Status-Q

Zebra striping is the practice of using alternating background colours in rows of a table. It’s supposed to make the table easier to read.

Jessica Enders did a study and discovered that a small majority of people preferred the look of striped tables. But did they actually help? Find out here.

As my friends will tell you, I’m not a political animal. I tend to vote for a different party at each election, and I often make up my mind when I’m actually in the polling booth, typically using some highly-sophisticated reasoning like, “Big majorities are bad – they’re like big monopolies – so I want to support the little guy”. Well, it’s often not far from that. And that’s assuming I actually remember that it’s polling day.

Now, it’s not that I don’t care about what happens to the country, or that I don’t value democracy.

It’s partly that I feel insufficiently informed to make a judgement. I don’t have time to follow the news, I’m highly sceptical about most of what I read in the papers, and like all well-brought-up Englishmen, I know that politics is not a suitable topic of discussion at the dinner table. (I remember amazing some American friends by telling them that I had no idea how my parents voted and that I certainly wouldn’t dream of asking them.) To raise the topic of politics is to invite an argument or to assume that others think the same way as you – neither is very polite, though in some circles you can get away with it if nobody present has any strong views.

Meanwhile, back at the polling station, there’s generally so little to differentiate the candidates and parties that it’s hard to make a judgement unless you believe very strongly in a few specific issues – always, I feel, a bad basis for electing a government that may be in power for a long time and is unlikely to worry too much about its manifesto once they’re there.

What I really long for is interesting politicians. You could have an opinion about Margaret Thatcher or Neil Kinnock; you could guess what they might say or do differently on a particular topic. But William Hague or Gordon Brown or, well, anybody recent really… in hindsight some of them may have been better choices than others but not really in any way that could have been predicted in advance.

Where are the old rogues, the wits, the orators, the rebels, the great statesmen? People you could applaud, curse, or admire? People who have the balls to make big gestures and risk big mistakes. Have they really gone, or is it that we and the press have just got more sceptical, more risk-averse?

Anyway, whatever you may think about London’s choice of mayor, both the departing and the arriving one, Londoners do at least have an advantage over the rest of the country in having politicians who can be readily distinguished from each other. Much more interesting..

Am upgrading Status-Q to the latest WordPress…

Let me know if you see any funnies…

I was 11 years old when the first series of Blake’s 7 came out, and was instantly hooked. I imagine it would look very corny if I watched it again 30 years on, but I can’t help but be intrigued by rumours that it might make a comeback, possibly with Sean Bean in the lead role.

Hope they keep the same theme music…

I think this is the best idea that I’ve seen for distributed computing on the SETI@home model: earthquake detection.

As you probably know, many new laptops come with accelerometers in them which let them do things like park the hard disk heads if dropped, before they hit the ground and the heads crash into large chunks of your data. People have made various fun toy applications using the output of these sensors. But what can you do if you network large numbers of accelerometer-enabled computers together?

Who knows how well it will work, but it’s a great example of lateral thinking. And vertical.

One of the useful bits of information in the manual for my new car:

Always be careful when closing a door. You could otherwise cause serious injuries to yourself or others. Make sure that no one is in the path of a door.

Good. I’m glad they put that in. It’s a big manual, though, and I haven’t got to the “Running with scissors” section yet, so I’m not handling any office implements for a while.

Did you know you can destroy your webcam if you lick it too frequently?

More information here.

Perhaps the word had got about that webcams were originally a way of dispensing caffeine more effectively.

Thanks to Andrew Arends for the link.

I’m in the process of buying a new car, and I’m bemused by the fact that every dealer wants to sell me a ‘paint and upholstery protection’ package, typically with a name like ‘Safegard’, promising a Teflon-based coating that saves my paintwork from nasty pollutants, saves me having to wash the car, and ensures that spillages of coffee etc inside will cause me no future problems.

All of which sounds attractive, but it could also be the emperor’s new clothes. These highly-efficient protective barriers are conveniently ‘invisible’, and who’s going to spill something on their new car seat just to test it out? More to the point, has anyone done a side-by-side test where they also spill something on an ‘unprotected’ car seat?

I’ve had fun asking dealers questions like, “What deficiencies in Volkswagen’s paintwork is this designed to address?”, but I’d really like a scientific answer to this. Many dealers persuade you to protect your precious shiny new vehicle in this way, and they tell me that they have a good take-up rate. If it’s that good, though, why don’t the manufacturers do it? Does anyone know of a Consumer Association or similar blind-test report on this? – I couldn’t find one.

Are huge numbers of people being conned? Is this just a cunning way of charging you £300 for a wash and wax?

The Guardian’s ‘Science Weekly’ podcast is rather good, and the episode I’ve just enjoyed finished off with a great song by Johnny Berliner about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

The classics in this genre are, of course, Flanders & Swann on The First and Second Law of Thermodynamics and Tom Lehrer’s recitation of the periodic table to the tune of ‘I am the very model of a modern major general’. If you like these, I recommend following the link above and scrolling about 22 minutes into the podcast.

More from Johnny here.

Walking through Stansted Airport this evening… Rose was there in Borders with the big names. Iain M. Banks, Melvyn Bragg, Jack Higgins, Rose Melikan…. Very strange feeling…