PowerPointless

This is a multi-purpose post. Firstly, it's to get me back into posting here. Secondly, it's to make amends with Telf for not posting here for a while (apologies once again dude). Thirdly, it's so I can share something that made me laugh a lot.

I've already shown this to quite a few people, but I wanted to put it up here too. It struck a chord with me when I first saw it as a significant proportion of PowerPoint-based lectures I've had during my PGCE so far have been reminiscent of this style. I just think that if you're actually saying things like "I realise the text is far too small for people to read" about your slides, you need to rethink how you're putting together your lectures. Anyway, here we go.



I do have a couple of "real" posts I've been meaning to make for a little while now, but it's far too late to do either of them now, so hopefully this entry will get the ball rolling again for me and I'll post a bit more frequently.

I think I'm alone now...

It's frustrating that the point of this blog is being so ironically compromised. When I was writing a blog on my own, it was difficult to motivate myself to post on a semi-regular basis, and I was glad that I felt more motivated about posting here when there was more than just my own content going up. However, no one other than me has posted since the end of October, and despite forcing myself to write some fairly extended pieces (and pieces that I'm on the whole pretty happy with), I can feel myself slipping back into my old habits and looking at the 'create post' page as a duty rather than a creative outlet.

I understand that people are busy, and this is not a rant against my fellow posters here (yet), just an update on how I feel things are going.

On a more flash-based, and less angsty note, many many addictive games (with leaderboards and secrets and awards and all that other jazz that is much more fun than actual work).

Oh. Hell. Yeah.

by their own petard.

When the guys from Penny Arcade announced that they were taking time off from reviewing games in order to create one, game publishers of the world began to sharpen their knives for the sweetest revenge of all.

However, with their game not out yet, we have a vaguely similar, if a zero-budget, pixelated and sardonic one in Art of Theft.

With the game coming from the keyboard of 'Yahtzee', he of the Zero Punctuation reviews, it was only a matter of time before a parody review appeared. It doesn't have his Yahtzee's accent going for it, but matches him for wit and humour, as well as doing a good job actually reviewing the game.

True Lies

I think my politics sensor is broken.

In almost every situation where I read an article or opinion about politics (in the sense of actual government, rather than political theory), I mentally side with the government. One reason for this could be that when I was growing up, I regularly had the message "Labour good, Conservatives bad" drilled into me. Not because my parents (mostly my mum) were trying to brainwash me, but because they were passing on what they believed. I remember in particular going to meet David Mellor at a prize giving at my primary school, and being told to spit on his feet by my mum. I didn't, incidentally, but being exposed to very one sided political debate for most of my childhood left a clear mark on me.

Hence whenever I hear a piece of political commentary that paints the Conservatives in a good light and Labour in a bad one, my brain throws up an error - "Wait, this can't be true, Labour are the good guys". I generally have to consciously overrule this part of my brain in order to try and think impartially about politics, which is annoying. I have no problem in general arguing left wing points, because I feel on much more solid ground with abstract ideas, but when the issue of the present government comes up, my brain starts to get into too many arguments with itself for me to make consistent arguments.

Another possible reason for my government-leaning tenancies would just be that I don't like the way the media tends to tear over-enthusiastically into people doing a very difficult job. I don't like the fact that the business of running the country has become one of trying to avoid too much bad press, rather than actually, well, governing. So it might be that my brain is naturally sympathetic towards those in power, rather than the Labour party in particular.

I have nothing to compare this with, since my interest in, and exposure to, politics probably started when staying up to watch the election coverage in 1997. In this sense, then, I would be interested to see the Conservatives come into power (my stomach actually tightened while writing that), if only so that I could work out whether my natural bias is with Labour or with the party in power.

Going back to my previous point about the business of spin and media relations getting in the way of governing, I find it pretty ludicrous that there are people calling for the Chancellor to step down over an issue that he can have had no control over. People pointed to the example of Paul Gray taking responsibility and stepping down as head of HMRC as being the right attitude, and implied that the chancellor and even the Prime Minister should follow suit.

It firstly seems ludicrous that the failure to follow government procedures by a junior official should be in any way the responsibility of two of the highest ranked public servants in the country. As you go up the government ladder, the general responsibility for the actions of those below you increases, but the responsibility for any individual failing surely decreases. The fact that Paul Gray decided to step down should surely be the end of the issue. There is no need for either Darling or Brown to take responsibility, because Gray has already done so.

However, the media know that they will have a bigger impact and generate more public interest by, for want of a better term, shit-stirring. Maybe people don't believe whatever the media tells them day to day, but they probably absorb some of it, and when the media is constantly banging on about government spin, hypocrisy, cover-ups and resignations, it can be very difficult to pick out those situations in which the terms are appropriate from those in which there is no real scandal, but which would get no public attention if reported in context.

The problem forms a vicious cycle, because officials are so desperate to avoid even the smallest situation being blown out of proportion (causing the inevitable resignation calls), that they are willing to stretch the truth, leave out facts and even outright lie to the media. When these lies eventually come out (as they almost always do), this then fuels the media's obsession that all politicians are slimy, corrupt, lying bastards, that there is no reason to trust anything that they say, and that the other lot would be much better.

The trouble is that no government will be able to look good for any extended period of time because at the first sign of a mistake (you know, the kind made by humans), the media start to wave their P45s and shout for an election.

I don't necessarily think that it would work, but I would like to see a government, a party, or even a politician make a sincere effort to avoid spin. Yes, there are going to be situations where for reasons of security or dignity, there are things you can't reveal, but I think that the majority of government should be transparent, and able to be examined as such.

