Category Archives: General

Seeing the future?

One of the first DVDs I owned – indeed, I think, one of the first released in the UK – was ‘Contact’, which stars Jodie Foster in Carl Sagan’s story about the first communications with extra-terrestrial intelligence.

It’s a fun film, and I hadn’t watched it for a while. But I’ve just discovered that amongst the ‘special features’ are several full-length commentaries, something which was quite a novelty back then.

One thing that tickled me while listening to the Director and Producer’s commentary, apart from the nostalgic shots of Netscape in use and the fact that ‘Web’ was always prefixed with ‘World Wide’, was the moment when a flat-screen TV made its appearance.

‘Look at that screen!’, they say, breaking off from their discussions of intergalactic travel. ‘That’s a real TV… We aren’t overlaying those pictures… See how thin is is? You could hang it on your wall!’

Curiouser and curiouser

Here’s an excellent Nature article by Ahmed Zewail. Extract:

Some believe that more can be achieved through tightly managed research — as if we can predict the future. I believe this is an unfortunate misconception that affects and infects research funding.

I’ve always liked Einstein’s comment that “if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research”.

Veni, vidi, wiki?

There’s a good post on the Economist blog about the WikiLeaks affair:

My gripe against Mr Assange is that he takes advantage of the protections of liberal democracies, but refuses to submit himself to them. If he wants to use the libel protections guaranteed by New York State, then he should live in New York, and commit himself to all of the safety and consequences of America’s constitution. If he wants to use Sweden’s whistleblower laws, then he should return to Sweden and let its justice system take its course.

It’s a bit of an over-simplification: if you’re an an anarchist, where should you live, since we no longer have Australia set aside for that purpose? But it’s basically a good point.

This makes me think of the observations by Dawkins et al that those who will flatly deny the validity of the scientific process when it challenges their view of the creation of the earth, or the efficacy of alternative medicines, will then happily get on a plane to fly home, where every minute of their very lives depend on hundreds of years of that same process.

This is the point at which, by the way, if you haven’t seen it, you should watch Louis CK’s comments on ‘Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy’:

Anyway, back to WikiLeaks: The other thing that bugs me is that the feeling that some of those who revel most enthusiastically in the WikiLeaks revelations would be those who would protest most loudly if their own privacy were compromised.

Just as ‘superstition’ is often the name we use for somebody else’s religion – and they for ours – so ‘freedom of information’ is often the name we give to invasion of someone else’s privacy, and, one day, might be used for invasion of ours.

Be careful what you wish for… You may get it!

Update: I should perhaps emphasise that I’m an advocate of freedom of information in general! But we’re starting to hear stories which remind me of what we’ve seen with the Human Rights Act in the past: the more such good intentions get formalised into legal structures, the more people come to think of them as unassailable rights in all circumstances, and the more they can be misused by those wanting to make a quick buck or write a sensational story.

Brand confusion

An elderly colleague turned to me at lunch yesterday.

“Tell me”, he said. “you’re a computer expert… All of these leaks must mean that nobody in government will be able to use email ever again. Just what are the political motivations of an organisation like Wikipedia?”

Traditional grid system

One of the monthly invoices I get by email (from those nice people at VoIPtalk) starts with:

Please view this with a fixed-width font.

And indeed, all the columns line up much more tidily if you do that, but come on, chaps, times have moved on! Even people like me are no longer using Pine to read their email, and you can bet that the vast majority of your customers won’t even know how to set their email reader into a fixed-width font.

Ironically, if you want people to view your message in Courier nowadays, you probably need to send it as HTML!

Against the grain

Just discovered Miguel Fernandez’s site, Gegen den Strich, which, if my decidedly rusty German is to be trusted, means ‘Against the Grain’.

Miguel is a cartoonist, and, though the site is in German, a fair selection of them will work across linguistic boundaries. I like these:

This is one of his, but doesn’t appear to be on his site at present:

Thanks to Nick van Someren for the original link.

Take that, Powerpoint!

Dennis Dutton’s TED talk on an evolutionary theory of beauty is very interesting in its own right, but it’s also illustrated by Andrew Park in a phenomenally clever way.

This is about as far from slides full of bullet points as you can get. Wonderful stuff. Worth watching full-screen…

Unfair criticism

Friends and family sometimes tease me because of their belief that I can’t cook.  

This is of course ridiculous.

I have a 100% success rate on all recipes which begin ‘Remove outer packaging and pierce film lid’…

Oh, for a beaker 1/4-full of the warm south…

It seems to me that beverage manufacturers have cottoned on to how profitable homeopathy can be.

