Status-Q

Well, I’m only about 9 years behind the times, but that’s because of my classical education.

As any well-educated computer scientist will tell you, most things in computing are measured in powers of two; a natural result of the fact that all of today’s computers are binary-based. And thus it is that a kilobyte is not 1000 bytes but 1024 bytes, because 1024 is 2 to the power 10. A megabyte is 1024 kilobytes and a gigabyte is 1024 of those.

That, at least, is how most of us were brought up, but there was always a certain degree of confusion caused by the fact that marketing types wanted to use 1000 where computer scientists used 1024, because it made their hard drives, flash drives etc look bigger. This is why, when you were sold a 100GB hard drive, and you took it home and plugged it in, it would look rather smaller; computers would report the size using a gigabyte that was about 7% bigger than the marketers’, so they would tell you that you had fewer of them.

Now, in 2000, the IEC established a new set of prefixes which are unambiguous, and have names which sound funny to those of us who have got used to thinking that ‘gigabyte’ is a normal sort of word. They are kibi, mebi, gibi etc – the ‘bi’ indicating ‘binary’. So a gibibyte (GiB) is 2^30 bytes, while a gigabyte (GB) is officially 10^9 bytes (a billion bytes), which is somewhat smaller.

Most of us have just ignored this change, but some systems now – like Apple’s ‘Snow Leopard’ operating system – apparently reports sizes in ‘official’ GB, so your 500GB hard disk will actually look like 500GB when it’s plugged in.

It isn’t really any bigger though. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Traditional hospital gowns are being phased out in NHS wards across Britain after patients complained that the garments left their bottoms exposed, says this article.

A pleased patient is quoted as saying:

I for one will be glad to see the back of them.

Note, though, that this is another (like this) somewhat over-enthusiastic Telegraph headline: it says the gowns are being ‘axed’ and ‘phased out in wards across Britain’. Well, yes, Southampton is getting rid of them, and the manufacturer of the alternative gowns says that another couple of hospitals have bought some as well. I’m not sure that this really represents a dramatic trend sweeping across the nation…

So said the headlines in the Telegraph a few days ago. (Interestingly, in the online version the big banner headline becomes the web page title, and so is much less visible at the top of your browser window.)

Fortunately, the article is much more moderate than the headline. Journalists often make many mistakes, but they often don’t write the headlines, and editors are much more concerned with sales figures than with accuracy. Creeping tabloidism has been infecting almost all of our broadsheets for many years, but how many readers will register that the article doesn’t really back up the headline imprinted in their memory?

Ben Goldacre has found himself a nice niche dissing – I believe that is the mot du jour – such reports after examining the evidence. Here’s his response to this one.

It’s 25 years since we started seeing footage of the space shuttle taking off – during which time the whole World Wide Web thing has happened – but it still makes for impressive viewing.

This is a pretty high quality video clip (on my broadband connection at least). Plug some good speakers or headphones in, turn up the volume, and watch as those rockets kick in. It’s hard not to be impressed at what man hath wrought.

The tragedy is, of course, that it took a cold war to get us to the moon, and nothing has quite lived up to that – it’s the rash but inspirational decisions that can perhaps only be made in wartime that often lead to mankind’s greatest achievements.

Will it take another war to get us beyond orbit once again?

The Monty Python channel on YouTube. Wonderful stuff, from Bicycle Repairman to the Ministry of Silly Walks. And I’ve always loved Every Sperm is Sacred.

Anyway, it’s all official and above-board and released by the Pythons themselves.

Bonnie Tyler as you’ve never seen her before.

From Jeannie Harrell.

Thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.

A splendid piece by Paul Graham on how PR works.

Many people think of Richard Dawkins as a strident, aggressive figure. I think this comes mostly from passages in The God Delusion where he’s deliberately mischievous, in a way that is decidedly uncomfortable to those of a religious persuasion.

I read The God Delusion and then moved on to several of his other books, like The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene – all brilliant books, by the way, which transformed my understanding of many aspects of science – but the thing that got me started was really YouTube. Hearing and seeing him speak made me realise he was a very smart, very thoughtful guy, who wasn’t just out to poke fun at religion. He doesn’t always give that impression in his writing, especially to those who have only read small excerpts.

Here’s a little four-minute example of the man who has been christened “Darwin’s Rottweiler”:

The U.S. edition of Rose’s second novel in the Mary Finch series, The Counterfeit Guest, hits American bookshelves today.

Jeremy Reimer writes a nice Ars Technica piece on why, after more than 20 years of using Microsoft Word, he now almost never uses it.

Is the age of the word-processor drawing to a close?

Thanks to John for the tweet.

Update: Well I never… at the other end of the table here, John was writing a blog post, and we both picked the same subject and independently came up with the same idea for the title!

This is great:

(Click to find out what’s going on…)

Many thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.