Rather than having the ridiculous situation of two parties arguing over who thought of a policy idea first, they should be celebrating the fact that they both want to implement the same idea. Since when did getting one over on the other side of the house with a witty comeback in a debate take the place of doing your best for the electorate?

The fact that Members of Parliament have to be forced to vote with the government because they don't agree with the law being passed is surely ignoring the whole point of having a representative democracy. "Oh, I was going to represent the views of my constituents in this vote, but then my party leader said I couldn't". Whither democracy then?

Equally, if you don't want the public (and/or the media) to know why you are financing something, investigating something or pushing for legislation then you are doing something wrong as a government. Either you are not representing the views of the electorate, or you haven't explained your position well enough.

And this is where it becomes a two-way thing, because in order for a government that actually didn't spin anything to work, the media would also have to avoid spinning. Rather than looking at a statement from the press office and thinking 'what are they trying to hide?', the media could take the chance to explain both sides of the argument to the public and letting the government getting on with actually making the decision.

Clearly a media that simply repeats what the government says is the mark of a less-than-free press, but I would argue that we have swung too far the other way, and that our dictatorial press is making for a less-than-free government.

The only way you are going to get rid of the culture of lies that apparently is destroying our political system is to have an electable politician that actually tells the truth without spin, and with the current media, I'm not sure that's possible.

As usual, that was pretty rambling, and probably inaccurate. For a much better insight into politics and the media (you know, from someone who actually knows what they're talking about) try this blog (listed over there on the right along with a ton of other good ones). In particular the post about lying to reporters that inspired whatever this was.

245 votes

From Sickipedia:
Also, and to stay with the image theme: Thanks to the xkcd store I now have a shiny new olde-style online community map on my wall.
This makes me smile every time I look up from my screen. :D

Links of a 2.0 nature.

I have been intending to write something long, rambling and uninteresting about gay marriage on here for a while, but Jabberwock has put down pretty much exactly what I would have said, so you may as well read that.

Also, looking back at this particularly embarrassing post, I realised that I missed a great opportunity to plug 'awkward things I say to girls', which is linked over there on the right, but hasn't been mentioned explicitly on here before. It's a great series of stories about situations this guy has got into while talking to girls. I can definately relate to his description of his mental processes and stumbling attempts at humour, and his writing style is brilliant and regularly very beautiful. As well as being hilarious. It's not updated very often any more, but read through the archives - it's well worth it.

Since I've been posting a fair number of link-based posts on here, I thought I'd try out del.icio.us, a social bookmarking program that, again, I had been intending to start using for ages. I'll put anything that requires comment on here, but I'll probably link a lot of stuff on there that'll never make it onto here, too, at least until I can work out how to automatically feed my updates through.

And, as if in some kind of web 2.0 frenzy, I have also finally got a flickr account. I had previously resisted this because the photos that I took tended to be more of the mates-getting-pissed variety than the artistic variety. With my early Christmas present (from me to me) of a new and slightly less amateur camera, though, I've decided to at least try and do something a bit different photography-wise. I'm no expert, but hopefully I'll improve, so check out my account every so often to see what I've added.

Any artistic merit those photos have comes pretty much entirely from the intelligent stuff the camera is doing with focus, exposure etc, btw...

My say

From the BBC's Have Your Say section on controlling binge drinking, particularly in young people:

"Why the hell should I be punished by extortionate price hikes due to some peoples lack of control?!

The report states teenagers/children drinking - hello? Isn't it against the law for them to do this?

When the little darlings end up in hospital to have their stomachs pumped/injuries attended to then arrest their parents.

It's nothing short of neglect. Do not try and justify their disgusting behaviour by saying you can't control them 24/7. Yes you can, that is your job as a parent!!"

Contrast with this story also on the BBC. Clearly not exactly the worlds most thorough investigation of a story, but I think that it shows the flaw in the blanket statement from Have Your Say. The parents are going to be the ones least able to control the behaviour of their children once they get into their teens. Hopefully they've passed on the proper lessons at an early age, but once a child starts to rebel, there's really very little a parent can do. If there are childen out there drinking, and there are, they are going to be more of an influence on their peers than their peers' parents can ever hope to be at that age.

The vast majority of the commenters were outraged by the government proposing a tax hike on alcohol, and rolled out all the old 'nanny state' arguments. When it was pointed out the the organisation that produced this report was not a government body, but a seperate group of health organisations, the response was that it was typical that this government was 'hiding behind' lobby groups.

"There ought to be a tax on busybody organisations that continuously poke their noses into other people's business."

While I don't necessarily agree that a tax rise would be the best solutions (clearly there are more complex factors at work than just cheap booze), but the organisation that has come up with these statistics is not saying that drinking alcohol is wrong or should be banned, but is putting forward a suggestion that could reduce alcohol deaths. Maybe I'm being naive, and maybe these organisations are looking to snare a big chunk of government money as a result of this survey, but I would certainly not describe any of the organisations involved as 'poking their noses into other people's business'. As charities, research groups and political pressure groups, the role of these organisations in our politics is job is to produce data and present it to both the government and the public, and that is what they have done. The fact that a 10% tax increase was one of several suggestions wasn't really picked up, because the word tax was mentioned, so everyone wheels out their penny-pinching-Gordon-Brown pens straight away. It's this kind of knee jerk reaction to (ultimately fairly dry) stories that I hate, blowing them out of proportion and picking out the elements that will get the biggest response, but it's the kind of thing that seems to happen more and more in both journalism and public opinion.

