Status-Q

I’m not very good at keeping up with politics and current affairs in general at present, and one treat I always allow myself on holiday is the shedding of even the limited news-reading and Today-programme-listening that I normally do.

And so the Snowden affair, which started while I was away, largely passed me by: when I got back they were discussing intricacies of conspiracy theories and extradition orders and it was a bit like trying to pick up a TV mini-series by starting on the third or fourth episode. I’ll save learning about it for when the movie version comes out.

But I did think John Lanchester’s article in yesterday’s Guardian was a pretty sane discussion of the issues, even for those of us who missed the opening chapters.

Nice extract:

I call this the “knowing you’re gay” test. Most of us know someone who has plucked up the courage to reveal their homosexuality, only to be cheerfully told by friends and family, “oh, we’ve known that for years”.

Now, though, search engines know facts about people’s thoughts and fantasies long before anyone else does. To put it crudely, Google doesn’t just know you’re gay before you tell your mum; it knows you’re gay before you do. And now GCHQ does too.

Here at Status-Q headquarters, we’re having a new bathroom fitted, which means we’re getting all these newfangled gadgets that you youngsters just take for granted. Things like mixer taps, which our international friends are amused that we didn’t adopt about 50 years ago. I tell them that British plumbing is like the weather: it’s unpredictable, and we like it that way, because it gives us something to make polite conversation about when inspiration is otherwise lacking.

Anyway, we now have a cistern with one of these dashed clever dual-flush buttons. You know, with a small difficult-to-press button embedded in a large crescent. I think it’s a kind of Islamic yin/yang symbol. But the real mystery is that nobody seems to know quite how it works. It didn’t come with a manual, and even our plumber couldn’t answer some of my questions. Here are a few – perhaps the readers of Status-Q have greater lavatorial expertise than we do:

• It appears from visual inspection that the small button provides a smaller flush than the big one (these things are difficult to measure, but that seems sensible). But what happens if you press both, which is the easiest thing for my chunky fingers? Are they additive in some way, producing a megaflush? Or is that the same as the big button alone?
• If the authorities really want us to save water, shouldn’t the big easy-to-press button be the one that does the smaller flush, leaving you to add on the side button for the full monty?
• In any of the above combinations, does a press-and-hold give you any more than a brief press?
• Is there an international standard for flush-button-operation, or might all of the above vary by manufacturer?
• How many unnecessary gallons of water are used around the world each day by people like me who, in the absence of such vital information, always press the biggest combination of buttons for the longest amount of time? Can Status-Q make a significant impact on world water consumption?

All enlightenment most welcome! Or failing that, I’ve at least given you something to ponder next time you’re sitting there…

This is, I think, a lovely introduction to Stephen Hawking’s big ideas, in a two-minute animation commissioned by The Guardian.

The fact that it’s substantially the creation of my nephew Matt Kemp, who works at Scriberia, makes me like it even more! 🙂

I have a theory. A hypothesis, if you will. It’s still in embryonic form, but I think it could have considerable impact, because it relates to a global conspiracy to create a mass delusion affecting hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

I am referring, of course, to fishing.

It’s a subject on which I am far from an expert, having only held a fishing rod in my hands twice in my life. Naturally, therefore, I didn’t catch anything on either occasion. But what was more surprising was that on both occasions I was accompanied by somebody much more experienced – in the first case, a Norwegian, in the second, an American. We were in good locations with lots of fish. And yet, after a day of staring at small things bobbing on the water, they hadn’t caught anything either.

Not a large statistical sample, I grant you, but it made me start to wonder. And I realised that throughout my life I have been walking on the banks of rivers, or sailing or paddling on lakes, and have seen vast numbers of fisherman sitting looking dejectedly at their lines, but never have I seen anybody actually catch a fish! Doesn’t that seem a bit strange, in forty-six years? Yes, you hear stories of people who claim to have caught them, and accounts from others of the ones they almost caught, but I feel that solid evidence is somewhat lacking. I’ve never seen it with my own eyes.

Except once.

I was in Nottingham, walking my dog along the river, and there was the usual collection of figures squatting by the water. Perched there, you might say. And then, suddenly, one of them jumped up with a cry, and started reeling in what turned out to be a reasonably sizeable aquatic beast. But it was the reaction of all his co-hobbyists that was impressive – they all crowded around with such excitement that I was persuaded that they, too, viewed this as something of a miracle.

