I mean I get the concept and all, and believe in the idea of democracy -- seems to beat the hell out of any currently available alternatives -- however the problem for me (and the same with many people) comes about in the two-party system.  Do you vote for the party which represents your interests, do you vote for the major party who’s most likely to get in that’s closest to your interests, or do you vote for the most likely party to beat the party you least want to get in?  And, trickily, what the hell do any of them stand for anyway?

Recently I discovered that I’m eligible -- and registered -- to vote in the UK elections, and so it made sense to actively try to figure out who I should be putting my mark against on the ballot paper.

Fairly helpfully The Telegraph have put together a web questionnaire which you can use to see how the 6 major parties stand on a selection of issues (based on the newspaper’s analysis of their respective party manifestos), and given how clear it is to understand the way politicians answer questions a lot of the time, this seems a reasonable resource I think.

Keeping it fairly simple, you give your position (For, Against, “Open Minded” (/don’t know/care)) on the thirty or so key issues identified, then select which groupings of issues mean more to you, and which mean less, then some wacky formula in the back gives you a percentage match based on your interests.

I don’t suppose I was too surprised to find out that my closest matches were the Liberal Democrats, followed by The Green Party.

What did surprise me was how far from Labour’s position I was, given that I thought my politics were more Left-leaning, and Labour’s nominally supposed to be Democratic Socialist -- of the majors, Labour was my lowest score, even compared with the British National Party (not shown on graph) at 52%.

Following the quiz section however you can analyse your responses against that of each party, and that’s where it sort of gets interesting.

I tabulated the data(.XLS file)  from the quiz and had a look at it -- if nothing else the exercise really drove home the point to me of why so many people in this country don’t vote!  From what I’ve observed a lot of media coverage doesn’t give attention to these issues, instead preferring to either bring the contest down to which of the party leaders has the most well-dressed spouse, or throwing the leaders in a bearpit and get hostile journalists to throw questions at them like howitzers in an attempt to get someone to contradict a statement they’ve just made so that the programme can capture an “A ha! We’ve got you!” moment.  That’s all well and good (except the spouse thing, which is after all completely frigging irrelevant), but surely more importantly than the showiness of a party leader is the core views which the entire party base their election on?

Equally, if a member of Party A gives a big speech to a journalist, telling them what the party stands for, and then Party B comes on & gives them a list of different things, that still leaves the poor punter none the wiser.

From the data, one of the key things I was interested in was the parties’ positions on nuclear power and climate change.  I’m no scientist, but it makes sense to me that nuclear power is the most efficient form of power generation the human race has currently got, and many who argue against it cite examples of disasters/leaks from ageing reactors and play on the fear & hysteria of people.  It’s not ideal, but assuming the Peak Oil theory is correct, it would make sense to move to a more efficient form of energy generation whilst continuing research & development in sustainable green methods of power generation.  So, the parties who are in favour of more nuclear plants are the Tories, UKIP, and the BNP.  However, as the BNP and UKIP believe that man made climate change is a myth, I feel I can confidently rule out their opinions on every other issue (actually I’d already ruled out the BNP, if not only because it would be hypocritical for a foreigner to vote for a party whose main platform is to get rid of foreigners -- and by hypocritical, I mean that whenever I’ve asked a BNP supporter of their position on Australians they think we’re OK… which I assume means the white ones are OK).

But I can’t vote Conservative, because they want to keep hereditary peers in the House of Lords (which is effectively saying “My Dad could beat your Dad in a fight”), they don’t believe the Iraq War was illegal, and are against free university education (a backward thinking policy).  And a bunch of other stuff.  No, no, no.

Argh.

Look, the point is, get out there and vote.  Find out what the issues are, what you feel about those issues, and what the parties say their standpoints are on the issues.  Don’t vote for someone because your parents told you to.  Don’t vote for novelty candidates because you think it’d be funny if they got in.  If you don’t want to vote because you think they’re all crooks and as bad as each other, then you might as well find out which is the least-worst crook to vote in, because someone’s going to get in, and you might as well have some input into it.  Last time they had an election in the UK only 61.3% of people turned up to vote -- the other 38.7% should either pull their fingers out & turn up at the polls (or indeed get a postal vote sorted out), otherwise they’ve got no basis to complain when their local MP starts building a moat & installing a taxpayer-funded duck house.

I’m sure I had more of a coherent argument or point to make when I started this, but I guess the overall thrust of it is: find out what’s going on out there.  The information’s around.  Get involved.

That’s it.

That’s not really it.  I know I said not to vote for novelty candidates -- admittedly, if they had convincing policies then maybe they’d be worth considering.  Still, I quite admire the balls on this guy**: Mad Cap’n Tom.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARjHBukWON8

Thankfully I can just smirk at the idea, seeing as I’m not eligible to vote in that constituency.

** it should be clear that by this sentence, I don’t actually mean I admire his balls.  Look, you know what I meant.  Stop it.

On Monday Feb 15th the London Skeptics In The Pub were holding a meeting, so it seemed a good idea to pop along & see what it was all about.  The topic was “Homeopathy and the 10:23 Campaign – There’s Nothing In It!”.