The final thing that both annoyed me and came up a number of times in the comments, features in the middle of this post:

"Putting 10%, as I've heard proposed by some groups, on the price of Alcohol is absolutely ridiculous. Do you really think putting that sort of measley [sic] amount on the price of a drink will put off people who want to drink. All the extra taxes will achieve is to give the government more money to squander on beaurocracy [sic] and useless 'studies' and irritate the majority of responsible drinkers whilst doing nothing to put off hardened drinkers."

The comment itself is not necessarily unreasonable; I agree that a higher tax will probably not have the effect that the study groups hope, and that young people who can get enough money together to afford (probably supermarket) alcohol at the moment will be unlikely to be put off by a small increase in that cost. However, I don't like the tone of the message - treating the studies and suggestions with scorn, while not even suggesting at any kind of alternative solution.

It also annoys me that the poster says that all the taxes will do is 'give the government money to squander on bureaucracy'. Maybe he is speaking in exaggerated tones for effect, but I think that his point is still unhelpful. I agree that the level of bureaucracy in government could probably be reduced, but I also believe that the government appreciates this. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to try and keep track of the vast budgets that the government has to deal with, and I don't like the implication of a blasé government throwing tax money around without a care for the effect on the poor workers from whom the money has been cruelly taken.

Again, I'm straying into naive woolly liberal territory again, but I genuinely don't think that the people in and working for the government are just in it for the quick gain. I don't like the way that modern politics forces people to play games rather than govern (but that's another story for another time), and I think that the people who work hard to get elected and into positions of responsibility do it because they want to make a positive difference to the country. This is why it frustrates and annoys me when I see black-and-white, one-sided, over-simplified analyses of the government as a money grabbing behemoth that doesn't care about the man on the street. The government may be a huge entity, but it is made up of individuals that all want to do their best for Britain as a country, whichever party they belong to.

Penultimately, a particularly helpful view of the Labour party from one comment:

"Labour Party Commandments

You must:

• Work hard to support the idle, MPs, criminals and government employees pensions.
• Accept higher taxes and bills without complaint
• Accept that we're watching your every move
• Use the bus/train to travel to work
• Not smoke or drink
• Not drive/fly
• Eat only organic food
• Accept that the law is on the side of the criminal
• Accept that your are second class citizens in what was your country
• Remember we know best what's good for you"

Does the person who wrote that really believe that that is what the Labour government are trying to do? Presumably not. But why try and understand what someone is trying to do when you can just stand to one side and ridicule them.

Apologies for the any of the above that was rambling, poorly thought out, or just naive liberal bilge, but I think most of it at least vaguely represents my points of view on the topics involved, so I'm not going to attempt to rewrite any more of it at this hour.

And finally, quite a sweet story about a cat.

V

Clearly I should have posted this yesterday, but I didn't realise until today: My first ever post on my first ever blog was made on the 12th of November 2002, making yesterday my 5th blog-versary. Or something.

There have been large gaps (my total post-count is only about 265 according to Blogger), and I have at one time or another posted on at least 5 seperate blogs.

While this record identifies me as an inconsistent and unreliable blogger, I feel a certain amount of pride that I'm still posting after 5 years, and raise a glass to the next five.

Copse

Browsing through the BBC website today, I came across this list of forms that the police have to fill in during an investigation. I've read a fair amount of the archives on coppersblog over the last couple of months, and this is the one main thing that the writers there complain about too.

The thing that strikes me most about the list of paperwork is not the volume of it (though that is clearly a factor), but the number of different mediums in which data is stored. Some information is kept in handwritten logs, some is on numbered forms, some is entered into a national database and some of it is on a local computer system, not to mention the storage of copies of video evidence, photos and audio tapes from interviews. That's a huge amount of information that may need to be recalled at any time, and which will all be stored in different formats and different places.

The problem is that none of this information-gathering is easily disposed of. If any of it was obviously redundant, then it could be removed, but it seems from the descriptions that all of the steps in the chain are recording reasonable information, either to help lead towards a conviction, or to cover the police in case of a mistreatment lawsuit brought by the arrested party. If we assume that there is no redundant information being collected (something which may not be true, but on which I can't really comment), then the only way to reduce the amount of time spent on paperwork is to reduce the amount of time filling in the existing paperwork, and minimising the occasions on which the paperwork has to be filled in.

On the former point, there must be some way of streamlining the existing systems for logging crimes and criminals into a single computerised structure. Even the time saved by having the system automatically timestamp and number everything would surely be useful. In addition, there would be time and resources saved by the reduction in paper forms. Further expansion into a national database (or at least remote access to regional databases) would be possible, to allow co-ordination between separate forces.

All of this is clearly a massive job, but looking at the BBC link above, it was the first thing that came to mind, probably at least partly because my current job involves writing software to do almost exactly this for the NHS, and I could all too easily see how much it could help in the police service.

The second point above, on minimising occasions on which this mass of information needs to be collected is another major theme that comes out of the procedural posts on coppersblog - that there is a huge amount of time lost recording and investigating crimes that are not going anywhere. Front line officers are given no room to judge for themselves what to investigate and what to leave. Clearly the police should not be ignoring crimes, but if the officer knows from experience that there is no chance of a conviction, or even a charge, shouldn't he be within his right to say so. And then to get on with investigating a case that may have a useful outcome. Is it not analogous to allowing your doctor to tell you the best course of action. If your GP says "It's nothing to worry about, leave it for a couple of days and it'll clear up", would you respond "No, give me pills, now." or "No. Refer me to a hospital. Now."? Sadly, maybe this kind of response to medical advice is becoming more common nowadays, but I would suggest that allowing the police to exercise their professional judgement in the same way as doctors is vital to avoid the justice system being clogged up with family arguments, kids fighting, and pub brawls.

