It really is upside down

Ideas for the unemployed masochist

2012-01-31T08:20:00.007+13:00

Since Susan got her iPad, she's been disturbingly drawn in to the insidious world of online gaming. Not gambling, mind - she's not that gullible - but those massively multiplayer thingies.

Some of these are fun, some are harmless, some are free. But some are none of these things.

Valor officially sucks. It draws you in by looking like a city-building game, but then turns out to be a strategy/warfare game in which there is no real opportunity to practice strategy. If you're one of the first into a new world, and if you've got absolutely nothing else to do with your time (e.g. sleeping) for the next month, you win. That's all there is to it.

Unless you fall victim to the frequent data losses and corruptions in the publisher's database, that is. Then you're just screwed. And good luck getting support when that happens. So having taken your (real) money to buy (imaginary) things, the game quietly and unapologetically proceeds to lose those "things". And there's no refund.

In game terms, the whole thing has been tweaked to make it hard to leave alone for a few hours. You'd think, for instance, a 40-foot high, 15-foot thick city wall with turrets would provide some rudimentary defence against being raided. But no, the attackers just leap blithely over it, taking trivial losses that contrast markedly with the resources needed to build the damn' thing in the first place. So basically, unless you're willing to stay online, there's no way to defend your city.

If only there were some way to identify these games up front... But most online reviews are written by raving enthusiasts or professional astroturfers. So here's a counterpoint, and I hope it shows up when people search for 'valor ipad'.

Two stars, only because it took me more than a couple of days to figure out how much it sucks.

The Lost Drivel

2012-01-18T15:47:00.008+13:00

For some years, my father made a habit of using me as a tame book reviewer. For a Christmas present he'd give me a book that he'd heard some buzz about, but wasn't convinced enough to invest his own time in. Then, based on my verdict, he'd decide whether or not to add it to his own reading list.

The process introduced me to some splendid books. I first encountered Philip Pullman and Iain Pears that way. But it was, as you'd expect, hit and miss: there were some serious turkeys in the Christmas mix.

So it was that one year, on my way to New Zealand for my then-annual New Year visit, I found myself saddled with an exceptionally bad 500-page hardback potboiler. I forget what it was - it had ghosts, I remember - but I didn't feel like carrying it home, so I 'regifted' it to my now-brother-in-law, whom we'll call Ben.

This Christmas, Ben got his revenge.

Dan Brown's most recent opus, The Lost Symbol, is a book so bad that I feel the need to recalibrate the bottom end of my scale. This undigested ramble around subjects that the author either doesn't begin to understand or, worse, simply chooses to misrepresent, runs to some 700 pages in paperback. (It could have been done in 300, tops, and it would still have been atrocious but less repetitive. Presumably Brown's publisher specified a wordcount.) Warning just in case you're planning to read this tosh for yourself: from this point on, I will be spoiling like milk in the sun.

Summary: a mysterious villain believes that 'ancient wisdom' guarded by the Freemasons would enable him to become a god, and sets out to force our hero to uncover the Masons' deepest secret.

Spoiler: it's a bible. Yes, that's right - the unspeakable secret that billionaire Freemasons are prepared to lay down their own, their families', and each others' lives to protect - is the most readily-available book in the Western world. If only our villain had thought to check in his hotel drawer, we could all have been spared this whole tedious taradiddle.

And if you think that's silly, just wait until you find out why the CIA is involved.

Along the way, we get introduced to the wonderful world of 'noetic science'. 'Noetics' - loosely speaking, Greek for 'bullshit' - is a label invented in the 1970s to make new-age mysticism sound scientific. In Brown's hands, it becomes a top-secret research institute that has conclusively proved the existence of multiple gods, the power of prayer, the weight of the soul and the length of a piece of string, through rigorous scientific experimental processes that are too dull to be explained even in this interminable pile of filler.

(Some of Brown's fans claim that the details are omitted because they're too technical. But based on the available evidence, it seems more likely that Brown simply neither knows nor cares what a 'scientific experiment' is.)

Science, then, is treated with a level of contempt seldom found outside a Bible Belt school board. It would be nice to report that Brown's other strand, mysticism, fares better. But here again, the author clearly despises his subject as much as his audience.

The hero spends much time lambasting others for taking metaphors literally. Yet Brown himself is agonisingly literal-minded. The idea of 'ancient wisdom' here becomes 'the Ancient Mysteries' - some sort of cosmic cheat sheet, well known to The Ancients, that can transform him who understands it into a god. (After all, when was the last time you left home without dropping a quick libation to Pythagoras?) And when Jesus says 'The works that I do shall [ye] do also; and greater works than these shall [ye] do', in Brown's world this means that we can all cure cancer by wishing hard enough. The mundane fact that proper science (as opposed to 'noetics') now routinely heals the sick, makes the lame to walk and the blind to see on a scale undreamt-of in Jesus' day - doesn't seem to have dawned on him.

I remember, as a teenager, talking ideas like these through with my schoolfriends and fellow students. And I don't believe my circle of friends was particularly elevated. In Dan Brown's world, these sophomoric meanderings become profound wisdom to be uncovered, to much gasping, by the most intellectual elite of the Ivy League.

Maybe Brown was stoned while he wrote. That would explain the prose style, but it's not much of an excuse.

Sam Vimes, RIP

2011-12-30T13:39:00.017+13:00

I'm a Terry Pratchett fan.

My credentials for that claim are, I think, impressive. I started reading his books before many of his present fans were born. I've introduced dozens of people to the Discworld. Until 2001 I was a leading light of his online fan community, and I have an e-mail address "@lspace.org" to prove it. I once bought the man a drink, and - indirectly at least - he first introduced me to my wife. It's no exaggeration to say, Pratchett changed my life.

So it's not a casual or flippant verdict, when I say that his latest book, Snuff, frankly isn't up to it.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a bad book. (Although I know one reviewer who would.) It was good enough to keep me up late enough to irritate the wife. Say rather that it's - unfinished.

First among its issues is pacing. The first hundred pages are, frankly, turgid. Characters whom we know as terse and economical spend page after page rambling on about nothing. And three-quarters of the way through the book, we're into the nailbiting climax... which drags on for altogether too long before seguing into another chase scene, culminating in... another confrontation, ending with the villain safely captured with 30 pages still to go. No prizes for guessing what happens next.

In between, we skim like a mayfly across the surface of the story, although 'surface' may be too flattering. Because there's also a problem with focus. In the first few pages, it's established that our villains are smugglers who peddle lethal drugs to trolls. A little later the crime seems to have morphed into trading in stolen goblin artifacts. And then there's a whole plotline about slavery. In fact our shadowy baddies are guilty of all these things, although you get the feeling it's sheer lucky coincidence that all these crimes are committed by the same handy villains - but none of them are described in enough detail to make me care as I should like about such atrocities. The evil mastermind never even appears on page, which makes it hard to feel much closure from his implied comeuppance. And at least two promising characters are introduced, then promptly forgotten, only to reappear for some particularly clunky jokes at the end.

The man formerly known as our hero, Sam Vimes, is being sent to the country on holiday.

In this book, the Vimes who has faced down dragons, clowns, assassins and kings is pitted against - a young thug whose very description reads "nondescript". If the calibre of your enemies is a measure of greatness, then Vimes has fallen far. From the indomitable, cynical rage of his earlier books, Vimes is reduced to a sort of selfconscious squirming about his place - both geographical and social.

Vimes lay there miserably, straining his ears for the reassuring noises of a drunk going home, or arguing with the sedan-chair owner about the vomit on the cushions, and the occasional street fight, domestic disturbance or even piercing scream, all punctuated at intervals by the chiming of the city clocks, no two of which, famously, ever agreed; and the more subtle sounds, like the rumble of the honey wagons as Harry King's night-soil collectors went about the business of business.

This sort of detail - which goes on for several hundred more words - would be understandable if it were Vimes's first trip outside the city - but of course it's not, he's been on much longer journeys than this before. It's hard to describe this hideous sentence as anything more charitable than 'filler'.

And that, sadly, is characteristic of the writing in this book. Even when the pace picks up after the first act, the lightness of touch from earlier volumes is gone. In the face of life-threatening urgency, characters noted for terse seriousness find themselves spouting turgid speeches that it is, frankly, hard to imagine anyone staying to hear the end of.

For comparison: here's an exchange between Vimes and Vetinari in Feet of Clay (1996):

Lord Vetinari glanced at a piece of paper. 'Did you really punch the president of the Assassins' Guild?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Why?'
'Didn't have a dagger, sir.'

Now here's the same two characters in Snuff (2011):

Vimes's knuckles reddened. 'They are living creatures who can think and talk and have songs and names, and he treated them like some kind of disposable tools.'
'Indeed, Vimes, but, as I have indicated, goblins have always been considered a kind of vermin. However, Ankh-Morpork, the kingdom of the Low King and also that of the Diamond King, Uberwald, Lancre and all the independent cities of the plain are passing a law to the effect that this drivel goes on for another full page.'

But by far the worst is what's happened to the character of Sam Vimes himself. He's always been a character 'on the edge', wrestling with his inner demons to act as a good man should. But now, this ultimate defender of the downtrodden against the wielders of privilege - repeatedly trades on his own privileged position. At one point the local plod turns up to arrest him, and rather than presenting his exonerating evidence, he simply intimidates the young man with his physical power and personal prestige. Within a few pages, the constable is practically tugging his forelock to his better.

Vimes has become the thing he hates: an aristocrat. He quite literally makes up the law as he goes along. And that's supposed to be all right because he's a good man.

The Pratchett of even ten years ago would have been the first to point out the problem with this. But now he seems to have given up the philosophy, along with the humour. What's left is a workmanlike story with some nice images; but if this were the first Pratchett book I read, it would also have been the last, and my life would have been quite different.

Fixing Office

2011-11-29T10:53:00.004+13:00

One dialogue box at a time.

You're welcome.

Good and bad

2011-11-15T14:22:00.006+13:00

This story makes me proud to be a Kiwi. Police are not bailiffs. We'd all be better off if their counterparts in the UK and USA remembered that distinction more often: their job is to keep the peace, not to "enforce" anyone's rights.

This story, I am much less proud of. John Key seems determined to victimise a more-or-less blameless cameraman just because he's been embarrassed.

Nobody looks particularly shiny in this episode. Banks is guilty of campaigning under false colours - he's a National man through and through, the only reason he's standing for a different party is to abuse a quirk of the electoral system that's supposed to improve representation for minorities (of which he decidedly isn't one). The opposition parties are guilty of hypocrisy in exploiting a stroke of luck - it's what I'd expect from Labour, but I'm disappointed in the normally idealistic Greens. And even the poor old cameraman is guilty of, at best, carelessness.

But John Key, now - his hypocrisy is multi-layered, cream-filled and chocolate-coated. He has been instrumental in making the ACT party the joke it is today - and now he publicly dispenses favours, like a medieval monarch, to reinforce its dependency on him personally. He publicised the meeting and made sure there would be plenty of coverage for it.

But the richest irony is in one of his last acts in the outgoing parliament, which was to push through - under "urgency", which is New Zealand-speak for "no discussion" - measures to make it legal for police to make (and use) covert recordings of political dissidents.

What's sauce for the goose, John...

"Long live the Acclamation"

2011-11-02T16:03:00.007+13:00

(This post started out as a comment on Niq's blog post regarding changing the rules of succession to the throne of the UK. Niq sees it as a modernist plot aimed at undermining the monarchy itself. I disagree.)

I'm wary of commenting on royalty. The medieval doctrine of the King's Two Persons has been updated, in our time, as a dichotomy between the royals' role as National Figureheads and their role as Mildly Irritating Celebrities. No matter how elevated you try to be, it's hard to prevent the discourse from degenerating into How Wonderful Her Majesty Is and whether Charles Should Stand Aside And Let Wills Take Over After She's Gone, which is a subject that interests me marginally less than the salt content of frozen peas.

But behind the soap opera there is a dark magic at work here, one that medieval philosophers understood far better than modern journalists, for all that they never knew whom their king was boffing on the side.

Niq believes that the "defining characteristic" of a monarch was to be a military leader. I think that role was only ever peripheral. It fell into disuse when the army became professional, for two reasons. First, the more reflective type of soldier began to think that it might be better (from the participant's point of view) for battles to be directed by people who had studied the subject full-time, rather than by some playboy in a funny hat.

The second, and more important, reason was that with a professional army, you no longer needed the king to raise his standard in order to signal to the peasants that it was time to down tools and come to fight. And that is our clue to what kings are really for.

A monarch's most basic job is to be recognised. No matter what our disagreements, on topics ranging from eugenics to spinach recipes, we all owe allegiance to the same monarch (which is how we know we're British). And once she announces what our national policy is - re, for example, Libya - that's what the country will do (us included), whether we personally agree with it or not.

(Of course a constitutional monarch doesn't make announcements like that in person, but through her officers in government and/or parliament. But that's a minor distinction.)

So: does changing the law of succession weaken the monarchy as an institution?

On the face of it - no. That's why there had to be a meeting of Commonwealth heads of government, and they agreed to the change unanimously. If just one country had opposed it - or even abstained - then there'd be the real prospect of a split monarchy, and that really would mean the end of monarchy as a useful institution. But they all approved it, so that particular crisis was averted.

If there is a danger here, it's the "can-o'-worms" type: the danger that by drawing attention to the subject, you will encourage people who want to make other, further-reaching changes.

But in truth, they didn't need encouragement.

Speaking from one of the loyaller Colonies, I can assure you that the "Monarchy vs Republic" debate is never far below the surface, particularly during a news drought. Any columnist in New Zealand, faced with a looming deadline and no imagination - which is to say, most of the time - won't hesitate to reach into their bag of pre-mulled opinions and reheat some tired old diatribe about either Shaking Off The Legacy Of Imperialism or Maintaining The Roots Of The Nation.

If anything, I think that changing the rules as a concession to modern ideas of "fairness" will make the monarchy more robust. It reinforces the idea of a living institution, whose rules can change. And it reminds us all that, when all is said and done, the queen is queen not because of who her parents were, but because we say she is.

"Divine right" died with Charles I, and good riddance to it.

The soothing properties of suicide by drowning

2011-10-21T15:41:00.009+13:00

It's taken a while to hone our routine for getting young Atilla to sleep at night, and the result is quite a drawn-out process. The final step is mine. I carry him around the darkened bedroom, crooning softly while he makes a spirited attempt to play football with my kidneys. Motivated by physical fear, I restrain him as tightly as possible until he loses heart and - usually quite suddenly - relaxes.

Then I continue to walk him up and down while I sing to him.

The show opens with Waltzing Matilda. On a good day that's enough, and I can put him down by the end of the song; but that's rare. Usually, we have to move on at least as far as Tit Willow. Then, if necessary, I work my way through The Lost Chord, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and Once in Royal David's City.

I'm not sure quite where this selection of songs came from. Tit Willow came into my mind when he was a newborn, for the lyrics seemed to cover the sheer inexplicability of his crying.

Is it weakness of intellect, birdie? I cried,
Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?

But for the rest, I really don't know. And why the Christmas carols should have lodged in my head, almost three decades since I last sang them at school, is a mystery. But there they are, and now they're being passed on to Tilly.

It's struck me that all these songs were written within the roughly-60 year span that we know as the Victorian era. Victorian music is reassuringly middle-class: it requires no great musical talent to sing in recognisable form, but it does have a distinct tune and words. Earlier music (at least, those works that have been preserved and handed down to us) was written to be performed by professionals for the entertainment of the elite, while later music (at least since the widespread availability of the gramophone) has been written to be performed by professionals for the entertainment of the masses.

But the Victorian period was a golden age of musical democracy, when every middle-class drawing room had its own piano, and to be "successful" as a composer meant writing songs that could be performed, adequately, by people with no talent or training. People like me.

An epitaph

2011-10-11T17:06:00.001+13:00

Truly, Steve Jobs was the perfect media figure for our times.

Telegenic and persuasive in person, with no qualms about spending money and encouraging others to do likewise. And in death, he's attracted ridiculous eulogies from the usual suspects (Stephen Fry, I'm looking at you) and equally ridiculous vitriol from others. So far his death has, if anything, slightly improved his already uncanny ability to sell pageviews.

I have little time for either the Frys or the Stallmans of this world. But I do have considerable respect for the Jobses.

Thanks to my technophile family, I came early to personal computers. The first machine I played with, in 1979, was a clunky toy that took five minutes to boot, and longer to load any program. It seemed improbable to me, back then, that desktop computers would ever be much more than toys. Certainly I never entertained the idea that they would one day make the television obsolete.

In the 1980s I studied engineering, I met people who could, more or less literally, make computers sing. But most of them, like me, suffered from a chronic inability to finish what they started: once you've solved the "interesting" part of the problem, they'd sneer, the rest is "merely packaging".

And that's where Jobs excelled. He recognised that there's nothing "mere" about packaging; on the contrary, it's the hardest and most important single step in product creation. You can spend decades developing and refining your product, but as long as you treat usability as "mere", you're still going to be stuck with the rump of users who are motivated to learn how your product works.

But Apple products, now... people actually want to learn them.

It seems to me that, when all is said and done, what Jobs did was to focus attention on the user: on what we want to do with computers, and helping us to do that. Jobs showed that you could design technology that people would use and enjoy using - and you could make money doing it.

Quantitative unease

2011-10-07T14:12:00.005+13:00

Memo to the Bank of England:

If you must print more money, for the love of all that's good and holy, don't give it to the banks.

You got £75 billion and want to stimulate the UK economy? Fine, give every Briton £20 a week for a year. The poorest will spend it (thus stimulating the economy), the richer will save it (thus improving bank liquidity). Everyone wins. Even the people you're robbing (savers) get some compensation.

And maybe the unwashed masses won't be quite so quick to blame you and your cronies for robbing them of their chance to have a stake in society, if you cut them in on the loot.

By giving the money to bankers, you miss all of these opportunities. All you're doing is bribing your own key constituents. That's very nice for you, but at this stage it might not be greatly overstating the case to call it "fuelling the boilers of the revolution".

Poe's paradox

2011-10-03T16:28:00.002+13:00

So, I was doing a spot of research on the deployment of smart meters in Texas when I came across this site.

I'm not sure if these people are for real. Maybe the whole site is an elaborate troll or a student prank. But I'm very much afraid these people - who, I have to assume, probably vote - really believe that, and I quote, "electrical induction [is] illegal everywhere in the so-called civilized world".

Now, I have to admit, I was slightly surprised to learn there are smart meters in the world that use wireless communication. I can't see any reason for that. It's not as if the meter had to be mobile, nor detachable from the mains, and there is (by definition) already a wired connection between the electricity supplier and the consumer site. European meters, as far as I can tell, use wired connections.

But even allowing for the silliness of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the sheer level of paranoid hysteria on show here takes my breath away.

Unless that's my wifi network.

There's a rule on the internet, that it's impossible to create a parody so blatant that it won't be mistaken for the real thing. As originally formulated it applies specifically to religious fundamentalism, but quite obviously the same is true in the spheres of politics, economics, technology and health. Now I think that rule needs a corollary: there is no theory so stupid that its supporters can't create and sustain their own community of believers.

Spitting tacks

2011-09-15T11:50:00.006+12:00

So, young Atilla has reached the age where he needs to start chewing on nails. Or something. Apparently, between 7 and 12 months, he's supposed to be knocking back 11mg of iron a day.

Doesn't sound too hard, right? But then They, by whom I mean "those busybodies who are never shy to tell us that we're doing everydamnthing wrong", give us this deeply confusing leaflet about how much iron is in different foods, and how much gets absorbed by the body. And doing the sums, to get 11mg into his system, he has to eat around 440g of lamb's liver a day.

That's pretty much a whole liver. Assuming one of the larger sheep breeds.

There are only 40 million sheep in New Zealand. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations tell me that there are probably 30,000-40,000 children in that age range. Which means they should be chomping through the entire sheep population approximately every four months.

Now I know why adults so seldom eat offal here - the kids are troughing it all.

Unfortunately, baby Tilly doesn't like liver. But of course that's not the only option. He could get the same results from eating a kilo of lean steak, or about 2kg of pork. For vegetarians, the best option seems to be baked beans - you can get by on around ten litres a day, or slightly less if you can also find room for several bowls of cornflakes and a flagon or two of red lentils.

It comes as no surprise to learn that this leaflet is published by Beef & Lamb New Zealand Inc, easily the most powerful lobby group in the country.

However, the "11mg" figure is supported by the US National Institute for Health. (The UK authorities recommend a relatively modest 7.8mg.) But still, I seriously doubt if any child in the history of the world has ever followed these dietary guidelines. Which kind of makes me want to see the research, if any, behind them.

Ten years

2011-09-12T13:21:00.005+12:00

I remember exactly where I was on "9/11". I was at work, labouring joyfully in pleasant company at work I was good at. It was Carol, our systems administrator, who came into the room and asked "Has anyone been following the news?"

No-one had. It wasn't until I was driving home with the radio on that I learned the full extent of what had happened. (There was also, which is easy to forget now, the nervous undertone of what might happen next. Was it all over, or was this just the beginning?)

Part of me was shocked, and part of me was scared. But a large part of me, and I quickly learned never to discuss this part in the hearing of Americans, was deeply impressed. At last, someone had figured out a way to attack America on its home turf.

Nobody had ever done that before. Barring some minor incidents involving a handful of private nutjobs - not once, in the history of the United States, had a foreign enemy landed a first-strike attack on the homeland. (Indian nations, and Confederates, don't qualify as foreigners, and Pearl Harbor is an imperial outpost.) Indeed, not within living memory had an enemy successfully struck the American homeland at all - even when its defence budget was tiny. And now some enemy - we didn't know who - had bypassed the largest and most sophisticated military in history, shown up the military-industrial complex for the colossal boondoggle that it is.

Well, we all know what happened next.

For the record, I thought the invasion of Afghanistan was foolhardy (the Taliban were bad, but they were willing to co-operate in arresting Bin Laden; and as every student of history knows, invading Afghanistan is the easy bit). And the invasion of Iraq was, also, a potentially just war (Saddam was a monster), fought for all the wrong reasons.

But the worst of it was what America did to itself.

As luck would have it, in late December 2001 I was passing through Los Angeles on my way from London to New Zealand. LAX is, I have been reliably informed, a hellhole at the best of times, and three months after 9/11 it was carnage. In between two 12 hour flights, being forced to stand in queues for three hours and interrogated by unsmiling officials about why I was entering a country I didn't, in fact, have any desire to enter at all, was not my idea of hospitality. (When I booked the flight, the rule was that transit passengers didn't have to go through immigration and customs proceedings. To this day, I don't know how that change was supposed to improve security.)

In 2002 President Bush announced the formation of a "Department of Homeland Security", and I knew they were in deep, deep trouble. You just don't come up with names like that, if your overriding priorities are peace and freedom.

In 2004 they instituted the policy of arresting all foreigners on arrival in the country, and I sadly concluded that I would never set foot there again. And since then, they have shown no sign of returning to the hospitable, free country I like to remember. Both parties have taken to demonising foreigners, even more than they loathe each other.

This juxtaposition of headline and picture, from the BBC today, says it pretty well. "US ideals" are dead. We may remember them, we may mourn them, but we can't bring them back.

And that's why, even if he didn't win his stated objective, from my perspective at least, Bin Laden won his war. "America" is gone.

The politicians we deserve

2011-08-22T17:36:00.002+12:00

The irony is strong in this one. Quite apart from the prospect of talking about "Colin Craig's Conservative Party" ("CCCP" seems an eerily appropriate acronym, for this instinctively statist social-conservative), there's the fact that he's breaking the law in order to campaign for tougher sentences.

This story should be funny. It's certainly embraced as funny by the big New Zealand bloggers.

But for me, the humour is overshadowed by sadness. Colin Craig sums up everything that is wrong with New Zealand. He's "a businessman" who made his money, not by making anything or providing any useful service (like a taxi driver or a hairdresser), but by renting apartments - in other words, by owning land and taxing people who do earn an honest living for the use of it. He's insular (proud of the fact that he never travels) and has no idea of what he really wants (his party platform is self-evidently incoherent). And he honestly believes, simultaneously, that he's better than the great rabble who aren't millionaires, and just as good as people who have comprehensively beaten him whenever they've contested.

On the back of these qualifications, this moron runs for office and sulks when he loses.

How will New Zealand ever drag itself into the modern world, if this is the calibre of our grassroots activism?

Mugged

2011-08-16T15:41:00.005+12:00

In the face of extreme provocation from the media, I've refrained from venting my opinions on the astonishing implosion of western civilisation as it's unfolded, over the past month, in the USA, Europe and the UK. There's no shortage of people closer to the action who are doing quite enough commentating for all of us.

But just so's you know it's not just you...

Last Wedneday was the bondholders' meeting, at our local racecourse, for those who'd lent money to Blue Star Print Group.

(A brief diversion here: Auckland has several racecourses. Where I used to work, in Epsom, was just down the road from a racecourse. Where I now live, in Ellerslie, is just round the corner from a racecourse. Gambling is big. Sadly we don't have British-style betting shops; even more sadly, we do have the tallest freestanding building in the southern hemisphere, and it belongs to a casino.)

And since it was just round the corner, I thought I'd go along and cast our vote in person.

My first impression was - familiarity. As a magazine editor in the 1990s, I attended scores of press conferences by well-heeled consultancy firms, and those events looked very much like this. I saw a phalanx of spotless business suits. The occupants, none aged over 35, clustered in groups based on what was clearly, among themselves, a well established pecking order. With my years of journalistic training, it was the work of moments to elbow my way through the crowd to the coffee dispenser.

This crowd, however, was not what I expected to see. There had been much talk of "mum and dad investors", and my mental image had anticipated that the suits, and the bodies inside them, would be rather more worn. Clearly, these were accountants - either here as representatives of the auditors or the consultants, or simply drawn to the smell of blood in the water.

Ah, there they were - beyond this antechamber in the main conference room. A scattering of middle-aged, middle-class people, all smartly dressed. I took a moment to wonder why they troubled to dress up in order to be robbed. Must be a colonial thing. I sat down next to a red-faced gentleman in his 50s, who looked fit for a bit of barracking, and waited for the entertainment. After all, I was paying for it.

Proceedings kicked off with an opening statement from the referee - sorry, chairman - who invited some preliminary questions from the floor. Of these, the only controversial one was "will you tell us how many proxy votes you're holding?", which he twice refused to do. Looking back, we should have pressed him on that. He was, he explained, on solid legal ground - but when you're asking people to trust you, surely it's no time to hide behind legalities. He added that he didn't want to prejudice our votes, then went on to introduce a series of presentations plainly designed for no other purpose.

The presentations were slick and, up to a point, persuasive. They pointed to a glowing future for the company, if we would just help them over this little temporary difficulty. But what struck me was that they didn't really seem to be aimed at us. We, the bondholders, still wouldn't get our money back even if this rosy future came to pass. There was a clause specifying, in so many words, that even if the company was sold for its weight in uncut diamonds we still wouldn't get more than about half our money back: the shareholders would keep it.

A few people explored this clause in their questions, but it didn't get much attention, because everything we heard was designed to massage our expectations into a very narrow range - the range in which we would get about half our money back. The chairman said that he'd opposed the clause, but negotiations had been bitter and bloody and in it stayed. (So why would the shareholders fight for a clause that would not be triggered under any plausible scenario? - is just one of the questions that didn't occur to me until some time later.)

For the most part, questions and answers were predictable. Would management and board be taking pay cuts? (No.) Is this really your best offer? (Yes.) Will the banks really call in the receivers if we turn you down? (Yes.) There was a surprising lack of passion, but I was cheered by much talk - and applause - for "voting on principle". Surely, I thought, they can't muster 75% agreement from this crowd unless the proposition includes lynching the shareholders. (It didn't.)