The 10:23 campaign has been set up by the skeptic/rationalist movement and has gained quite some attention lately – the cut & thrust of it is that the scientific & medical community believe it’s unjustified for the NHS to fund homeopathic treatments on the basis that there’s no proveable scientific basis that they’re in any way effective.  It also draws attention to the fact that some chains of chemist stores are selling these unproven remedies without any clear labelling to indicate that the remedies are placebo in nature.

There is a huge raft of materials expanding on the topic matter – a very good summary of the issue is on the 10:23 Campaign Website – but in essence it relates to homeopathy (and specifically to homeopathy, not any other form of complementary or alternative medicine), which is the belief that symptoms are treatable by taking super-diluted mixtures of a relevant compound.  The system was invented in 1796 by a German doctor, and the concept is that a super dilute solution is given which is so dilute it just contains an “idea” of the substance.  The typical dose is at a concentration known as 30C, and as the wikipedia entry on homeopathic dilution puts it:

on average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.

The content of the Skeptics talk was summing up of the case from the scientific side, and outlining the sorts of claims which homeopathy proponents have made, such as what is treatable and what scientific evidence & research they have in support of their discipline.  The main body of the talk was delivered by Martin Robbins: a science blogger who writes for The Guardian’s blogs, and much of the content mirrored a recent article he’d written for them, and then his response to the British Homeopathic Association’s response to that article.

As someone who has a broad working understanding of the topic area I found it fascinating to learn more of the specifics of the issue, such as the BHA referring to certain studies as evidence of the efficacy of homeopathy – whereas they’ve cherry picked what looked like statistical outliers from the greater body of research, and used partial quotes to substantiate their claims.  One example was a quote the BHA pulled from a study performed by Cucherat (2000):

There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo

As Robbins pointed out, the full published line that quote is taken from is:

There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo; however, the strength of this evidence is low because of the low methodological quality of the trials. Studies of high methodological quality were more likely to be negative than the lower quality studies.

Overall the evening was excellent and the speakers were highly knowledgeable and informed within the topic area: the introducing speaker was scientist, broadcaster & author Simon Singh.  He spoke of a small trial that some people from the Sense About Science campaign conducted whereby they sent a girl around to 10 homeopaths to say that she was travelling to Africa and wanted to obtain an anti-malarial treatment, but didn’t want to take “conventional” malaria tablets due to their side effects: each of the homeopaths sent her home with a highly diluted homeopathic remedy containing no active ingredients whatsoever.  As a “control group”, they also sent the girl to a travel advice centre with the same question – here they asked her what kind of tablets she’d had side effects with, as there are more than one variety of proven effective conventional treatments.  As well as this, they discussed various means of minimising infection risk in the first place, and she left with many strategies and a lot of useful information.  I was quite staggered by this: the idea that anyone would advocate sending someone into a high-infection-risk situation with sugar pills to protect them is quite stunning.

As I said – the evening was very informative, however if I was to offer any sort of critique it would be that I found it all a bit smug.  The room was definitely full of rationalism zealots, and the smugness that came across was that of a bunch of people who know that they’re right and what’s more they can prove it with repeatable scientific evidence.  It’s difficult to articulate what about this I disagreed with – I’m a huge supporter of the science/evidence school of thought, however in the field of civilised discussion I guess I believe that the way to prove the strength of your argument versus someone else’s is by presenting your case as:

My claim is this, and here is my explanation and evidence to support it.

The tone of the Skeptics evening, as far as I could interpret, was more along the lines of:

My claim is this, here is my explanation and evidence to support it, and oh my god can you believe that these other people believe something different? They’re so stupid! What they think is clearly ludicrous!

Perhaps it’s a stylistic point – I’d always thought arguments were more effective if the losing party had the chance to realise by themselves how ludicrous their side of it was, rather than having it beaten into them.  Although I can also see that there must be a point where once the argument’s gotten exhaustive and the opposing side still refuses to give currency to a watertight case it all gets a bit frustrating and easy to conclude that possibly the opposing viewpoint doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand the facts.

Still – I was rather hoping that the content & attitude of the evening would be such that if they’d invited a homeopath spokesman along to present their side of the story that they could do so without it turning into an intellectual sort of “Lord of the Flies” moment.

Overall though the quality of information outweighed the downsides of the presentation.  There were certainly some moments of quality humour throughout the proceedings: the shape of the room was such that not everybody could hear very well, and at one point someone shouted out “We’re experiencing a homeopathic quantity of sound around this side”.

I guess you had to be there.

If you’re a Skeptic Trainspotter then it’s not a bad night to be at – along with Simon Singh, also present was wild-haired Bullshit-Buster Pursuivant Dr Ben Goldacre, and Allan Green who runs the excellent Jack of Kent legal blog.  Sort of rationalist royalty, if you will.