As a personal example, when I was 13 or so, I was beaten up in an alley while coming home from school by a guy much older than me. When the police came round to interview me that evening, I told them as much as I could, and gave them a description of my attacker, and they said "It's really pretty unlikely that anything is going to come of this". I never heard anything else from them, and to me, that's fine. I would hate to think that they had to spend any longer than it would take to give me a crime number and record a brief description of my case on it, since, clearly, there was no way they were going to catch the guy. Even if they somehow came across him, it would be my word against his, and there would be no chance of a conviction.

I was going to talk more about government targets here, but I'll have to save that for a later post, as it's getting late and I'm starting to ramble a bit. Either way, if you consider the worst aspects of targets and paperwork, then think how far we've come from these principles, particularly the last one.

Nice try.

Great article on Ted Nelson and Xanadu, neither of which (whom?) I had ever heard of before. Via Coding Horror.

Lexical levity

I found this via this whilst trying to find what this book was called, having heard about it in several places, including HIGNFY and this podcast, which I was recommended to try in this post.

Incidentally, trying to find that book via Google is very difficult if you don't actually know any specific details such as title or author, as any description of it is too wordy to be useful. I finally found it by searching for example words that were given in the podcast.

Doodling

Awesome doodle games:

http://www.tinkerx.com/index.php/2006/02/08/my-team-your-team-crayons-at-dusk/

http://www.bearskinrug.co.uk/_articles/2005/09/16/doodle/index.php

Leading to:

http://thesuperest.com/ (recommended in person by Russ).


The whole doodle-for-the-sake-of-doodle, with no real winner, reminds me of Blank White Cards.

Three Links

- A heartwarming post from coppersblog

- A more depressing one from battleground. (there may need to be a health advisory on that one for anyone interested in going into teaching).

- A frankly quite distressing graph. From nhsblogdoc.

Two Links

Just a couple of links this time. I have two or three things I want to do big-ish posts on, but finding time when I am rested enough to think clearly, but not so rested that I have slipped into a catatonic Team-Fortress-2-playing coma is difficult.

The 13 most awful American fears
- I don't check Something Awful nearly as much as I should. And neither do you.

Demotivational posters
- These have been ripped off a lot (to good effect, sometimes) but as far as I can tell, despair.com did the originals.

"Additional generic cop comment, Brian!"

I couldn't think of a blog entry title, so I resorted to a quotable mainstay. Understood? Good.

I recently started using the StumbleUpon add-on for Mozilla Firefox, and it's really quite handy when you want to be entertained by the internet with little to no effort of your own (shameful, but truthful). You tell it things that you're interested in hearing about and then click the "Stumble!" button and it shows you a website. If you like the website you can tell it so, and if you don't like it you can let it know that too, thereby refining the types of website it shows you. I recommend trying it out.

This page is one of the ones I've liked the most so far. Very clever and very funny. The Thought For The Day is also particularly profound:

"Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic".

Entries of more substance and less rip-offery shall be made in the near future.

Via

My DVD writer has an irritating habit of failing to actually write DVDs. If I decide I want to listen to some music, watch a video, play a game, or even access a media-heavy website, my writer has a tendency to both soak up enough memory that these activities are no longer entertaining and also crash Windows. So, while I'm burning DVDs, I generally end up browsing around various blogs. Today, I started at Coding Horror, recommended to me by a friend of mine*.

While there, I particularly enjoyed this article on blogging, which led me to this article on the same site, which led me to more articles elsewhere. Thank goodness for tabbed browsing. I now have between ten and twenty tabs open, all of which I intend to read. However, these tabs are spawning new ones as fast as I close them. That, after all, is what blogs are meant to do, link me to other relevant material that the writer thinks may be interesting or helpful. And there's no shortage of blog entries talking about blogging out there. The problem of how to deal with this content-virus, constantly tempting me onwards with more and more lists and analyses and constantly multiplying until I have so many tabs open I don't even know which way is back, is my problem.

The real reason I decided to write about this is that it is not entirely clear to me what the etiquette about linking to other sub-linked stories is. Clearly I should provide a link to the blog that led me to an interesting article, partly because the context of my finding a link is interesting, and partly because the linking article might have salient points of its own to make.

But then, what if I'm linking to an article that I have reached through seven or eight step journeys. What if I want to link to sever articles in that day's particular link-tree. What if I don't want to have to type out the address of every interesting page I went through. What if I want to encourage the reader to follow the different paths that I have followed, but don't want to list ten or fifteen urls which are already connected anyway.

What, I think, would be interesting, would be a way of presenting your link tree on a page, beside (or as part of) the link itself. Clearly if you have several links to different, unconnected pages, there would be several link trees, but instead of having to put 'via' next to each link and then reel off a list of other pages that the reader might want to visit, you could provide them with your link tree. I don't want to worry about the construction of this tree particularly at this moment, but it could be done by entering addresses manually into some sort of GUI, or by setting up an 'auto-track' mode, that tracks your movements and then lets you pick a section of this journey to display with the link.

What makes this idea more interesting to me is that if you reached an interesting link tree on someone else's blog, there is no need to worry about building your own to mimic his. Instead, you simply include his tree on your article. Another node is added automatically to represent his article at the top of the tree, and the rest of the tree already exists. Clearly you can trim and prune if you want to, to remove anything that appears irrelevant, but a reader of your article can immediately see that you have been to this other person's blog, and through them, on to other places. Writers who draw together interesting articles are automatically credited by the people who link to them in the future, and people can see at a glance the extent of an article's research and scope.