After a couple of hours of this, the crowd dispersed more or less peacefully, and I went home to await the announcement of receivership.

Instead, about 2.30 in the afternoon, I saw the news that the offer had been approved.

I was stunned. I would suspect dirty work in the counting, but that was the job of those nice accountants, and surely if they were going to jeopardise their good name for a quick buck, they'd take it from someone who was more solvent than this? Surely...

Still, the message went out from that meeting loud and clear to the New Zealand exchange: "We small-time bondholders know our place, and will gratefully accept whatever crumbs our betters deign to throw us. There may be such a thing as an offer that is too unfair or treats us with too much contempt, but you haven't managed it yet. Try harder next time."

So there you go. If ever you're tempted to lend money to a New Zealand company, don't. You might as well take it to the races.

Financial analysis

2011-07-20T14:58:00.009+12:00

We got a nice chunky package in the mail yesterday.

I was quite excited. After all, nobody takes the trouble to send a chunky package for bad news, do they? A single sheet of paper - that's a rejection letter. An acceptance contains all kinds of inserts - contract, conditions, instructions for your first day, occasionally even a complete employee handbook. A bulky package must be good, right?

Turns out, not so much.

The package is from Blue Star, a troubled printing company in which we invested some money a few years ago. (Mind you, I don't recall anyone using the word "troubled" back then.) We bought bonds. Now - stripped to its essentials - the company wants us to trade in those bonds for new ones that will be worth considerably less. If we don't, they threaten without much ceremony, they'll go out of business and we'll get nothing.

Well, first thing to note is that times evidently aren't so hard that they can't afford to put together a 150-page, glossy, full-colour prospectus for these new and improved bonds. Mind you, it's a printing company, they probably got a good deal on that.

But something stinks about this offer. How can a company renege on its debts, and continue trading? Surely that's the definition of 'insolvent'. If they offered to renegotiate the debt, that's one thing - but this isn't negotiation, this is blackmail.

See, while we bondholders are being asked to take a scalping to the tune of at least half of our investment (and absolutely no guarantee that it won't yet be 100% - in fact, the de-ranking of our debt makes that even more likely), the shareholders aren't being asked to give up squat. On the contrary: one shareholder in particular, Champ Funds, is offering a loan of $15 million - at an interest rate way higher than we've been offered - in return for getting higher ranking among the company's creditors.

Seems to me, that's not the sort of terms you would offer if you had much faith in the company's future.

I was taught, way back in economics class, that it's shareholders who take the risks - when the company thrives, they get the profits, and when it sinks, they take the hit. Bondholders get a smaller return for a smaller risk. But that's not what's happening here. We, the bondholders, are being asked to bail out the shareholders. (Well, one shareholder in particular, but others will obviously get a renewed window of opportunity to dump shares that would be worthless if the company folds immediately.)

The company's own 'independent advisor' - KPMG - endorses the offer in the weakest possible terms. I paraphrase, but the gist of it is: "on the strength of the information we've been given, we can't be sure that this is a complete ripoff, so we don't quite have sufficient grounds to prevent it from being put".

I say the hell with it. If the company is insolvent, let it fold now. If it isn't insolvent, then it can come up with a better offer than this. Worst case, I'm willing to lose a few grand to uphold the principle that shareholders don't get to just take money from small investors.

It may seem irrational to choose nothing over something, but if the price of 'something' is that your economy is to be run by bandits - I'll take a big ol' handful of nothing, thanks.

Microsoft: digging holes since 1997

2011-07-08T17:55:00.003+12:00

For a while there, I was almost starting to like Internet Explorer.

When my bosses told me to "slick up" our website, with scrolling headlines and graduated tints and rounded corners and shadows and all that tired old tat, I rubbed my metaphorical hands gleefully and settled down to learn the very latest web languages (by which I mean, HTML 5 and CSS 3). That didn't take long. But then, as I'd expected, the hard part began: learning how to make these gimmicks work in each type of browser.

I'll spare you the ins and outs of that - the stylesheet is kinda messy, and at almost 600 lines it's about three times as long as it has any business to be, but it works. (It's even technically valid, at least according to w3.org.)

When I handed my designs over to my bosses for feedback, they loved them. The pages, though I say so myself, look pretty cool when viewed on PC, Mac, tablet or notebook. For good measure I even checked them on my Nintendo DS. Lovely. My only negative feedback came from - what else - Internet Explorer 9.

But how? I've got IE9 myself. The same version, on the same platform, looking at the same pages - yet the results are completely different. (For instance: my version of IE9 has no problem with supporting display:table-cell, whereas yours evidently thinks it's the work of the devil.) What goes on?

It took me a whole afternoon to work out the answer to that.

Microsoft, rot their vile souls, have built "handy" features into Internet Explorer called "browser mode" and "document mode". Which means that the same browser can apply completely different sets of rules to interpret the same code.

On paper, like most of MS's output, it's not a bad idea. In practice, also like most of MS's output, the implementation is awful beyond description. See, the thing is: there's no way to control which settings someone else's browser will apply.

Oh, in theory there is. There's a tag you can put in your page header to tell it "This page is meant to be rendered in IE 9". That's annoying enough in itself - why would a browser need to be told not to pretend it's something else? And obviously it doesn't work if the client isn't using IE 9. But what's really winding me up, right now, is that it still won't work even if they bloody are using bloody IE9.

For a partial explanation, look at this unholy monstrosity. But even that is only a small part of the horror. See, while the page author has some minimal control over the "document mode", they have no control at all over the "browser mode", which overlaps with and partly overrules the "document mode". The browser user sets that at installation time - usually without even realising what they're doing, because it's disguised as a question about "how would you like to view the web?". And if you've downloaded the page in "IE7" mode, and then tried to apply "IE9" layout to it, the result is an ungodly hybrid that would make Doctor Moreau blench.

To add insult to injury, the mode that sometimes gets applied without realising it is "IE7". So I have to hack the design to work in IE7, despite the fact that nobody in the entire world actually uses IE bloody 7. (Well, okay. To be strictly accurate, according to our website logs, about 10% of IE users do - although I'm guessing most of those are really using later versions that are just pretending to be IE7.)

What people do still use, in their droves, is IE6, which is an entirely different pain in the fundament.

So now I'm having to insert four, count them, four separate stylesheets - for IE6, IE7, IE8 and (every other browser including IE9). And just hoping to goodness that IE10 works acceptably with the IE9 design.

Keynes, famously, is supposed to have argued that in times of recession, it would be worthwhile to pay the unemployed to dig holes only to fill them in again. That's about how useful I've been feeling this week.

Poisoning the cloud

2011-07-06T13:57:00.001+12:00

A lot of Europeans seem to have got their knickers in a twist over Microsoft's plain speaking on data protection. Stripped to its essentials, the CEO of Microsoft UK said that Microsoft doesn't do data protection as required by EU law, because US law explicitly forbids it.

I can see why this causes some consternation, but legally it seems quite straightforward to me. Microsoft, by its own account, can't provide a "safe harbor" for personal data on European citizens. Therefore, any European company that tries to store such data in a Microsoft-provided "cloud" service is opening itself to legal action from its European customers (and/or European governments, prosecutors or regulators, depending on the individual country's law). Those companies, in turn, might sue Microsoft for misrepresenting its service (before last week, at least), and they and Microsoft might sue the aforementioned governments and regulators for losses arising from negligence in applying their laws.

All of which could get messy, sure, but it's hardly the gutters-running-red-with-the-blood-of-the-aristocracy.

The interesting question is, why has Microsoft gone out of its way to declare itself incompetent to serve European data storage?

Simple answer: it doesn't want the business. Much better for Microsoft if people don't store data in clouds, but instead spend tens of thousands of dollars on licenses for SQL Server, and training on how to administer it. That's where the profit is.

Of course, in poisoning its own cloud, MS has also poisoned Google's - and every other US company, for that matter, but Google is the one it cares about. And to Google, the cloud isn't a low-margin fringe activity - it's a whole business model.

So what does Google have to say on this story? Not a word, as far as I can tell. Google is just waiting for the whole thing to blow over.

I wonder if a European, at this point, can take out an injunction to prevent companies she does business with from storing their data outside European jurisdiction? Seems to me that the prospect of a jail term for contempt of court would give CEOs more pause than the distant threat of a corporate fine.

Just something for you Europeans to mull over.

What the CIA learned from Trotsky

2011-06-14T14:37:00.003+12:00

Good news, sort of, from Syria: at least one person is not in danger.

For a while now, the BBC's line on Syria has been - ambivalent. About a month ago, I heard a very interesting 'From Our Own Correspondent' slot about how the government's brutal repression of protestors wasn't quite as one-sided as most news made it out to be. Long story short: there was plausible evidence that the unarmed protesters were, in fact, fighting back quite violently, and (at the time of that report) more than 50 Syrian security force personnel had been killed.

As compared with several hundred civilian casualties, that may not sound like all that many - but it does suggest that the Syrian government may have a genuine terrorist problem on its hands. Not that the Syrian government is justified, but there is a case to answer

He also pointed out how effective the Syrian opposition had been at taking videos and leaking them onto the internet - a process that takes organisation and planning on an impressive scale. We have solid evidence that the rebels have access to readily concealable cameras, in numbers large enough for many to be present at a single event; and to internationally-operable satellite phone SIM cards. These are, I'm reliably informed, not things that you can just walk into any Vodafone shop in Syria and buy for yourself.

Now, it's easy to characterise the BBC's Mid-East reporting as biased (and here is one self-appointed media watchdog doing just that). But it's not clear why such bias should inspire it to take sides in the Syrian business, nor why there were no comparable doubts expressed about Egypt or Tunisia or Libya.

I'm reminded of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. At the time, I was lucky enough to count among my friends both an American (whose wife had worked in Ukraine) and a Russian. The American regaled me with stories of vote-rigging by the Ukrainian government, while the Russian told me about the Americans who gave out free smartphones and orange shirts to favoured political groups. It was an interesting time.

Now there's this report, which shows that at least one of the causes célèbres of the anti-Syrian-government lobby is a deliberate, systematic fake, created by - an American.

Of course, it's possible that these Americans are all just private citizens exercising their rights to free speech, using money provided by anonymous private-sector donors. And it's possible that "Just Journalism" is a nonpartisan group of citizens with a love of Pure Truth and no financial connection to any government. And it's possible that I'm a brain in a jar.

Conclusive proof that I'm not Elect

2011-05-23T14:41:00.001+12:00

The more I read about the Rapture, the dumber it gets.

We all know by now that the latest prediction, by some engineer-turned-numerologist, didn't happen - thus bearing out the predictions of the great majority of both Christians and non-Christians alike. But the last I heard of the prediction itself was that it set not only the date, but the precise time of the event: 6:00 p.m., wherever you happened to be.

Thus it would strike Tonga first, then roll westward across New Zealand, Japan, Australia, Asia, Europe, and finally sweep across America and Hawaii, ending up in Samoa 24 hours after it began.

I'm not clear whether it was supposed to be guided by 'official' time (so that whole timezones would be struck at once), or real astronomical time, so that it would roll steadily westwards at constant rate of approximately 1000mph (at the equator). If official time, then I wonder how long it would take for governments in all points west of New Zealand to hastily amend their own timezones? If astronomical time, then why would it begin at the International Date Line? - I would have pegged Jerusalem as the obvious starting point.

This is what happens when engineers get hold of holy scripture. They (we) are ferociously literal-minded people (Osama bin Laden was educated first as an engineer, before the CIA trained him to be a terrorist).

There's something about a certain type of religious fantasy that appeals to people who believe in "working things out". Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic bilgewater, describes himself as "... raised by a crossword-puzzling, poetic father and an anagramming, word-loving, Latin-knowing, grammarian Mother".

When you look at a crossword, you can be reasonably sure that there is a solution. And when you look at the world as something designed by a higher intelligence, it's very tempting to see it in the same terms - as a puzzle, with clues inserted for those with eyes to see. And if you get your predictions wrong, that's just like getting a 'x' from God - it doesn't mean your whole approach is flawed, just that you've made a mistake somewhere.

For people who think like this, the idea that there are no clues, there is no plan, there is nothing to be worked out - strikes at the heart of their belief.

Take that, Friedman

2011-05-19T15:32:00.003+12:00

I keep hearing about how the UK gov't is cutting spending, in a desperate and probably doomed effort to bring the finances into something like balance within a reasonable timeframe.

Meanwhile, the New Zealand government continues spending as if it seriously believes the Rapture will strike on Saturday. In the wake of economic disasters (the collapse of one mine, and the announcement after an investigation that fully half of those remaining open have unsafe working practices), natural disasters (the Christchurch earthquake) and financial disasters (still no end to the stream of financial firms needing bailouts), the government doesn't hestitate to reach for its chequebook.

Yet for some reason, the foreign exchange markets love the Kiwi dollar over the pound. Can't get enough of it.

Each time some fresh disaster strikes New Zealand, the dollar rises. It's uncanny, really.

I can only conclude that free markets (I think the forex markets are about as close to 'perfectly free' as any existing market) believe strongly in the merits of heavy-handed Keynesian economic intervention.

Think about that, next time someone tries to tell you that governments shouldn't interfere because free markets know best.

The Crowded Planet guide to Britain

2011-05-12T16:47:00.000+12:00

Big news from the UK this week is that the famous Lonely Planet guide is sticking it to Britain's tourist industry.

About time too.

I love England. I love touring around it, I love showing it off to my foreign friends and relatives. (I've had a fair bit of practice at that now.) But there's no denying that the restaurants, hotels, sights and resorts that make the most effort to attract tourists - are those that are the least worth visiting.

There's probably a good reason for this. Every Briton - well, at least every middle-class Briton with my upbringing - knows that the best don't need to advertise. So it follows that anyone who does advertise is, at best, second-rate. Stonehenge doesn't advertise; but the tacky visitors' centre that has pretty much destroyed the point of going there - that advertises like nobody's business.

Whatever the reason, there's no denying: if it's British and you've heard of it, it's almost certainly either (a) crap or (b) laughably overpriced. Sometimes both.

What's important to remember about Britain, though - and England in particular - is the incredible density of it. This means there are two things everywhere you look: people (hence, pubs, hotels and restaurants that your guidebook has never heard of), and history.

It's not exactly secret, but it's not advertised either.

My recommendation, if you're contemplating a visit to the UK, is to do some reading before you go. Either pick a place[1] and read up on its history, or pick a history and identify the places associated with it.

[1] "London" isn't a place - it's about 60 places all wedged together. Trying to do them all is a rookie mistake, and a recipe for (at best) extreme boredom.

And don't take the Lonely Planet. While it's true that most places marketing themselves to tourists are overpriced and disappointing, a guidebook's job is not to lament these pitfalls, but to guide you safely past them. If it can't do that, it's not worth the weight.

Victory conditions

2011-05-02T17:01:00.002+12:00

So Osama bin Laden has finally run out of luck. Good riddance, and congratulations to whoever got him.

Not wishing to carp... but the US has spent, so far, more than $450 billion on the Afghan war. That's over $130 million per person allegedly killed by Osama, not even counting the lives wasted.

I say "allegedly", because since he's dead, he'll never have a trial. I bet some in the CIA are toasting that fortunate circumstance, as much as the achievement itself. Now no-one will ever question all the crimes they want to pin on him, and no-one will have to explain (publicly, at least) why it took 18 years*, plus the biggest budget blowout in human history, to catch up with him.

* (Counting from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when the FBI first put a price on his head.)

And if we factor in the Iraq war, the economic costs to the US and its allies, the number of lives lost by the US and its allies, and the horrific damage to US foreign relations and strategic goals (think North Korea), and of course the gargantuan budget deficit - then strategically speaking, Osama has inflicted far and away the most humiliating defeat in US history.

I don't like it. I hate everything Osama stood for. But we should face facts: he won.

Future lies ahead

2011-04-14T14:13:00.007+12:00

Last week, we heard that the New Zealand Press Association is closing. One of its joint owners, Fairfax Media, is no longer willing to support it.

I find myself conflicted. On the one hand, I've been moaning about the quality of journalism in this country since I got here. (Honestly, it's pathetic.) But now I'm pretty sure it's about to get a whole lot worse.

To explain why, I'm going to have to go into a little context.

Fairfax Media is an Australian-owned company that bought into the NZ newspaper business in 2003
Fairfax owns the NZPA jointly with its (also Australian) rival APN
Fairfax publishes the Dominion Post, Sunday Star Times, and a motley bag of local and suburban newspapers
APN publishes the New Zealand Herald plus sundry other titles, and also owns a handful of widely promoted radio stations
The NZPA, which has been in business for 130 years, provides news feeds indiscriminately to whoever will pay for them.

The important point to note here is that NZPA is a relic from the days of actual newspapers, whereas its owners are both modern transnational corporations.

But why should that matter? Give me a chance, I'm coming to it...

The reason Fairfax gives for taking its ball home is that it's not happy with the NZPA's output. "Often those stories aren't investigative, they're not stories carved out by the NZPA", says Fairfax's "Group Executive Editor", Paul Thompson.

But isn't that the point of an agency? They're supposed to provide facts, not "stories". Investigating, and writing stories, is the newspaper journalists' job. What an agency provides is the raw materials for this process.

There is, however, no money in facts. Facts aren't protected by copyright; it's impossible to 'own' them (barring a few special cases, such as trade secrets). The only type of information that you can monetise is the type you've made up.

And that's why the most successful media organisations of our time would rather not report news; they prefer "comment", "analysis" and outright fiction. Because we ask to the free market to provide our news, but - now that information is no longer tied to a physical object, or even a persistent medium - we have completely failed to provide any incentives for it.

And that's why Paul Thompson is, quite rationally, doing away with the supply of facts. Oh, I'm sure the decent journalists - of whom there are a few, although criminally overworked - will do their best to be truthful. But fact-checking takes time, which is in ever-shorter supply nowadays; and worse, it often derails the train of your story.

Much easier just to go with what seems likely. Worst case, if anyone calls you on it, it'll just drive more traffic to your website. Win-win.

(Incidentally, I saw this news story on TV3, owned by yet another Australian consortium. Oh well, at least none of them belongs to Rupert Murdoch.)

A question of lies

2011-04-12T17:48:00.002+12:00

Has anyone but me noticed the very odd form of code that politicians speak, when talking about Libya?

There's "the Libyan army", which as far as anyone can tell consists mostly of mercenaries from Mali. There's the "rebel leadership", who seem to lack even the most basic qualification to lead anything, viz. a sense of their own aims.

(Hint, fellas: read this.)

There was Col Gadhaffi's "ceasefire" on 18 March, which was clearly a signal for "Finish them off quickly!"

When NATO, or whatever they're styling themselves currently, first started bombing, they said it was "to protect Libyan civilians from their own regime. Not, we must stress at length, not to force Colonel Gadhaffi out." So - after all the rejoicing at persuading the good colonel to give up on his weapons and terrorist training programmes, NATO was going to all this trouble to antagonise him, only to leave him in power to live out his days as "the man who beat NATO"? Yeah, right, and I've got this beautiful bridge to sell you...

A few days later, President Obama wanted to "hand over operational leadership from American to international authorities". And so, after days of trivial wrangling, the American operations commander signed over command to a NATO commander, who continued using the same (mostly American) planes and missiles to fly the same missions.

A couple of days ago, it was the African Union's turn to say what they clearly didn't mean. When they triumphantly announced that the regime had accepted their "ceasefire" proposal, it didn't take much of a visionary to foresee that the rebels would refuse it. And thus that this "proposal" had more to do with the need for the AU to be seen to be doing something - taking the initiative, not letting NATO have everything their own way - than stopping the fighting.

Today's headline is "Former (defected) Libyan foreign minister says Libya could become 'next Somalia'". In other words, he's also afraid of the possibility that NATO will fail to finish the job, and so he wants to stiffen their resolve.

In short, everyone and his dog is talking about Libya in these curiously coded terms. It's not hard to see what they really mean. My question is: who are they lying to, and why?

It's one thing for tinpot African dictators who control their own media to talk like this. But in the USA and Europe, surely the Free Press is supposed to keep some kind of a check on what is really going on. And yet, as far as I can see, nobody is being called on this bullshit.

Do we all take it for granted, that politicians won't say what they mean? Are we so numbed by the 24 hour news cycle that we don't even notice? Or are we just comfortable with the pretense, so we don't want to discuss reality? Seems to me that none of these options reflects well on "democracy"...

As seen from the windows

2011-04-11T14:27:00.008+12:00

Everyone loves pictures.

A pigeon gathers its thoughts, if the word can be applied to pigeons, after mistaking our bedroom window for a low cloud.

The silvereye is possibly New Zealand's most beautiful native bird. But sadly, also quite shy.

The tui: uglier, but more iconic.

I don't want to point fingers, but this might have something to do with why we don't see more silvereyes around.

And finally: our upwardly Møbler dresser.

Rwandan women on top of the world

2011-03-18T16:47:00.007+13:00

No sooner had I published my puzzlement at being congratulated for having a son as opposed to a daughter, than the New Zealand Herald chimed in with: "New Zealand is the best country in the Commonwealth [in which] to be born a girl".

This surprised me a little, because it seems to me that unabashed sexism is vastly more widespread here than back home. So I set out to track down the study that the Herald is reporting. It wasn't as easy as it should have been, thanks to the Herald's principled refusal to reveal its sources, but eventually I found it.

It's a study by the Royal Commonwealth Society - an organisation I'd never heard of before this week - into gender inequality in all 54 countries of the Commonwealth. It looks at eight parameters, and assigns each country a grade from A to C for each. The parameters are:

life expectancy
infant health (defined as proportion of young children reported to be underweight)
years spent in full-time education
teen pregnancy rates
proportion of Commonwealth Scholarship beneficiaries who are women
proportion of members in the country's national parliament who are women
proportion of medal winners at international sporting events who are women
average pay.

So, New Zealand women do better on these values, in aggregate, than those in any other Commonwealth country - right?

Well, not quite. See, while some of the measures are based on numbers relative to other countries (e.g. teen pregnancy), others are based on comparison to men in the same country (average pay, education). So, for instance, Kenya scores an 'A' on pay because, while its people are dirt-poor, men only earn about 30% more than women; whereas Brunei scores a 'C', even though women there earn more in a month than a Kenyan woman makes in a year.

Then there's the 'education' measure. In the UK, for instance, girls spend an average of 13.39 years in full-time education, versus 13.23 years for boys. Better than equal! An easy 'A', surely? Well, no - the UK only gets a 'B' in that category, because the gap isn't wide enough. Presumably the study's designers believe that girls are innately stupider than boys, and need more education to compensate. Bangladesh, meanwhile, gets an 'A' for giving its girls 7.85 years of education - because its boys only get 7.25.

But for real confusion, turn to the final summary page. This ranks all countries by gender equality (which is where NZ comes out on top), and adds in figures and rankings for national income per head. Then, bizarrely, it subtracts one ranking from the other.

"If the figure is positive,", it explains, "it means that the country is doing better on our gender criteria than in its income ranking amongst Commonwealth countries."

Unfortunately, perhaps, this method handicaps all "developed" nations, so that for the richest country in the study (Brunei), there's no way to have a score higher than zero - and for the top ten or so, it's pretty much random. New Zealand and Barbados come out positive, while Australia, Canada, the UK and Singapore all come out negative. By this ranking, the country that takes gender equality most seriously is... Rwanda.

I wish I knew what the Royal Commonwealth Society is, and what it's playing at.

Aspirations

2011-03-10T16:40:00.001+13:00

There's one conversation I had over and over when Susan was pregnant, which still bothers me. It went something like this:

Random Person: "So, do you know what you're having?"
Me (brightly): "A baby, I hope!" (Trying humour to head off the inevitable. Seldom works.)
RP: "No, I mean a boy or a girl?"
Me: "It's a boy."
RP: "Oh, that's great, congratulations!"

At this point I found myself - stuck. It seems uncivil to cavil at the sentiment. Yet I do want to know: why is the sex of the baby considered so important? Would you not congratulate me if I'd said "a girl"?

I discussed this with one of the innumerable, interchangeable midwives who attended Susan during her 47 hours of labour. The best explanation she could come up with was: "He can be an All-Black."

Now, far be it from me to express anything but the deepest respect for New Zealand's most cherished national heroes. They're a fine body of men, and may they enjoy the very best of luck. But really, just now, I'm not thinking of pushing baby Atilla in the direction of any particular career. And if the biggest difference between sexes is that males have a one-in-200,000 shot at being an All-Black, and females don't - that doesn't seem like all that much, to me.

There are, of course, many reasons to take joy in Atilla. If the greatest hope of New Zealand youth is that they have a 0.0005% chance of one day being on a certain team, we're all in trouble.

"No soul to be damned, no body to be kicked"

2011-02-25T17:20:00.002+13:00

There's a possibility you've missed the story of Dr Peter Wilmshurst, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, being sued by Boston-based NMT Medical over alleged comments about the conduct of a trial that he was, at one time, lead investigator for.

Summary: NMT sponsored the trial of a treatment that it thought could benefit chronic migraine sufferers. The trial showed, fairly conclusively, that the treatment - which is both expensive and invasive - doesn't work. For reasons that I'm not fool enough to go into here, the final published paper glossed over the negative result, hinted at more positive effects (beyond the scope of the original trial parameters) that could be deduced by suitably massaging the data ("excluding outliers"), and ignored potentially serious side effects arising from the procedure. Dr Wilmshurst and one other investigator withdrew their names from the paper before it was published, and Dr Wilmshurst was so indiscreet as to talk about the whole fiasco at a conference in Washington in 2007. His comments were published on the web, and from there it's only a short hop to the High Court.

There's so much Wrong in this story that it's hard to know where to begin. It's wrong that a US company can sue a person under English law for something said to a conference in the US. It's wrong that a speech made - on-topic, by an eminently qualified person - at a technical conference, should be the subject of legal proceedings. It's wrong that lawyers and judges, of all people, are being asked to judge the validity of medical trial methodologies. It's wrong that Dr Wilmshurst has, so far, spent the price of a medium-sized house on his own defence; what exactly are his lawyers doing, to earn that sort of money? It's wrong that he has no prospect of ever getting that money back, since (a) most US courts will (understandably) refuse to enforce an award ruled by a UK libel court, and (b) if he wins, the company will probably be broke anyway. It's utterly, indefensibly, inexplicably wrong that a company can sue for libel - a law that's supposed to protect the reputations of people - at all. This case is the epitome of asymmetrical justice.

And not least, it's wrong that you and I only hear about the whole story through blatantly partisan blogs (like this one). Because, while I know nothing about Dr Wilmshurst personally, I know that he chose to have this fight. And there are plausible people on the other side of the case.

But what's most wrong of all is that NMT's directors are doing the right thing.

If their flagship product doesn't work, their company is in big trouble. It is clearly the directors' duty to do everything in their power to obscure that fact and continue to milk money out of the structure of gullible, vulnerable patients, susceptible doctors, and equally amoral insurers that, collectively, represent their meal tickets. Already the company has lost over 90% of its share price; a decisive victory for Dr Wilmshurst could wipe it out.

It's not optional. NMT's directors have to be as unscrupulous, vicious and amoral as inhumanly possible. It's their duty to their shareholders; anything less could get them sued.

Welcome to the world we've built ourselves. Not only do we reward amorality - we demand it.

Rumour as news

2011-02-23T09:54:00.004+13:00

"Christchurch struck by another major quake, worse than last September's."

That was the news that somehow osmosed into the office yesterday afternoon. The usual New Zealand news sites, unaccustomed as they are to being viewed by more than three people at once, promptly vanished from the web. The Herald, TVNZ, Stuff were all unavailable.

So where to find out what was going on? Experimentally, I tried Twitter.