I don’t know – maybe the smugness thing’s justified after all.  I mean, any discipline which seriously suggests that taking sub-molecular doses of sulphur can treat over 1300 complaints – including

“being busy all the time, childish peevishness in grown people, averse to business (loafs-too lazy to arouse himself), nervousness before period, vertigo & dizziness while walking in the open air, dry scalp, cornea like ground glass, offensive smelling discharges from ear, imagining foul smells, elongated uvula, very weak and faint about 11 am, haemorrhaging from anus, great quantities of colorless urine, back perspiration, waking up singing and freckles”

- and can’t provide any solid scientific evidence to prove effectiveness or mechanism for any of it, and yet maintains that it should be sold in pharmacies because the public have demonstrated a demand for it is past the point of level-headed discussion.

(story caption image borrowed from Flickr)

Anti-clockwise from bottom right: Timmy Dunstone, Mike James, Alex "Sir Psycho" Coombe, Andrew Fewster, Jack O'Neill and Lochy Cupit

What an ace collection of mo-work, wouldn’t you agree?

Right, now the prompt for this post was just the Amazon delivery I got this morning – a fairly big box turned up, and I was thinking “Awesome! Pressies!!” somewhat foolishly.  I had ordered something, but being a fairly small article it seemed sensible that it’d be in the small postal bag that also turned up this morning.

The unboxing can be seen below, and without doubt earns Amazon a Packaging Pillock award*

Yes, they sent me an A4-sized box, about 10cm deep, containing 2 sticks of laptop RAM: actual measurement (minus their own plastic packaging) approx 2.5 cm by 5cm.

And if I hadn’t had that delivered to the office, you can bet that the postman would’ve had to stick a “While You Were Out” card through the mail slot at home.

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!  Y’know sometimes when you do something which is just straight-out cool, and you know you’re gonna remember for the rest of your life?  Well, that!

I read on the HIGHLY EXCELLENT “Ian Visits” blog that it’s possible to arrange to take a tour of the Clock Tower at the Houses of Parliament, and that sounded to me like a fine and excellent thing to do so – following the instructions – I contacted my local Member for Parliament and made the relevant request (the instructions are here: more info below).  A month or 2 later I recevied an email back asking me if I had any preference for dates in November, and soon enough the date was upon us!  As you’d expect, on the morning of the tour I went scrabbling around my room to find the letter detailing the meeting place and time, and proceeded to tear the place apart in the process of discovering the “safe and memorable place” I’d put it.

Sadly, no photographs are allowed on the tour – the tourguide’s assistant assertively if somewhat ethereally insisted that this was for security reasons – so I can’t share with you the view down the narrow stairwell, taking in the 334 steps, or the Victorian mechanism – still calibrated to 2/5 of a second using Old English Pennies, or the 4 chime bells and that massive 13.5 tonne Great Bell.

The tour was fascinating, as you’d hope, and during a quiet moment I learned that the tour guide climbs to the top 3 times a day.  I also managed to get her to confess that when she goes on holiday it’s typically to places like Holland – no point climbing up things in your spare time, I guess.

The mechanism is purely mechanical, and as we heard & saw it working away at the quarter-to-the-hour point it was quite strange to actually see Victorian-era clockworks in action.  There was the sort of amount of ratcheting, clunking and clattering you’d expect but which you rarely see in this day and age as everything gets replaced by electronics.  Nevertheless, the clock is maintained by a team of clockmakers – who get extremely narrow windows of opportunity to do any maintenance work!  Typically it’s during the hour changeovers at daylight saving.

I was extremely impressed with the reliability and accuracy of the thing – they just never stop it.  There’s been points in history where things have caused it to stop, but in terms of system uptime the numbers are pretty damn impressive.  One episode the lady told us about was when the fly fans (whose air-resistance provides braking for the descent of the weight driving the chime train) failed, and rather than chiming in a controlled manner the weight just dropped with gravity acceleration, which caused half of the chiming mechanism to hop out of its cradle and distribute itself in pieces around the mechanism room.  Luckily it happened at 3am and nobody was in there.

Another time-losing incident happened one day when a group of 50 starlings simultaneously landed and perched on the minute hand, and their weight caused resistance on the hand mechanism.  They were moved on by the charmingly British method of a man opening the inspection panel on the clock face, and threateningly waving a broom at them.  Probably shouted “Shoo! Shoo!” quite menacingly too, I should think.

Moving upstairs to the bell platform we took in some excellent views of London, before inserting earplugs and witnessing the chiming of the Westminster Chimes.  The guide advised us to touch one of the metal beams to get some sense of the vibration resonating through the structure.  As the 16 chimes rang out you could certainly feel the metal buzzing, and follow the chimes around the 4 bells as they went off in sequence.

Then there was a slight pause, and I thought to myself – “Wow, that was intense”, nearly forgetting that the Great Bell was to now strike the hour.  The massive central hammer moved slightly, and then struck.  I wasn’t quite sure what to expect at this point: the sound of Big Ben chiming the hour is a distinctive and iconic note – a slightly flattened E with a hint of twang thanks to the hairline crack, and one to which I’m surprised to say it’s possible to grow accustomed to the longer you live here.  But as that hammer struck for the second time it occurred to me that there I was – standing right next to the source of that monumental sound, recognised the world over.  The hammer retreated to striking position and rang the third & final hour strike. BONGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can’t describe anything quite like it – a real mix of thoughts was swimming around my head, partially about the sheer volume & power of the sound (which took quite some time to stop vibrating), and partially wonderment at the idea that an insignificant computer programmer from Adelaide had somehow manipulated events such that he was standing next to the most recognised clock in the world at 3pm on November 19th.  I took my earplugs out, and as the resonance faded off it was hard not to imagine that it was in fact the sound of that chime echoing off into the distance to the edges of visible London.