My interest in this idea is purely whimsical. I have no idea (but would be interested to hear) if there are huge practical or philosophical problems with the idea, or if there is a technology that allows you to do this. Equally, if there is not, I have no huge desire to push for it. It is simply something that occurred to me whenever I wrote the word 'via' after a link.


* a friend, in fact, registered as a writer on this blog. A writer in name only. Apparently.

"To express one's thoughts / in seventeen syllables / is very diffic"

A bit of linkage to some of my own work. A task I had to do for the creative writing part of my PGCE course was to create a series of haikus about something that has a definite sequence. Being an English geek, I chose to do mine about Shakespeare's Hamlet, attempting to summarise each of the five acts of the play as a haiku. I have to say, I'm very pleased with what I've managed to create. I've uploaded it to my FanFiction page (which, incidentally, I haven't touched for a couple of years until now) and have had a couple of positive reviews already which is always good to see. Here's a direct link to the actual piece. I'll post more links to any creative writing I do here, either stuff from my course that I like or enjoyed, or when I get the chance to do any of my own accord.

By the way, the title of this blog entry is a haiku, called "Haiku", by John Cooper Clarke. I think it's ace.

They flash upon that inward eye

This is a complementary entry to my previous entry. Firstly, after reading back what I wrote last night, the post makes me seem a lot more depressed than I actually was. I said I was "melancholy", which was in hindsight too strong a word to use, but in my defense I was incredibly tired when I wrote the last entry. More accurate a word would probably be "deflated". In all honesty, I don't know the word for how I felt. When I read about the death of the second person, I was shocked. And a couple of seconds later I recalled vividly my meeting with the two people who were close to the first person who died. My emotions entered my stomach which then turned into the drum of a washing machine. It was all so mixed up that a particularly emotional state of shock is probably the best way I can describe it, but as I read that back it doesn't sound very accurate.

Moving on. I also didn't mention that both people died a recently, but not very recently. I don't know how long ago the first person died, but the second person died around a month ago. I just happened to hear about them both on the same day. And that was what took me aback about how I felt. I had heard about two people dying and I was feeling like this? But I hear about people dying on the news all the time, and I don't feel like this every day. If I had a point in the last post, it was something to do with that. Obviously one of the people I had known some time ago, but the other person I had never met. I had never met the two people who had know that person until yesterday. And yet I was affected by it. It just surprised me. I wasn't depressed last night, I'm not now, but I was definitely feeling something I didn't expect. Emotions are strange. Human beings are even stranger.

I doubt this entry has cleared much up. But I read back last night's entry and it seemed alarmingly dour, so I just wanted to clear that up if nothing else. And I'll try to make sure whatever I post about next is a little more upbeat, in tone at least.

In vacant or in pensive mood

I should be going to bed, but I wanted to write something here, however briefly, to attempt to capture some of my feelings at the current moment. Today I have experienced death on two occasions.

The first occasion happened to me this morning. I didn't know the person who died and had never met them. I interacted with two people who were close to the person who died. The person died in a way that, from what I was briefly told, in a way that was not pleasant and was self-inflicted.

The second occasion happened about fifteen minutes ago. I did know this person, although I had not seen him for years. Any direct interaction I had with this person was scarce (although as I type this I have just remembered a specific shared experience between us that stands out in my mind). That said, there was a period in my life when this person was regularly around me and I knew who they were. This person also had interaction with people with whom I am friends, and I have no doubt that they were fairly close to him and were shocked to hear of his passing. I don't know how this person died.

I don't really have a point, other than neither of these people were people that I really knew - in one case not at all, in the other not well - but hearing about their deaths affected me a lot more than I would have expected. I feel somewhat subdued, almost melancholy, after hearing about them. These two experiences together just brought home to me in a way that has never happened before how curious a thing death can be. Probably the most incomprehensible thing life has to offer.

I think this may be why I'm single.

That is, I think this may be one of the huge number of reasons that I am single.

Picture the scene: I'm walking home from work, happily minding my own business, when I receive a text from Attractive Single Girl (ASG). The text reads:

'Hey. Have you seen [film]? x.'

Where [film] is a current release, and not just the word film encased by square brackets. What follows is my internal monologue, as I remember it:

"Oh, cool, a text from [ASG]. Ah, a film. I would like to go see a film with her. Hm. I wonder if she wants to go on a date. No. Don't think like that. That's just setting yourself up to be disappointed. Assume she doesn't want to go on a date. No, don't assume anything. Hm, I've already seen that film. Damn. I wonder if I should suggest an alternative. Hmm. That seems a bit presumptive. Hm. I wonder what the difference between 'assume' and 'presume' is. I dunno. Gah! Don't think about that. Think about [ASG]. She may not actually want to go see a film with me, but be organising a general cinema trip, in which case suggesting an alternative would seem a bit weird. Maybe I should say no and ask whether she's seen it. No, that's stupid too. She's not carrying out a survey, she must be intending to go and see it. Gah! I'm overthinking it, aren't I. Even if she isn't organising a general trip, she may just want to go and see the film with me as a friend. Why should I assume she wants to go out on a date? Hmm. I can't think of a way of saying no and suggesting an alternative without knowing whether she wants to go on a date, just go and see a film as friends, or invite me to a group viewing of a film. I also can't think of a constructive response that would cover more than two of those possibilities, leaving the option that I'll be sending an inappropriately presumptive reply, and making me look like an idiot... Damn... Well I have to send something, I can't just ignore it. Maybe if I just keep it simple she'll ask a follow up question and I can take it from there. Sending anything more complex now is just too risky. Ok. Just answer the question. Have I seen it? Yes. Well that's silly. I can't just say 'yes'. I need to send a full sentence at least. Hmm. I could ask how her day was, but that's a bit of a non-sequitur after her question. Maybe I should say something about the film. Hm..."