Now, there are those e-vangelists who claim that Twitter is the only news source you need nowadays. You get breaking news from people on the spot, far faster than conventional media can deliver it. And, of course, unfiltered by editorial policy or bias.

And this is true, kinda. On the other hand, the news is filtered by the fact that it's being written by twits. But now let's see how it covers this breaking news story...

Well, first observation is that it doesn't merit inclusion among 'Trending Topics', being squeezed out by news of greater moment, such as "Libia" and "rafa araneda" (the Chilean TV presenter, of course). If I were relying on Twitter to tell me what's new in the world, I'd have missed this story entirely. Granted, one of these is, objectively, a bigger story - but surely Christchurch should outrank "BIEBER ALERT"?

Hard information from Christchurch? Almost none. What I'm seeing is the accounts of people all over the world who are watching their TVs. New media feeding off old. There are some excellent pictures (I think this one deserves some kind of award, but Lord alone knows who took it or who first posted it online), but if I were watching TV I'd have seen a lot more, a lot quicker.

Decisive victory to old media.

Observing the observers

2011-02-11T15:15:00.005+13:00

The local New Zealand media doesn't even pretend to care what's going on in Egypt, not when there are truly important stories such as Lindsey Lohan's alleged kleptomania to talk about. So I've been watching a lot of Al Jazeera lately.

AJ, for those not blessed with its coverage, does care about Egypt. It cares a lot. It seems to have covered absolutely nothing else for the past two weeks. And apart from the obvious partiality of its coverage (it makes no attempt to hide its contempt for Mubarak and his regime), there's one other thing that bothers me about it...

Western media has tended to portray the protests as "pro-democracy". Yet that word is significantly missing from most of AJ's coverage. Rather than aspiring to future democracy, they are passionate about purging current corruption.

Just to prove I'm not imagining this slant, I compared Al Jazeera's coverage with that of several major Western news outlets (by searching their websites for current news stories featuring "Egypt" plus either "democracy" or "corruption" or both). What I found:

Dear Mr Mubarak,

First, congratulations on being Egypt's longest-serving ruler since Muhammed Ali Pasha. Egypt is an ancient and widely respected country, unlike some in your neighbourhood, and having earned a place in that history should stand as an achievement in itself.

And congratulations also on remaining in residence long after many lesser dictators would have given up. You are clearly a man of principle and tenacity. We must stress, however, that at this difficult time it is more important than ever to avoid seriously blotting your record with the Americans. Keep this up, and you can look forward to a retirement peppered with prestigious speaking engagements, talk-show appearances and memoir-serialisation rights that will keep you in both hookahs and hookers for life.

We understand that you're not a democrat. We understand why you're not a democrat. That's fine with us. Our media may quack up a storm about "democracy", but as William Hague made clear on Al Jazeera last week - we're perfectly happy for you to govern Egypt however you like, just so long as you do it quietly. And if you can end your present domestic crisis - or even just ride it out until October - without spawning an international one, then good for you.

And we understand that people in your position should be appropriately rewarded for your efforts. It's a stressful job. Nobody begrudges you a few millions in your Swiss retirement fund. You absolutely should give plum jobs to your unqualified cronies, treat yourself to the occasional duck island or private business trip or bunga-bunga party at your taxpayers' expense. That's expected.

But there is such a thing as moderation. When you've amassed a family fortune that's one-seventh of your country's total GDP, you have run your course and then some. The time to retire was probably about $60 billion ago. You're not Rupert Murdoch.

On your way out, if you could forward this note to every other Arab leader in your address book, it would save us the trouble of researching them.

Sincerely,

The People of Europe

More home improvements

2011-02-09T17:25:00.004+13:00

I've been wanting a heat pump, now, for 26 years. That's how long it is since I learned about them in first-year thermodynamics. The idea of getting much more energy out than you put in appealed strongly to the lazy freeloader in me - which, let's face it, has always been a strong if not dominant character trait.

But it wasn't until I came to New Zealand that I saw them widely advertised as a household appliance. We had ours fitted yesterday, a day before - in accordance with the universal laws governing these things - the weather turned cooler.

The installation involved drilling a hole through our wall. I was eager to watch this operation, because I wanted to know if it was true that the wall is, basically, made of polystyrene.

Turns out it's completely true.

There's a thin layer of plaster on the outside, then about two inches of polystyrene, then (allegedly, though I haven't actually seen this) a timber frame, then about a quarter-inch of plasterboard on the inside. Sometimes I'm amazed the house has stood up this long.

But so far, touch wood, it's doing well. And as from yesterday, it's significantly more comfortable, when the weather outside is either inclemently warm or cold.

Atilla the Hon

2011-01-21T14:00:00.001+13:00

It's generally agreed, I think, that Christmas babies get a raw deal. His birthday forever overshadowed by the unrelenting promotion of Saturnalia, throughout his childhood he will have scant chance of even seeing his friends on the day, never mind getting his fair share of prezzies and well-wishes from them.

On the other hand, no-one will ever suggest going to McDonald's for his birthday. So, y'know, swings and roundabouts.

My son was born at an antisocial hour on 27 December last. That's as precise as I'm getting in a public place like this - I don't want his identity being stolen before he's even old enough to know it. For purposes of this blog, I'm going to call him Atilla.

I don't intend to bore my public for the next fifteen years or so with a recitation of his boundless genius and achievements. He spoke his first word before he was two weeks old (my father, a devious Scrabble player, assures me that 'erm' is a perfectly good word). He fills nappies industriously, usually within minutes of having one fitted. He needs no alarm clock to wake him with the dawn, or even earlier, despite partying well into the small hours the night before. And although it is customary to describe babies as 'defenceless', he has shown a level of resource and precision in fending off untimely attentions that, I feel, augurs well for his future security.

In short, I'm sure that within a few years you'll be reading about him in the press, so you won't need me to keep you abreast. Which is just as well, as I'm still reeling at how much laundry one small person (who only wears about two garments at a time) can generate.

In the meantime, what to do about his birthday?

We could, of course, simply lie - tell him his birthday was in August or something. But there doesn't seem any likely way of keeping up that pretence. Sooner or later it will dawn on him to wonder why his passport and other official documents show the wrong date of birth, and then his trust in us will be considerably undermined.

Or we could try raising him as a Buddhist, to despise both vain material possessions and arbitrary calendar events. How hard could that be?

Nah...

My present idea is to celebrate his name day. "Atilla" is celebrated (in Hungary, at least) on 7 January. Perfect, except of course that that's not his real name.

Truly, fatherhood is an awesome responsibility.

On the origins of hobbits

2010-12-17T17:12:00.002+13:00

Back before the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I used to enjoy arguing with Tolkien fans.

They are (or were), I discovered, among the most argumentative people on the Internet, back in the day. Far more so than the real nerds who exchanged lists of reasons why one Star Trek captain was better than another. Until you've seen a bunch of Tolkien geeks arguing, and I swear to all that's holy I'm not exaggerating this even slightly, for weeks on end about whether Balrogs had wings or whether the Rohirrim used stirrups... you don't know what vitriol is.

At one stage I tried to play peacemaker. "It's not as if anyone was going to dig up a fossilised Balrog and prove the answer either way", I said. "Why can't we each have our own image?" Which, of course, made me no friends at all, and pretty soon I learned to stay out of those threads. It was, it seemed, the most important thing in the world to be able to correctly divine the precise image that was in Tolkien's mind when he wrote the scene. To compromise in pursuit of that ultimate truth - that would be sheer apostacy.

These were the people who had gobbled up each of the interminable volumes of Trash Reconstructed From Tolkien's Litterbox & Blotter, known in the trade as the History of Middle-earth, as well as collections of the great man's letters, reminiscences by other people who knew him, and Vague Hints His Son's Housekeeper's Daughter's Boyfriend Told This Guy Who Wrote To My Local Paper.

Occasionally in these robust discussions, someone would mention Tolkien's dream of creating "a mythology for England". I think, now, that phrase is key to understanding his work.

Tolkien was a scholar of mythology. He didn't use the word lightly or randomly. He knew that it is in the nature of mythology that there is no such thing as a definitive version. The whole point of myths is to be retold.

That's why the Tolkien and his estate, for years, made no attempt to "control" his intellectual property. Everyone and his dog copied Tolkien's basic prototypes for "dwarves", "orcs", "elves" and "hobbits" from his work, and Tolkien lifted not a finger to stop them: not, as Hollywood imagines, because he was a senile old quack who didn't recognise a gold mine when he was sitting on one, but because that was what he wanted to happen.

By the time his estate fell into the hands of "competent" (read: "evil") managers, those stereotypes had made their way into thousands of imitative books, paintings, films and cartoons, games, posters, and, of course, Dungeons & Dragons.

Where there are contradictions and inconsistencies, or incompleteness, in his books - that's not just a mistake. I'm not saying it's intentional, but it is an intrinsic part of the whole. The books themselves aren't "authoritative": they are meant to be a vehicle for debate, not its subject.

This mindset is, of course, the antithesis of modern Hollywood. To Hollywood, all stories - and to the (steadily increasing) maximum extent permitted by law, all separable literary or visual elements of those stories - are by nature private property, to be exploited and monetised ruthlessly. To Hollywood, someone "giving away" his intellectual property is not a hero or a philosopher, but merely a mug to be exploited.

And that is why no film of these books made by the present-day studio system is ever going to do them justice. Movies are produced by a process based on ideals and morality that by its very nature cannot begin to understand Tolkien. In carrying Tolkien's legacy, D&D was more faithful and more effective than any movies will ever be - because D&D is based on creating new stories, not merely the messy regurgitation of old ones. To be faithful to Tolkien, you would have to donate all your scenery, sets, designs, props, models, scripts, scores and publicity to the public domain, the moment the movies were finished. And, of course, allow anyone else to sample, recut, redub, rebuild, reimage etc. as much as they liked.

Even if Peter Jackson had no problem with that (and to do the man justice, I think he might not), the studios would never allow it. It's anathema to their business model.

Open season on messengers

2010-12-16T11:49:00.004+13:00

I heard today that the US Air Force is blocking its people from viewing the New York Times website, and those of other papers that have republished the Wikileaks cables.

The words "stable door" spring to mind. Although in this case the horse hasn't so much "bolted", it's more like it's lounging around the paddock sniggering at the stable hands and enjoying a quiet ciggie. Everyone knows exactly where it is and how it got there. We're a little vague on the "why", though. Why did a private soldier have access to all that material? Why, exactly, does a very junior soldier need to know what the US ambassador to New Zealand was writing to the State Department?

The official explanation goes something like "Blah blah, 9/11, blah, intelligence sharing, blah, join the dots, blah blah, never happen again." Which, of course, is utter bollocks. Material of the level that would be required to foresee another 9/11 is specifically excluded from the whole bundle - there is nothing "top secret" there.

And if you take the view that even low-level people might be able to glean patterns and spot warning signs in this dross - wouldn't it make more sense to publish it?

Well, they have effectively published it now. And much as I hate to think "conspiracy", I can't help but notice that it's been published in such a way as to hand maximal ammunition to several interest groups. The CIA, FBI and Pentagon have all been furiously angling for funding for "cyberwarfare" divisions; the unapologetically-fascist wings of both political parties believe that the First Amendment was frankly a mistake; the White House has been itching for an opportunity to apply some sort of "control" to the Internet. All of these groups are in full cry.

Meanwhile, USAF personnel - uniquely in the world, apparently - don't have access to this material now. So much for intelligence sharing.

Diplomatic language

2010-12-02T11:19:00.011+13:00

A whole lot of American diplomats have spent this week fuming over the demise of a golden age, when diplomatic communications were private. Since Congress, Senate, the White House, Sarah Palin and FOX News are united in their condemnation of Wikileaks, you might think its days were numbered. And sure enough, the US is throwing a lot at Wikileaks - from character assassination and prosecution of its founder, to cyber-attacks that it would undoubtedly describe as terrorism if they were directed at a US government site, to para-legal shenanigans aimed at destroying its hosts.

And so far, the Internet has interpreted each of these attacks - correctly, I suspect - as a publicity stunt.

But even if they did bring down Wikileaks, they'd just be shooting the messenger. Leaks have always happened. If you think you can commit something to writing and share it with tens of thousands of people, but not with the world - you're kidding yourself.

When the British ruled the world, we knew this. Which is why our diplomatic communications were couched in, let's say, careful language, so that it would not cause much embarrassment even if it did leak. Apparently the blunt, plain-speaking, tell-it-like-it-is US State Department has forgotten the use of "diplomatic language" in private communication. So here, in the interests of world peace, is a quick refresher:

Don't say	Say
angry	concerned
rude	direct
shouting	forceful
drunk	tired
pederast	mentor
stinking	authentic
screaming	agitated
foaming at the mouth	distressed
demanded the immediate invasion of Iran	proposed an urgent realignment of Shi'ite regional authority structures
... using nuclear weapons...	... urgent siliceous realignment...
leeringly offered to buy my daughter	expressed a wish for closer familial interaction
leeringly offered to buy the president's daughter	... at the highest level

Your colleagues will know exactly what you mean, but when your memo inevitably winds up on the front page of the New York Times, your interlocutor won't mind as much. With luck, they might even keep talking to you.

You're welcome.

Disasters are God's way of telling us we're not the centre of the universe

2010-11-25T11:35:00.005+13:00

My respect for John Key just went up another notch. I knew he was a canny politician, from his performance over The Hobbit. But now I'm also inclined to respect him as a manager.

Throughout the Pike River disaster, Our Leader has kept a conspicuously low profile. (It helps that he's been out of the country most of the time.) Not for him the theatrics of Chile's President Pinera, who practically ran his administration from the site for the duration, or even President Obama during the Deepwater Horizon fiasco. No, Key was happy to let others take the heat. When the media wanted a politician, what they got was Gerry Brownlee, the charisma-less minister for energy. But most of the time, the face on our screens was a haggard-looking Peter Whittall, CEO of the company.

And Whittall did an outstanding job. His stress and distress were obvious, but his control was even more so. He fed the facts clearly and promptly and accurately to the insatiable media. He answered the obvious, frustrating questions ("What are you waiting for?") calmly and with infinite patience, and consistently refused to be drawn into the stupid questions ("Whose fault is all this?").

But after the news broke, yesterday, of a second explosion, and the story turned from drama to disaster - then Key took the limelight. He was grave, he was direct, and best of all, he continued not to discuss blame. There would be inquiries, he said - several of them - but until they had some answers, he wasn't going to start speculating.

It's probably Whittall we have to thank that the only casualties were the people trapped. There are any number of ways he could have killed more people. He could have rushed rescuers in earlier; he could have failed to explain his reasons for not doing that, which might well have prompted someone to act behind his back. Or he could have looked too calm and detached while explaining, which could have had the same effect. But he did none of these things. And the politicians let him.

Compare with President "I want to know whose ass to kick" Obama during Deepwater Horizon - he took the opportunity to stir up anti-British xenophobia, lambasted Tony Hayward for Being Unsympathetically Foreign, and prompting the company to replace him with an American. Neither helpful nor constructive.

I'm thankful, at this point, to be living in a country where politicians don't feel they have to be seen to run everydamn'thing personally. There's a time to kick arse, and a time to let people get on with it. Key has shown that he can stay out of the way when it counts. That means the Peter Whittalls of this world can do their jobs.

The population density school of lit crit

2010-11-19T17:39:00.002+13:00

One of my favourite writers is Kazuo Ishiguro.

For a while after I read The Remains of the Day, I wondered what it was that gave a Japanese-born writer such a deep, sympathetic insight into the character of his all-too-English narrator. Okay, so Ishiguro is English by naturalisation, but still - his understanding of Stevens' mentality is infinitely more insightful than that of almost anyone I know. In just two generations, it seems, the "servant" mindset has been, pretty much, completely erased from British culture.

When I read An Artist of the Floating World - one of my favourite books - the mystery began to clear. Because that story is almost exactly the same, but for the teensy details that it's set in postwar Japan, rather than postwar England, and deals with a distinguished artist and patriarch, rather than a never-married butler. Those differences don't really amount to the proverbial hill of beans, compared with the similarities.

Why, I mused, did English society have so much in common with Japanese? On the face of it, it would be hard to identify two cultures that have had less opportunity to influence one another.

The answer I came up with can be boiled down to one word: population. Both Japan and England are densely populated, and they're both islands (well, technically England shares its island with a couple of other small nations, but let's gloss over that for the moment). That fact means that in both countries, it's very hard to forget that land (room, space) is a very limited commodity.

And that, I hypothesised, gave rise to two cultures in which "manners" play a very important role. You know that you're always going to be living very closely with other people. Therefore, it makes sense to follow fairly rigid social rules, even if those rules are not enforced.

Compare and contrast with grossly underpopulated countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Wide open spaces foster the illusion of personal independence and autonomy, the belief that the individual is somehow sovereign and has the "right" (whatever the heck that means) to ignore what others think.

My theory is that if you could come up with a way of quantifying the degree to which "manners" and "formality" are valued in a society, you could then plot that value on a graph against population density, and it would show that the more people are crammed into a limited space, the more likely they are to understand the need to get along with each other.

Granted, there's plenty of counter-examples. Big-city-dwellers, from Paris to Los Angeles, are proverbially rude and unsympathetic. But they are rude, principally, to outsiders - that is, to people who are not familiar with the city's protocols. People born and raised in the city seldom make that complaint, because they understand the reasons for city manners and values.

Values such as "keeping a stiff upper lip". When you live in a community of a thousand people, and you know by sight just about everyone you meet from day to day, it makes sense to share your feelings and support one another. When you live in a city of a million, it's a different story. No-one wants to go through every day, getting drawn into the lives of another random selection of strangers who happen to be going through rough times today. Hence it's important that people learn not to show their feelings in public, out of consideration for others.

And these are the sorts of values that Ishiguro's protagonists cling to, failing to realise that the societies around them no longer understand this need. The war has mixed everything up, and now they find themselves surrounded by people from different backgrounds who no longer understand how the old ways came about, and consequently have no respect for them.

It's a haunting and tragic story, both times. Ishiguro conveys sadness and regret like no other writer I know.

At least it's not a tabloid...

2010-11-04T17:37:00.000+13:00

If you're not in New Zealand, chances are slim that you've heard anything about the Wellington Declaration.

But here in the middle of the sea, we're pathetically grateful when the Great and Good, in this case in the shape of Hillary Clinton, deign not merely to notice us, but to pretend for a few minutes that they give a damn' what we think about anything. (If that were true, the Fed wouldn't have announced yesterday that it was deliberately devaluing the US dollar - sorry, I mean "reinvigorating the economy" - by printing an extra $600 billion.)

The press release celebrating the Wellington Declaration is thin on detail, and the Herald's coverage does nothing to improve matters. We're treated to a description of Mrs Clinton's dress and a blow-by-blow account of her reception (which leaves me thinking someone must have mistaken her for the president); then we get to the political insights of Steven Beban - an 18 year old 'Wellington local' who has never been to the US, but he has an Obama poster.

Seriously. If you've read the above paragraph, you now know as much about 'Steven Beban' as I do. There's no suggestion of why anyone should believe a word he says.

It's nice of the Herald not to overburden our poor provincial little brains with any actual facts or analysis. Discussion of what 'co-operation' might mean, how it reconciles with our oft-reaffirmed 'nuclear free' policy, how the new relationship will differ from the existing one, what exactly New Zealand is likely to get out of so lopsided a deal - well, who knows? Not the Herald, that's for damn' sure. As far as I can tell, they haven't even tried to find anyone who might have so much as thought of these questions. They've reprinted the press release (and the text of the "declaration" itself), and called it a story.

Welcome to small-country journalism.

Exeunt. Seriously.

2010-10-28T10:02:00.002+13:00

Big news in Kiwiland this morning: The Hobbit will be filmed here, but (says the government) Warner is insisting on a change in labour law. No longer will film industry contractors be able to claim that they are, in effect, employees, and entitled to employee protections.

"A likely tale", cry the unions. "This is just another step in the government's agenda to strip away all workers' rights and reduce us to the status of some third-world hellhole like Mississippi. What are we doing, letting these American thugs dictate our domestic employment law?"

For once, I think the unions have a good point. No matter what's at stake, when a foreign company tells you to change your employment law, the only decent answer should be to refer them to the reply in the case of Arkell v Pressdram. Moreover, treatment of contractors is one of those areas where NZ employment law really doesn't need rebalancing in favour of employers. The fact that this change is, apparently, to be specific to the film industry is probably supposed to reassure me, but I've always been against making "exclusive" laws.

But if the unions are right about this, then their leaders really need to resign. Today. Because they have royally screwed up this dispute. They literally couldn't have handled it worse if they'd been in cahoots with the government all along.

They picked a stupid fight over a high-profile issue - associated with the country's biggest international success in living memory - pitting themselves directly against the most popular person in the country. They allowed themselves to be cast as pawns of foreign interests who wanted the movies made elsewhere. They made themselves look both callous and cowardly. They say that they only "requested talks", but at this point that looks like sheer revisionism: they threatened the production, and they did it in a very high-profile way. It's been national news for a month.

In all seriousness: if you were trying to give the government an opening, what would you have done differently?

The only explanation that would make any sense at all is that they were trying to make the National government overreach itself and hand a much-needed PR boost to Labour, which has wisely remained aloof from the whole fiasco. In which case, Key's limited retaliation makes sense - it's a giant middle digit extended to the unions, at a time when almost no-one in the country, least of all their own members, is going to sympathise.

Jennifer Ward-Lealand, head of NZ Equity, and Helen Kelly, president of the Council of Trade Unions, need to go. They have let down the whole country, by putting the government in a position where it could sell out our laws to a foreign corporation. Worse, they've let down their own members - jeopardising the very livelihoods they're paid to protect. It's time for some union leaders in this country who understand something about politics.

It's a simple question...

2010-09-30T16:48:00.009+13:00

Dear Lazyweb,

Somewhere out there, there has to be someone who knows what the "priority" attribute does in a style definition in MS Word 2007/2010:

Google is no help. Word MVPs aren't saying.

Word Help is its usual helpless self:

But someone must know. Bonus points for an answer referencing a source published by Microsoft.

Anyone? Anyone at all?

Hate to say "I told you so..."

2010-09-30T12:55:00.004+13:00

Ah, who am I kidding? I love to say that. Who doesn't?

According to figures released by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety - an American outfit, natch - laws banning texting while driving may actually increase the rate of accidents.

The irony is strong in this one.

One suggestion is that offenders don't change their behaviour, but do start trying to conceal it, by holding their phone lower - thus taking their eyes further from where they're supposed to be.

Whatever. To me, it just highlights what I said at the time: this is a stupid law, enacted by people who were either dumb, or playing dumb, or just plain corrupt.

When a law whose purpose is to improve public safety turns out to be not merely ineffective, but actively counter-productive - what should we do about it?

If the answer turns out to be "repeal the law", I'll be amazed.

Parenthood

2010-09-13T16:38:00.002+12:00

For those who don't know: Susan is currently expecting our first child.

(By "expecting", I mean "growing internally". A bit like a cannabis plant, but more expensive.)

It's an exciting, disturbing and costly time. There's stuff to buy, stuff to research, stuff to prepare and book and make. And Susan's appetite, always healthy, is growing positively heroic. Having spent years learning to cook smaller portions, now I find she can eat as much in one sitting as I can. The difference being that while I typically eat only a light breakfast and/or a light lunch followed by a proper dinner, she currently eats solidly for three or more meals a day. I think of myself as following the "camel" model, whereas she's closer to "cormorant".

And it seems as if there's a carefully constructed script that we're supposed to follow. No-one has given us a copy - which is fine by me - but somehow we're meant to know it.

The midwife tells us some of it. Yesterday, for instance, S had a blood test that's supposed to tell whether she may be developing diabetes - the midwife told us about that one. And the various ultrasound scan sessions. (For some reason, it's customary to refer to the image one sees on these occasions as "perfectly formed". I don't know about anyone else's experience, but what I saw on the screen would not have looked out of place on a Halloween mask.)

And we're shopping for all the hideous paraphernalia of early parenthood. Cots and bassinets and mattresses and changing tables and strollers and child seats and day-care facilities and who knows what we've forgotten? (Apart from the people trying to sell it to us, of course.)

At this point, I'm wondering through what loophole "parenthood" has slipped into the modern world as something that's still allowed to be done by amateurs. If you want to build a house, or a bridge, or a car, or open a pub, or treat a sick animal (let alone a human), or even cut down a tree in this country - there's a whole grand checklist of things you need to know and do, and even enterprising, can-do people will take time to research it. Most of us, most of the time, will just find someone who's qualified to do it for us.

But not parenting. There are plenty of books that tell you how to do it, but there's no nationally-mandated standard or test to pass. There is no compliance certificate for children.

I'm not complaining. It just seems - incongruous, that's all. After all: the arguments for building codes - that it affects public safety and hygiene, makes a material difference to people's lives, that faults may not become apparent for many years after building, may be impossible or outrageously expensive to fix later - all apply a fortiori to raising a child.

On people who are less trustworthy than politicians

2010-09-01T16:14:00.001+12:00

It's a sad fact that journalists are lazy buggers - and if they think they can get away with not working, they will.

Witness the coverage of last week's publication, in the UK, of the Department for Transport's (whatever happened to the Department of Transport? Fed up with people asking whether they were "for" or "against" it?) latest efforts to siphon obscene amounts of public money into private investors' pockets. Oops, sorry, I should have spelled that "... periodic survey of public attitudes to traffic congestion".

There wasn't much coverage, but such as there was, was clearly based on the Department conjunction Transport's press release. The BBC's headline is "Half of UK road users support usage-based road charging". And other outlets are no better. Even the normally-cynical El Reg has swallowed this line of spin.

There is no indication that any of these journalists has read the survey itself. If they had, they might have noticed that's not what it says.

True, over half of people are against the present system, and I don't blame them, because road tax became indefensible around the time horse-drawn carts became rare. But they don't express approval of the options being pushed here. Quite the opposite: when asked "Do you think a new charging scheme is fair?" - without giving any information about what it might involve - over half of those questioned return an unequivocal and full-throated "No!". Barely one-quarter say "Yes". And this opinion has actually hardened over the past few years.

The headline figure, as far as I can tell, comes from asking whether the current system "should be changed so that the amount people pay relates more closely to how often, when and where they use the roads" - that elicits about 50% of "Ayes". But faced with the more specific suggestions that people who drive on busy roads, or at peak times, should pay more, that proportion drops to 25% or less.

If you're advocating road pricing, those answers don't add up. The public appears to be "confused". Me, I think the public understands the issue far better than the people framing the survey, and certainly better than the journalists covering it.

Fortunately, there is one group of people whose livelihood really does depend on interpreting this kind of survey correctly: politicians. Things have come to a pretty pass when I'm appealing to politicians to save us from the idleness and corruption of journalists, but that's where I find myself today. And the UK's coalition government, bless its insecure little heart, has correctly divined what its civil servants are up to here. It "has ruled out for the duration of this Parliament national road pricing on existing roads and any preparation for such schemes beyond that time".

Let's hear it for the politicians...

Prescription sugar

2010-08-20T16:52:00.004+12:00

I read the other day that Britain's National Health Service sometimes pays for homeopathic prescriptions.

Blah blah, insert rant here about giving taxpayers' money given to snake-oil merchants, undermining the authority of the medical profession, and generally reducing western civilisation to a smoking ruin. But the fact is, I can't get terribly worked up about this.

The Department of Health says it doesn't know how much of the NHS drugs budget is spent on snake oil, but it's "a tiny fraction (approximately 0.001%)". How they can know this figure without knowing an actual figure - is a subject for reasonable suspicion, but even if they're out by a couple of orders of magnitude, it still suggests that there are more important things to worry about. Namely, the other 99.9(99)% of the budget.

I'd bet that a considerably higher fraction of that budget goes to AstraZeneca, a company with a documented record of deliberately hiding the truth about its own products. And the company is not unusual in that; what it's been caught doing is entirely standard industry procedure.

This isn't even news. We've known it anytime this past quarter-century. And yet we continue to pay these companies to poison us and lie to us about it.

I have a simple suggestion for the NHS: it should refuse to pay for any drug or treatment that is covered by a patent. Patients who want those treatments should have to find some other way to pay for them. Generic drugs are vastly cheaper, better tested (by 20 years of actual use), and more honestly marketed. Let the NHS stick to those.

(Remember, patents expire after 20 years, so that would still allow every drug and treatment that was available before 1990, and medicine wasn't exactly in the dark ages then.)

Of course, no sooner were this rule suggested, than a thousand and one "patients' groups" would form to lobby, loudly, for this or that exception. And most of them wouldn't even pause to think that they were acting as pawns of the pharmaceutical industry.

I wonder if the directors of those companies ever have nightmares of creating the perfect drug - one that actually cures a condition, with no bad side-effects? Because that would be the death of their business model.

Games and fun

2010-08-18T17:36:00.004+12:00

Games play (heh) an important part in my life.

I blame my big brother. He introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons at the impressionable age of, ooh, about 13. It was new and exciting, a fun game in those days, before the news media and fundamentalist Christians had heard of it; a friendly, co-operative game, bringing socially inept geeks together in their common love of fantasy and fairy tales.

D&D has come a long way in the 30 years since then (mostly backwards, at least for the players, although obviously it's kept the publishers in business). But it's also given rise to an entirely new genre: the computer FRPG.

It's not widely appreciated, even by players of both, how different the computer FRPG is from the version with pencils and paper and polyhedral dice. Some people think that writing the perfect computer FRPG is just a matter of coding a big enough world, and faithfully and meticulously translating enough of the rules. But this thinking ignores the most important rule of all, which is the core of the difference.

Put simply: the pencil-and-paper game is a social event - a bunch of people get together to have fun. The computer version is a storytelling medium - the "author" draws up a plot, and the player's job is to find a way through it. There may be many different ways, some arriving at slightly different endpoints, but the basic framework and goal are not negotiable. (True, most human DMs start out with a similar "plot" in mind. But good ones will change it as they go along; only bad DMs will try to force their players to stick to a framework they planned from the start. A well-run game is not so much a story as a symposium.)

And that's why the computer FRPG is a form of art, no matter what Roger Ebert says on the subject; because it's not like the social game that is played between friends. Rather than spending so much time defining "art", I think Ebert should give more thought to his idea of a "game". Games like Neverwinter Nights, the Zelda family, Morrowind, Jade Empire - these are not about winning or losing, or even playing. They are about experiencing a story.

Some of them allow more latitude than others. Resident Evil imposes a fixed path, set out by constant short-term motivators. Neverwinter Nights - the most faithful translation of pen-and-paper rules I've seen - forces you to jump through the hoops laid out in the order required, because there's simply not much else to do. Oblivion, by contrast, gives you near-complete freedom - but there's still a single, central storyline to be completed.

The 2008 version of Prince of Persia is an extreme example. Not only do you have to follow the plot (with virtually no latitude about what order you do things in or what skills your character develops), but when you screw it up, you're immediately returned ("restored") to the point just before you did. This mechanism caused a lot of controversy at the time - some people thought it was taking the risk and the skill out of the game.

But, in truth, none of these games is about risk or skill, any more than watching a whodunnit is about your ability to outguess the fictional detective. They are about the experience.

And that, dear Mr Ebert, is art. Some of it is even, I would claim, good art.

I recently replayed Jade Empire, and I would say that, in script, acting, cinematography and (most importantly) storyline, it stands comparison with decent Hollywood action movies. Zelda: Twilight Princess is by turns engrossing, thrilling and touching, as well as beautifully visualised. Oblivion, while scriptwise a pale shadow of Morrowind, tries to make up for it with technical execution (I recall the first time, stealing through some tunnel, I saw an ogre ahead of me - I almost wet myself).

There's also, of course, plenty of bad art in the genre. Assassin's Creed has a confused and cliched storyline, with little latitude to explore and no attempt to reconcile the inconsistencies. Ditto Freelancer, and Neverwinter Nights 2. Bad writers keep you on the story railroad by putting in arbitrary, unexplained restrictions to what you can do. Whereas the better games either trap you in a storyline where there is always an obvious, immediate short-term goal (Zelda, Resident Evil), or continually nudge you towards the plot with internally consistent motivators (Morrowind).

But even bad art is still art. Good art shows what it can aspire to.

If the computer FRPG were really just a digital version of the tabletop game, then Ebert would have a point. As it is - well, he should try playing through some of these games. Then let's see if he can still maintain that he hasn't experienced some kind of art.

Two concepts of quality

2010-08-13T17:20:00.006+12:00

Researchers from Rice University's Department of Luddite Apologetics have found experimental evidence for what many of us have long suspected: that video content is more important than quality. If you're enjoying the movie, you won't notice that it's grainy, scratchy, blocky or even black-and-white. Conversely, if the movie is in super-high-resolution, that won't make you enjoy it any more.

Not surprising, perhaps. We know the brain is very good at filling in detail and smoothing over cracks. That's the whole principle on which movies work in the first place - if you show a series of still images quickly enough, the brain stitches them together into a single "moving" picture.

But it's always nice to have one's prejudices confirmed.

This should be terrible news for Sony, which has staked pretty much its entire product line on the assumption that we'll mortgage our firstborn to get higher-resolution video. Conversely, great news for TV viewers: you don't have to buy that HD screen and Blu-Ray player, it won't improve your enjoyment: good movies are good without it, and crappy ones will still be crappy even with it.

Unfortunately, Sony wouldn't be Sony if its plans were based on anything as fickle as "what we want". The poor old consumer is routinely stitched up with products that they either didn't ask for, or actually begged not to get - cellphone cameras, rolling news, American Idol, movie sequels (and prequels, and remakes, and Jar-Jar), cover versions, deep-ocean oil rigs, wars, Windows upgrades...

And HDTV is one of these. We're already being forced to accept "digital TV", on the laughable pretext that it will simultaneously allow more channels and better quality (which is a bit like wiring up your aircon so that it will only work when your heating is on maximum). Within ten years, I confidently predict, non-HD TVs will be hard to buy, ruinously expensive to service or repair, and incapable of receiving anything other than rolling news and reality TV. Thus requiring more movies and programs to be remade, to meet our higher expectations.

Consumerism. Gotta love it. After all, what choice do we have?

Biblical taxation

2010-08-09T15:48:00.011+12:00

For some reason, there's been a lot of coverage lately of an American politician named Michelle Bachmann, who favours a "biblical" model of taxation. "We render to God that which is God’s and the Bible calls for ... maybe 10%", she apparently says.

Since I was brought up to believe that everyone - no matter how stupid or insane they sound at first encounter - has something to teach me, it occurred to me to wonder what a Biblical tax model might really look like.

Sadly, Bachmann has it quite wrong. When Jesus was questioned about taxation, He pointed out that money bears the image of Caesar, not God, and therefore (He implied) it is Caesar's domain (Matthew 22:21); the church has no call on it at all. What one should "give to God" is "what is God's" - a definition that, given the context, is clearly meant to exclude money. Paul, ever the pragmatist, recommends that Christians should give a fraction of their income for the upkeep of their church (1 Cor 16:1-2) - but he never mentions the 10% figure. And money donated to the church is, in any case, entirely separate from the issue of paying taxes; the donation is, very explicitly, not a tax - it is something that must be given voluntarily, "not reluctantly or under compulsion" (2 Cor 9:7). The "tithe" is an Old Testament concept, where it's levied by the Temple to support its works - again, quite separately from what the state or the king demand for their works.

Clearly, in conflating taxes with tithes, this Bachmann is on very unsound ground theologically.

I can, however, think of one example in the Bible where a righteous figure is charged with managing a secular tax regime. In Genesis 41:33-49, Pharaoh appoints Joseph as first minister of Egypt, to establish a tax rate of 20% in years of plenty; the idea being that it will be doled out in the lean years to follow (making Joseph, arguably, the first Keynesian).

This tax is raised for one purpose: to alleviate the effects of famine (recession) by feeding the hungry. It does not include any allowance for defence, law and order, education, fire safety, maintenance of public roads or buildings, the Pharaoh's majesty, or any other kind of public service - those are all extra, presumably levied by a separate, parallel set of collectors. This 20% is taken purely for the purpose of redistribution.

What could we do with a regime like that?

The UK's GDP per head, today, is around £27,000 per annum. Imagine if the government took 20% of that money (only a fraction of its actual spending, of course) and simply paid it out evenly to everyone over the age of 18. Assuming one-fifth of the population is under that age, that'd be a shade over £120 per adult per week.

That's enough to live on. Not "live well", of course - you'd probably have to share lodgings, and you couldn't support much of a family on it. But enough to take the edge off poverty. No matter what happens - employed, unemployed, self-employed, retired, on holiday, in education, in prison - every UK citizen would have a guaranteed top-up to whatever other income they could get. For life.

I think that would be a Good Thing.

It would remove the poverty trap - no more losing benefits when you gain income, because all lesser benefits are simply abolished. It would massively cut down on the government-related paperwork that afflicts ordinary people (I've been unemployed, I remember it with horror to this day - and what I had to put up with, including the 90% marginal tax rate, was only a fraction of the ordeal that's inflicted on the most vulnerable people in society when they try to claim, for instance, disability living allowance). It would establish a base level of income for everyone, tied directly to national income, thus reducing inequality. It would allow us to forget about "fully funded pensions" - pension income would be, quite transparently, paid for out of current income (which is what must happen anyway, it's the only thing that makes economic sense, and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something). It would support rural areas and take the pressure off inner cities - honest people need not be quite so desperate for jobs. It would eliminate the state retirement age, and indeed the entire concept of "retirement" - you could stop working at whatever age you felt you could afford it, and change your mind at any time later, with no repercussions and no paperwork.

So how, specifically, would we go about paying for the Universal Benefit?

For starters, it's considerably more than the current jobseeker's allowance, or the basic state pension (even including the winter fuel allowance), or disability living allowance, carer's allowance, child benefit, maternity benefit... So we could scrap all of those - basically, reduce the Department for Work & Pensions to a rump department charged solely with keeping track of who's still alive and what bank account they want their money paid into. That would save about one-sixth of the entire government budget, or over 35% of the money needed, without levying a penny more in taxes.

Second, the Universal Benefit itself would be taxable. So while the poorest get the full £120 a week, a top-rate taxpayer would get only £72 (my tax rates may be a shade out of date, but never mind that for now). Let's call it, to a reasonable back-of-the-envelope level of precision, another 25% of the cost clawed back directly from taxpayers at present rates.

The remaining cost to be charged in a direct tax amounting to 8% on all UK incomes. Since the money we're still looking for is (40% of 20%) of national income, it follows that 8% of national income would fill the gap. Of course there's still the zero-tax band (below, say, £10k), so the actual rate for those paying would have to be a bit higher - say, 9-10%. We could call it "national insurance contributions", and no-one would even notice the difference.

Who'd've thunk? It turns out that Bachmann has a fantastic idea. All that's at fault is her reading of the Bible.

De grass is riz

2010-07-30T15:36:00.004+12:00

Spring is - well, trying to.

The basic winter weather pattern of rain, wind and chill has given way to a more compromising rhythm, in which the rain sometimes takes whole days off. As I type this, the sun is actually looking quite friendly. Hardy European souls like me can now wander about Auckland, during the day, without even a jacket on.

The downside is, I really have to drag out the lawnmower as soon as I'm able. In this idiotic climate, the grass never really stops growing. As a result, the lawn - and even more, the communal area I take care of - are looking more than a little shaggy.

One of the neighbours was dropping heavy hints to me the other day about rats nesting in long grass. Personally, I think the local cat population should be well on top of that - we see them prowling about quite routinely. But I do want to mow it anyway, before it gets even more out of hand.

Once upon a time, my ancestors mowed the grass with a scythe - a tool that positively relished length. For the past 20 years, I've searched for such an instrument in every DIY store and garden centre I've been in. You just can't get 'em. And so I have to struggle with a powered lawnmower, which costs ten times as much, requires recharging, and can't cope with grass that's more than ankle-deep. That's progress for you.

On officers

2010-07-28T15:26:00.001+12:00

When I received my training, such as it was, in the law as it applies to journalism - in 1989/90 - the lesson that stuck most in my mind was the simplest:

The only special treatment you can claim, as a journalist, is the right to be treated exactly like everyone else. You have no authority to go anywhere, to do, say, photograph or talk to anything or anyone, that any member of the public couldn't do. You can flash a press card, sure, but all it does is maybe help to persuade the person you're talking to that you're not just a random prodnose. Legally, it means bugger all.

At first it didn't seem like much. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. It's very comforting to be just a part of the crowd. And it has a flip side: "no rights" also means "no obligations". There's no requirement, for instance, for a journalist to identify him/herself, except as a courtesy.

(There was also a very cool lesson about libel: "If you're going to libel someone, don't pussyfoot around. Lay into them properly. At least that way you'll get your money's worth." But I digress.)

Sadly, I believe this is no longer the case in Britain. I've read, for instance - with what accuracy I don't know - that journalists now enjoy the right to take photographs of some types of events and places. The implication being, of course, that ordinary people don't have that right.

It's always a mistake for a law to single out a group of people for special treatment. Show me a law containing a personal label (such as "journalist", "teacher", "police officer", "minister of religion", "foreign national"), and I'll show you a bad law. ("Bad" in the sense of unnecessary, ineffective, morally corrupt, or any combination of the above.)

For example: police officers are entitled to enter your house if they have a warrant, and that's fine - anyone can do that, although most of us would have a hard time persuading a judge to issue the warrant. They can also enter if they have a good reason to believe that it's necessary to protect someone or something from imminent harm. Again, well and good. If you hear someone yelling "Help! Rape!" from a private house, you should probably do the same, so long as you're reasonably sure you'd survive the experience.

But somewhere along the line, some fool (I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt in assuming that they were probably just stupid, not actively malicious) decided that police officers, in particular, should also force their way in where they have merely the suspicion that something illegal might have happened - for instance, if they smell cannabis smoke. And that's how we end up with stories like this one. Which leads, as inexorably as eyes follow legs, to more special rules being made, driving the wedge ever deeper between Us and Them. Until you reach the position where both parties forget that they are supposed to be on the same side.

Two concepts of fairness

2010-07-15T10:29:00.005+12:00

Sarah, my sis-in-law, was talking about the State of Kids Today the other month. Not complaining exactly. She likes kids, and prides herself on talking to them on their own terms. But still, she sometimes gets a shade exasperated. "She kept saying 'It's not fair!' So I asked her 'Can you tell me what you mean by fair?' When she thought about it, she had to admit that basically she meant 'I don't like it!'. That's all 'fair' really means."

(Sarah is an eloquent woman. She really does talk like that, punctuation and everything.)

I thought it was a good observation, but incomplete. 'Fair' may be vague, but vague isn't the same as useless. And it doesn't only mean 'fair to me' - there is more to it than that. Kids will often invoke 'fairness' on behalf of others, not just themselves.

Last week, no less an organ than The Economist ran a leader headed 'Against fairness'. This frankly bizarre piece argues that it's a weasel word used by politicians to fudge the necessity to make hard choices.

Fairness is fudge. This newspaper will have none of it. We reject the wide, woolly notion of fairness in favour of sharper, narrower words that mean what they say, like just or cruel.

When I read that, it was my turn to be exasperated. This is pure Newspeak: limiting language, with the aim of limiting thought.

'Fair', in case anyone was in doubt, is not meant to be a synonym for 'just'. When lawyers talk about the concept of fairness - and surprisingly, they do in fact talk about it quite a lot - the word they use is 'equity'. Therein lies a clue to how the concept works.

I recalled an essay I wrote, a couple of years ago now, on the difference between 'liberty' and 'freedom'. I had always kind of assumed that the two words were synonymous; and if you look in a dictionary, the meanings are very similar. But if you look at the historical and cultural baggage they bring with them, they are very different. The bird that symbolises liberty is an eagle - an apex predator, majestic, fearless, and above all strong - liberty is something that must be asserted, defended, recognised. Whereas freedom requires no special size or strength: in the canonical representation of 'captivity', it's not an eagle that's in the cage, but a canary. I associated the two words with Isaiah Berlin's concepts of "positive and negative liberty" - freedom to, and freedom from.

Freedom - what Berlin calls 'negative liberty' - is the area within which one may act without being prevented. As such, the very word implies limits. "If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air [...] it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced." Whereas liberty - Berlin's 'positive liberty' - recognises no such constraints: "I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside."

I think there's a similar relationship between 'fair' and 'just'. 'Free' and 'fair' are Anglo-Saxon words whose meaning is so simple that any kid can grasp them, even without being able to define them. Anglo-Saxon rhetoric flows from the soul, not the mind. Whereas Latin-derived words, like 'justice' and 'liberty' (and, of course, 'equity'), are the subject of endless debate, political demagoguery and hair-splitting sophistry.

Back to The Economist's uncharacteristically ill-thought-out rant:

To one lot of people, fairness means establishing the same rules for everybody, playing by them, and letting the best man win and the winner take all. To another, it means making sure that everybody gets equal shares.

Personally I would have no hesitation in telling anyone who expressed either of those views that their game design was deeply flawed. Good games are not 'winner take all', because that leaves the losers with nothing, and people with nothing have no way to play; nor do they guarantee 'equal shares', because that would be not so much a game as a story. Equity is 'balanced', but it does not prejudge the outcome - it is not equality.

'Playing by the rules' may be just, but 'winner take all' is clearly not equitable. 'Fairness' implies balance, in much the same way as 'freedom' implies limits. The same word 'equity', that lawyers use to describe 'fairness', in finance means 'shares'. That's not a coincidence.

Cooking tips

2010-07-06T16:04:00.002+12:00

I'm a big fan of efficiency. My boss calls it "laziness", a virtue that he respects enormously - the ability to get results with the minimum possible investment.

Nowhere is this skill more important than in the kitchen. Despite the addition of our lovely Danske Møbler sideboard, space is still at a premium and we only have two saucepans. And when Susan starts to get hungry, her normally sunny disposition starts to cloud over, and getting calories into her becomes a time-critical exercise. I dread to think what she'd do if she were dining in Hell's Kitchen.

Thus it came about that last night, when I'd put the rice on and realised I hadn't hard-boiled the eggs as I'd intended, I came up with the bright idea of popping the eggs in with the rice. After all, I reasoned, it's all boiling water, isn't it? And rice requires ten minutes of simmering plus five to ten minutes of standing - that's surely enough time to get a nice hard-boiled result, yes?

For the record, it is. The eggs were perfect. There were only two drawbacks.

The first became apparent when the time came to hook the eggs out of the bed of quietly steaming rice. A spoon did that job nicely, but it also hooked a non-trivial amount of rice out with them, which immediately stuck like glue to the shell. I don't know why rice (Basmati, in case it makes a difference) is so adhesive to eggshell, but take it from me, there is an affinity there.

The second struck me when I contemplated the smooth, shiny whiteness of the freshly peeled eggs. Each egg showed a distinct patch of yellow to one side. Deprived of the tossing motion of the more conventional rapid boiling, the yolks had settled to one side. Not a disaster, merely a minor suboptimality.

I offer this finding in the spirit of furthering human understanding. My training as a process engineer tells me that your less brilliant ideas are just as worthy to be recorded as the best of them; that way, you (and others) will know, next time, without having to do the experiment again.

You're welcome.

Rewards and expectations

2010-06-30T10:44:00.000+12:00

So England crashed out of the World Cup, to the surprise of no-one except those few million fans who seem to have a 44-year blind spot in their collective memory. And this is disgraceful and pathetic, and shows that England's footballers, and their coach, are a bunch of overpaid, overrated pillocks.

Well, fair enough. I can't see any way of arguing that anyone who earns that much isn't overpaid. It's not as if there were a critical shortage of applicants for their jobs.

But I can't help being struck by the contrast with the New Zealand story of the 2010 World Cup. The unfortunately named All Whites succeeded in getting draws in all three of their first-round games, failing to make it to the second round. And this is a national triumph, the best result ever for New Zealand football, and suddenly the All Whites are national heroes.

Such is the alchemy of "expectations", which can transform the same result into triumph or disaster.

And salaries, of course. We are very attached to the unfounded superstition that, if we pay more for certain jobs, we'll get better people. How's that working out?

The impulsive economy

2010-06-04T16:27:00.009+12:00

Scott Adams has a glum view of the outlook for authors and other creative-artist types in the coming decades. He sums it up as his theory of content value: "As our ability to search for media content improves, the economic value of that content will approach zero."

I predict that the profession known as "author" will be retired to history in my lifetime, like blacksmith and cowboy. In the future, everyone will be a writer, and some will be better and more prolific than others. But no one will pay to read what anyone else creates. People might someday write entire books - and good ones - for the benefit of their own publicity, such as to promote themselves as consultants, lecturers, or the like. But no one born today is the next multi-best-selling author. That job won't exist.

Adams isn't the only one predicting the death of Old Media. There's been a bull market in such predictions anytime this past fifteen years. The argument goes: since "content" is essentially free (on the internet), the only reasons people are still paying for it all boil down to inertia, and that won't last forever.

While I have enormous respect for Adams (and other prophets who've said the same thing), I think they're working from a fundamentally flawed mental model.

The flaw dates right back to the economics we learned in school, where a consumer has $whatever to spend, and divides it up into 'budgets' - $something for necessities, $something for savings, $whatever's left for luxuries/discretionary spending. Within that "discretionary" budget - the theory goes - they make rational decisions based on what will give them the greatest satisfaction ("utility") for the $.

In that case, why would anyone spend their limited $ on something that they could get for free? It's - not rational.

And that model is well and good. But it's based on a fundamental assumption that just isn't true in real life: that the consumer is on a budget.

Oh, of course they are in a sense. Big-picture wise. They live where they can afford to live, the clothes they wear and the consumer goods they possess and the car they drive - these things are dictated, in large part, by their income. But for the small stuff - for books, magazines, movies, fast food, drinks - there is no exact limit to their spending. If they overspend one month, all that means is that they put off buying that big-screen TV for another month. It's not a decision they'll even notice making.

In general, the only time they'll set a fixed weekly budget is when they're driven to it by a crisis - unemployment, baby, divorce or whatever - and when the crisis is past, they'll abandon the budget just as soon as they think they can get away with it.

What this means is that a significant part of people's spending is not so much "discretionary" as "impulsive". And getting one's hands on that money is not about offering them the most attractive package for their money, compared with your competitors. It's about persuading them to give you some money.

Not much money. The best business models for this part of the economy, I think, are those that take small amounts, but take them frequently. A coffee shop is a good example (occupying the same niche that pubs have, by and large, been taxed out of).

Another is mobile phones. The operators have only recently realised that their market falls into this category, which is why they're now frantically marketing "packages" designed to subsidise heavy users at the expense of lighter ones - so that each individual customer only sees bills that are just small enough not to sweat about - because if the bill is small enough, then the provider can live happily in that "impulse" segment where spending isn't scrutinised at all.

In the digital economy, Apple has built the most successful business model of the past decade on this insight. Everyone knows that paying money for music, online, is entirely optional - there are lots of ways to hear that music for free, many of them entirely legal. But if you price it as an "impulse" buy, and make the process easy enough, then an awful lot of people will succumb to that impulse. In other words: you can compete with "free".

Within that impulsive proportion of their spending, people don't "spend" all their money to get the best possible "utility" for their limited resources. They spend it to feel better about themselves. From the providers' point of view, they're pretty much giving it away; the trick is to get them to give it to you rather than, say, Coca-Cola.

And this is the key to how authors are going to survive in the next couple of decades. It's not about "selling" a product. It's an exercise in persuasion. Make people want to give you money - to give a talk, shake your hand and collect your autograph, put your picture in a magazine, subscribe to your latest writings, convert you into a TV series or a range of coffee mug slogans, go to bed with you... whatever. Or even to have a small bundle of paper with your name and your words printed on it, to sit on their coffee table and lend to their friends and read wherever and whenever they like, unlike electronic devices which are too bulky, and too fragile, to use in many environments. We could call it "a book".

I could easily use another pun on 'tooth', here

2010-06-01T13:46:00.001+12:00

People can get very confused when you go off-script.

Yesterday took me back to the dentist. Not for the root canal this time, but for a general 12,000 mile service. The assistant, knowing I was British, asked me how I like New Zealand.

After five and a half years, I'm used to that question. But I still don't know quite what to say to it. I equivocate.

"At least the weather is better than England, huh?"

I look out at the concrete-grey sky, the leaves carried by the bitter winter wind across the car park, the runoff from ten days of rain that has left much of the country underwater. I think of late May/early June in England.

"No," I reply firmly. "I haven't been to England in the past week, but I'm pretty sure the weather right now is better than this."

It catches her completely off-balance. The impression I get is that in all the many times she's had this conversation before, nobody has ever said British weather is better than NZ.

, != &

2010-05-27T14:53:00.001+12:00

Today's New Zealand Herald carries, as the subheading on its lead story, "Prison tower looming over motorway and schools offends mayor, community".

I've always hated the hideous American journalistic habit of using a comma to mean "and". In this case it's not even necessary to save space - the line, as printed, is about three characters shy. But I've always been able to comfort myself that it's only an Americanism, and civilised newspapers don't do it.

So much for comfort. Next thing I know they'll be talking about what "we reported May 27th". And the day I see the word "ouster", that's the day I stop buying this crappy paper.

Failures of imagination

2010-05-26T16:41:00.001+12:00

I just noticed a poster for the new Robin Hood movie.

No, we're not quite that far behind the times. The poster has been there for, ooh, must be over a month already. But sometimes I'm a slow reader.

From all I've heard, I have no interest in seeing the current movie. I've often complained about the prolonged rape of British culture by America - the process by which our stories are taken without so much as an acknowledgment to a thousand years of tradition (or, in some cases, to real live heroes) - then recast in dysfunctional Hollywood molds to suit some featherbrained modern philosophy and sold back to us - and it's going to take a more appealing offering than this to sell me on such a product again. I think one per year is a reasonable limit.

But what struck me today was the tagline: "The untold story behind the legend".

Of course, every generation retells myths in its own image. That's what myths are for. What I'm wondering now is, what does it say about our generation that this version is being marketed as some kind of "true story"? (The same thing happened to King Arthur in 2004.)

Throughout the history of cinema, Robin Hood has been a fruitful vehicle for stories. You can watch virtually any version and deduce what decade it was made in by the political values it espouses. Our hero has been cast as a Saxon liberation fighter (in the 1930s), a selfless patriot (in the 1950s), an economic pragmatist (1990s), and today, from what I read, he's become a rationalist republican, chafing against taxation in general. Maid Marian's role has been steadily upgraded over the decades, from passive damsel in varying degrees of distress, to (in some cases) full-fledged bandit leader and the real brains behind the whole operation. In the 1990s it became de rigueur to include a token "Saracen" in the Merry Men. I gather the latest version was initially supposed to cast the Sheriff of Nottingham as the hero, and Robin as a sort of proto-terrorist; but then Obama's election showed a public falling out-of-love with the police state, and the Rebel-figure suddenly became glamourous again. (A shame - I might well have gone to see Nottingham.)

At the same time, films have striven for "authenticity" in sets and costumes - from Errol Flynn's tights, via Sean Connery's chainmail, to Patrick Bergin's mud. This is a fashion thing - Hollywood has long taught us to despise "stagey" settings, costumes and acting. But there's a big difference between "authenticity" and "truth". Showing something that approximates, in at least some dimensions, to the reality of medieval life, is not the same as pretending that the story you're telling is a bona-fide recreation of actual events.

Maybe it's the CSI syndrome applied to folklore: we've grown accustomed to see people using magical computers to recreate past events based on the thinnest of evidence, so why shouldn't we demand the same of historians? - that they should "know" things that no-one will ever know, short of the invention of time travel. Maybe it's the way Hollywood has infantilised its audience, to the point where we can no longer accept historical tales for what they are - an imaginative retelling of an old story.

Or maybe it's just a marketing department with a total failure of imagination, trying to make a completely redundant film seem, for a few weeks at least, like a significant contribution to our culture.

Personal faults

2010-05-26T11:13:00.002+12:00

Last I saw, niq was trying to make this a new meme, so here's my contribution:

I'm lazy. I have a chronic aversion to work (defined as "doing what I'm paid for"). In my defence, this wasn't the case when I had a job that interested me; but then, I haven't really gone out of my way to find such a job (my research suggests they are very few and far between). My present employer sees laziness as a positive character trait: "Lazy people are efficient, they're good at identifying what really needs to be done", he says.
I'm arrogant. I think I earn "about enough", and I'm impatient of those who want to earn vastly more - more than about three times what I make. I think most of the economic misery in the world today can be laid at the door of ambitious people.

Phew. That was hard to do. If anyone connects my real name to this blog, this entry will probably disappear...

Interred with their servers

2010-05-21T15:29:00.012+12:00

Usenet meant a lot to me, at one time. Specifically, the time between 1997 and approximately 2001. I spent most of my spare time there; I made a reputation, I made friends, some of whom graduated to real-life friends; I met my wife there. If that doesn't qualify me to feel nostalgic for it, I don't know what would.

So it's with some sorrow that I read about the death of Usenet. While this death has been reported many times before, this time it probably means something.

For my less-technical readers: Usenet is (I'll use the present tense for now) a worldwide network of computers, called servers, that exchange messages. The messages are written by people - ordinary people, like me for instance - who "post" them to their local server (in much the same way as one might write and "post" an e-mail), addressed to one or more "newsgroups". Once posted, a message is promptly copied ("propagated") between hundreds or thousands of other Usenet servers in the world - this process normally takes a few tens of seconds - and subsequently read by other people, anywhere, who "subscribe" to the newsgroup you addressed it to. Anyone who reads it then has the option to reply, in the same medium.

Discussions - sequences of replies stemming from an original post - commonly go on for several days, often running to scores of posts from a dozen or more participants. A long post might spin off half a dozen tangents, and people will commonly pick on just one detail to reply to; so you frequently find yourself conducting many different, distantly-related discussions with different people. And (and I think this is the aspect that appealed most to me) all of them can read what you're saying to all the others; so you have to be either consistent or clever, or at least witty. You could take as long as you liked to compose a reply, and there was always the option of not replying at all; but if and when you did reply, it had better be consistent with what you'd written before.

It's a medium that encourages both thought and honesty. So maybe it's not surprising that it's dying.

It has its problems, of course. Spam is one - although it's not nearly so intractable on Usenet as it is in e-mail, thanks to a mechanism called "cancelling". Anonymity and anarchy can be problems: it's a perfect forum for bullies, and for loons with too much time on their hands. Usenet gave us the concepts of "flame wars" - the exchange of written insults as a form of competitive performance art - and "trolling" - the art of provoking thoughtless responses from people who haven't been around long enough to know better.

Worst of all, it popularised the form of debate that has since become known as "fisking" - line-by-line dissection of an opponent's argument - which, I think, has done a lot to shape the over-cautious, content-free journalism of our time. Journalists soon realised that no well-written article can withstand fisking (it's named after Robert Fisk - possibly the greatest journalist of his generation - because he was the most popular target for the (American) right-wing political bloggers who coined the term). The only effective defence is, simply, to avoid saying anything that it's possible to disagree with.

So why am I sad that all this is gone? Is it just nostalgia?

Well, it's interesting to note that all the bad effects are still with us. Spam, cyber-bullying, trolling and flaming and fisking - all these have outlived the medium that gave birth to them. But the good effects - that open, free discussion - that's gone.

On the web, discussion is relentlessly compartmentalised and, increasingly, professionalised. If you want to make friends on the web, you find a 'social networking' site, give them your personal details, agree to their rules, submit to their censorship, and generally put yourself at their mercy. What should be a free exchange between peers has been replaced by a commercial relationship, between users (who are, at best, a commodity), and site owners (who are gods).

If you wanted to make friends on Usenet, you just joined a group that interested you and started posting; you revealed precisely as much or as little about yourself as you wanted. You could present yourself as serious or frivolous, serenely wise, icily logical, tempestuously romantic or tortuously dadaist - all in the same day, if you could manage it. You could enter a discussion about the ageing of a fictional character between books in a series, armed with nothing more than a nodding acquaintance with literary criticism, and emerge with a wife. All of it without paying a cent.

"The evil that men do lives after them." The same, it seems, is true of technologies.

The whole tooth

2010-05-17T16:05:00.000+12:00

We call it the Medical Mile: a stretch of Remuera Road where every building is a high-powered clinic. If you can buy a medical treatment in New Zealand, this is where you come to pick it up. Just down the road is where my sister-in-law got her eyes lasered. Along this road you can buy any treatment from a glorified pedicure to hair restoration surgery. It is not a locale for the faint-of-wallet.

It's my teeth that have brought me here. I want a deep filling replaced; my high-street dentist has spent the best part of three hours excavating it with everything short of heavy mining equipment, before declaring that she's never seen such a devious and twisted root and how would I feel about going to a specialist? It's a shame, she says, because my teeth are mostly in excellent shape - I only have the one filling, but it is, as we say up north, a doozy.

Reassuringly, the consultants' surgery is not quite on the Medical Mile itself. Presumably going twenty metres down a side road makes the rents cheaper. But inside all is light and modern and airy, a far cry from the rather dingy high-street offices of my regular dentist. You can see what these guys do with their $1000 an hour.

There are four women behind the reception desk, all of them carrying the air of full-time employees, all working. Only one of them is dealing with a visitor; according to the sign in front of her desk, she's the one I need to check in with. Of course. Her visitor is telling her all about her daughter's pregnancy.

I approve of this. Making the clients feel relaxed is an important part of the job; if that means chatting aimlessly, then chat they should. Quite right. I just wish one of the other three could deal with me in the meantime. All they have to do is hand me one of those stupid forms asking about my medical conditions. But they're far too busy to look up from their respective spreadsheets.

Eventually I get my form ("Do you have leprosy?", and suchlike penetrating questions - I wonder if the purpose is to check that you've come to the right clinic) and take a seat. There are half a dozen people in the waiting room, mostly older than me. There are two ways to look at this: either I'm successful enough to afford The Best treatment earlier in my life than others, or I'm mug enough to be paying top dollar while my hipper contemporaries all know better options. I decide to look on the bright side.

I don't have to wait long.

Dr Peter shakes me warmly by the wallet and welcomes me into his surgery. Here, again, the evidences of Upmarket are not hard to see. The mounted binocular microscopes for peering into one's cavities; the X-ray viewer displaying on screen, rather than (as at my high-street dentist) on tiny sheets of film; the video monitor on the ceiling - I'm not stuck with staring into a lamp while he rummages. On my first visit, I got to watch Belinda Carlisle - not that I was really in the mood to appreciate it, but I was looking forward to some more eye candy to relieve the next hour and a half. But instead I'm treated to BBC coverage of the aftermath of Britain's election. I'm not sure I wouldn't be better off with the lamp.

Dr P exclaims in admiration at the quality of my teeth, even while he sets to work on the miscreant molar. There are drills, buzzsaws, sanders - it looks like Black & Decker's entire catalogue in 1/36 scale - and pretty soon I can sense the gaping hole where my temporary filling used to be. Then he attacks the remaining filling material with a collection of solvents, the least of which is chloroform. I'm wondering whatever happened to general anaesthetics.

The session lasted a little longer than the budgeted 90 minutes, so I consider myself lucky to be charged a mere $1000 for the experience. And now I have a nice even filling that looks and feels vaguely like a tooth. Bargain. The downside is that I have to go back in June for him to take out the temporary inner filling and replace it with a permanent one.

Yo ho ho

2010-05-13T15:30:00.007+12:00

The good ol' Business Software Alliance has released its annual study of software piracy rates worldwide. And this time - after some people whinged about the lack of clarity over their methodology - they've also released a video explaining how they compile the figures.

I can't comment on the video, because whenever I try to view it my browser crashes. This is a classic obfuscation tactic: put part of the documentation in a form that we can't read, then, when we ask questions, they can just ask "Did you watch the video?" Nice work, but I'd have to deduct marks for lack of originality.

So instead let's look at the methodology section of the published report itself:

The basic method for coming up with rates and commercial value of unlicensed software in a country is as follows:
1. Determine how much PC software was deployed in 2009.
2. Determine how much PC software was paid for/legally acquired in 2009.
3. Subtract one from the other to get the amount of unlicensed software.

Which raises two rather obvious questions: how do you go about step 1? and how do you go about step 2?

The next page explains helpfully: "Total software units installed = # PCs getting SW × Units per PC"

By now I'm getting déjà vu. This is like sixth-form economics, when I learned the infamous monetarist equation "Money supply × Velocity of circulation = Price level × Number of transactions". It's true, but it tells us nothing about how to measure all these things.

To get the total number of software units installed [...] IDC determines how many computers there are in a country and how many received software in 2009. IDC tracks this information quarterly in 105 countries, either in products called ‘PC Trackers’ or as part of custom assignments.

A swift Google search suggests that the only "products" commonly called "PC trackers" are a form of software used to play music. Unless the survey is using its own variant of the language here, in which case it might (more plausibly) mean some form of spyware. Again, kudos on the obfuscation - using words to mean something other than what the rest of the world means by them, that's another good tactic to ensure that no-one can tell what the hell you're up to.

If it means "music software", then your survey will be weighted towards people who care about playing music on their PCs. If it means "spyware", then - apart from dubious legality in several countries - that means your survey will be weighted towards people who don't take their digital hygiene very seriously. If it means something else entirely, then I wish you'd say so. Whichever, it will produce results that are weighted one way or another; how do you compensate for this weighting?

It gets worse.

For countries that are not surveyed, IDC uses a methodology that relies on a correlation between the number of software units per PC and an emerging market measure published by the International Telecommunications Union, called the Information Development Index (IDI). IDC also considers other correlations such as gross domestic product
(GDP) per capita, PC penetration and various measures of institutional strength

(It's "International Telecommunication Union", by the way. Don't worry, everyone gets that wrong.) More importantly, this means that you're basing your "survey" - which you are asking governments and the like to accept as primary evidence - on secondary sources. (Arguably, tertiary sources even.) You're using "various measures of institutional strength" to estimate rates of software piracy, then using those estimates to argue for stronger institutions. Do you really see nothing wrong with this process?

There's more, but by now my readers can be divided into (a) those who agree with me already and (b) those who've stopped reading. Plus, if I'm really lucky, (c) some junior BSA analyst or press officer who's been briefed to look for blog posts on the subject.

The tone of the report seems to have changed from past years. This is welcome. There's no scaremongering here about connections between pirates, pornographers, traffickers and terrorists; instead, we have a few plausible tales about the dangers of doing business with people without some sort of enforceable contractual relationship. There's also some cajolery about the benefits of paying for your software. What bothers me here is that the best they can come up with is "support and updates". I know what that means: "support" means that if you get an address to send e-mail to (although there's absolutely no reason to believe that any kind of help will come back), and "updates" means that every time you go online your bandwidth gets crushed by a honking great patch to deal with some bug that would never have been allowed out of the door under any kind of competent QA regime.

I find it kinda sad that, after 30 years of shrinkwrapped software, the industry still can't come up with any better incentives to buy its product than these.

Twitting

2010-05-07T17:12:00.005+12:00

Well, I've been avidly following the BBC coverage of the UK elections all night. It was either that or work. And, by way of experiment, I've recorded my impressions at intervals in bites of 140 characters or less. This is how the night has looked, from down here:

God, Jeremy Paxman hasn't half aged. I wonder if he's stopped dying his hair. Or started. Perhaps grey is the new black.

Is that the Dimbleby? At least his hair looks natural. Which is more than I can say for the studio, looks like a Quantel dream gone berserk.

"Voters angry at being turned away from polling stations." What, a 15 hour day isn't long enough to get your arse down to a polling station?

"2230 California gov Arnold Schwarzenegger phones David Cameron to congratulate him." What does the Governator know that we don't?

Pix of queues outside polling booths. Good grief. But turnout is no more than usual. Cock-up, conspiracy, or both?

Maybe ID requirements have been tightened up, to demonstrate how ID cards are Absolutely Necessary In Today's Dangerous World.

What is the BBC playing at? Cosy panel of insomniac pundits is replaced by frantic bustling room of 30-plus. Trying to impress Americans?

Good luck with that. It's hard enough to get a US television audience to watch their own elections.

"BREAKING NEWS: Next result - Sunderland Central - Labour win". Surely "Lab hold"? This is the kind of thing I'd expect from Sky News.

"2303: Another former Lib Dem leader Neil Kinnock also says the figure for the Lib Dems is "almost certainly wrong"." It's not alone.

"2346 The BNP saved their deposit in Washington and Sunderland West." Oh dear. Maybe inevitable after Gordo's little Episode.

"The prime minister will try to form a coalition government in the event of a hung parliament." NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

National result after 17 seats: 4.2% swing to Con. Not nearly enough. Good grief, how much must Cameron suck that he can't even beat GB?

"0135 Gordon Brown increases his majority." Seriously, how was "date with density" wrong?

"0150 Lib Dems fail to win Guildford, Tory majority increased." Nothing like a Lib Dem threat to galvanise the Tory vote.

More license money being well spent. Have you seen what they're playing with right now?

"0236 Speaking on the BBC election boat,..." - "Election boat"? Seriously - WTF?

Very disappointing night for the Lib Dems. That's the downside of being taken seriously - people start to look at *all* your policies.

Cameron clearly thinks he's won. His constituency victory speech is all about what he'll do as PM.

Bet he's still hoping for a razor-thin majority. He knows the next five years will be a mess, he'll want to be able to share the blame.

0308: Alex Salmond concedes defeat to Labour. Damn shame. There was one party I'd love to see come out a big winner.

0313: BBC says UKIP and BNP have gained, but Greens have lost ground. So, not just a "protest" defection to minor parties then.

0321: Stories of problems for overseas voters: ballots not delivered. What with the home voters being turned away - bit of a balls-up, then.

0416: "BBC's freelancer at Stevenage reports expected declaration time at 0330am." Even *with* all those people, BBC still can't keep up.

0618: Tories now on 268 out of 550, Labour 213, LD 42. So 27 "others". If "others" split or abstain (Sinn Fein), that's a Tory majority.

0622: Bugger this for a game of soldiers, I'm going home. No doubt I'll hear the result on the News Quiz.

Soul music

2010-05-06T16:23:00.002+12:00

(Note: this post talks a lot about popular music. I'm not including links to each song; you can search YouTube as well as I can.)

While my mother was, on the whole, charmed beyond reason with our fair country, there was one aspect of our colonial lifestyle that drove her completely up the wall. This was the inescapability of background music.

Just to be clear what we're talking about here: in New Zealand, practically every shop, mall, cafe, restaurant, food hall, arcade, bar and supermarket you can walk into has its own canned music playing - usually low, but very audible. It's everywhere. Even on the street you can often hear it. It is so ubiquitous that, when I find a rare case of a shop that doesn't have it, I will pause and wonder for a few moments before I figure out what's missing - then I'll enjoy the peace.

Contrast: in 1992 I visited Budapest - my first trip behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain - and there, too, I found music everywhere; but that was live music, played by real musicians. Good musicians. It seemed that dozens of concert-quality violinists, cellists, clarinetists, trios, quartets, and even (on at least one occasion) an entire symphony orchestra, were trying to supplement their livings by busking in the streets and public spaces. The result was noisy, but not unpleasant.

The music here is not like that. It's recorded, trawled from chart hits and popular oldies (occasionally dating back to the primordial days of the 70s or 80s), and played endlessly at a background level. In short, it's music at its worst. Some places have a more upmarket selection - mellow jazz, piano arrangements, whatever - but these are rare.

In my workplace, music is played over speakers all day long. This irks me on several levels. First, there's the choice of music - in an office of 20-plus people, most of them young, you can imagine how hard it is to reach a consensus on what should be included in the playlist. Then there's the volume; some people want it loud, some want it soft, I want it switched off entirely. There's the chorus of jeers and outbreaks of banter and lively discussion when certain music or artists pop up in the rotation, which varies - depending on what, if anything, I'm trying to concentrate on - from mildly entertaining to knuckle-chompingly distracting.

"Why don't we just each listen to our own music on our own headphones?", I've asked more than once. It's not as if everyone in the office didn't have an MP3 player of some description, to say nothing of their own computers. That's what we used to do back in good ol' Bristol, and the result was a happy and hardworking office with background noise kept sternly under control.

But that was in England, where personal space is a serious matter. More importantly, I think, it was among mature professionals, not the 20-somethings that dominate this workplace. Rejecting the music here is seen as rejecting your colleagues' tastes and values.

And somehow, I think, there's more to it than 'tastes and values'. Music is no longer just a matter of preferences. Increasingly, with the ubiquity of pop music, it's become a part of our very souls.

When I hear a song I've heard before, there's a part of my mind that is irresistibly drawn back to the previous times I've heard it. In most cases that's a weak or meaningless memory, but with a few songs, it's deeply embedded in my mind. If I hear Spiller's 'Groovejet', for instance, I am instantly dragged back to the late summer of 2000 - the time I quit my job and spent eight months eking out a freelancer's pittance. It was uncomfortable, but very liberating. Anything by the Cardigans recalls the mid 90s, which to me means security, boredom, loneliness and opportunity. Tears for Fears - my sixth form - a combination of naïve optimism, creative romanticism and teenage desperation. And I can't hear Shakira's 'Whenever, wherever' without being taken back to a chalet at Center Parcs, with a bunch of my oldest friends from university. ("Is that Britney?", asked Penny. "No way," I thought. "That woman has more talent in her hair clippings than Britney will ever muster." But I didn't say it out loud, just in case I was wrong.)

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that these songs are a part of my soul. Because of the way pop songs are promoted - played widely and frequently for a short time, then discarded - they will always be associated with particular phases and periods of my life. They will always evoke some kind of feelings in me - feelings that are nothing to do with the singer or the song, but are mine, arising from my life and my personal history.

And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in feeling this way. That's why there are so many 'oldies' radio stations out there, each aiming at its own particular demographic.

This realisation comes with some uncomfortable corrollaries. First is that my emotions can be readily, though clumsily, manipulated by someone who knows what songs to play. Really I'm not worried about that, because these associations are far too personal for any stranger to guess precisely what effect any given song will have on me in any given situation.

Then there's the thought that a part of me is made up of the horribly commercialised products of an industry that is justly renowned for destroying human beings, in pursuit of fame and wealth. And that the music industry itself, increasingly, tries to manipulate my associations with their 'product' by placing it in TV shows, movies, games and elsewhere; these people are trying to write directly to my soul.

And this may be a clue to why my current colleagues can't imagine their world without constant music. It has been written to their souls. They hear the soundtrack to a movie, and their memory is of whatever excitement and pleasure they felt in watching the movie. They hear a song that was used in a TV ad when they were ten, and they remember life as a ten-year-old. It's not quite that simple, of course; but it's a lot easier to predict their responses than those of us who've reached middle age, with our wider variety of background and experience.

Finally, in the uncomfortable-reflections column: this is the music that, the industry insists, doesn't belong to me. If I want to play it, to evoke those memories - my memories, remember - I have to pay them to do it.

This, I think, is another important clue to my colleagues' attitudes. Because not one of them would dream of paying for any of this music - they simply rip it from somewhere online. The music played in our office is not paid for. And even though I don't generally condone piracy or commit it on my own behalf, and even though I hate the music, I find myself wholeheartedly approving of this attitude. The notion that you can implant something into someone else, and then claim to own it - that is just Evil. So, I think - good on my colleagues, for their subtle but ongoing 'Screw you' to the industry.

ACTA - the fair, the bad, and the just plain silly

2010-04-22T14:27:00.003+12:00

The full negotiating text of the long-secret 'Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement' has finally been released.

As everyone and her dog has long known, the agreement has little to do with "counterfeiting" as we English-speakers know it ("trying to pass something off as something else"), but is rather about protecting the revenue streams of the US congress by "harmonising" international copyright law. Apparently, the six existing international treaties on the subject just aren't cutting it. True counterfeiting (trademark infringement) does get a mention, but it is very much an afterthought. The real meat is all in 'copyright'.

In the Kafka-esque process of negotiating this secret treaty, there have been several rounds of "consultation" in which we, the public, have been invited - albeit very quietly - to comment on various aspects of the text that we've never been permitted to see. In the last such round, I sent in a short submission to the NZ delegation on the aspect that most bothers me, which is an area known in NZ law as "technological protection measures".

TPMs sound complicated and obscure, but in fact they're not nearly obscure enough. They are what prevents you from playing your Region 1 DVD in a Region 2 DVD player, from using your backup copy of your software CD, from copying the text from your legally-purchased e-book, from saving a streaming media file to your desktop to listen offline.

All of these actions are, at least in NZ and the UK, explicitly permitted by law - that is to say, a copyright holder has no right to prevent us from doing them, without asking permission, even if they want to. Yet TPMs are used to nullify those laws and stop us anyway. And - and here's the kick in the teeth - the publishing industry wants it to be illegal to "circumvent" a TPM, regardless of the circumventor's motives or their use of the product. That is what I'm fighting to keep out of NZ law.

In the event, the text is so convoluted that it's hard to see who's winning. Omitting footnotes, and condensing without loss of meaning (note: ellipses mark excisions for brevity; square brackets are in the original):

Effective technological measure means any technology ... that, in the normal course of its operation, [controls access to a protected work, performance, phonogram, or protects any copyright or any rights related to copyrights.][is controlled by the right holders through application of an access control or protection process such as encryption, scrambling, or other transformation of their works, performances or phonograms, or a copy control mechanism, which achieves the protection objective.]

[4. In order to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors, [performers or producers of phonograms] [the right holder of any copyright or related rights or owner of an exclusive license] in connection with the exercise of their rights and that restrict unauthorized acts in respect of their works... each Party shall provide for civil remedies, [or] [as well as] criminal penalties in appropriate cases of willful conduct, that apply to:

[Each Party shall provide for adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies... against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors, performers or producers or phonograms in connection with the exercise of their rights and that restrict unauthorized acts in respect of their works, performances, and phonogram. These shall apply to:]

(a) the unauthorized circumvention of an effective technological measure [that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram]; and
(b) the manufacture, importation, or circulation of a [technology] ... that is: [marketed] or primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing an effective technological measure; or that has only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than...

I think I begin to see why the Americans finally agreed to let this be published. The various options and alternate clauses are so divergent, I could be headed for a famous victory or a disastrous defeat; it's literally impossible to tell.

A TPM may be something that "controls access to a protected work... protects any copyright or any rights related to copyright [name three - Ed]". Or alternatively, it may be something that "is controlled by the right holders through application of an access control or protection process". It doesn't take a Hallam or a Holmes to see that these are two very different definitions - one based on what it does, the other on who does it. Then comes a third definition, much better than either of these: measures "that restrict unauthorized acts in respect of [protected] works".

It would be tremendous vanity to see my own fingerprints here, but that last version is exactly what I'm aiming for: tying TPMs to the limited set of rights that they are allowed to protect. An act that is explicitly protected by law cannot be "unauthorized" - therefore, something that restricts it is not a TPM within the meaning of this text.

All is not lost. There is plenty of text here that, if allowed to stand, would make a decent, liberal, liveable treaty. There is also some extremely bad text that, if allowed to stand, would enforce a new world order in which you could no longer lay claim even to the contents of your own memory. Which way will it go?

Time to support the other thugs

2010-04-07T16:43:00.005+12:00

Gordon Brown has named the day for his date with density. In the now time-honoured manner of government stories it was extensively leaked in advance, which allowed it to be reported as news for three days running; but now, apparently, he's told the queen, which is the final step. Time was when Her Maj would have been the first to know, but tempora mutantur and all that. I wonder if she minds, hearing it from the BBC?

And I find myself in the awkward, even embarrassing, position of rooting for the Tories.

It's nothing to do with the wars, or taxation, or the economy. On those topics I see no reason to believe that Mr Cameron's gentlemanly thuggery would be any better than Mr Brown's randomised blundering. (Speaking of which, I can't believe that Mr Brown is running on his record. Or that the British public is, apparently, inclined to see him as a "safe pair of hands". "Yes, Sweeney Todd may have slipped a couple of times, but you can't deny his razors are sharp.")

No, there are two good philosophical reasons for ditching even the very well founded ideological conviction that the Tories are a bunch of crooks who are just waiting for the opportunity to shovel the tax money to their friends instead of Labour's...

The first is the National Identity Register - or as it's also misleadingly known, the national ID card. A massive, detailed, authoritatively maintained database of who is and, by exclusion, who isn't a British citizen. It's hard to define "fascism" with any degree of rigour, but one of its most consistent features is a hard, definitive clarity about who is Them and who is Us. I don't think I want to be a citizen of such a country.

The Tories have been encouragingly hostile, in a discouragingly non-specific way, to major government IT projects in general. Personally I think this is a big mistake. It means that the contractors will tend to side against them (on sound precautionary principles), but because they haven't made specific commitments to scrap specific projects, the rest of us won't credit them. We will simply assume that the Tory plan is, as usual, to divert money from Labour-supporting shareholders to their own. If Mr Cameron really wants to mobilise the popular vote on this issue, I suggest promising a complete moratorium on all government IT spending for at least five years. No new computers, no new software, no maintenance payments, all training to be provided exclusively in-house for that time. If you're going to create cushy, subsidised jobs, at least make them in the civil service where security and continuity are king - not in the private sector, where profit and growth are the motivators.

Best of all, it will keep the government from growing too efficient. In theory this should appeal to the Tories. An inefficient public sector, after all, is one you can't rely on. It's the best possible insurance against the unconstrained growth of the state, and against the all-pervasive intrusion of the state into private business. If only they could think straight, and rid themselves of the ridiculous fetish for "value for money"...

But one thing the Tories have specifically promised to scrap is the NIR. This is, of course, a 180-degree reversal from the days of Michael Howard, who thought it was the best idea ever. That's what a couple of terms in opposition will do for you.

Which brings me to the second reason: the natural cycle. When any party has been in power for over ten years, you can absolutely guarantee that it has long since run out of anything that might be called "good" ideas, and is now mostly jerking its knees when tapped by the tabloid press. Voting for an incumbent government, at this stage, basically means voting for Rupert Murdoch.

Voting for the other lot, on the other hand, gives them a chance to implement some of the policies they've come up with in opposition. Some of which may actually be good ideas. They'll be tapped out in, at most, two terms, and then the pendulum can swing back. But it's not good for anyone that it takes too long to swing.

If the National Identity Register comes to pass, the best I can hope for is that the Scottish Nationalists sweep to power and declare independence from the UK. I haven't read the specification for the NIR, but I have learned a thing or two about databases these past three years - and I'm guessing that an independent Scotland would render it obsolete at a stroke.

Mumsie

2010-04-07T09:55:00.003+12:00

It's some months, now, since my mother's visit.

After a lifetime of studiously avoiding the southern hemisphere, it was a big deal for her to come here. Not least because she's even older than me (go figure), to the point where travelling isn't as easy as it could be. On the plus side, she could afford to fly business class, which (as I've learned) makes a huge difference on a long flight. (The difference between $2500 and $5500, for a start.)