Now, I do know that there are fish in the sea, and I have eaten quite a few of them, so somebody must catch them. These trawlers seem rather good at it. And I have even caught fish myself, using the rather trivial technique of stretching a net halfway across a quiet fjord one night and pulling it in again the following morning. That’s not what I’m talking about here. No, I mean the process of leaving your wife and family, gathering large amounts of expensive equipment, and sitting for hours beside, or on, a river, looking at a gently bobbing thing, when you could be enjoying the view, going for a nice walk, or, if you like sitting by the river, reading a book. This is clearly not something that rational people would do unless they had been seduced into it by the promise of some great reward.

It’s a bit like making pilgrimages to Lourdes, or buying lottery tickets. These also sustain major industries on the basis of future rewards almost never actually experienced by the participants, so you need to make sure that, when the rare miracle occurs, it is well-publicised. Hence those pictures of Hemingway next to an enormous marlin, or the stuffed pike over the rural hotel mantelpiece. They say, “Look! It can happen! Someone caught one once! This could happen to you too!”

And so I rather suspect that the chap I saw in Nottingham was a plant by one of the local manufacturers or vendors of outdoor equipment. He probably kept this fish in a tank and, once the gig was done, would move elsewhere on the river, slip it back on the hook, and chuck it in again. That seems the most plausible to me.

Think about it, dear reader. You know it makes sense. The conspiracy is now exposed. And fortunately, you and I have not swallowed the bait…

This was a lovely story, featured on the BBC this morning. A Russian man, before signing a contract with his bank, altered the small print, signed it, and sent it back to them. They signed it, not noticing that they were then obliged to provide interest-free loans, no management charges, and would pay a substantial penalty if they wished to get out of the contract…

Fabulous idea.

I’ve done nothing as cunning as that, but often when I call some institution and get an automated voice saying “This call may be recorded…”, I say “Thank you!”, and click the record button…

That’ll show ’em.

One of the challenges, when storing or transmitting the image of a scanned multi-page document, is that it takes an awful lot of space. Unless, of course, you compress the data. But how should you do this?

The kind of lossy compression used by the JPEG and MPEG standards is great for photos and movie frames, but not much good for text – it makes the edges blurry. And the hard-edged, often lossless, compression used by things like PNG and GIF is great for text but will do nasty things to any embedded photos or background textures. So how do you handle, say, a typical magazine page, with crisp text, embedded photos, graduated background colours?

In the late 90s, my friend Yann LeCun and others created the DjVu format, which cunningly works out how to split a document up and compress each bit using the most appropriate system, then reassemble them for viewing later. It was particularly good for things like digitising historical manuscripts – it would separate the script from the parchment, deal with them separately and still produce a realistic-looking copy afterwards, but take a fraction of the amount of data that most other schemes would have used; especially important in those pre-broadband days. The same concepts are now in the JBIG2 standard, which is included in PDF and embedded in many devices, including Xerox copiers.

Another way to save space and time is that, once you’ve separated the text and other symbols from the background, it’s fairly easy to see if any symbols are re-used. So you don’t have to store the image of every ‘e’ in the document – you can store a representative sample of each size, font etc and simply insert an appropriate one wherever it is used in the original. All very cunning.

Assuming you get it right.

But this story on the BBC describes how some Xerox photocopiers may not have been getting it right, occasionally substituting incorrect digits in their copies. This can be something of a problem if you are, say, an accountant, or an architect. It’s not clear from this article whether this has ever caused anybody serious problems yet, or just been noticed in the lab, but you can imagine the potential lawsuits…

It’s a potential danger of any technology that reassembles a perfect-looking output, when in fact some data may have been lost since the input. You could save a lot of mobile-phone bandwidth if you noticed that someone had just used the same word that they used a few minutes ago, for example…

Xerox fought hard to preserve their trademark by not allowing it to become a generic verb meaning ‘to photocopy’. But I guess they’d like it less if it came to mean something else.

“Ah, hello, is that my tax accountant? I was wondering if you could…. ahem… Xerox this year’s figures for me?…”

Thanks to Mike Flynn for the link.

This is pretty cool. Some German physicists have done some awfully clever quantum stuff and frozen light for a whole minute within a crystal. What makes this even more impressive is that they used it to store and successfully retrieve information – a simple image of three light-coloured stripes.

I think this may prove to be an iconic image in the history of IT, because this technique may enable storage in optical computers in the same way that mercury delay lines did in the early days of electronic computing, before we had RAM.

And wouldn’t it make a great plot device for a Star Trek episode?

More information here – thanks to Anthony Albertyn for the link…