... ... ...

"There. That's a good text length. Ok. Review. Is there a situation in which this could be taken the wrong way? No, looks pretty clean. Ok, good. Send. Awesome. Job done."

So that's what I ended up sending:

'Yes I have'. Followed by a short review of the film in question. Gah!

Looking back, I can think of many better ways I could have answered the text, but in the heat of the moment, my mind just did not perform well. I've written this post, partly as a way of showing the bizarre and embarrassing way that my mind works, and partly as a comparison. If this is what is going on in my head when I'm replying to a text message from an ASG, what the hell is going on when I'm talking face to face? What actually happens is that my brain tries to process too many possibilities, overthinks to a point several factors higher than my mind can handle and then shuts down. With embarrassing results.

Sorry for the angsty post, I don't really want to do too many of the teenage 'omg i'm nevvar guna get a gurlfrend. zomg the world hatez me. :'(' posts, but I thought that I could pull this one off and still make it externally interesting. I hope that I succeeded. If not, then I won't broach the subject again.

Locked up

All the way back at the end of August I wrote this post. In some senses this is a follow up.

I was having a discussion about politics with a couple of friends in Nando's this evening, when the guy at the next table decided to join in. He was nice enough, and there with his wife, so we were quite happy to chat to him, even if he'd had enough to drink that he didn't make a huge amount of sense. Anyway, he told a story about his childhood that I thought was quite interesting:

He said that when he was eleven, he'd seen some older kids steal a car and go for a joy ride. He and a friend of his had taken a screwdriver and tried to do the same. They got the car started, but had no idea what to do to actually drive it, and were caught by a policeman, who arrested them. They went to court and were sent to borstal for two months. He described crying for most of his time there, and showed us a tattoo on his hand that some of the older boys had given him (against his will, he implied). He said it was a 'reminder not to fuck up', and said from then on he'd never done anything else that would get him into trouble.

The implication of this story was clearly that he believed a spell in a youth correction facility would help to teach modern teenagers/youths some respect for authority, and help them get back on the right track. He also suggested a mandatory five year stretch in the army for anyone who doesn't have a job or apprenticeship to go into when they leave education. I think the latter suggestion is a bad idea, because a huge influx of bored, angry young men who have been forced into the army against their will seems like a recipe for disaster. Ultimately, if they're not going to form an effective part of the armed services (which they won't if they don't want to), it's no different from keeping them in a highly regimented part-time prison for five years.

His point about the youth detention or borstal system is, I think, also misguided, though clearly driven by the constructive effect it had on his life. I really wanted to ask him some follow up questions about his story, but he was switching topics quite quickly, and it was difficult to get a word in. I'd have been interested to know what his parents thought, firstly about him going to borstal, and secondly about him being tattooed while there. I can just imagine the media circus today about a young child who was forcibly tatooed by other inmates in a young offenders institution. I certainly imagine that there would be lawyers involved.

It's quite possible that for some of the 'problem' youths currently growing up in council estates (and, I'm sure, more affluent areas), a stint of hard dicipline with a threat of more would have an effect, possibly for the better. In general, though, it seems to me that treating kids like criminals would not help them to become productive members of society. A kid with a tattoo reminding him of a terrible experience that he doesn't want to repeat is going to behave out of fear, not because he understands why behaving well is desirable. Perhaps it is wooly liberal thinking, but it seems to me that someone who understands why not stealing a car, why not taking drugs, why not acting in an aggressive and confrontational manner, is desirable by thinking about the sociological consequences of these actions is going to be able to apply those rules to other aspects of life more readily and more accurately than someone who unhappily obeys the rules they are given by people in authority because they don't want to be punished.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe some people would not be able to grasp the reasoning behind laws and social responsibility, or maybe they wouldn't care. Maybe some people are too far gone down their own path to be shown the way back, and maybe some people were never going to be able to follow the path society wants them to in the first place. Whatever the reality of it, it makes me happy that we live in a society when political discussions can break out randomly between strangers in the middle of a restaurant, even if not regularly.

If you consider silhouettes to be NSFW, then NSFW.

I don't really believe that this is to do with left or right side brain activity, it seems to depend more on when you start looking at the animation. Interesting nonetheless. After a few minutes I could get it to reliably change direction at will.

Also good to see Bambi posting again. I was starting to worry that I'd had a schizophrenic episode, registered lots of imaginary Blogger accounts and forgotten about it.

An Inconvenient Profession?

Apologies for my lack of input to this blog lately. I have recently started a teacher training course, and the work and preparation for that has taken up a large amount of my time. There have been one or two things I've wanted to write entries on though, so hopefully I'll be able to get them up here over the weekend.

One thing I wanted to comment on is this story.

I was going to write something about this when I first read about the issue, but as it turns out it may work out better now that a follow-up story has been written.

For starters, I haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, but I would like to see it to form my own opinion on it. I also didn't really think of the story with respect to how important the film was in telling schoolchildren about climate change and protecting the environment. What I see is yet another distrust of teachers, the authority they have potentially and that they are rarely allowed to use.

Stewart Dimmock didn't want the film to be shown in school because it contains "partisan political views" and "sentimental mush". If that is indeed the case, and if I was going to use that film as a teaching tool, those are two of the main things I'd try to get pupils to draw out of it. Not to just take it as 100% truth, but to interrogate the film they're watching. If the politics and sentiment are that overt then I'm sure many GCSE level pupils, maybe even those at the top end of Key Stage 3, would be able to work that out, perhaps with a little prompting to question.