Slightly head-spinning from this moment we then did a quick tour through the clock’s four faces.  The opalescent glass is now apparently irreplaceable, and also quite fragile, and the ironwork comprising the Neo-Gothic face decoration (designed by Augustus Pugin) looks quite spindly.  My upcoming visit to Prague perhaps had the idea of defenestration rolling around in my brain, and I wondered if anybody had ever tried to jump out through one of the faces.  It made sense though that the ironwork would prevent it – certainly by the way the guide was standing on the ledge with her back to the face suggested that she wasn’t concerned about her safety.

Returning to the bottom of the stairs we passed through the tunnel and back into neighbouring Portcullis House, and on our merry way.  I was quietly pleased that such an icon of British and then by extension global importance was subject to the same sort of ineptitude that features in the rest of the Houses of Parliament – I loved the fact that due to the tower not being finished at the time, they tested the first bell at ground level.  When it cracked (they were using heavier, and heavier hammers in order to get the tone to the E Natural that Edmund Beckett Denison so craved), the bell was broken down and a second one cast.  By the time the second bell was cast the tower was ready, so 8 men took 30 hours to haul it up the top, and after the clock mechanism was put in place they started testing the bell & hammer weight, whereupon the 2nd one cracked!  By now it was too late to lower the bell, so they just went with it – hence the “distinct” tone.

Equally I thought it was indicative of the sorts of men they were that the mechanism’s designer, Edward John Dent, doesn’t have his name commemorated in any of the clock parts.  He died prior to the project finishing, and his son Frederick Dent completed the clock, and therefore had his name immortalised on the iron framework.

I suppose my favourite fact of the day was that the BBC used to broadcast the chiming of Big Ben live around the world at the strike of noon, 6pm, and midnight – the rules changed though when there was a team of maintenance builders carrying tools and materials up and down, and during the midday chiming one of the men dropped something on his foot or thumb and let fly with a loud swear word which, due to the sensitivity of the BBC microphones, was broadcast live to all corners of the Empire.  It was the “f***” that was heard around the world.

In order to arrange a tour, UK residents must write to their local MP with a request.  This seems to take a couple of months to process.  The tours don’t cost anything, and are open to UK residents.  My understanding is that tourists aren’t allowed to do the tours.  The official website with instructions and information is found at: http://www.parliament.uk/visiting/visitingandtours/bigben.cfm

OK, it would be safe to say that the recent televisual goings on involving Harry Connick Jr. in Australia have been quite well publicised, and possibly the last thing the world needs is another opinion thrown into the fracas, but the reactions that I’ve read about are so stunning to me that I feel like I should write something if for no other reason than to try to make sense of it all and see if I’ve missed something.  The happenings were:

Last Wednesday night on Australian TV there was a reunion episode of long-term variety programme, Hey Hey It’s Saturday -- a light entertainment show which ran for 25 years but had the curtains drawn in 1999.  Though a little bit childish, and not always home to the highest production values ever, it was endearing for its good-natured shabbiness and cobbled-together feel at times.  The programme was made up of various segments of different sorts, and as it was the only Saturday night programme of its type, would often attract large touring stars of music and film: many of whom enjoyed themselves in the set’s irreverent well-meaning atmosphere, and who would repeatedly return.  One of the segments was a sort of talent show, entitled Red Faces -- a “gong show”, featuring acts harvested from the general public, and of vastly varying quality.

On Wednesday night’s show one of the celebrity judges for Red Faces was New Orleans jazz maestro Harry Connick Jr. and one of the acts performed on Red Faces was a group of Michael Jackson impersonators, entitled “The Jackson Jive”.  Five of them started on stage in black face makeup and afro wigs, and they were later joined by a fronting Jackson with white face makeup.  During the judging part, Connick was visibly nonplussed, and awarded the act zero -- indicating that if they’d gone on US television with an act like that there would more than likely be no more show.  Later in the broadcast Somers addressed a piece to camera explaining that they hadn’t really thought it out in advance, and that he’d spoken with Harry, who wanted to explain his reaction to the audience.  What followed was a well-constructed explanation, outlining why as an American he’d reacted like that, and that he was sorry for taking the show to that place.  The audience and crew seemed to react positively, and the exchange ended on an upbeat feel.

Or, for a better explanation, here’s a YouTube video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmaF7Pys7OI

So, what’s prompted me to write about this is my surprise at the reactions to this story that I’ve witnessed, which come in several forms: the most immediate of which is web comment boards.  These aren’t often useful sources of information, as the anonymity and distance afforded seems to encourage people to present a more polarised view than they otherwise might in a face-to-face discussion.

