Status-Q

Michael Shermer is the founder of Skeptic magazine and the author of several books. He’s quoted often in Dawkins’ The God Delusion. He’s also rather a nice chap. I know this because a few years ago he was cycling high up in the Tuscan hills above Cortona and had a puncture, and I happened to pass by and give him a lift down to his hotel, so got a chance to chat to him.

OK – enough name-dropping. The point of this post is that he gave a splendid talk at TED, which is great fun and definitely well worth 17 mins of your time. You can watch it or download a higher-resolution version here.

Interesting statistics about mobile phone usage:

In the UK, the number of outgoing voice calls made to the number of text messages is 0.6:1; in South Africa as a whole the the ratio is 3:1 for pre-pay phones; and in rural communities the average ratio is 13:1. Text messages are cheaper than phone calls, so this data, looked at from a western perspective, seems surprising. However, when considered in the context of a community where a significant number of people are illiterate it is more understandable.

from a talk given by Arun Sarin, Vodafone Group Chief Executive, last February.

About twenty years ago, my brother and I went on a cycling holiday in France. As we sat eating a baguette in the central square of a small town in the Loire Valley, we watched a wonderful scene play out before us. There was a bank on the square, which had a shiny new cashpoint (ATM) machine – something of a rarity back then, at least in rural France. As we munched our lunch, a family approached it hesitantly; a tall, gaunt father, a rather shorter and decidedly less gaunt mother, and a young boy. It was an outing which was to end in disappointment, because, despite the careful attention of the father and the suitably Gallic gesticulations of the mother, the machine swallowed the card and they departed empty-handed.

What I had forgotten was that, that evening in our tent, I had written a short (and most unworthy) homage to Miles Kington’s wonderful ‘Franglais’ sketches. When clearing out my filing cabinet this weekend, I came across a faded dot-matrix printout, and decided to post it here, if only for nostalgia…

À La Cashpoint

Thanks to John for pointing me at this:

I called my dentist this morning. I could barely hear the receptionist over the sound of hammer-drilling.

Was most relieved when she said they had builders in the surgery that morning.

The general population really doesn’t understand digital technology. And it’s costing them money.

This was brought home to me last weekend while helping a friend choose a new TV. In the local shop, I noticed a variety of HDMI cables for sale. Now HDMI, for those of you not familiar with it, is quite a nice standard. It provides digital video and digital audio down a single compact and convenient connection. Much neater than the bulky DVI, VGA, SCART etc which preceded it.

However, notice that it’s a digital standard. This means that, subject to major failures, what goes in at one end ought to come out at the other. Why, then, does the store sell a variety of cables of different qualities and prices? In the days of analog connections, there was something to be said for low-impedance connections and for careful screening. Who knows, those articles in the hi-fi press extolling the virtues of gold plugs and low-oxygen copper cables might even have had something to them.

But in the digital world, if you put ones and zeros in one end of a cable and don’t get something recognisable as ones and zeros at the other, you don’t get a slightly worse picture or sound. You get complete breakdown, and major image or sound corruption. A cable which does that should not be sold at a cheaper price; it shouldn’t be sold at all. Better-quality cabling will allow things to work over greater distances, but for the average user with a DVD player under his TV, it will make no difference at all.

For example, my (quite expensive) CD player is connected to my (quite expensive) amplifier through a digital COAX connection. I use a single phono-phono cable I bought for about $1 in a Radio Shack sale. And the sound is perfect.

So I asked the nice man in the shop about the fact that they sold a modest-length HDMI cable for over £100 just beside the one for £15 (which, incidentally, probably costs less than a dollar to make).

“Oh yes”, he said, “it does have an effect. We had a customer do a side-by-side test just recently and he could see a difference. He bought the more expensive cable.”

“But how?”, I asked. “It’s ones and zeros! You don’t get better quality ones or nicer-shaped zeros by paying more! How could there be a difference?”

“Well, the customer said there was one. I don’t really understand the science behind how it all works…”

The customer is always right, you see. Even when science is against him.

And now back to my copy of Richard Dawkins…

Followup: Gizmodo did some tests and agreed with my assertion. It makes no difference whether you have cheap leads or expensive ones for short distances. It can be worth paying the extra if your cable is more than 50ft long.

Why should I sell the Canadian farmers’ wheat?

So asked Pierre Trudeau, a Canadian Prime Minister in the sixties.

“Why on earth am I reading that quotation here?”, asked the readers of Status-Q.

Well, simply because it struck me when I saw it in the Economist this morning as a lovely illustration of why kids need to be taught how to use the apostrophe, something which appears not to be fashionable in schools today.

The Economist, of course, got it right. But if Trudeau had asked “Why should I sell the Canadian farmers wheat?” it would have had almost exactly the opposite meaning – a ‘coals to Newcastle’ scenario.

And if the apostrophe had been one place to the left, he would either have been questioning a specific favouritism to one farmer, or making some more general statement about a stereotypical agrarian Canadian. We think the latter more likely because we happen to know he was PM of that country, but had M.Trudeau been a grumpy flour merchant in Provence who disliked one of his new immigrant neighbours, things might have been different.

Anyway, nothing earth-shattering here. I simply offer it to parents who need more examples of why homework is important!