To me, Mr. Dimmock is doing one of two things:

1. Not wanting teachers to teach children these kinds of skills, instead getting them to simply take everything they are exposed to at face value.
2. Not trusting teachers to be able to teach these kinds of skills, therefore calling for the removal of texts he deems unable to be taught in English schools.

Either way, he seems like the kind of ignorant person I'm likely to meet more often than I'd like throughout my potential career.

Bible Fight!

Less painful than the real deal (those things are heavy, man) but still Bible Fight!

The loading times are pretty excessive and the controls sometimes annoyingly unresponsive, but a fun distraction for a few minutes.

Also, I downloaded the demo of Peggle (see a couple of posts back) and yes, addictive. Like to the point of "I need to go out and buy more heroin, but I really just want to play this next level. Just one more. My dealer will totally still be there in 10 minutes." Lucky the demo's only 15 levels or so. I think I can resist buying the real thing. I think...

Webcomic Links

A list from FullyRamblomatic (the guy who creates the reviews in the previous post) of his favourite webcomics. And a link to a blog that ridicules poor webcomics.

It Lives!

I keep trying to set aside some time to write something interesting and well argued, but keep failing, so as an apology, I'm going to give you a ton more links.

I've been reading Charlie Brooker's writing for a fairly long time now (I started reading PC Zone just as he was finishing writing for it), including his columns in the Guardian and a couple of his books. His humour is prurient, irreverent and pretty abstract. It's kinda hit and miss too, but generally moves between topics quickly enough that it stays funny.

I was worried about whether it would translate to the screen, and so didn't see the first series of Screen Wipe - his BBC4 show where he provides kind of a commentary on current news in the television industry, kind of an analysis of recent programmes, and kind of a slightly surreal sketch show. Having seen the start of the fourth season, however, I really want to go back and re-watch the previous ones. The vast majority of the show is brilliantly observed criticism of the tv industry and reviews of shows. Brooker is refreshingly honest, and embodies everything modern 'family' television attempts to hide in presenters. He's quick to get to the point, cynically dismissive about anything that he feels doesn't matter and quite willing to attack people personally when he feels that they deserve it. Some of the best moments come from the fact that it is very aware that it is a TV program commenting on TV programs, and the self-referential lines and in jokes are really entertaining.

The occasional miss is generally in a sketch that goes on too long, or a personal insult against someone undeserving, and Brooker's delivery sometimes appears as though he's simply reading from a script, but in general Screen Wipe is fanstastically witty, honest and uncompromising. I keep wanting to call the show original, but really it's not original, it's a show commenting on the TV industry. Surely that can't be an original idea. It feels original because the quick delivery and all too rare bordering-on-the-rude-honesty that is constantly on display is something that I don't think I've ever really seen in the sanitised modern television industry. Anyway, well worth a look.

I was reminded of Brooker's presentational style (and hence encouraged to write a long, rambling post) by a link on KTR* to this review of Peggle. Which led me to these other reviews by the same guy, which led to me laughing a lot. He has the same fast, no nonsense, semi-obscene delivery that Brooker has (although with fewer references to pushing pine cones up people's arses, a staple of Brooker's Guardian column), with the same witty and uncompromising put downs for anything that doesn't make the grade. Which in turn reminds me of RiffTrax. I've never listened to one, but it's a great idea (spawned from MST3000) and one that I may investigate at some point in the future...

One of my friends told me recently that they had trouple reading a previous link from KTR* because it required too much knowledge of gamer history/culture/slang. I hope this isn't the case (because if it is, I apparantly have no way of telling the difference between an article that does and an article that doesn't), as I hope that the reviews above aren't inaccessible to non gamers, as they really are very funny indeed.

Also I'll try and post more often. Even just links. There's nothing more depressing than seeing days and days with nothing written on a blog the express purpose of which was to try and encourage regular content.

* I realise that I'm a horrible link-whore and anyone who reads KTR and Jabberwock (listed helpfully on the sidebar over there) could pre-empt 90% of my posts. But I like to think I provide some small level of commentary too. Or at least aggregation. Or at least text.

I have no idea what this is. Seriously.

Imagine if a 5 year old was forced to translate a philosophy textbook while on acid.

I have no idea what this is. But it's pretty compelling.

Found via Play This Thing!, which is a really good resource for those of a gaming nature.

Quotable.

I have wasted many hours of my life (particularly at work) reading the bash.org archives. For anyone unfamiliar with them, they are a general repository of funny quotations from IRC logs (though I think they accept quotes from any instant messaging service). Either way, some are clearly faked, some are boring, some make no sense, but the vast majority have some element of humour in them and there are many absolute comedic gems.

The humour is generally computer-centric, but there's enough there even if you're not that technically minded for it to be worth a look. Browse the top rated ones for an idea of what kind of humour is there. They're good work material because they're in chunks, so you can do the old work-nonwork-work-nonwork cycle quite efficiently.

This is probably the one that put me most in danger of actively falling off my chair at work today: #572066

All a little phishy

I meant to post this back when it happened a couple of weeks ago, but kept forgetting. Strange and slightly worrying phone conversation:

Me: Hello?
Switchboard: Hi, got a call for you from Alpha Deliveries
Me: Ok. Thanks.

Them: Hi this is Pete from Alpha Deliveries, and we've got a parcel here for you that's due to be delivered on Monday. It's registered post and weighs more than 4 kg, so we're going to need a signature.
Me: Ok...
Them: Can you confirm that you'll be in between 7am and 7pm?
Me: At work?
Them: Yes... your office is on Upper Richmond Road -
Me: Yeah. I won't be here all that time, no.
Them: Well, could you give us the name of someone else that'll be there so that we can make sure someone named signs for it. Otherwise we'll have to bring it back here.
Me: [name of co-worker]
Them: And is there another name, just to make sure that we can get it delivered?
Me: [name of another co-worker]
Them: And can you give me another name, just so we can definately make sure it gets signed for.
Me: (suspecting something is wrong and panicking slightly) Um, no, I don't think there's anyone else that'll be here.
Them: Ok, thank you.
Me: Ok...
Them: Bye.