To say that “everyone’s gone mental” would probably be unfair, as internet forums don’t represent the majority.  However taking the often inaccurately named news.com.au site as an example, the reactions tend to broadly fall into a couple flavours of categories (with individual responses varying in intensity):

1) Australians are all racists (primarily but not exclusively echoed by commenters outside Australia).

2) It wasn’t racist, and what right does a self-righteous American have to come and force his viewpoint on us? (combined with “Get a sense of humour”)

3) Hmm, perhaps that wasn’t such a good idea after all.

As far as my personal reaction goes, I’m in camp number 3.

Of course there’s the storm-in-a-teacup effect at work here, and with each successive iteration clarity and realism gets lost, such that once it had turned up a load of overseas news sources such as the New York magazine, and The Guardian, followup sensationalist Australian coverage cherry-picked elements of the story and jacked it up a few more notches:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YuM_IBl5Tc

Such appeared to be the public outrage/backlash against Harry that he had shopping centre appearances cancelled out of safety concerns.  I guess whether there actually were “threats” is now tertiary to the story: sounds like the shopping centre operator wanted to avoid any controversy and cancelled just in case.

Interestingly, many people seemed to think that the problem was that Harry didn’t have a sense of humour, and this is interesting, as he’s not someone who’s been particularly shy about appearing on Australian TV -- he’s always invited back, and he loves being on those shows!  It doesn’t seem to be anywhere on YouTube, but Harry’s got a longstanding relationship with Andrew Denton following their first interview, and there wouldn’t be many celebrities of Connick Jr.’s calibre who are so readily prepared to get on board with a joke at one’s own expense.

So anyway, to the bewildering part -- upon seeing the footage of the Red Faces segment, and subsequent explanation/apology, my reaction was “Wow, that was a bit ill-judged of Daryl & the crew to put Harry in amongst, however rather than cause too much of a fuss he’s explained why he reacted the way he did, and we could probably all learn from that”.  It was a reasonable, level-headed objection, and subsequent explanation…  so does there need to be any flying-off-the-handle accusing people of racism, or cultural imperialism?

Don’t, mind you, cast me into a bucket marked “apologist” -- in my opinion “racist” has become a widely misunderstood catch-all accusation, levelled about wildly -- in some cases by people who often have no understanding of what it is they’re objecting to: this brings about another question of course, of if they’re upset by something, then does the original intent matter?

An example would be the word “Paki” -- when I was growing up in Australia in the 80s I clearly recall that in my first real awareness of other countries, that of touring cricket teams, the common practice among commentating broadcasters was to shorten or abbreviate the names of the teams that Australia was playing against.  Presumably this would be partially out of laziness, and partially out of our natural tendency to try to de-formalise things.  So as far as I was aware, as an eleven year old, instead of referring to Australians, New Zealanders, British people, West Indians, and Pakistanis, it was quite OK to refer to Aussies, Kiwis, Poms, Windies and Pakis.  Now it’s never actually come up, to be honest, however since moving to the UK it has become quite clear that over here it’s not acceptable to call people “Pakis”, and in fact on the radio the other day a broadcaster went so far as to refer to that as “the ‘P’ word”, analagous to “the ‘N’ word”.  Initially surprised by this, I’ve since found that there’s quite a long history of violence and awful behaviour tied up in this, and that’s why it’s now taboo here.  What I’m saying is that if I’d referred to someone as “Paki”, and they’d taken umbrage, then I’d apologise for upsetting the person and for the misunderstanding, perhaps explain my background, and learn from the experience that it’s something to be more aware of in future.  I’d hope then, having made my best effort to make amends, that the person I’d been talking to wouldn’t then continue to call me a racist.

Harry apologised & explained himself -- a fact which lots of news reports (other than the Guardian article linked above) seemed to gloss over, and which many commenters seemed to ignore entirely.  I reckon the grownup thing to do would be to find out what the lesson is.

Wow, that was less insightful than I thought it was going to be.  Oh well.

(Incidentally, for a summary of my feelings on racism, probably the best reference I could point you towards would be Brendon Burns’ show, “So I Suppose You Think This Is Offensive Now“.  Wouldn’t recommend it if you’re easily upset, unless you’re also the kind of person who’s happy to examine why it is that you’re getting upset.)

Some computer problems are easy to diagnose.  Some are extremely difficult.  Often the more subtle, the more difficult – especially when you’re using multiple bits of software.  It adds layers to the possibilities of where the cockup may be nestling, if indeed the symptom you’re seeing is based on there being a cockup.  Sometimes a cockup is as a result of 2 or more things working exactly as they’re intended.

For quite some time now I’ve been using a Microsoft Natural keyboard – otherwise known by my colleagues as “one of those weird wavy hippy kepboards: the rationale for it is that the keyboard is split such that the resting position of your hands is more akin with their anatomical place, and you don’t have to force your wrists around all day to type.  The downside, of course, is that it’s a Microsoft Keyboard, and typically involves having extra drivers and software to make all its bells & whistles do their various tinkling and whistling.  I think it’s actually impossible to get the plain Natural keyboard – the minimum spec now available is the Multimedia version, with soft buttons (aka Places For Cockups To Hide).