Bottled drinks seem increasingly to be pure water with hints of flavour or claims of added vitamins. And the more dilute they are, the more they cost. Isn’t it wonderful that the language provides us with positive words like ‘purity’, indicating the absence of anything else? A marketer’s dream…

[Aside: I had a drink today which boasted about its levels of antioxidants. People should know by now that antioxidants are not necessarily a good thing…]

Anyway, I sometimes wonder if you could take it to extremes and leave out the water?

I think I’ll try that. I’m going to start a company which sells vacuums in little containers. It won’t be a total vacuum, of course, because we know nature abhors that, and it must, of course, be Natural. It’ll be a vacuum which echoes the purity of the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere. There’ll be a few oxygen and nitrogen molecules in there, just the way nature intended…

You can take it home, open it up and release a little bit of outer space into your room. Breath deeply, focus on your inner energies, and meditate on starlight…

iA Writer

Now, this looks like an interesting app. Called iA Writer, it is almost like a typewriter for the iPad. Formatting is definitely not included. I have several of these basic editors (Elements and Droptext, for example). Writer shares many of the standard features, including the now ubiquitous sync-with-Dropbox.

But what piqued my interest was the fact that it’s the first app I’ve seen to extend the standard iPad keyboard: it adds a few basic punctuation characters, simple left and right cursor keys, and previous/next word keys. Very handy if you sometimes find the process of selecting a precise point with your big fat fingers a little tricky, as I do, though even that is easier here thanks to the large and well-spaced font the developers have chosen.

So far, I’ve only written – let’s see – 170 words with it (it tells me that too), but I can see I could get to like it for any situation where I’m trying to do real writing on the ‘Pad.

More info here.

Noel Coward and Facebook

I still find Facebook a bit confusing. Non-intuitive. And I don’t have this problem with other networks. I’m wondering whether this is because I can’t be bothered to spend much time there, so it’s unfamiliar territory, or whether it really is badly designed, or whether I’m just getting old!

I was an early Facebook user and was rather put off by the invitations I would get to sign up for a plethora of pointless apps. “John Smith has just slapped you on the cheek. Click here to add CheekSlap to your profile…” That’s all handled much better now, but I never really got the FB habit.

This is partly because creating blog posts and web sites was already second nature to me by then, and I preferred publishing in a format over which I had more control, and which was more open. Stuff I write here gets found by Google and is accessible to everyone. Stuff in Facebook doesn’t, and isn’t. When I post on my blog, I can notify my FB friends automatically and the post is only one click away. And I can be pretty confident it will still be accessible in decade or two’s time, which is important for me, to the degree that this is a personal diary.

I also started to use Twitter fairly early and my tweets are similarly cross-posted to FB. You can’t conveniently do this the other way around because of Twitter’s 140 char limit. Yes, I suppose you could tweet a link to new FB content, but again, that link would only be of any use to those with FB accounts. Facebook is a closed, walled garden, though admittedly with rather a lot of people inside the walls now! But as Jason Kottke eloquently put it, Facebook is AOL 2.0.

All of this means that I tend to think of FB as a secondary, write-only medium. I actually post quite a bit there, but almost never directly, and I usually only open the site when I get an email notification that a friend has responded. Is this antisocial? People who take from networks and never contribute anything back are sometimes called leeches. What about the other way around?

I prefer to think that I’m just following Noel Coward’s excellent advice about the new medium of his day, television.

Television, he said, is something for appearing on, not for watching.

Well, exactly, dear boy.

Measure for Measure

I still remember my delight in realising – from a throwaway comment by my physics-teacher father – that a Newton, the unit of force, was roughly equivalent to the weight of an apple. I had known its scientific meaning for some time, but all of a sudden I could visualise it in a way I never had before, and an apple… well it just seemed so appropriate!

I’ve been thinking about scientific units and measurements, and illustrations that can help one understand them in terms of daily life. Here are a couple of others that I find pleasing:

* Thanks to plate tectonics, America and Europe are moving apart at about the speed that fingernails grow. (Thanks to Bill Bryson)

* The distance from London to Cambridge is about one degree. (I worked that out before realising it was a nice academic double-entendre!)

* A nanosecond is the time it takes light to travel one foot.

* A microwave oven is about one horsepower. (Not sure if that’s useful, but it’s interesting)

Anyone got any others? Please add them in the comments if so!

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser