Status-Q

Tens of thousands of British horse chestnut trees are dying. Including the ones next door that I can see from my study window. Very sad…

Thanks to David Hopkin for the link.

The modern computer has an appendage, a relic of its early evolution, which causes more trouble than it’s worth. It’s time to get rid of it. Join CAPSoff.org, the campaign to deal once and for all with the Caps Lock key. Or another similar site, anticAPSLOCK.com.

Here are some of the things Caps Lock brings to our lives:

• It takes up valuable space in an important part of the keyboard.
• It causes us to type passwords which then aren’t recognised.
• It encourages idiots to write VERY ANNOYING MESSAGES ENTIRELY IN UPPER CASE.
• It requires us to retype bits of our last sentence when we’ve hit it by accident.

It’s time to put a stop to this now!

Until we can get Caps Lock replaced with something more useful, you can fix it yourself, by disabling it or turning it into something more useful, like Control. Many people insist that this is where the Ctrl key should be, anyway. Even if youu don’t anticipate using an extra Ctrl, you may be grateful that you’ll no longer turn on Caps Lock accidentally!

There’s a variety of utilities to do this for you. Mac users have the option built in. There’s a ‘Modifier Keys…’ button in the Keyboard section of System Preferences:

John has some great links to good online video satire.

And it’s not often I take my hat off to George W Bush, but I think this clip, from the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, is splendid. It happened a few months ago, but I hadn’t seen it before.

John quotes Michael O’Leary, the colourful CEO of RyanAir, complaining that by instituting and continuing extra security measures the government is keeping people from flying and handing the terrorists a victory.

Now, I’ve always assumed, perhaps foolishly, that the agencies concerned were smarter than that. They must know that it would be possible to make explosives look like chewing gum or talcum powder. That I could rig my laptop to wake up half way through the flight and blow up its lithium-ion batteries in the hold. That you could make some nasty cocktails out of the liquor or perfumes on board and set light to a fuse with a magnifying glass. Or trigger it electrically using the power sockets in the bathroom… and so on. If you’re really keen to bring down a big plane, and all else fails, it’s not that difficult to fly a small one into it.

No, I assume that they know this. It’s pretty hard to defeat determined terrorists, intelligent ones at any rate. (There are the dumb ones, I suppose, who might think, “They’ve just uncovered a plot to use liquid explosives. Now might be a good time to try using liquid explosives.” ) But most of the general public don’t know it, and think that these measures will make a substantial difference, and so keep flying.

I assumed that the real aim of the stringent measures was to keep people like Mr O’Leary in customers. If plots were uncovered and nothing were done, it might be more damaging to the industry. But it’s a fine balance…

Follow-up: Actually, the more I think about it, it would be quite easy to cause a fire on board a plane, or to take out a member or two of the crew, but that’s rather different from bringing the plane down. I’d guess that your average Jumbo comes equipped with pretty good fire extinguishers in both the cabin and the hold. So you probably do need a reasonable explosion on board to do any serious damage and, while you can make explosives look like other things, the swab tests that they’re doing at the moment are probably rather good at detecting most of the suspect chemicals. So perhaps they do some good after all, beyond the purely psychological.

Of course, the best way to prevent terrorism is not to do things which make people want to terrorise you. Some people are crazy and will want to blow people up anyway, but it’s good not to give them an excuse…

It’s sometimes said that Americans have no sense of irony. Rose, who is one, and who does, points out that this is hardly a fair accusation to level against the country that created Woody Allen, or Frasier. I think she’s right.

But, as part of life’s rich tapestry, there are some people over here who will hang signs like this in fabric stores:

What bothers me is not just that someone should actually display such a thing. It’s the number of people who must have been involved in its design, creation, printing, delivery, hanging… Did no one, in this whole process, ever think, “You can’t be serious! Come on, this is ridiculous! Live to quilt?” At which point everybody should have burst out laughing, admitted it was a joke, and sent it away.

I shouldn’t be too cynical, though. Sometimes these in-store displays can really reach out and help those in distress. I’m sure that many of us have lain awake at night, tossing and turning, with the following question spinnning endlessly through our minds:

I’m in San Francisco, staying just off Union Square. It’s a much nicer temperature here than it was in Detroit last week. A cool breeze drifts in through the window, along with the sound of a saxophone in the street outside. Very mellow…