I like Open Source Software.  I like the idea that it’s out there for anyone to write & make improvements to, particularly by way of having many, many more pairs of eyes to find & fix bugs.  The Closed vs. Open Source argument’s not one I want to have here, but the salient point here is that it’s not 100% uncommon when using OSS for stuff to have been released which displays some “undocumented idiosyncrasies”.  Generally it’s not the case, however it’s something I’ve learned to keep in the back of my mind when using it.  Two of my favourite pieces of software are Mozilla Firefox (the best web browser available today), and the java-based text editor, jEdit.  Both programmes have embraced an extensible, modular framework which 3rd parties can use to bolt on features & functions.  Or, as this blog post’s calling them, Cockup Hutches.

Oh yes, then of course there’s Java – a highly versatile programming language which can run on any computer architecture by way of using a “virtual machine” to run on, so if you have a Windows PC you get the Java Virtual Machine for that, then run the java code on top of that.  If you have a Mac, you get the JVM for that, and can then run the same java code.  Got a Commodore 64?  Well, so long as you’ve got a JVM for it, you can probably run the same code as well*.  It’s going to be pretty damn robust, but as with any bit of core gear, it’s an iterative process that gets updated regularly, and so becomes another neat place for Cockups to Nest.

Having established that there’s now *plenty* that can go wrong, here’s what was bothering me: sometimes when I’ve been working at a PC for a while I go to type something in quotation marks, and get a @ character.  Or, for the last 5 years, go looking for a £ and get a # instead.  It’s bloody frustrating.  It’s not the end of the world, by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s just that when you’re typing in complex passwords, for example, it’s often useful to know that every keystroke is what you intended it to be.

The irksome part is that when you start the computer up the key does exactly what it’s meant to.  Then, however, after some unspecified interval or event, the key decides to go off-piste and do its own thing.

In fact, it seems to make sense that what’s going on is the keyboard layout is somehow changing – the UK keyboard layout has the ” character positioned as the SHIFT function of the 2 key, whereas in the US normal layout the 2 key gets the @.  Equally, the Americans don’t really need a £ symbol, so they’ve made their SHIFT-3 into # (although both are referred to respectively as the pound symbol, weirdly…).

My confusion lay in the fact that I’d be writing some code in jEdit, then swap over to a half-finished email in Outlook, and all would be hunky-dory.  Swap to Firefox, write some notes in our bugtracker, fine.  Go make a coffee, come back, wake up the screensaver, finish the bug notes, go back to jEdit, and suddenly everything’s arse-about!

A few weeks later (after forgetting about the particulars of what happened last time, only that keys seemed to be randomly hopping about) I’d go to send an email in Firefox, and discover that I have to go hunting for the @ symbol.  It’s like being on holiday, all of a sudden (anyone who’s used a French or Czech keyboard knows what I mean).

I’ve never been able to pin down what the cause is – it never seems to happen to me on most computers, and I’ve never heard anyone else complaining about it.  As I said, I’d assumed it was something to do with the software I was using, or something – there didn’t look to be anything amiss in the Regional/Language control panel settings, or in the Keyboard control panel.

However tonight, armed with that most powerful of motivations – finding ways of procrastinating over something else – I’ve found it!

Microsoft Windows XP – pretty much the main OS I’ve been using since 2001 – has a feature called the Language Bar.  It provides ways of setting your Windows installation up to make use of alternate character sets and keyboard layouts.  Being fairly Anglo-centric, I’ve never actually found a use for it – in fact with PS/2 keyboards you can’t usually unplug one and plug another in without doing some “find new hardware” action, or worse, rebooting.

Imagine my delight to learn that the thing that’s been buggerising my @ symbol spasmodically over all these years was in fact a Windows Feature – some berk decided it’d be a good idea to allow people to toggle between keyboard layouts with the key combination of Shift and Left-Alt.

Even better than that though – having changed layouts, the OS gives you no visual clues that you’ve changed anything.  I mean, you can see it if you have the language bar in the Start Bar, click on it, and notice that your keyboard layout has changed – but even then there’s a chance you won’t get it, because it seems to be set ON A PER-APPLICATION BASIS!  Hence why Firefox might give you ” symbols when jEdit, Word, Outlook, and everyone else is giving you @.

Now, as someone who spends a lot of time switching between apps I almost exclusively use keyboard shortcuts, of which Alt-Tab is the usual one.  However if you’ve got loads of apps open it often helps to use Alt-Shift-Tab to cycle through your apps in the other direction.  What I want to know is On What Frigging Planet did whoever decided to bind something as largely useless as swapping keyboard layout to a set of keys that do something else entirely useful?!

The good news is that once you know about it, you can do something about it – right-clicking on the Language Bar gives you access to its settings, from which you can turn off the ridiculous key combination.

It’s enough to make you want to install Linux, honestly.  Or move to a country where they use US keyboard layouts.  Like Australia.

* yes, there is.  Well, there was going to be.

