Status-Q

“Not all cottons are equal”, says the label on my new John Lewis shirt. “We use Supima cotton because it’s one of the most superior types of cotton in the world for creating strong, comfortable and colourful fabric.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake! One of the most superior types in the world? What do they teach kids in English lessons these days? Before you ask, this does appear to be a label printed by that old English retail partnership itself, not by the Bangladeshi factory from which the shirt originates.

Still, perhaps I’m being too fussy. At least they are only claiming it to be one of the most superior types, and, in any case, if I am going to wear a superior type of cotton, I should probably be grateful that it’s not one of the least superior types.

I wrote a couple of years ago about why I really like the Signal app for chat-style communications.  

(Quick summary: it’s just like WhatsApp but doesn’t require you to sell your soul and all of your contacts’ private information to the devil!)  

I’ve been using it for a few years now, for business and social discussions, and it’s been great.  It has very nice software both for mobile and desktop devices, and I know that several people have started using it because of my recommendations, too.

So I thought it only fair also to highlight here one of its key ‘limitations’; in fact, probably its only downside, as far as I’m concerned.  But it’s something fairly important that you may never discover… until it takes you by surprise.

Messages in a Signal conversation are transmitted using end-to-end encryption between the devices taking part in the conversation, and stored in encrypted form only on those devices as well.  Unlike some other communication networks, they are not archived on any organisation’s central servers and, on iOS at least, the messages are not included in any backups of the device.

If you buy a new phone, there’s a process you can go through to move your history directly from your old device to the new one, but here’s the rub:

Both devices need to be available and operational for you to do that.

There isn’t any other method. If you have lost your old iPhone, or it has completely died, then, while you can connect to Signal on your new phone and carry on your conversations, you won’t be able to see any past messages.  If you have them on another device such as an iPad or desktop machine, you should still be able to see your history there, but not transfer it.

There are good security reasons for most of this, and it certainly doesn’t stop me using Signal any more than it stops me using phone calls, but the price of the security is that you should consider Signal messages to be somewhat ephemeral.  Don’t think of them as an archive you will necessarily be able to go back and search indefinitely.  For that, it’s still better to use standards-compliant email… or to copy the important stuff into your personal Knowledge Management System.  You do have one of those, right?  

If so, make sure it’s something that you will always be able to get your data out of in future, like Obsidian.

At Telemarq today we were discussing some of the rather good Open Source text-to-speech systems now available, and testing them with some difficult-to-pronounce words.  They did struggle a bit with some of them, but who can blame them?

British names can be challenging at the best of times; I knew, for example, that Menzies is not usually pronounced as it appears, but I must confess to being ignorant of the fact that the surname ‘Dalziel’ is actually pronounced ‘Dee-El’ (which sounds like a class of droid from Star Wars, don’t you think?  “That old DL-4 unit will do fine.  We’ll take that one.”)

While looking at the Wikipedia page, though, my colleague Nicholas noticed the Dalziel coat of arms, which is rather striking, and should eliminate any suggestion that the Dalziels are not thoroughly human. Take a look! (The page does explain the origin too.)

If you examine the expression on his face, it can be fun coming up with captions.

“Listen, laddie, if I’m willing to come into battle armed only wi’ this, are ye really ready to fight me?”

I think Robert Burns would approve, though. “Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine; // A Man’s a Man for a’ that:”

Heraldry, of course, has a language of its own.  Your family’s arms might be technically described as “azure a fess or between three mullets argent”, for example, and we are reminded by this Britannica article that ‘a bordure is an ordinary in England, but in Scotland it is never a charge, being reserved for cadency. Some count the roundel as a subordinary, while others consign it to the “others” category as a simple charge.’  

Actually, if you read the article, you’ll understand the above. (I had a splendid teacher at school who believed that a well-educated English gentleman ought to have at least a smattering of knowledge of a range of topics that weren’t in the normal curriculum, and would take the odd lesson out to tell us about them, so I gained some awareness of those who charge a field purpure or a bend sinister with a lion rampant, when I should technically have been learning about Thomas Hardy.  It’s wonderful stuff.)

There are rules to be followed too. The aforementioned article reminds me that “a colour is very rarely placed upon a colour, a metal upon a metal, or a fur upon a fur. “

All of which made me think this would be a fun body of material for training an AI system.  Could you create something which, given a coat of arms, would return the correct heraldic description, and vice versa? And then, phase 2: given somebody’s ancestry and history, could you create a coat of arms for them following the conventions and the rules?  I fancy doing another PhD, so if anybody could kindly come up with a source of funding for this, I propose to create such a system and name it ‘Sable Basilisk’, in honour of the character of that name immortalised by Ian Fleming.

The funder of my research would, of course, have a beautiful coat of arms generated just for them.  If they’re really lucky, it might resemble the Dalziel’s.