on somebody else’s algorithm. There’s essentially no spam or advertising, at least for now, and it’s much less likely in the future.
-
Mastodon is ‘federated’, meaning that it consists of lots of servers talking to each other. Many people sign up to one of the big ones like ‘mastodon.social’ — you can find me as @quentinsf@mastodon.social — but there are lots of other options. Some servers (or ‘instances’) are built around particular interests or regions, others may be run by companies or other communities. Each server is moderated and managed by the people who run it, and one view you can choose shows you the new content from people on your instance.
-
But you can follow, and be followed by, people on any instance, not just the one you’re on. The best analogy here is email: a large number of people choose to use gmail.com, but they can still send and receive emails to people on any other email server. You can choose to get your email service from Fastmail or Microsoft or Yahoo or you can run your own server. (Running a Mastodon instance — e.g. for your company — is rather easier than running an email server!)
-
You can have multiple accounts on multiple instances and switch between them easily. If you decide to move somewhere else, you can leave a forwarding address so people will find you, and you can even arrange that all your followers will follow you automatically. (Your actual posts are stored on the instance, though, so your history doesn’t come with you to the new place.)
-
For the technically-inclined, Mastodon instances communicate using an open protocol called ActivityPub, which is also used by other systems such as NextCloud and PeerTube, and I suspect we’ll see it adopted more widely soon. For example, I’ve installed a plugin for this blog, so it can publish using ActivityPub. As well as following me as @quentinsf@mastodon.social, you can get notified of posts on this blog by following @qsf@statusq.org. (Please do!) If all goes well, this post will be one of the first I publish that way! The feed will be entirely independent of any other organisation, but you can still choose to follow it through, for example, any Mastodon apps or websites.
What I like about this stuff is that, to me, it feels more like the way the internet was in the early days, and the way it should be: people running or choosing their own servers, and people reading and subscribing to content based on their own preferences and not on the profit-maximising algorithms of big American or Chinese corporates.
I hope it flourishes.
Mustelidae
I’ve just started playing with one of those ‘trail cams’ or ‘camera traps’. You attach it to a tree or similar and it captures movement using an infrared camera sensor, and illuminates the scene with a number of IR LEDs on the front. These cameras are not particularly expensive, and I think it’ll be quite fun.
My first attempt in the wood next to our driveway didn’t quite have my subject facing in the direction I’d hoped! I also spotted several rabbits and a muntjac, but mostly I got clues as to where I should put the camera next to capture more of the nocturnal social life. Coming soon, I hope…
Morning, campers!
One of the great things about owning an EV — which, after seven years of electric driving, I tend to take for granted, until I get back in a dinosaur-fuelled vehicle — is the heating system.
Because it’s independent of the motor, you get heat more quickly as you drive off since you’re not waiting for big chunks of iron and radiators full of water to warm up in order to warm you.
More importantly, though, you can also run the heating (or cooling) without the rest of the car being switched on. Most EVs will allow you to turn it on remotely from an app, and if you do this five minutes before you want to set off, the car is always comfortable, and my old winter practice of pouring milk-bottles full of warm water over frozen windscreens before departure is becoming a distant memory!
In the Tesla, the climate control has various special ‘modes’.
The one we use all the time is “Dog Mode”, which keeps Tilly at a comfortable temperature whatever’s happening outside, disables the internal alarm sensors, and puts a picture of an animated dog up on the main display with a notice saying “My driver will be back soon! Don’t worry, I’m comfortable in here: the A/C’s on and it’s 20 degrees C.” This is to prevent people from breaking your windows to save the poor animal trapped inside on a hot day!
But recently I’ve been experimenting with another: “Camp Mode”. This is for people foolish enough to consider sleeping in their car, an activity made rather more pleasant by having your bedroom well-ventilated at exactly the temperature you want and without excessive condensation on the windows! But it’s still sleeping in the boot of your car. YouTube has no shortage of videos talking about how to do it and the expensive products you can buy to make it more comfortable.
So, for no better reason than that I have to try out all the functions on my gadgets, and it might prove more comfortable than my tent at this time of year, I’ve been giving it a go. More comfortable – yes. More spacious? Definitely not! (If you had a bigger and more expensive Tesla than mine, it would be a different experience.)
But, for your amusement, here’s my little camping video:
One thing I neglect to mention is that just across the car park is a big building with nice loos and excellent showers. That makes a big difference!
I’ll be back there on Saturday night. You can envy or pity me as the mood takes you!
Quote du jour
My French friend Cyril receives Status-Q updates by email, and after yesterday’s post concerning hobbies, he sent me another quote about holidays:
“Les vacances, c’est la période qui permet aux employés de se souvenir que les affaires peuvent continuer sans eux”. — E.J Wilson
or, roughly,
“A vacation is the time that allows employees to remember business can continue without them.”
I love this. I learned a very important lesson many years ago as the CEO of a small, fast-moving technology startup…
I think the company was only about six or seven people at the time, and we were in that classic startup mode: working mostly from a garden shed, having conversations every other day with investors or potential investors, watching the cashflow very carefully while convincing potential customers of our robust credentials and our ability to deliver.
But I wanted/needed to take a short holiday. Having gone from one startup to the next, I hadn’t had one for quite a long time and for various reasons I needed to take it now to coincide with other family plans. But I was torn: could I really leave this small team without their leader at such a critical time? What would the investors think? And so on…
In the end, I did decide to go, had a wonderful few days’ break, and came back to the office in some trepidation to see what had manage to survive my absence.
“Hello everyone!”, I said. “I’m back!”
The team looked up from their desks, puzzled for a moment, and then said, “Oh, yes, you’ve been away, haven’t you?”
It was a humbling and enlightening experience, and I’ve never forgotten it. Nobody is indispensable. Even you.
Anyway, there’s a nice twist to Cyril’s message. When I looked at it more carefully, I realised that he hadn’t just found a nice quotation to send back to me.
It was the first line of his vacation email auto-response.
Quote of the day
“A satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant… a defiance of the contemporary… an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked.”
— Aldo Leopold
Incommunicado
Not being well up on Italian hits of the early 70s, I only learned about this today, but I think it’s great.
In 1972, the singer Adriano Celentano released a single called ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’. The words are gibberish, but intended to sound like someone singing in English with an American accent – or at least, how such a song sounds to a non-English speaker.
“Ever since I started singing”, he once said, “I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang — which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian — I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”
(Here’s a direct link – your browser may give you a better viewer than the player above.)
According to Wikipedia, the song was very popular, reaching the top 10 in several European countries, and, if you search, you can find a couple of other versions featuring Celentano, and tributes by numerous groups since. But this is my favourite; I certainly found my foot tapping to its beat… and I thought the choreography with mirrors was great!
All of this reminded me of a trip to Indonesia in my youth, where I ended up playing guitar with a group of guys who thought that Eric Clapton sang about “Snog, Snog, Snogging on Seventh Floor”. (I wrote a post about this and about ‘Mondegreens’ a little while ago… let’s see… gosh! – even that post was more than 16 years ago!)
Anyway, today I started down this particular rabbit-hole thanks to Charles Arthur pointing me at a Twitter thread containing some other linguistic gems, including this clip of Sid Caesar’s performance at one of Bob Hope’s birthday parties sometime in the 80s. A five-minute comedic performance with almost no words that can be understood by anybody:
(Link)
Wonderful stuff.
Feeds
RSS feed© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
Recent Comments