Was looking for something in my room the other day and was disturbed by the amount of Stuff that I had to shift out of the way in order to look for whatever it was.  A seriously disturbing amount of Stuff.  The trouble with e-commerce is that you can consign more Stuff to be brought to you without having to invest the time or kinetic energy to go and find the Stuff.

Looking through my email folder for invoices & orders, and tallying up all the Stuff that I’ve bought this month, the total was a bit on the alarming side: it’s probably atypical (I *hope* it is), but this month I’ve spent £523.07 on Stuff.  By which I mean t-shirts, electronics, books, miscellaneous crap from eBay, software…  y’know, just Stuff.  Of that, £279.85 was for me, and the other £243.22 was random gifts for other people.  It’s a bit silly.  That could have been part of a house deposit.  Or a trip somewhere.

The challenge for September, therefore, is to not buy ANY Stuff.  Not sure how the self-discipline programme will work, but we’ll see, eh?  Realistically, nobody needs that many t-shirts anyway.

Wish me luck.

In terms of art, the man’s a genius.

Since arriving home I caught on the live webcast the last 20 minutes of a woman apologetically shifting from side to side dressed as a pigeon, and now there’s a bloke, who looks like a geography teacher, taking photographs.

Once you get past the idea that you’re watching something a bit boring, there’s a few things that come out of it.  Firstly, it becomes painfully obvious just how long an hour is.  The girls dressed as a pigeon clearly thought it’d be hilariousn and for 5 or 6 minutes it probably was, but in putting yourself on a pedestal, so to speak, you’re demanding the attention of whatever audience there is.  Crucially, the live internet feed guarantees you’ve got no idea who or how many are watching at any point.  The photographer bloke lasted about 6 minutes actively photographing before he sunk into talking on his mobile phone – for all intents & purposes a form of hiding whilst in plain sight.

There are 2400 “places” in total, counting down as of earlier this afternoon.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens – the human need to impress will mean that people are going to want to steer away from replicating the plinth piece of others, and yet ARE people going to be able to come up with 2400 different ways of occupying a plinth?  Reading the list of the first day’s worth of participants, it seems that several of the “acts” don’t know what they’re going to do, and some are planning to “raise awareness” for various things.  3 of the first 24 have pre-determined that they’re going to dress up as something out of the ordinary (town crier, androgynous person, cow), and a further 6 don’t seem to know what they’re going to do (of those, one elected to dress like a pigeon).

Overall, as with many of Gormley’s pieces, I think we’re going to get some very interesting reactions, and it’ll be as much about watching the way the public interact with what’s going on on the plinth as it is about what’s on the plinth itself.  A parallel I discussed with my mate Dave just now was Big Brother – however thinking about it, that’s probably easier, as those people are confined in an unusual envorinment, and have others to direct the focus away from them.  On the plinth, you can’t hide.  4 of the first 24 claimed to be doing it for a cause, or to raise awareness of something – assuming that’s a reliable statistic, that means approximately 400 people are likely to be pushing awareness of a cause or issue over the next 100 days.  Is the volume going to overwhelm the message?  Or will it be counterbalanced by the statistical 200 hours of people who are going to sit/stand up there and read?

It’s all a bit potentially exciting.  It promises to be inordinately tedious in reality, but in concept, brilliant.

And thumbs up too to Gormley who, without lifting a finger or having to stand on a cement slab for an hour, guarantees himself 100 days’ worth of media spotlight.

Oh look.  The girl up there now is drawing a sketch of the people looking at her – primarily, the video suggests, drunken idiots.  Never mind, in a few short hours it’ll be sober idiots, just as short of witty heckles.

http://jeff.goldblum.mediafetcher.com/news/top_stories/actor_new_zealand.php

A sickening feeling dawned on me as I realised what was going on: Twitter had been subjected to the “Bill Gates will personally send you a cheque if you forward this email on!!!1!1!” effect.  People who have emailed me chain letters in the past warning of devistating computer viruses, Microsoft email trials, and other popular mail hoaxes will probably tell you that at some point they get a miserable email from some git pointing out that it’s a hoax – with me typically playing the role of Chief Git.  It’s just that the thing that 12 years on the internet has taught me is “Check Your Sources“.

There’s several clues out there that this story is a fake.  Firstly, the URL – whilst disguised by some URL forwarders, there’s a fairly big clue in the URL, and if you were to alter the URL to contain something slightly different (for example, http://jason.standing.mediafetcher.com/news/top_stories/actor_new_zealand.php) you’d see an eerily familiar story.

People who read to the end of articles might further be rewarded with the following fairly obvious disclaimer:

Furthermore, were you to do some googling for the phrase “died while filming a movie in New Zealand early this morning” you’d probably find a reference to the “Tom Hanks is dead” rumour of 2006.

It’s like a wildfire effect caused by what I’d describe as “prairie dogging” (based on this definition, not this one):

• Person 1: I read that Jeff Goldblum died – anyone know if it’s true?
• Person 2: OMFG Person 1 says Jeff Goldblum’s dead!
• Persons 3-7: Has anyone heard that Jeff Goldblum’s dead? Person 2 says that Person 1 said so.
• Persons 8-15: Apparently Jeff Goldlbum’s dead.
• etc.

One can only assume that the whole thing’s driven by a pressing urge to be the first to tell people something – news services operate largely on the basis that if they are the first to market with a breaking story then it attracts eyeballs and they accumulate revenue as a result: unfortunately with the rapidity of internet communication and peoples’ slackness in checking references, occasionally stories break through into proper mass media, such as the Jeff Goldblum story getting aired on Australian TV – again, it was couched in the “Reports just in that this MAY have happened” style, but a mention like that is usually enough to get the grassfire started.

The joy of the Chinese Whispers effect on Twitter is magnified by the notion of “trending topics” – the software keeps statistics on which keywords are popular at the moment and draws users’ attention to the current top 10 under the auspices of enabling people to find out what the current buzz is about.  So when people start hopping up and down panicking about Jeff’s welfare, suddenly the story gains stratospheric attention merely by being talked about a lot.

About 2 hours after the first Goldblum story I read, a second “development” in the story – allegedly actor (and all-round legend) Kevin Spacey had apparently weighed into the discussion, by way of this re-tweet:

RT @KevinSpacey: Jeff Goldblum is alive and well. I just spoke to his manager. Stop these stupid rumors.

Now, the thing about Twitter is that you can pretty much say what you like.  In reality I could type “RT @KevinSpacey” and then any arbitrary thing I liked, such as “RT @KevinSpacey When I grow up I want to get my bum cheeks tatooed with the pattern like a pineapple”, and as far as any non-fact-checking people are concerned, he genuinely said that.  Furthermore, it’s very hard to verify that the Twitter user called @KevinSpacey is in fact the person we think it is – there’s currently a user called @KSpacey as well, and the names @Kevin_Spacey and @KevinSpacy haven’t yet been claimed.  There are, of course, other Twitter users out there who can claim to verify whether or not a celeb twitter handle is owned by the real person, however it’s equally trivial to set up your own verification account, and then verify all your own fake celeb accounts.  So what we potentially (until proven) have here is “a (sham) story (possibly) disproven because (someone who claims to be) Kevin Spacey put a post on twitter (which doesn’t require any need for authentication of fact) which has then been forwarded around by a bunch of people we also don’t know, necessarily trust, and can’t vouch for the authenticiy of”.

I guess the point is that just because someone’s talking about something, it doesn’t mean it’s true.  A bit of research & deductive reasoning, and a bit less cranking of the hype handle, and the world might be a nicer place to live, eh?

Incidentally, as everyone else is talking about Michael Jackson, I suppose it’s appropriate to cast my cynical hat into the ring: does the following headline sort of conform to the “discussing outlandish speculative rumour in order to drive public attention” idea explored above?

For what it’s worth, though I generally disapprove of opportunistic humour at a time like this (and yes, it’s already started!), can I just point out that whilst I am currently in London, I didn’t do it, I was nowhere near him, and I’ve got witnesses.

This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

The BCA – rather than providing any evidence to support their claims – have sued Singh for libel, which seems to (incredibly) have some legs on it thanks to England’s archaic libel laws.

This is an extremely important case, because the substance is court intervention in silencing a scientific matter – I’m condensing this because many more informed words have been written about it than I could possibly muster, but the idea that you can use libel laws to silence criticism on scientific grounds without having to provide a shred of evidence to back up your side of the story is an incredibly scary one, and totally at odds with the aims of science.

The case has caused quite a stir among the scientific community (understandably), and a statement has been drawn up to be raised to parliament, signed by some quite heavy academic & scientific hitters – if you’re concerned about the direction this case is taking, feel free to add your name to the list of supporters!

Further reading:

• Comment by Singh at Sense About Science
• For Simon Singh and Free Speech Against the BCA Libel Claim Facebook group
• Jack of Kent’s blog coverage of the issue (analysing from a legal standpoint, commencing in August 2008)
• Jack of Kent’s analysis of the current state of English libel law
• Google News results on the story

I’m certainly not a lawyer, and I’ll freely admit that my grasp of the facts is tenuous at best, however the thing which seems readily apparent to me is that the BCA, having sued Singh for damages over his allegedly defamatory statements causing damage to their reputation have in fact damaged their own reputation many times more visibly than had they ignored the article completely.

I’d hate to get into an argument with someone which required lawyers to sort out, however you’d hope that if that ever happened then the verdict would go in favour of whoever was able to prove their case.  What this case seeks to do is prevent Singh from being able to make his case, despite the plaintiffs having no means of proving theirs but also having no requirement to do so.  Should the BCA win, this case would set a fairly awkward precedent against anyone who was critical of alternative medicine – I guess that point is the whole reason I got swept up into this story in the first place: fairly frivilously catalysed by my enthusiasm for Tim Minchin’s magnum opus “Storm“.

So I guess we’ll see what happens, eh?

Update 2009-06-09: More from Dave Gorman – relating to the ASA ruling against a chiropractor regarding claims that they could treat colic.