So we were absolutely chuffed to see her, take a week off to drive her around some of the more accessible picturesque bits of the island, and put her up in our excellent spare room while she was in town. (I say "excellent". It's on the cool, south side of the house, which is nice in summer; it's next to the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom and the wine cellar, so all necessary conveniences are close at hand. We should have more guests.)

And like everyone who visits, she got introduced to the Wii.

It didn't take her long to fling together her Mii. Now, "mumsie" is permanently added to our roster of playable characters. (Not that anyone else would play her, of course. That would be rude.) And she has an impressive record of Wii Fit achievements, games played and unlocked, to say nothing of her ratings at sports. The Wii misses her.

And she, apparently, misses it. Because she's been and bought her own. I wish I could have seen my father's reaction. He does a good line in 'flabbergasted', he's the only person I know who can register that particular reaction properly.

But she can't work out how to recreate "mumsie" properly. So just for her, these are the images from our Wii. And for my other readers, enjoy it, because this is the first time I've posted a picture of a friend or family member here:

Crime against art

2010-03-22T15:06:00.016+13:00

I was curious to see "Alice in Wonderland". Tim Burton's works generally have a degree of quality, and Johnny Depp is always watchable. I'd heard that it was a quite different story from the original, featuring a 19-year-old Alice revisiting a land populated by critters from both books; but, I reasoned, how can you go far wrong filming the Mad Hatter's Tea Party?

In a surprising number of different ways, it turns out.

First, you can set the whole thing in a kind of fantasy version of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where everything is broken and dusty and looks vaguely poisonous. You can explain this by introducing a conventional good-versus-evil story in which the Red Queen (modelled superficially on the Queen of Hearts, but really owing more to the Wicked Stepmother) and the White Queen (modelled mostly on Generic Disney Queen Number 3, the Exiled Wise Benefactor, and resembling nothing in either of the books even physically) are duking it out for control of "Underland".

Add in an unexplained and pointless prophecy about Alice slaying the Jabberwocky (the noun is "Jabberwock", by the way, as anyone who's read the freakin' poem could have told you). Scene set for a final battle, because what's a fantasy movie without a climactic battle? Add in romantic tension between Alice and the Mad Hatter. Convert Tweedledum and Tweedledee into an underplayed comic sidekick with almost no audible lines - then they can fight in the final battle with their own unique martial art which involves one riding the other piggyback (whaddya mean, "stupid"? - it worked in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey). Oh, and make sure there's a talking dog, because without a talking dog how would we know it's Disney?

Next, take out all the bits that don't fit into this infantile new narrative. All those Victorian nursery rhymes, they've got to go. All that clever mathematical and satirical stuff, we don't want anything in the script that you need to be over 12 to understand. Take out the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, the White Knight, the Dodo and the caucus-race, Humpty Dumpty, the Sheep. Take out the Pool of Tears, Giant Alice in the house - in fact, everything relating to Alice's difficulty in controlling her own size is reduced to some feebly predictable dilemmas about her clothing (and despite having reworked the rules of size changing, the writers haven't bothered to make them coherent). Take out the jokes, and don't replace them with anything; after all, there's no point trying to be funny without Jim Carrey, is there?

Finally, turn the caterpillar into some kind of oracle (and, of course, the obligatory "transformation" metaphor), turn the Cheshire Cat into a deus ex machina, forget about the trial and the chess game. Oh, and tell Johnny Depp he's still playing Willy Wonka.

Put it all together, and we have what might well stand as the worst crime against literature ever perpetrated. It's hard to be sure, but it's definitely a contender.

What's even more pointless is the framing narrative, in which Alice runs off and falls down the world's biggest rabbit-hole...

The child Alice is seen talking to her father, Charles. Their surname, bafflingly, is neither Dodgson nor Liddell, but Kingsley (or, IMDB insists, "Kingsleigh"). They live in London, not Oxford, because obviously that's the only place in England that a young American audience might have heard of (and ratings forefend that we should be thought to be trying to Educate...).

Thirteen years later Charles is dead, and Alice is being proposed to by a young aristocrat - which is odd, since it's clear neither one of them can stand the other. She feels the pressure of expectation upon her, everyone from Jemma Powell to Frances de la Tour is confidently willing her to say yes, so what could be more natural than that she runs off after a rabbit in a waistcoat?

Later in the film, she's feeling exactly the same communal pressure of expectation to take up the vorpal sword and slay the monster. That time, to nobody's surprise, she caves in. This is a blessing, because I have to admit the warrior Alice looks very fetching in her silver armour. Sad to say she doesn't wear it long, before being transported "home" to reject her pompous, patient swain in the gratingly anachronistic language of post-feminist empowerment.

Lewis Carroll's Alice, lest we forget, is no diffident, oppressed Victorian flower:

'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!'
'Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.
'I won't!' said Alice.
'Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
'Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) 'You're nothing but a pack of cards!'

Tim Burton's Alice says none of this. She's an entirely conventional Disney heroine, all trace of individuality or independence wrung out of her not by Victorian social convention, but by the far more deadening hand of a Hollywood focus group.

With due thought and consideration, I give this film an F. F for Failure. As a visiting friend put it: "Never in the field of human cinema has so much talent been so squandered by so many for so little."

Caveat venditor

2010-03-17T16:12:00.005+13:00

I've just been reading perhaps the most thoughtful essay I've ever seen come out of a Microsoft source. It describes why computer security is a waste of time.

Not "waste of time" in the normal colloquial sense, that it does no good. "Waste of time" in the strict economic sense, that the costs (in time) associated with basic security measures outweigh the plausible economic benefit. Basically, if (in any given year) 0.1% of computer users suffer direct monetary losses averaging $5,000 to computer-based fraud attacks, then the expected benefit to the average user of protecting themselves from such attacks is $5.00 per year - or, about half an hour of time at a low wage. Since it's impossible even to read the current set of security advice, much less implement it, in so little time - and since it provides no guarantee of safety anyway - most users, quite rationally, ignore it.

The paper goes on to dissect three popular "security" provisions: password rules (password expiry "will help only if the attacker waits weeks before exploiting the password"), user education about URLs ("a user who conscientiously follows the rules on URL parsing shoulders a considerable burden. The ΔBenefit is that he avoids some subset of phishing sites") to SSL (secure website) certificates ("Ironically, one place a user will almost certainly never see a certificate error is on a phishing or malware hosting site. [...] The rare cases that employ certificates use valid ones.")

Or there's the occasionally-quoted figure that "an unpatched Windows machine connected to the Internet will be compromised within 12 minutes" - the intended message being that you should keep your machine patched. But of course, to patch the machine, you need to connect to the Internet. And it would take considerably more than 12 minutes connected to download the patches on such a hopelessly outdated machine. You could only do it safely from behind a solid firewall - the kind that would make the security patches redundant.

Anti-virus software. What is it good for? It prevents someone else from installing and running software on your machine that you don't want. But it requires you to instal and run - and worse, maintain - software on your machine that you don't bloody want. It protects you from a limited set of types of damage (that might potentially cost you money and time), but it inflicts other costs (in money and time). It updates itself to protect against new threats, but only if you connect to the Internet and thus expose yourself to those threats. (If you haven't connected in a while, your anti-virus will start nagging you to update it - even though "not connecting to the Internet" is far better protection than it can ever offer.)

(Incidentally, most of these objections to anti-virus software also apply to Windows itself.)

The trouble with computer security is that it's been left up to the market. If seatbelts had never been mandated in cars, how many people would choose to pay extra to have them fitted? If there were no government regulation of food safety, how would we think about the steady trickle of deaths from poisoning and disease? Judging by our attitude to computer viruses, the default response would be: "It's their own fault, I always check my Symantec Bacteriograph before eating anything".

The market's solution to such things is not based on making things or people safer: it's based on selling stuff, which is best achieved by making people feel threatened. When the question is about safety, "the market" is not only not the best answer - it's quite possibly the worst.

It's probably too late, now, to try to impose seatbelt laws and driving-license requirements on computers, as well as being way beyond the competence of any government anyway. But there's nothing to stop us passing laws that put the costs where they belong: on the people who sell crappy software. Everyone who sells software should be directly liable for any damage occurring to its users as a result of security holes in that software, and there should be no disclaiming of that responsibility, no matter what contract the buyer signs. After all, it's no more than we expect of people who sell cars, or food, or electrical goods, or drugs.

Of course there are problems with vendor liability (how do you decide which piece of software was at fault? what do we mean by "selling" software? what about "free" software? what about people who charge you to instal or customise someone else's software?) But these are just the sorts of complications that the industry likes to throw up, to make it seem as if the whole idea is impracticable. In fact, once you get over the sheer number of such objections, it's not hard to come up with simple, equitable answers to all of them. Once we've agreed to the principle, the details will be solved in short order.

Eyes on the Tiger

2010-03-03T12:39:00.007+13:00

Burning bright

The end of Chinese New Year is party time in Auckland. A truly unbelievable number of people descend on Albert Park to admire the lanterns, eat the food and marvel at the sheer crush of the crowd.

So that we could capture the event properly this year, we invested in a new camera. It's described as a "beginner-friendly" SLR, which means that even though its functions are outrageously complicated, they're not compulsory. It takes a ridiculous number of pixels - the images shown here are scaled down to something reasonable for web viewing, otherwise they'd eat up my storage allowance and bloat your browser into a flubbery widescreen pancake, and nobody wants to see that.

We arrived at Albert Park about six-thirty on Sunday. The smell of deep-fried food was everywhere. Susan's nostrils flared, she vanished into the crowd like one possessed of an insatiable hunger for fish balls; I looked away for a moment, and condemned myself to spend the next 40 minutes combing through the crowd in search of her.

An unusually thin part of the crowd. You can see through it.

Apart from that, we had a great time. There was a Chinese prog-rock group (very 70s - they would have been right at home opening for Hawkwind or Pink Floyd). Unfortunately they only got to play a couple of numbers, before being followed on stage by a marginally rehearsed children's choir. The announcer for this latter act kept telling the audience "This next song is very pretty. You will enjoy it."

China's answer to Rush

Well, Chinese culture does tend towards the authoritarian. Eventually we gave up trying to believe her, and moved off in search of lower culture.

That's why they call it a lantern festival

Hundreds of (lucky) red lanterns hung from the trees, along with various ugly faces and improbably-floating luminous babies. The Tiger, of course, had pride of place among the lanterns; a handful of skittish-looking zebras were in front of him, presumably in case he got peckish. Other set-pieces included animals from previous years (the Ox, the Monkey and others), and the traditional turtle orchestra.

At least they sounded better than the kids

I recommend it, it's a fun evening for all the family. But keep an eye on them.

A bid for freedom

House room

2010-02-25T16:14:00.003+13:00

It's seven years, now, since I sold my last owned house in England. (It feels less. I still think of it as home, sometimes, even though I hadn't lived there for two years before that.)

It's six months since we moved into our first owned house in New Zealand. We've replaced the windows with good double-glazing, restored the garage to its proper use (rather than the half-assed workshop space so beloved of Kiwi males), and furnished it with some of our own things, but largely with stuff looted from the in-laws. The king-sized guest bed, the dining table and chairs, several other chairs, the sofa - all donated by Susan's side of the family.

Also about six months ago my parents, fed up with storing such of my possessions as I hadn't brought over yet, crated them up and shipped them over here. They took a while to arrive - I think they might have come via Somalia, among other places - but come they did, eventually. Then they had to wait for me to get off my backside and chivvy them through customs and biosecurity. I finally got the boxes home and unpacked last month.

The first thing I noticed, in unpacking - no, make that the third thing - was that quite a lot of this stuff wasn't mine. (The first thing was that the packages were held together with enough parcel tape to secure a small moon launch. The second was that they contained enough scrunched-up newspaper to constitute almost an entire edition of the Sunday Times. No wonder they weighed so much.) As in, I'd either never laid eyes on it before, or I had but I knew damn' well it belonged to someone else. Clearly, my parents had decided to retaliate by making me store some of their stuff. (We now have a Czechoslovakian-made 12-setting tea set, which is vaguely familiar but quite definitely Not Mine. I'm mildly curious to learn where I've seen it before.) And there's a medium-sized pile of books that my father may have thought I'd enjoy, and maybe I will, but he can't possibly have imagined were mine...

It's amazing how much you can fit into your cupboards, once you start exploring their innermost recesses and apply what you learned from Tetris. But cupboards thus filled are not - comfortable. They lack a belt to let out. They become dense, precarious places, without room to move and breathe, and accessing parts of the content starts to feel like outfitting a polar expedition.

And so last weekend, we decided to act on my mother's suggestion of buying a sideboard or dresser, to increase our total storage space. Another wriggle in the inexorable settling-in to middle-class existence.

Now, furniture is one of those industries that is much, much better done in Europe than it is out here. We looked, halfheartedly, for antique shops, but failing to find what we wanted, we made a beeline for Danske Møbler (which, we reasoned, must surely sell decent Scandinavian-designed furniture at exorbitant prices).

DM has a huge, modern-looking (if you're from the 80s) showroom in Mt Eden, which we saw from afar while house-hunting, and it was the work of - ooh, about half an hour - to find it again. It's the kind of showroom where, when you amble in, there's a brief period when you wonder whether it's supposed to be open, because there's not a soul in sight, and there is, wonder of wonders, no muzak. Eventually you become aware that the place is, in fact, staffed - but discreetly, like I imagine the public reception room of MI5. You can stroll all around, get your bearings, take the measure of things, before some suave assistant materialises at your shoulder and offers to help.

I like it. Maybe I'll go back just to enjoy the decent sofas and drink the free coffee.

In the end we settled on a beautifully scuplted, rimu dresser - about 20cm lower than I'd have liked, but it will fit the space under the dining-room window to admiration. It has lovingly bevelled edges and rounded corners, feels smooth and solid to the touch. One of the drawers has a cutlery-drawer-like divider lined with felt. I think it was maybe meant for a casino rather than a kitchen, but never mind, at least it's not green felt.

It's due to be delivered roundabout early April. (Why, exactly, does furniture take so long to make? Answers to the comments section please.) Until then, the cupboards will just have to suffer in silence.

Wildlife

2010-02-12T14:29:00.003+13:00

It must be officially late summer now.

You can tell because the cicadas, having spent four months gently chirping to one another when no-one was looking, have launched their bid for full aural domination (FAD). You can't open a window, currently, without being deafened by the continuous roar of insects desperately signalling about... oh, the flag, the All-Blacks' new lineup, or Proust, whatever it is that cicadas care about.

Seriously, they're loud. By mid-morning, walking anywhere outdoors is like being flanked by invisible cheerleaders.

Maybe they're just wishing Happy New Year to everyone. The Chinese New Year festivities start on Sunday, and go on for four weeks. We're sending out cards this year, mostly to apologise for our disorganisation in not having sent Christmas cards.

Which reminds me: a very happy Year of the Tiger to ~~both~~ all my readers. Be well!

Creativity, RIP

2010-02-05T16:37:00.003+13:00

What exactly is modern copyright law trying to encourage?

To: CBS Productions, NBC, CNN, Fox Broadcasting, Comedy Central, et alia

From: Sue, Grabbit & Runn, Solicitors at Law

It has come to our attention that a significant number of your productions are located on or near Manhattan, New York, USA. During the course of a number of these productions (listed in Appendix A), the distinctive skyline of Lower Manhattan is used as a background, to identify the location, to establish key plot-relevant context, and to brand and publicize the product.

This skyline is the creative work of a number of architects, but it is generally acknowledged (including by your own networks: see Appendix B for references) that one of the most prominent contributions of recent times was the work of our client O. bin Laden.

Our client assures us that he has never granted permission for images of his work to be used in your productions, nor can we find any record that such permission has ever been sought. We are seeking damages for this infringement in the amount of 60% of your gross earnings from these productions filmed since September 2001.

Moreover, we have strong evidence that the great majority of your producers, writers, directors and camera crews are fully aware of our client's contribution. Therefore the failure to seek permission can only be attributable to a wilful and deliberate policy on the parts of their employers, i.e. you. Accordingly, we will be asking the court to assess maximum statutory damages of US$150,000 per infringement. We will be seeking full disclosure of the number of times each of the infringing works has been distributed to the public, and to how many people, but preliminary research suggests that final damages will be in the region of US$14 trillion.

The infringing use of our client's trademark 'Al-Qaeda' to refer to incidents not authentically created by that organization or any of its licensees or affiliates is currently the subject of a separate action.

We look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

H. Grabbit

Now to see if this blog gets deleted for praising or glorifying terrorism.

Just leave ET alone

2010-01-28T16:25:00.003+13:00

For some reason, there's been a lot of yatter on the BBC lately, for values of 'lately' dating back to 2007, about talking to aliens. Not in the science-fiction sense, but in the real practical sense of transmitting directional signals into likely-looking patches of space in the hope that something will care.

Some scientists really like the idea. I used to work with a guy who earnestly believed that any alien intelligence we encountered would surely be more wise and benign than us, because (basically) that's not a very high hurdle to clear. That was the extent of his argument. "We're nasty and brutish, therefore they must be better than us."

Yeah, the logic eluded me too.

Others, and personally I'd tend to side with this camp, think it's stupid and dangerous. If there's one thing we can learn from playing Civilization, it's that when two or more groups of people are interested in colonising the same patch of space, they will end up fighting each other. Since it's likely that these hypothetical aliens have developed through processes of biological, social and economic evolution that are not entirely unlike ours, it's reasonable to assume they know this. And if they do have any much better technology than we do, they'll use it to crush us like nuts.

So the best we can hope for, really, is that anyone who does hear the messages is even stupider than we are. In which case, I'm not sure there's much point in talking to them.

Not that that will stop anyone... Communication based on the assumption that the other party is a moron has been raised to a fine art in our times.

"Dear Organism, We have been monitoring your excellent planet for some time now, and we are really impressed with the range of topics you cover. We wish to purchase ad space from you in exchange for Earth currency denominated in the highly collectable 2009 Zimbabwean dollar."

"Dear ET, Earn money in your own time! This is not a pyramid scheme and is guaranteed 100% legal in accordance with current USPS guidelines!"

"DEAR THING: HOW ARE YOU AND YOUR FAMILY? I HOPE ALL IS WELL WITH YOU. I WRITE TO INFORM YOU ABOUT MY DESIRE TO INVEST AND TO BUY A HEXAPOD ON YOUR PLANET, AND I HOPE THAT THIS TRANSACTION WILL BE GIVEN AN URGENT APPROVAL AND WILL BE TREATED WITH THE STRICTEST CONFIDENCE."

Come to think of it, exactly what are those idiot scientists saying anyway? Are we spamming space already? If so, the aliens will have all my sympathy. Until about 0.3 seconds after their planetary bulldozers uncloak, that is.

Order of the boot

2010-01-26T12:01:00.003+13:00

When my employers wanted to experiment with Windows Vista, it was an easy choice to pick the employee whose work they could most afford to lose. Was it, they wanted to know, really as bad as people were saying?

It took me about two weeks to make up my mind about that. Yes. Yes, it was. If anything it was worse than people were saying. Not only had it reorganised some basic functions and obscured others, added enormous delay to simple things such as booting, file copying and even file deletion; it was prone to slowdowns and erratic pop-ups occurring for no discernable reason at all; it would make its own decisions about how to display a file folder (it's convinced that some of my application folders are full of MP3s, and others are photos, and no matter how many times I tell it they're not it always reverts sooner or later); and it broke some of what I considered the best basic features of earlier Windows versions, such as giving the user a warning when they try to delete a file that's marked as "Read Only".

Now, Vista has already been superseded, and I'm seeing the Internet fill up with people commenting "It's not that bad, really".

I have two words for those people: "Stockholm Syndrome". It is that bad, really. Two service packs, innumerable patches and 30 months of use experience later, everything I complained about in the above paragraph is still true. The big difference is that now I know how it sucks.

And so it was with a heavy heart that I rebooted my laptop this morning. See, Windows updated yesterday - presumably that security hole that everyone's been going on about - and that meant that when I woke it from overnight hibernation this morning, it reminded me to reboot. Options at this point are: "Remind me again in 10 minutes/1 hour/4 hours". No option for what I want, which is "Remind me when I click 'Hibernate' or some other shutdown option again, and in the meantime just shut up and work."

Just in case anyone thinks I'm exaggerating about how bad Vista is, I took the liberty of recording what happened next:

8:09 a.m.: I click the "Restart Now" button in the "nagging" dialogue. The dialogue goes away and my cursor changes to the dreaded infinite-looping affair that says my computer will now not respond to anything I do for an indeterminate time to come.
8:11: Dialogue pops up: "Windows Explorer has stopped working". Options are: "Check online for a solution and restart the program", "Restart the program", "Debug the program". No mention of "Just shut the fucking program down already." I ignore it, in the well founded hope that Windows will forget about it.
8:12: Outlook pops up a dialogue asking if I'd like to auto-archive my old items now. Miraculously, this dialogue does have a "No!!!!" option. I click it.
8:14: Screen goes black.
8:17: I get back with coffee. Screen is still black.
8:18: Part 1 of the Windows startup sequence appears. It looks superficially like a progress bar.
8:19: "One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended you continue." Windows has said this on every single startup since a new hard disc was fitted about a year ago. CHKDISK has never found any issues. To be on the safe side, I humour it. (In fact cancelling is more trouble than it's worth, because it means pressing a key, which - since Windows is not yet aware of the external keyboard - means opening the laptop, which means Windows rearranging the displays, which would take another 90 seconds at minimum.)
8:21: Screen goes black. Remains black for over 50 seconds.
8:22: "Please wait". Well, that makes a nice change of pace.
8:22: "Configuring updates: part 3/3"
8:24: "Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on". I do so.
8:25: "Welcome"
8:26: Desktop appears, but cursor is still in circling "wait" mode
8:27: Cursor switches to "ready" mode. I click to open Outlook.
8:29: I can see my Inbox! Start trying to read e-mail.
8:35: "Multiple problems exist with your computer security". This dialogue is another thing that keeps coming back like a vampire, no matter how many times I stake it. The "problems"? "Windows Defender is out of date. Update now?"

So, your recommendation is that I go through all that again? I'll pass.

Time taken from switching on to getting a usable desktop: 20 minutes. Time taken to anything like full functionality (i.e. Windows stops interrupting me every 2 minutes to nag about something): over 35 minutes.

I remember when booting a computer meant loading a program from cassette tape. It didn't take one-quarter as long as this.

Short film review

2010-01-21T16:52:00.002+13:00

We went to the movies last night. For myself, I wanted to satisfy my requirements to remain a cultural consumer in good standing; I think Susan was mostly looking forward to the popcorn. And we were pleasantly surprised by the Berkley in Mission Bay: clean, reasonable seats, not too big.

And the popcorn was good. This in itself is unusual, possibly unprecedented in my cinema-going experience in this country.

And we enjoyed Sherlock Holmes. It was interesting to see the world's first superhero getting the Dark Knight treatment. Could have done with fewer explosions and without the prizefighting scene, but you've got to allow these creative types some leeway. My biggest complaint was that the ending made the whole thing look like the pilot to a TV series, or (gods help us) a series of movies.

Note to producers: if you make a TV series, I'll give it a try. But if you make it a movie series, don't count on me to keep buying tickets. That's a lot of money.

Whose health is it anyway?

2010-01-19T16:40:00.004+13:00

Susan gave me a book for Christmas. Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre, based on his regular Grauniad column of the same name, deals with how the media reports science. Specifically the British media, and mostly medical science, but the principles are fairly generalisable.

This fine read has taught me a bit about experimental design and medical ethics, and quite a lot about the placebo effect. One factette that lodged in my mind: when a new drug is released, older drugs that treat the same condition actually become measurably less effective. That is to say: if they previously had a 60% chance of curing the condition within a certain time, that chance may drop to 40% when the new drug becomes available.

No-one is quite sure why this should happen. Could be something to do with experimental design or sample selection. But Goldacre's money is on the placebo effect - the doctors themselves, being subject to the ferocious marketing tactics of drug companies, have more faith in the newer treatment.

Another case is the story of fish oil. Thanks to the charlatanry of "nutritionists", most journalists now accept as Proven Scientific Fact^TM that fish oils are good for the brain, and feeding fish-oil capsules to children makes them perform better in class. All over the country, to hear Goldacre tell it, parents are shovelling pills into their children daily; in some schools, not doing so is considered tantamount to child abuse. And yet there's not a shred of clinical evidence to support this superstition.

Big-time win for the drug companies. They've successfully persuaded a whole generation that "taking pills" is a normal activity for healthy people.

I thought of this today when I saw this story in today's paper. "Wear gloves to avoid cancer in the car" says the headline. Even by the Herald's standards, that's a pretty opaque headline - is there some nasty type of cancer that affects drivers, carcinogens in that rubber-like material that coats the steering wheel perhaps? But no. The story turns out to be about exposing your skin to sunlight while driving. Glass, it transpires, doesn't stop all UV radiation.

Plain, clear vehicle glass blocks only 37 per cent of UV-A radiation. The main risk comes from long or frequent trips exposed to sun through side windows.

Intrigued, I did a little more research into UV-A and UV-B.

UV-B is the stuff that causes sunburn, and plain ol' glass stops nearly all of that. But that nasty UV-A gets through, and according to the Cancer Society, that too is dangerous, even though it doesn't burn. I'm not qualified to comment on the health risks of UV-A, but my suspicions were aroused when I came to this line in the story:

The issue was highlighted by sunscreen maker Oasis Beauty, which urged drivers to apply sunscreen before driving.

The Cancer Society, to its credit, is leery of that suggestion. It recommends instead long sleeves and, optionally, gloves. (In summer, no less.) But, I had to wonder, what sort of weight should we apply to health advice from a company that's selling a product?

Even these measures are only necessary if you're driving long distances, because UV-A takes a good long exposure to do harm, and laminated windscreen glass stops 80% of it - it's only exposure through the un-laminated side windows that's really dangerous. So long sleeves should pretty much eliminate the risk, at no real cost.

But as with pretty much everything health-related, there's another side to this story. No UV-B means no vitamin D. And if you're of the male persuasion, no vitamin D is a recipe for, among other things, prostate cancer.

Over 200 people die of skin cancer in New Zealand every year. But roughly 600 men die of prostate cancer. In other words, as a man, I'm approximately six times more likely to die of too little UV-B than too much. So why is all the public-health propaganda telling me to get less sun?

The obvious answer is: sunscreen is bottled, marketed and profitable. Whereas sunlight is, as yet, still free. It's a lot harder to make money by telling people to use less of a product.

And this is why our health advice is so confusing: because it's all coming from people who have a product to sell. Nobody is disinterested. Nobody is on our side.

Health advice I believe in: eat fresh vegetables, don't get too fat or too thin, don't smoke or drink to excess, and last but not least, don't let the bastards grind you down. Everything beyond that, I'm now convinced, is guesswork based on information that is partial in every sense of the word.

Editing the Herald

2010-01-18T14:46:00.000+13:00

Since James is, apparently, still on holiday (bloody academics), it falls to me to get angry about today's New Zealand Herald.

"Half of Kiwis doubt global warming: poll" says the headline. Curious, I click to the article. "A Herald survey", it reports.

Oh, excellent. So the Herald has commissioned its very own poll? That means it'll be telling us all the data, not just cherrypicking a few findings that happen to catch the reporter's eye. It'll tell us how many people were surveyed, when and how, what questions they were asked, and how their answers varied with their demographics...

Well, not so much as it happens.

Almost one in five of 2296 respondents said the concept was a giant con, and a further 28 per cent said global warming had not been conclusively proved.

"Almost" one in five? You wouldn't care to be any more precise about that figure? Did they use the words "giant con", or was that suggested to them as Option 1? As for "conclusively proved" - what does that even mean?

An online survey of the Herald Readers' Panel was conducted by the Nielsen Company between December 10 and December 17, as world leaders prepared to meet at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen.

Thirty-eight per cent said global warming was a serious problem that needed action now, 13 per cent said it was the world's biggest challenge, and 2 per cent did not know.

Again, your words or theirs? I'm going to guess yours, but would it hurt you to publish the damn' questions?

Nineteen per cent - including almost 30 per cent of men aged 45 or older - thought it was a giant con and a waste of money.

A giant con and a waste of money. Two separate options, one portmanteau one, or just the reporter's own interpolation? I guess we'll never know.

And that, believe it or not, is all the data we're given about this poll - the one commissioned by this newspaper, for which it has presumably paid good money. No list of questions (let alone answers), nothing about the design of the form, the sample selection process or the demographics of the sample. Without which this research quite literally isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

This is a newspaper, right? Its entire raison d'etre is to report stuff. And this particular stuff is its own exclusive property. If the Herald doesn't tell us this stuff, no-one else even has the right to it.

No wonder Kiwis are uninformed about science, when their leading national daily newspaper can't even be bothered to publish its own original research...

Star, arts, tsar, tars

2010-01-12T15:16:00.001+13:00

Of all the Google searches that bring people to this page, by far the commonest is "anagram rats".

I would've thought that most people would be capable of working those out for themselves - it's only four letters, after all.

Truly, there is no such thing as an upper limit to human laziness.

How not to pass a law

2009-12-30T17:17:00.004+13:00

Lord Can't-Mind-His-Own-Business-For-Just-Five-Bleeding-Minutes Mandelson is back in the headlines, now proposing a "Digital Economy Bill" that, apparently, must be passed right now, not in five months' time after the election, or else Britain will fall apart. Wales will collapse into the Irish Sea, Scotland will declare independence and form a union with Somalia - or worse, France - while London degenerates into a barren wasteland stalked by gangs of feral children preying on the flesh of tourists. I paraphrase slightly, but it's certainly urgent that Mandy gets his way.

And what he wants from Santa is legislation to, among other things, cut off internet users who download stuff they don't have the right to.

Now, as an aim, I have a deal of sympathy with that. Illegal downloaders are a pain in the itinerant. Not only do they score for free all that content that the rest of us are paying good money for, thus upping the price for we poor saps who pay it; they also clog up the Internet while doing it, thus making my (legal) downloads run like a three-legged donkey. Climbing a stairwell.

And Mandy's proposal - ISPs to write warning letters to alleged offenders - is not unreasonable. Crucially, the letters are to be sent at the complainants' expense. That's a positive step, putting the burden of Being Serious in the right place. It gives "rights holders" (gods, how I hate that phrase) a much-needed incentive to think twice before simply spamming everyone whose IP number shows up in a server log.

Now, naturally enough, the ISPs are kicking up a fuss. It's all very well Big Content paying for the letters (they say), but what you're talking about is putting in place technical measures and procedures that are far from simple, and that's going to cost us real money. Being reasonably savvy in the ways of PR, they don't phrase it quite like that; they say it will cost the consumer money. Specifically, about £25 per broadband connection.

Obviously, the ISPs want money. They don't care who it comes from, and they think they see a chance to grab it from the "content providers" rather than directly from their own customers. (Of course the consumer ends up paying it either way. Just through different channels.)

What bothers me here is the lack of honest debate. The "Digital Britain" report was published six months ago, Mandy's legislative proposals one month ago, and he wants them passed into law in less than six months.

That's just silly. The questions involved here are not questions of dark sorcery or byzantine banking practices; they're simple moral questions, which any reasonable person can understand. Given time, you could come to a consensus that people would accept. You don't have to impose it by fiat from above. Democracy could actually work here, if only you gave it the chance.

I've already outlined my reasons for disliking digital freeloaders. Mandy's proposals for dealing with them answer some of the standard civil-liberties complaints. What's left is, to a large extent, whipped up by the two industries - ISPs and content owners - both of whom stake out ridiculous positions in the hope that the inevitable "compromise" is enough to ensure diamond-encrusted pensions to their great-grandchildren. Given time, we could hear some worthwhile points put to them:

ISP: "Why should we spend money to support someone else's business?"
Me: "Because your business benefits directly from theirs. How many fewer broadband subscriptions would you sell, if people couldn't download copyrighted content?"
Copyright Holders: "Too right! These pirates are costing us billions!"
Me: "And you, just stop it. Stop stealing my culture and trying to sell it back to me. Stop trying to resell the same thing over and over. Stop punishing me for buying your product. Stop lying about piracy. Just sell a decent product at a fair price."

But these things take time. Not to come up with the questions - geeks like me have this set just waiting - but to debate them, make the public aware of them, put together some sort of consensus about what is and isn't "fair".

And time is what Mandy won't allow.

Unsilent night

2009-12-24T11:09:00.005+13:00

There's a line in Janet Frame's amazing short story Tiger, Tiger about "the dreadful meaning quiet of Christmas Eve".

Long before I ever thought much about New Zealand, I heard that story on the radio and fell in love with it. I must have read it twenty times since then, and to this day I'm still not sure whether I'm supposed to laugh or cry at the end. I usually end up crying, but smiling as well.

(You can find it in The Lagoon and other stories. I think I've bought six copies of that book so far.)

The DMQ of Christmas Eve is a time of waiting. Nothing more is going to happen before the big day. If you're a kid it means you go to bed and, depending on temperament, try to either go to sleep to make the morning come faster, or stay awake to see it early. If you're an adult, it means your deadline is here - all your preparations are made, for better or worse, and there's nothing more you can do before the big day. "Alea jacta est", as Julius Caesar doubtless said the night before Saturnalia.

This is the time - one of the very few times - when I actually like to hear Christmas carols.

Christmas music on the whole is a pain in the ears. When played in shops, malls and other public places it just makes me feel harrassed, like I'm being nagged. (In fact I'm starting to come down against all playing of recorded music in public places, thanks perhaps to my mother's influence. But that's a separate rant.) When played in someone's home at this time of year, it becomes a thoughtless, pointless noise: it makes me think that the person doesn't really care much about music, but just plays it for its associations.

There are three occasions when I'm open to Christmas music.

One is at any Christmas party where there are strangers and colleagues and other people you wouldn't normally mix with from choice. In those cases it's a social lubricant, like alcohol but cheaper.

One is when it's being sung, live, by people - preferably children - with good voices who have put some thought and practice into what they're doing. Carol concerts - lovely. Carol singers performing in public - heartwarming. Decrepit glam rockers performing their own hit from 30 years ago - exhilarating. Any of the above recorded and replayed the next day - soulless and flat.

And the third is in the DMQ of CE. At that point I don't mind being nagged. For a few hours, although I might roll my eyes and mutter darkly about crimes against music, nothing can really dent my calm.

Although I'd rather hear silence.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Mistrust, mistakes and misdirection

2009-12-16T16:49:00.000+13:00

Remember Britain's "War Crimes Act"? Passed in 1991, amid a faint public hysteria at the thought that if foreign bad guys took refuge in the UK, we couldn't prosecute them. The headline baddies at the time were aging Nazis who may or may not have been living in Britain for years, but there was always an assumption that the long arm would also scoop up truant Serbs, Russians, Chechens, miscellaneous Africans, and others who might be prone to attract adverse media coverage to their atrocities. Basically, the law allows certain categories of criminals to be tried in British courts if they are foolish enough to come within their reach, even if what they did was legal in their own country, and even if it happened long before the law was passed.

I know, I know. A lot of us said so at the time. But you can't argue with Nuremberg, and that's the precedent. A perfect illustration of hard cases making bad law.

In the news today, that law has come back to bite Britain in the proverbial. Hearing the news that Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli government minister, was due to visit London, some enterprising Palestinian activists went to a magistrate and got a warrant issued for her arrest. Ms Livni promptly cancelled her visit.

(I did always like to dream of doing that to George W Bush, but it was hard to find anything concrete to pin on him. "Starting a war on false pretexts" is not considered a crime nowadays, even though it was in 1945. Plus, he never visited.)

Anyways, the British ambassador in Tel Aviv was hauled before the Israeli foreign minister and given a stern lecture about what would follow if Israeli government officials decided they could no longer visit the UK. Normally these affairs are couched in diplomatic language, but based on the British government's reaction ("This can never ever happen again"), I can only imagine this one was pretty brutal. The Israeli government waxes indignant still. Deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon splutters that the whole thing "makes a mockery of universal jurisdiction".

I've always thought that "universal jurisdiction" was a silly idea. (Something I have in common with Henry Kissinger, apparently.) Although let's not forget it was originally an Israeli idea in the first place.

But never mind the hypocrisy of all parties concerned here. Frankly, between Palestinian terrorists, Israeli politicians and the British foreign office, this looks to me like a perfect opportunity to reintroduce trial by combat. What really bothers me about this story is what the British government is promising to do next.

Foreign secretary David Miliband says: "The procedure by which arrest warrants can be sought and issued without any prior knowledge or advice by a prosecutor is an unusual feature of the system in England and Wales. The Government is looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed in order to avoid this sort of situation arising again."

It's not about making sure Israeli ministers can visit safely. If that was all they wanted, they could just give the woman diplomatic immunity. What Mr Miliband is talking about, here, is establishing political control of an inconveniently-independent judiciary. No warrants to be issued unless a prosecutor - a political appointee - says so.

Now, Britain's law lords are, as a rule, neither stupid nor shy. I don't imagine that they'll fail to see this move and block it, which shouldn't be too hard. My guess is that by the end of the month, the government's proposals will have quietly morphed into amending the War Crimes Act to raise the bar for issuing a warrant (which is clearly what they should have proposed to begin with). But the whole episode is interesting for the light it casts on the thinking of the current crop of politicians: "If it's going wrong, take it over".

Which goes back to the issue of trust.

Delegation demands trust. As long as you trust your underlings, you can give them jobs to do and then let them get on with it. Modern life teaches us to think of "control" as something absolute, fine-tuned, responsive - the kind of control we have over a car, over our phone's ringtones, over our own webpage. But politics is supposed to be more subtle than that. In politics, no matter how powerful you are, you have to let other people make decisions. That's what politics is.

Because they will make those decisions anyway. You can't stop them. You can lead them, but only if you're willing to treat them as "on your side". And that means identifying your interests as, if not identical, then at least aligned with theirs. The skill of politics is to persuade other people that this is, in fact, the case.

But If you treat your underlings as enemies, they will take on the role. What choice do they have?

Expectations

2009-12-15T10:36:00.001+13:00

"So how does this Christmas thing work then?" Thus Susan to me this morning. Her family has no Christmas traditions of its own, and she's anxious to help make sure it meets my expectations. Bless her.

"Well, you wake up early. Not too early, but it's still dark. Then you check out the sock you hung up at the foot of your bed, you take out the things one by one. There's nothing very exciting in there, usually, but it's Christmas and you're a kid so everything is good. There's no whistle or anything to make that much noise, because my parents aren't complete idiots, but all the same you try to keep it down. But still you're excited, and you might sneak downstairs to look under the tree and see all the presents there and wonder which ones are yours, even though your parents have absolutely forbidden that.

"Other people get up and you start asking about the other presents, but nobody's going to get those until after everyone is washed, dressed and breakfasted, and that takes a long time because your brothers don't have the same sense of urgency as you do. The eldest, in particular, is a lazy bugger who's also as bloody-minded as Jack the Ripper, and you know if you try to speed him up he'll go slower on purpose.

"About the only thing that ever worked was telling him that Christmas dinner was almost ready. But even that only worked once.

"Eventually you're allowed into the living room, you gather round the tree, and your dad sits at the foot of the tree and reaches for the packages, one by one, and throws or slides or passes them to whoever they're addressed to. Sometimes there's a little show of rattling or weighing or sniffing or some other sort of diagnosis, but not much, because your dad mostly wants to get it over with. You unwrap each present as you get it, and some of them are really cool. Your parents remind you to thank people, and then you're left to your own devices to play until dinner."

"You mean lunch."

"It's called dinner. There's a colossal amount of food, I've told you about it all before, it takes two hours or more to get through it and probably two-thirds of the food is left over. Eventually the table gets cleared, the washing up gets done - you have to help with the drying - and your mother gets out her inevitable 1000-piece Christmas jigsaw and starts sorting out the straight-edge pieces, which means the dining table is now occupied for the next two days, but that's okay because it'll be that long before you're hungry again anyway. Until about nine o'clock at night, when it's time for tea and Christmas cake."

I stopped. I'd got quite caught up in my account, but there's something in Susan's eye that expresses roughly equal parts amusement and frustration.

"I should have asked your mother," she sighs.

Digital pollution

2009-12-11T16:38:00.005+13:00

So I'm looking in on niq's blog to see if he's had any more replies to his latest whinge, which is about an unabashedly pro-middle-class tax break in the UK, when I happen to notice the "Possibly related posts" that Wordpress has selected for this one. There are two shown: New Jersey Property Taxes Useful Facts, and Tax Advantages of Live/Work Properties.

The second of these titles promises perhaps the dullest article I've ever read, but the first at least has the appeal of being geekily specialist. And besides, useful facts are always useful, nicht wahr? Lacking anything better to do for the next 30 seconds or so, I click on it.

The first sentence is quite promising:

You see, we should be very thankful that we are born in this modern generation because of the existence of the Internet.

Indeed, I thank my parents daily for delaying my conception until a mere quarter-century before the invention of the World Wide Web. How farsighted they were! Tell me more...

With the Internet, every information (whether about new jersey property taxes or any other such as raised, pennsylvania property tax, property tax laws or even business property tax) can be found with ease on the Internet, with great articles like this.

Hmm. Actually, I have to say that my interest in all of those subjects was never very high, and is now evaporating with each letter I read.

What follows is, as far as I can tell from about ten seconds of careful scrutiny, a perfectly serious and deathly dull article that looks as if it's been generated by some kind of automated broken-English script generator.

My curiosity piqued, I click on the latest posting for that blog:

I am sure your quest for bexas county property taxes has come to an end as you read this article.

Too right it has.

It looks for all the world as if some wannabe tax advisor has set up a script to produce post after post of bland, tedious waffle, far too vague to be of any real use to anyone, while giving each one a title that they hope will exactly match someone's Google query. Each post is prefaced with a generic statement of how great the Internet is, presumably in the hope that anyone Googling this sort of thing is predisposed to think that way already. And for some reason, the raw phrases and sentences they're using are written by someone who speaks English only brokenly as a second or third language. And they ran this script for one day last November, generating seven posts for a random selection of states, counties and circumstances across the USA.

I know my posts may not be the best-written or most intelligent materials around, but I like to put a little effort into them. I like to think I am contributing something to... something. But these gits... It's as the elitists and purists said all along: blogs have made it too easy to make noise. You don't even need a human being any more.

Does anyone else feel ever so slightly creeped out at the sight of a machine using the pronoun "I"?

Newsprint wrestling

2009-12-07T16:52:00.005+13:00

A few months ago I was excited to pick up, in a secondhand bookshop, a copy of John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. I'd long been curious about this book, widely admired in its day (the 1860s) and remembered as a highly accessible work of Victorian theology. When I began to read it, I discovered it was in fact a highly charged polemical shot in a bitterly personal ongoing argument between Cardinal Newman and the progressive, yet orthodox, Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley.

I know, from personal experience, how one's best work can be provoked in the heat of verbal battle, and then sadly loses its pith, point and relevance when taken out of that context. Newman may have had the wisdom of a poet and a prophet, but today, without the context of Kingsley's snide insinuations, he comes across as a petulant teenager.

For this reason alone, I think, Newman should be required reading for anyone who wants to take part in public life. Moral: don't duel in print.

The New Zealand Herald's leading crusty-old-fogey columnist, Garth George, thought almost as poorly of Don Brash's '2025' task force as I did. Granted his reasons are slightly different from mine - he thought it was ideologically motivated, whereas I, I regret to say, thought it driven by the interests of corruption - but all the same I was pleasantly surprised, on the basis that he probably thinks like a significant constituency of Kiwis, to find myself agreeing with GG for a change.

Today, I was - what's a word that means simultaneously incredulous and amused? - slightly flabbergasted, perhaps - to see Dr Brash taking the time to rebut Garth's attack specifically. This abuse of newsprint is remarkable for its amateurishness. Dr Brash makes no attempt to hide his passive-aggressiveness, his theatrical aggrievement at being so misunderstood, for all the world like a sulky pre-teen:

Mr George also suggests that we recommended abolishing subsidised doctor visits, and implies that we are advocating an American approach to healthcare. This is again utter nonsense. We suggested targeting subsidies for doctor's visits at those who need them, either because they have low incomes or have chronic health problems.

I think I'm not the only one to hear this undertone, because the Herald's subeditor has given the piece a title that perfectly sums up the juvenile level of the debate: "Don Brash to Garth George: You're wrong".

Finally, Brash goes on to admit the central charge of his critics: that he basically cribbed the whole thing from OECD or IMF reports and right-wing 1990s manifestos. Well, that's not quite how he puts it. What he says is:

The recommendations of the 2025 Taskforce are actually totally in line with orthodox thinking in most developed countries, and are almost entirely consistent with the recommendations of the recent OECD report on New Zealand.

In other words, there's not a spark of thought or originality here - his $150,000 report hasn't told us anything we hadn't already been told by other people who mistake us for a wannabe tax haven.

Second memo to Don Brash: This is not an argument that's worth getting into. Arguing in newspaper columns is like mud-wrestling: no matter how well you do, there's no way to come out looking or smelling cleaner than you went in.

It feels odd to be giving this level of unsolicited advice to a supposedly experienced politician and former leader of the opposition. I mean, William Hague may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but even he would never have made himself look quite this dumb.

No jackboots required

2009-12-01T13:55:00.002+13:00

I see the UK is joining the dishonourable roll of countries that fingerprint foreigners on entry. Apparently, this is to confirm that the person entering the country is the same as the person who applied for a visa (or equivalent) to let them in.

If that's the case, then there's no need to store the fingerprints in perpetuity, right? You can just delete the record pretty much immediately after the comparison is made. Also, there's no need to take a full set of prints. One or two fingers should be plenty to tell whether or not someone matches a single, already-known set.

So that's two simple tests to see whether the UK Border Agency is telling the truth here.

Greatly to my surprise, it passes them both:

On arrival in the United Kingdom, trained Officers will scan two fingerprints on an electronic fingerprint reader at border control. In the majority of cases we will use the right hand thumb and first finger.

...

Passengers will have to provide their fingerprints each time they travel to the United Kingdom [...] Fingerprints will be held for a maximum of 48 hours, after which time they will be destroyed.

So let's hear it for the UK Border Agency, an organisation that may actually be doing its job without unnecessary Stalinism. US DHS, take note.

Bankrupt ideas

2009-11-30T15:00:00.000+13:00

The Kiwi dollar dropped slightly last week, and not a minute before time. It seems the financial world is finally starting to notice that our dollar is underpinned by an economy slightly smaller than Kansas, and our high interest rate is not a product of self-confidence, but a bloody liability.

Last week Don Brash, the charisma-less banker turned National politician who in 2005 led his party into its third successive election defeat, released the fruits of the deliberations of a "taskforce" he has chaired on how to catch up with Australia.

(Excuse me: "catch up with Australia"? Why would we want to do that? Given that we have a common labour market, when Kiwis envy the Oz way of life, there's nothing to stop them from moving there. And vice versa. Take away the difference between the countries, and that choice would be meaningless. Seriously, does Kansas spend its time producing reports on how it could "catch up" with, say, Illinois?)

But anyway. It's an article of faith for Mr Brash that the one thing we all want is more money in our pockets, and we will do or support anything to further that goal.

And his prescription for achieving it is all too depressingly familiar.

First, he says, we need to cut the top tax rate. Yeah, like every right-wing politician since Attilla the Hun has promised, just before they funnelled all the cash that should be going to the exchequer into their own pockets. Speaking as a top-rate taxpayer, personally I think it should be higher. 39% is not particularly rapacious by international standards. (It's lower than Australia, for one...)

Second, he wants congestion charging to pay for new roads. As a way of improving the budget, congestion charging remains one of the dumbest ideas ever. Petrol tax is cheap to collect, hard to evade, creates a broader tax base, and encourages exactly what we want to encourage (less pollution). The only downside is that it doesn't create the same scope for outright corruption and government patronage of private contractors...

Third, and my personal favourite, "to remove the temptation for future politicians to use the superannuation fund for political purposes", we should just do it now. Steal the whole bloody thing and use it to reduce taxes, i.e. to increase the amount of money going straight into Mr Brash's own pockets.

Memo to Don Brash: This is why you lost. Most Kiwis don't want their country to be a tax haven for obscenely rich Australians. They'd prefer not to see people, even strangers, starving in the streets. If that means we live slower and have less fancy toys than Australia, that's fine.

And if you don't like it, move to Oz. We won't miss you.

Trust me, I'm a blogger

2009-11-27T15:23:00.004+13:00

Apparently, the pope doesn't approve of the Twilight series of books and movies. The Vatican feels it's morally unhealthy for millions of teenage girls to be lusting after soulless monsters.

The only person I know who's seen the latest movie agrees that His Holiness has a point. Vampires have always had erotic undertones, from Dracula to Buffy, but at least they had the decency to remain undertones and subplots in an Epic Tale of Heroic Resistance to Ancient Supernatural Evil. Whereas Twilight, from what I hear, has abandoned most everything but the sex.

Of course, vanishingly few teenage girls are likely to care what some decrepit crossdresser thinks of their favourite soft-porn fix. The pope still carries some influence, but not as much as he'd probably like. Which brings me to today's ramble.

There was a report on Slashdot the other day of a survey that said that more than one-third of employees surveyed (in Canary Wharf and Wall Street) would sell confidential customer data, if the price was right. Of course the penalties for that sort of thing are pretty stiff, and it's unlikely they'd ever be offered enough to offset those. But it's still preying on my mind.

It seems to me that there's been a sharp drop in trust. And with trust goes loyalty.

It's not so much that, once, we would have "trusted" bankers to be honest. Really we had no choice. Bankers - like butchers, bakers, priests, auto mechanics, lawyers, computer programmers, farmers, manufacturers of everything from airliners to zip fasteners - most everyone, in fact - did their work, or at least the important bits of it, behind firmly closed, opaque and soundproof doors. Even journalists, those apostles of openness and transparency, kept their own work to themselves.

Now all that has changed.

Take itemised billing. We got into the habit of checking our bills. And occasionally there would be a mistake - not often, but it seemed often enough to make it worth the trouble. Banks and credit cards led the way, followed by phone companies, shops, restaurants, professional services, hotels... slowly but surely, we reached the point where nobody just says "That'll be four hundred and seventeen dollars thirty-two, please" any more. We get itemised bills... and we're expected, nay, actively encouraged to check them.

The Internet has spread this 'doublecheck' attitude to all walks of life. Now you're considered a chump if you believe a news report, without cross-checking. You're supposed to check prices before shopping for anything that costs more than groceries. Check reviews of consumer goods, movies, hotels. Follow every link. What we get then is a barrel of conflicting reports. And none of them is authoritative, because what we've done now is to reject the very idea of authority. We don't trust anyone to tell us "the truth".

All of which is just the way we thought we wanted it. We're all economically rational beings in pursuit of the perfect information that will enable us to make the optimum decisions about how to use our resources. We're all smart enough to make our own decisions - aren't we?

But now we don't expect the truth, most people have given up even the pretence. Politicians and corporations openly talk about "spinning". Journalists increasingly disclaim responsibility for the truth of what they say. With the notable exception of FOX News, most media make some effort or pretence to tell "the truth" - but the best they ever manage, the best they can ever manage, is what we've learned to call "spin": a single view of "the truth", which may make perfect sense within itself, yet still look entirely different when seen from a different angle.

And so the "perfect information" that, economic theory says, we need to make our decisions, is more elusive than ever. The people qualified to make decisions are the ones who not only have, but also understand, all this information. Authority figures. The very people whose advice we no longer trust.

Even this could work, in theory. Instead of letting the professionals get on with their work, we watch them with the intensity of a child watching an ice-cream cone being filled. Unfortunately, also like the child, we have only a very superficial understanding of what the cone is being filled with. This doesn't matter to the child, because she trusts the ice-cream vendor...

What really screws us up is, as always, human nature. When someone says to you "I don't trust you, I'll be watching your every move", what's your natural reaction? Do you think of the person as a friend, one of us, someone you want to help? Or is there a part of you that starts to think: how much can I get away with, can they really tell what I'm doing anyway, damn' know-it-all prodnose...

When you treat someone as your enemy, over time, they'll start to think of themselves that way.

And yet it seems that, increasingly, that's the expectation for how we should treat one another. Employers monitor their employees' activities; and worse, that's increasingly seen as "reasonable". School-age children are told to include references and citations in their work - an undreamt-of requirement in my day, until I reached university. Parents are supposed to monitor their kids, not just outdoors, but increasingly in school, on the bus, on the Internet, you name it. In the UK now, you need to be registered on a central database if you want to work anywhere near children. In the USA, I'm told, you need to show photo ID to enter a government building.

I was listening to a BBC podcast recently, which talked about the policing of political demonstrations. Protesters complained about the practice of "kettling" - corralling people in a limited area and not letting them leave for a certain time - a practice that, not infrequently, scoops up and seriously inconveniences innocent passers-by. Then there's the practice of police systematically photographing demonstrators (try to photograph a cop, on the other hand, and you stand a good chance of being arrested on the spot).

The police superintendent wheeled out to defend the Met talked about the "small minority" of "troublemakers", whom, apparently, the police can't distinguish from the eternal "law-abiding majority". And so, he concluded, the fuzz have no choice but to treat everyone as a potential terrorist.

That officer, I thought, was missing the point in the same way I've been talking about here. By casting "police" as "us" and "protesters" as "them", the police have made their job a hundred times harder. Police are supposed to see all law-abiding people as "us"; only criminals are "them". If they didn't treat every protester as a criminal - an enemy - then maybe the protesters themselves would be more inclined to help the cops do their job.

Mistrust leads to resentment. Resentment leads to hostility. Hostility leads to enmity. The pursuit of economic rationality has led us into a deeply dysfunctional world, one in which everyone really is our enemy.

Somehow, we need to rebuild trust.

A good starting point might be to rethink what we mean by "trust".

If someone lies to us, and we know they're lying to us, does that mean we shouldn't trust them?

"What are you thinking about?"

"Oh, nothing."

There are times we choose to accept the lie, knowning full well what it is, because we trust the liar.

Catholics are familiar with this concept. They've long since accepted that the fairy-tales told in the Bible are not "true" in the strict sense of being literal descriptions of actual events as they happened. But that doesn't matter. What actually happened to a bunch of ancient Jews is not important to us, now, today: what matters is how we live our lives and bear ourselves to God, and the stories in the Bible (they believe) are the best guide to how we should do that. "Truth" is immaterial - only "faith" matters. That's what our sceptical age has forgotten.

And ye shall hear of protests, and rumours of protests...

2009-11-20T17:18:00.005+13:00

This Saturday sees the "March for Democracy" in Queen Street.

New Zealand has a functioning democracy. It's just been rated the least corrupt country in the world, nudging Denmark into second place. But mere democracy will never be enough for some people. The MfD, while denying that it's a single-issue pressure group, is basically concerned with repealing the "anti-smacking" law.

If only they had the honesty to admit that, I'd have no problem with them. But instead they have to make it an issue of "democracy". Seriously, grow up already.

Unfortunately, I'll be disturbingly close to the MfD idiots tomorrow. We're off to Waiheke to celebrate our wedding anniversary, and that means getting a lot closer to Queen Street than I'd like, when those unsavoury types are loose. If anyone takes me for a marcher, I'll be really very upset indeed...

In disturbingly related news, I read today that a majority of those US voters who identified themselves as Republicans, believe that Obama didn't win the presidency fairly. (I wonder how that compares with Democrats' beliefs about Bush in 2000?)

On the same day, self-styled Conservative ~~performance artist~~ candidate Doug Hoffman retracted his retraction of his retraction of his concession in the ludicrous NY-23 race. (That means, for those of you who can't be bothered to figure it out, that he is - for the second time - challenging the result and demanding that "every ballot be counted". He is demanding that the election not be "stolen". Apparently, he considers some other election recently, which he doesn't name explicitly, was stolen...)

That makes three stories in one day pointing to a breakdown of faith in the democratic process: one homegrown, two USAlien. All it needs is for a survey in the UK to report that most people don't believe that voting can make a difference any more - not that unlikely, I'd think, on recent trends - and we'd have a full set.

Does this mean there's something wrong with democracy? Well, obviously there is, plenty, but is the present spate anything unusual?

I'm inclined to think not. There have always been plenty of people who are upset about losing. Until they actually go out and buy guns and try to change the government the old-fashioned way, I'm going to take the bright view and say that democracy is still working. For now.

Deep Thought, shallow mind

2009-11-19T13:49:00.004+13:00

IBM announces a computer that simulates a cat's brain.

Well, not quite. What it says it's actually built is a neural network with as many neurons as a cat's cerebral cortex. That's quite a long way short of a cat's whole brain. And it works at least a hundred times slower than the real thing. And it takes truly ridiculous amounts of computing power and memory to do it - if you could somehow chain together every computer I've ever seen in my life, including various super-computers in my journalistic career, they wouldn't even be fit to read its keyboard.

The thing must play a mean game of chess.

Why a cat? Because neurologists have been playing with cats' brains for a very long time. I still remember reading an account in Scientific American of dream research on cats, over 30 years ago, and they've remained a popular experimental subject ever since. Maybe because they're so like humans - egotistical, arrogant and lazy. Anyway, the feline brain is extremely well mapped territory.

And of course it lends itself to all the obvious jokes about lasagne and mice and sleeping and walking on keyboards...

Which brings me to my point. (Yes, I've got one.)

If you build a brain without a body to put it in - what is it going to think about?

I don't know about you, but when I wake up in the morning the very first thing I think about is generally "does it feel like I've had enough hours asleep?" - if not, I'll start looking for clues (like light and noise levels) that might indicate that it's not, in fact, morning. If it's still night, I'll try to eliminate whatever discomfort caused me to wake up and then get back to sleep. If it is morning, then I'll try to make myself as comfortable as possible while I open curtains, drink tea, dress, breakfast, etc., etc...

Basically, the driving motivation of my thoughts at this point is my bodily comfort.

And that remains true for a lot of the day. My body needs things to eat, clothes to wear, a roof over its head and a chair under its bum, all of which it will go to considerable trouble to optimise. It contains, within it, the desires for chocolate, alcohol, sex, coffee, toilet paper and other good things. Take all those desires away, and what exactly would be left?

"This intellectual being/These thoughts that wander through eternity", as Milton puts it. But would those even exist, if it weren't for the deeper physical needs that give rise to them? Even the sense of boredom is caused by physical constraints - the physical inability to do what you want to, when you want to do it. In science fiction, the archetypal Brain In A Jar is usually obsessed with the simple goal of acquiring a body for itself. (Or - which is the same thing - the delusion that it already has one.)

But if it had no concept of what a body was, then what exactly would it think about?

If anyone from IBM is reading this, maybe they can answer me.

Agrizoophobia

2009-11-16T14:43:00.006+13:00

I never used to worry about cows. Even when, aged twelve or so, I was charged - rather half-heartedly, it must be admitted - by a bull, I was more amused than scared. But now they're preying on my mind. Maybe it's my conscience, reminding me of all the steaks I've eaten and the leather shoes I'm wearing.

Or maybe the cows are getting more dangerous.

I've spent the past week driving my dear sainted grey-haired old mother about the island. It's her first visit to New Zealand, and I wanted to show her as much as possible of what I love about this country. Her admiration for the scenery is perfectly satisfying; she goes into unsolicited raptures about the trees; she enjoys the geology and the flowers.

But the cows worry her. There are too many of them, she insists. Not in absolute numbers, but each field that contains them, contains too many of them for the size of field.

You might say they're overcowded. But let's not.

Admittedly she's not a farmer, but she has lived a large part of her life in the country. She knows what a field full of cows is supposed to look like. And it may be just the power of suggestion, but I think she's right...

On Sunday, as we drove from Coromandel to Whitianga, I was privileged to see one of these bovines relieving its bladder. It was a horrific sight: not to mince words, it looked as if this particular cow had been bred more for firefighting than milking. Suddenly I became aware that I'd had a lot of coffee for breakfast, and my own bladder would be needing relief before I was much older. Which was vexing, as we were not, so to speak, conveniently located.

For the next half hour, I tried to take my mind off the spectacle. As we drove through the rolling agricultural pastures of the Coromandel peninsula, I tried not to think about cows. As we stopped at the beach, I studiously ignored the waves gently lapping the shore twenty metres from my left ear. A house across the road had what looked like an outhouse. On these occasions, one can't help looking at these things a little more speculatively than one has any strict right to.

Sometimes the scenery just won't give you a break.

By the time we reached the sanctuary of Whitianga and a civilised cafe, I was wondering: how hard can it be to drive with one's legs crossed?

But now Deadlyjelly's report has my mind going in an even more sinister direction. What if the cows themselves sense that they are being packed too tightly? What if it's affecting their (and you'll have to pardon me here, contact with my immediate family often has this effect on me) mood? What if modern farming is turning these legendarily placid animals into barely-containable barrels of raw bovine vengeance?

What if New Zealand is heading for its own Orwellian nightmare? The irony would be rich indeed.

Blood money

2009-11-06T16:15:00.002+13:00

There's one of those sad stories on Slashdot, today, illustrating the real purpose of the Iraq war...

It points to a New York Times story about how the Iraqi army is using, basically, divining rods to detect explosives at checkpoints. There's a predictable slew of comments attacking unscientific methods in general and dowsing in particular, uncited studies supposedly debunking unverifiable anecdotes, all of it illustrating the boundless arrogance of random people on the Internet. But what really strikes me is the price of these divining rods.

Apparently, the Iraqis buy them for anything between US$16,500 to US$60,000.

That's a lot of money for a stick.

And they bought them - 1500 of them, so far - from a British company. That is to say, from one of the occupying powers.

I don't know how much Britain has spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Billions, I presume. So it's nice that they've got $50 million or so back like this. Except, of course, that the money came from the taxpayers, but the return is going into the pockets of private investors. In other words, it's yet another redistribution of cash from (everyone) to a very select group of people.

It'd be vastly more efficient, to say nothing of costing many fewer lives, simply to let them dip their hands in the till directly. Looked at in that light, the "MPs' expenses" business looks positively enlightened.

Personally, if someone offers me a dowsing-based bomb-detection system, I'm perfectly willing to listen. If they put on a good demo, I'll even set up some tests of my own. But I also have this belief, which I can't quite shake, in the concept of a "fair price" - something that is at least vaguely related to the cost of production. Don't tell me that price was set in a free market.

In which I tell journalists their business

2009-11-03T11:20:00.004+13:00

I buy at least one newspaper a week. Every Thursday, the New Zealand Herald publishes a simple, easy-to-follow and mostly accurate seven-day TV guide; buying that issue relieves me of the need to buy TV Guide, with its irritating layout and pages of guff about soap stars and other people I don't ever want to know about. (The Herald's own pages of that guff are an order of magnitude less irritating.)

Some weeks I also buy The Economist. It gives me something to read in the bath. And it makes me feel as if I'm still part of the world, not completely cut off on this tiny island a thousand miles from anywhere. So that's two newspapers some weeks. Let's say an average of six per month.

On top of that, there's a couple of freebies that get dropped in my letterbox: a council newsletter of no interest (it doesn't cover anything controversial, and I haven't taken an interest in any of what it does cover), and the Howick & Pakuranga Times, a very local sheet that covers school sports, amateur dramatics, road changes and the like.

The latter is really pretty good. I read more of it than I do of the Herald, for reasons I'll come to presently.

All this dead-tree consumption probably puts me ahead of most people, nowadays. I've been hearing a lot about how newspaper circulations have dropped off a cliff. Ad revenues have dropped, and big-name players are in trouble. Back in June Richard Posner, a highly regarded US blogger on things legal, made this the basis of an argument for stronger copyright for online newspapers. Unless online newspapers are able to charge for content (Posner argued), they'd all end up out of business.

Naturally I rolled my eyes and started to dream up reasons why such a change either wouldn't or shouldn't work. But it's only more recently that I've discovered a clearer and more objective flaw in Posner's reasoning: his premise is just plain false. Not all newspapers are in trouble.

The Economist, for one, goes from strength to strength. So does the Wall Street Journal. The Financial Times has compensated for circulation falling in its home market by expanding its international subscriptions.

Apparently it's not such a bad time to be a journalist, if you're a business journalist. And that's an important clue to what's really going on in the news business.

To be sure, the Internet has changed the news-publishing game by making practically all published news available for free. Why (the conventional wisdom runs) would people buy the New Zealand Herald when they can read the whole thing online?

But conventional wisdom is severely underestimating the problem. Not only can I read the Herald online - all of it - I can also read the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, or the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Jerusalem Post or Cape Times. Every English-language newspaper is now available in every English-language market. That's a lot of competition.

There are still things the Herald does better. (NZ TV programmes, for instance.) But those things probably aren't enough, in truth, to justify publishing and distributing a whole broadsheet paper every day.

Newspapers need to understand, not only what it is that they can deliver 'better' than anyone else, but also who their target audience is. Historically, that was clearly defined by their circulation areas, which in turn were dictated by the logistics of printing copies and distributing them to readers. Now, that's no longer the case. The Herald's target readership should include not just the northern part of New Zealand's north island, but every English-speaking person in the world who, for whatever reason, wants to know what's going on in New Zealand.

The Economist understands this. Anyone with a reasonable education in anything can pick up an issue and read it, without feeling that they're missing out on vast swathes of vital background knowledge. Try that with - ooh, any other paper you don't read regularly - there are plenty of links above. The press's central problem isn't with protecting their content, but simply with a massive global overcapacity in their business.

And that's where Posner's idea comes from. From an economic perspective, it makes sense to address that overcapacity by wider syndication of content - which would, indeed, require simpler and better ways to control unauthorised copying. Posner's problem is that he only sees a tiny part of the overall issue, and offers no way to address the rest of it. His proposal makes sense if, and only if, you trust that the big players in the market will deal fairly and honestly not only with each other, but also with every small-timer and two-bit blogger.

Fruit and nuts

2009-10-30T15:18:00.008+13:00

Priests and prophets have never got along.

Ever since Moses came down from the mountain to find Aaron cavorting in front of an ornate bookend, every prophet has made it his business to condemn the priests of his own time. And the priests have returned the favour. A prophet is basically a heretic with a following.

Since Christ's day, the term "prophet" has been out of favour in Christendom. Instead we've had various kinds of "reformers", many of whom have also been condemned by the church of their day. The rules are reasonably clear. You can have all the private communion you want with God, but your preaching and argument has to be grounded firmly and solely in scripture. Those who want to give their personal revelations a comparable status, generally have to split completely from mainstream Christianity. (Like Islam, or Mormonism.)

Sometimes it can be hard to tell, at a glance, on which side of the dividing line a given Holy Figure stands.

Brian Tamaki - or Bishop Brian Tamaki, as he calls himself - is the founder and leader of the ominously-named Destiny Church. It's a vaguely Pentecostal organisation, with branches in New Zealand and Australia. Tamaki preaches a type of prosperity theology, and accordingly lives the high life as a demonstration of his own righteousness.

Yesterday, he was in the news for conducting a ceremony in which 700 "spiritual sons" swore personal fealty to him and subscribed to a 1300-word manifesto specifying how they must conduct themselves towards him at all times.

Now, some people have been calling Destiny a cult for some time. Yesterday the Herald sat on the fence: the ludicrous Garth George broke out the c-word, but the more measured journalists and editorial writers refrained from comment. TV3 did a fine hatchet-job. Today, Destiny is complaining that TV3's anonymous commentator "misrepresented" the church.

I heard part of that report (I was cooking at the time), and it strikes me that the things TV3 is accused of misrepresenting pale in comparison to what I heard Tamaki saying in his own words.

Tamaki claims equivalence to respectable religions ("If we are a cult then the Catholics, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists and the Pentecostals are all cults as well").

And I'm disappointed to see that a surprising number of supposedly intelligent atheists are willing to let him get away with that. Editing the Herald, for instance, points out that it's not in the business of criticising random nutcases (fair enough), but then goes on to grant Tamaki the equivalence he craves: "The old saying goes that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. A similar sort of thing could be said about religion: a 'valid church' is a cult with fancy robes and the favour of journalists." The lunatic-Libertarian Not PC makes the same mistake: "He's not doing anything that hasn’t been done before by other religious leaders".

Now, that's a line that could only have been written by someone who not only has no understanding of religion, but also doesn't really believe that there is anything to understand. I guess it just goes to show how un-seriously religion is taken nowadays.

Because what Tamaki claims goes far, far beyond what any of those religions claims:

"What [God] loves, I love. He loves people, he hates the world. I hate the world."

Look at that claim for a moment.

There is no wiggle-room there. No interpretation, no reference to a primary source. It's a direct, unarguable claim to know the mind of God. Even the much-mocked Doctrine of Papal Infallibility doesn't give that kind of authority to any one person.

Catholics and Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists and Pentecostalists - all claim to communicate with God, but none identify with Him. That claim - private revelation that trumps anything you know or think you know about God - puts Tamaki beyond priesthood and firmly into the "prophet" category.

Couple that with people swearing personal loyalty to him - not to the office of the bishop, but to Brian Tamaki personally - and I'd say the difference between "church" and "cult", in this case at least, is pretty clear-cut.

Heroes

2009-10-27T10:28:00.005+13:00

It's true that the Internet is killing imagination. Consider this question, posted to WikiAnswers 26 seconds ago: "Who lived at the same time as michelangelo?"

Who indeed? Tens of millions of people. If I, aged ten or so, had wanted to know that, I'd have asked my dad - and received a lengthy lecture on how to frame a meaningful question. (Of course I didn't understand the lectures, but they lodged in my brain for later.) Then I'd have asked a bunch of other people, getting answers of varying degrees of relevance and truth, until my mind would brew up some magical version of the Renaissance in which, very likely, the Pope was locking his daughter in a tower while he led crusades, and Dracula haunted the caves of southern Italy.

But now you just post it on the Internet and wait for an answer. What use is that?

Well, it's not the first thing to kill imagination. Video games did it; TV did it; movies did it; photos did it, and printing. Five thousand years ago, I don't doubt one Egyptian storyteller complained to another "Mark my words, this writing business is going to be the end of us."

But sometimes real information can be inspiring.

Yesterday was Labour Day in New Zealand. I had thought it was merely a contender for Most Ironically Named Holiday (although we both worked damn' hard yesterday). But looking it up online, I learned about a great New Zealander I'd never heard of.

Samuel Parnell was a carpenter from London who came to New Zealand in 1840, where he encountered a shipping agent who wanted a store built in (what is now) Wellington. Parnell agreed, on condition that he would only work eight hours a day. Eight hours of work, eight for sleep, and "the remaining eight for recreation and in which for men to do what little things they want for themselves". The agent protested, but Parnell stuck to his terms, and because carpenters were scarce he got his way.

In his spare time from that day onwards, Parnell made it his business to greet new migrants arriving and tell them about the eight-hour-day rule. He lived prosperously for another 50 years, and died a national hero.

Parnell was not a typical working-class hero. He was the son of a gentleman. The fact that he was apprenticed to a trade suggests that his family was struggling, economically - but the young Samuel was raised with the secret, middle-class knowledge that leisure is a wonderful thing. More importantly, he had an instinctive grasp of economics. He knew that you don't create value by the hours you work, but by the output you produce. That's what people will pay you for, and the amount they'll pay depends only on how badly they want it and how hard it is to get. The amount of work involved doesn't enter into it.

Workers of the world, take note.

Collaborationist philosophy

2009-10-22T09:56:00.002+13:00

Apparently, men who voted for the losing side in an election experience a sharp drop in testosterone when the result is announced.

At least, this was the case for the last US presidential election. Among certain experimental subjects, who knew they were being monitored while they watched the whole thing. To what extent that finding can be generalised to all men watching all elections remains a mystery for future research grants.

There's a very plausible animal-behaviour theory that says: when you've just lost a pissing match, it's a good time to sit quietly and reflectively and not make any aggressive moves, lest the winners feel motivated to make an example of you. But that only accounts for half the story. How does that concept translate into a non-violent contest involving proxy champions a thousand miles away? Is it different if you're sitting quietly at home and not being monitored? Is the effect more or less marked in younger or older voters? Would it still work if they didn't hear the result at once, but some hours after the event? Would Democratic voters have been similarly affected if Obama had lost?

Most of all: are they taking the whole thing just a leetle too personally?

The president - allegedly - is the leader of the whole country, not just those who voted for him. To see one candidate's victory as a defeat suggests that your identity as an American is taking a back seat to your identity as a Republican. I know modern democratic (small-d) politics encourages this sort of tribalism, but why do we play along?

Perhaps our countries would all do better if we all took a more measured approach to politics. Whoever is in government, it is probably not a good idea to oppose them automatically in everything they do. I know you think that by making their job more difficult, you're hampering their ability to fulfil their promises and win the next election; but you're also making your own country a nastier place.

It's like pissing in your own soup to spite the cook.

By all means argue against your government when it's doing the wrong thing. But make the arguments measured and focused. Ranting and railing is very satisfying, but all it does is inspire your opponents to dig deeper into their entrenched position. If you really want to change their minds, you need to persuade them that you're on the same side.

Speaking for myself: I'd rather have a government led by a party I dislike, but can influence, than one led by a party I like, but that only listens to its own trusted apparatchiks.

Professionalism

2009-10-21T11:19:00.003+13:00

The New York Times announces it's laying off 100 newsroom staff. Oh well, at least it's still healthier than The Observer.

Our own New Zealand Herald shows what happens when a newspaper thinks that cutting its newsroom staff is a sensible answer to falling circulation. Basically, the less news-writing resource the paper has, the more news gets written by those who are willing to put money into it. Namely, those who stand to make money out of manipulating public opinion.

It's most obvious in political coverage, both here and in the US. Reporters no longer make any effort to cover politics: they simply reprint, largely unchecked, the stories fed to them by professional spin doctors. (I know how that works. I've edited a magazine myself.) In the US now, "political reporting" means getting two insane people to shout at each other for three minutes, while a nominal moderator makes token efforts to drag them back on-topic. The ghost of Joseph Pulitzer forbid that they might say something that could be interpreted as critical of the talking heads. That would be "expressing an opinion".

(And that, dear Americans, is why Fox News is wiping the floor with the older networks, and why your best current-affairs programme comes from Comedy Central. Those journalists are not only allowed, they're actively encouraged, to take up a position of their own.)

In the UK, the BBC has been a layer of insulation against this effect. But even the Beeb has spread its abundant resources too thin, in pursuit of the chimerical 24-hour news cycle. And now it's under direct attack, by the likes of Murdoch Jr and his minions in the Tory party. "It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism", bleats James Murdoch, "that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it."

Newsflash, Mr Murdoch: nobody pays for "independent digital journalism". There are some things you just can't pay for, even if you want to. If journalism is to be independent, it has to be free in both senses of the word.

Let's try to formulate a pithy observation here:

Professionals do what they're paid to do.

Okay, that seems a little... oblique. But it's actually at the heart of the problem. Let's try a corollary:

Professionals hate to work when they're not being paid.

Still not clear? Okay, try this:

A true professional will do the bare minimum amount of work required to get paid.

Really, that's implicit in the word "professional". If we want people to do better, that's the word we have to focus on.

Already, it's obvious that bloggers do a far better job than "professional" journalists of covering many stories, because they're keen. Therefore, they don't stop working the moment they've got "enough" for today.

Sadly, there's no way of getting an actual news feed from blogs, because blogs simply don't try to cover all news. If they did that they'd be newspapers, employing professional staff paid to do things they weren't particularly interested in, and we'd be back to square one.

The price of liberty is - everything

2009-10-20T13:47:00.003+13:00

Of all the sad things about the Internet, the fourth most depressing, I've decided, is the rise of "libertarianism".

This, for those of you lucky enough to have missed it, is a political idea whose conditions seem to be ripe - though not as ripe as its conclusions, which are higher than a skunk's latrine. During the Cold War it seemed just plain silly; before the Internet it was written off as an adolescent phase one grows out of, much like Leninism; before the economic crisis it seemed to be addressing an abstract, tedious problem that few people cared about. But now it's gaining traction.

It's sad, really. "Libertarianism" started out as an extreme left-wing idea, aimed at freeing people from the shackles of arbitrary authority. Now, it's been adopted gleefully by those whose main concern is to preserve their own privileges. For that, I mostly blame Ayn Rand - the woman who made a career out of her personal bitterness that the Russian Revolution had robbed her of the wealth and privilege that, she was raised to believe, were hers by right. Rand took a deeply held personal belief - that there could be no possible justification for strangers to have taken her toys away - and turned it into what's euphemistically called the "philosophy" of Objectivism.

Now, in a reasoned debate with any real political philosopher, Rand wouldn't have lasted five minutes. In her lifetime she was, rightly, ignored by everyone. Her ideas simply don't take account of - well, pretty much anything outside her own head.

But on the Internet, that's no longer a problem. Online, it's not hard to find a clique of true believers for absolutely anything. St Patricks' Day is a global conspiracy to promote the colour green? Barack Obama is the direct male heir of Genghis Khan? The Rapture actually happened in 2002, and now we're living through the End Times? There is no belief so bizarre that some idiots won't support it.

Better yet, those who don't support you - no matter how numerous - can simply be ignored. And so you can live in a beautiful dream bubble in which yours is the mainstream opinion, and you never have to defend it. It's a curious paradox, that free speech has delivered us to exactly the opposite of the situation that John Stuart Mill, with his sunny Victorian logic, hoped for: where every idea goes unchallenged, and nobody ever needs to change their mind.

And people see these sites, and there will always be a small number of those people who imagine that there must be something to them.

Take this drivel, for example. These morons seem to think that there are people who oppose exploiting the Earth. (Of course there are such people, by the same no-niche-left-unfilled principle I've just been describing. But to characterise this belief - that we need to exploit the Earth - as a courageous, individualistic stand against repressive conformism, makes about as much sense as handing out leaflets proclaiming "The sky is UP! Don't let THEM deny it!")

The Exploit-the-Earth loons remind me of the philosophy of Franz Fanon, who held that violence has a liberating effect. To make oneself free, one must break taboos; and the greatest of these is violence, especially murder. How do you show your defiance for the eco-nazis who would subjugate human life to the interests of trees and squirrels? Set fire to a tree today!

We are free, within the law, to destroy what we own. You can, if you like, buy a field, then salt the earth with chemicals so nasty that nothing will grow there and no builder will ever want to build on it. It's your property - if you want to destroy it utterly, the libertarians would say, that's nobody's business but your own.

But does that make it right?

"Do cats have nose hair?"

2009-10-14T17:30:00.005+13:00

There's a truly weird site that you've probably seen, if you've Googled a lot of random trivia, but I for one have seldom dwelt on. It's called "WikiAnswers". The idea is that you can log on and type in any question you like, and take a chance that some random J Bloggs, somewhere on the Internet, will take the time to answer it just for the sheer joy of showing off their knowledge.

Or maybe that they'll make up something entertaining enough to be worth sharing with your friends.

It's amazingly popular. In a random 60 second period this afternoon, 20 new questions got posted:

What is the name of the group made from former klymaxx members?
Bobs discount furniture?
Do apples brown faster in the fridge or on the counter?
How are the functions of connective tissues reflected in its structure?
What is the gvwr of a 1981 toyota 2wd pickup?
What is broken down by cells to produce energy?
In ancient china what did they use money for?
Where is the high speed relay located on a 1983 chevy el camino?
Is Nomex windproof?
Outline the role of condensation and hydrolysis?
What was the significance of the fall of fort sumter?
How many syllables has the word house how many syllables has the wordcurtain?
Ancient method to predict the future?
Do cats have nose hair?
What are the areas that border mexico?
California's largest county?
I had sex 3 days in a row alot of times he finished each time my period came the next day its a week early could you still get pregnant?
Full faith in credit clause example?
Is there a scary movie 5 comming out soon?
Why are the dim lights on a is300 blue but the bright lights and running lights are white Can i make them all blue?

Fairly obviously, about half of these are from schoolkids trying to get their homework done for them. (I do hope their teachers look in from time to time. In fact, if I were a teacher, I think I'd post the question here myself before setting it to the kids.) One is a frightening testament to the quality of sex education. Some seem to suggest that the questioner has never heard of Google (which would tell you, without waiting, that California's largest county is San Bernardino, and Scary Movie 5 is scheduled to appear in 2011).

Or maybe they're just craving acknowledgment and validation, the (extremely indirect) human contact of some faceless, random stranger picking out and taking the time to answer their question.

So if you happen to know the answer to any of these, feel free to head over and show off. Make someone's day. But no-one will thank you.

Back-of-the-envelope economics

2009-10-14T11:24:00.003+13:00

It's almost like being back home. In the 80s. Auckland is in the eighth day of a paralysing bus strike.

Well, "paralysing" might be overstating things a tad. Most people drive themselves anyway. I, swelling with ecological smugness, walk to work. Only an unlucky minority, such as Susan, are really affected.

It's also not a strike. What happened was that 875 drivers and cleaners, wanting better pay, notified their employer that they would work to rule; and their employer, NZ Bus, responded by locking them out.

To me that makes the whole issue cut and dried. Working to rule is about the mildest form of industrial action it's possible to take; if I had my way, it should be the norm for everyone everywhere. Any company that feels threatened by a work-to-rule - is exploiting its employees. To retaliate with a full lockout, completely shutting down your services for over a week - that's a huge escalation.

And most people seem to agree. The (Auckland-based) New Zealand Herald has been squarely behind the drivers. Even Auckland's city government, such as it is, has mostly aligned itself the same way, threatening to cut off $58 million in subsidies to NZ Bus unless it gets back to delivering the services it's supposed to.

Now, we're told NZ Bus normally carries approximately 80,000 passengers per day. Since Susan is one of them, I happen to know that a standard, full-price season ticket costs around $110 a month. Allowing for concessions, let's say the average passenger pays about half that much. That's a monthly income of $4.4 million from fares. Add $58 million in subsidies from the city, and we're talking about an annual income (not counting advertising) in the ballpark of $110 million.

There are 875 drivers and cleaners - let's guess that there are 400 actual buses, each costing (let's say) $25,000 per year in tax, maintenance and depreciation - that's $10 million. Fuel - maybe as much again. That leaves $90 million to pay for advertising (minimal - mostly done by the city anyway), premises, wages, parking and other running costs and overheads. Let's say 40% of that should be going to the people who actually do the work - $36 million between 875 people comes to just over $40,000 per year, or (assuming a 40-hour week) about $20 per hour.

But NZ Bus pays its drivers $14-16 per hour. Susan tells me that other bus companies are significantly more generous. (Although how she knows this, I don't know. All I know is that they're not having these problems, at least not at the moment.) Which suggests my calculations aren't too far out.

It's enough to make me want to start my own bus company. If only I knew where I could lay my hands on 400 buses and a bunch of spare subsidies...