I was concerned by the slightly strange request for so many names, and the fact that I hadn't ordered anything. Needless to say, nothing arrived on the Monday. So either it's the world's slowest delivery company, they got the name on the parcel wrong (possible, since there's another person in my office with my initials, and people have called the wrong one of us before), or it was someone trying to fish for information.

Had I been a little more awake (it was a Friday afternoon when they rang) and not trying to do two things at once (I was showing someone where something was on my computer at the same time), I hope I would have been a bit more guarded with what I told them. I hope also that I would have asked for the guy's name and the company name again. And possibly a contact number or order number.

As it is, I have no idea how they got my name and work number, since I don't even know my work number and certainly haven't written it down anywhere. The only place where my name and the name of the company I work for are together is on Facebook, which seems an unlikely source of information for whatever scam they're trying to pull.

I also don't know what they could do with the information they got from the call, the names of two other people who work for the company I work for. I don't really know what other information they might have hoped to get out of me, over the phone, either. Altogether, I don't think I gave much away, and if it was a scam attempt, I don't really see what they got out of it.

Lol, RL n00b.

Finally, someone talking in a language I can understand. I found these a while back, and I've definitely posted these somewhere before, but I can't remember where. Certainly not here, though.

Part 1: Preparation
Part 2: Conning
Part 3: Spawn Points

UPDATE: As promised in the comments thread -
Part 4: Chat

Yay! :D

Strange fruit

I've got a couple of things I want to do entries on, but my brain is so frazzled from the whole working week thing, that I'm going to leave that till tomorrow at the earliest. So just a couple of links for now:

Via Enter the Jabberwock, this story that has apparently been quite big in America, but which appears to have escaped all coverage here in the UK. No particular reason why it would be covered over here, but it's interesting to think of all the hugely important stories that just don't make it through national news filters.

It's also the first time I've noticed the international blogging community exerting a pretty serious self examination in response to a percieved lack of coverage of a particular story. I'm not qualified or knowledgeable to draw conclusions about whether it's new or notable, but I thought it was interesting.

Even if you don't read the whole discussion of the reaction here, read Joe Solmonese's words at the march - they're pretty powerful.

Clearly the reaction and coverage linked to above are pretty one sided, and it would be interesting to read a piece taking the other side of the story, but whatever the details of the situation, it seems pretty clear that there are double standards being imposed.

fryPhone

I don't give a shit about smartphones, but the fact that Stephen Fry has a blog makes me very excited.

His server seems a bit dodgy atm, so you may have to try a couple of times.

UPDATE: Yep, his server appears to have gone down. I assume it's being fixed.

UPDATE 2: Seems to be working again now.

Evening all.

Now that's policework

Found via The Policeman's Blog, as featured on the BBC.

"Gate"-aholics II

This is not going to be a long post (and there are the famous last words) because it doesn't need to be and I've already made a substantial entry today. Plus I'm tired, so this is bound to not be as good as I want it to be anyway.

I agree that the use of -gate as a suffix should be avoided in general, and I believe that it largely is apart from by those in the press. I believe that it's functional more than patronising to the reader however, being as it is a catch-all phrase which is useful in headlines and summaries. I do however see the constant stream of -gate's in the media as lazy (and not in the good language evolution way, in the uncreative I-can't-be-bothered-to-think-of-anything-else way).

I think I know what you mean about -gate being more specific than the other neologisms I mentioned, and that whereas something like "workaholic" is instantly understandable, as long as you know what "work" and -holism both mean, "spygate" isn't. I don't think that's necessarily a problem. We've already agreed that "spygate" is rubbish in the story it's been used in, but also pretty much in any context as it is so vague. Let's take another fairly recent example instead: Lewinskygate. I'd say that anyone with a general knowledge of recent history would know that Lewinskygate refers to the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the mid to late '90s. When more carefully formed, -gate constructions can work as a useful summarising of something that would otherwise be a little wordy. In the Lewinskygate example, you'd have to instead say "The Monica Lewinsky scandal" or "the Clinton-Lewinsky affair". I personally prefer the more wordy descriptions as they seem more elegant (as elegant as a presidential sex scandal can be, anyway), but I'd have no problem with anyone using Lewinskygate either.

Insofar as being understood in general conversation, I'd also say that both the -gate construction and a more traditional description are on a par. With either, you'd have to have at least some knowledge of the event to know what it referred to. Using "the Monica Lewinsky scandal" and "Lewinskygate" again, I think that with both you'd have to have some background knowledge of the event; in both cases, if you knew nothing about it you'd have to ask for further clarification. And again, putting "spygate" into this example against something like "the F1 McLaren scandal" shows how terrible that particular -gate really is.

I hope all that's made sense. I agree with you on most of your points, and pretty much everything you've said about the way a lot of the media write, but I'm still willing to not close the gate on -gate, if you get my meaning.

Suffixgate part deux

Thanks to Bambi for the swift response - I feel that I agree with many of your points, but, much as my sense of self-preservation is screaming at me not to get involved in a debate on grammatical necessity with an English graduate, I do want to post some follow up thoughts.

I totally accept the points you make about the evolution of language being both necessary and out of our control. I'm not attempting to suggest that there is anything that can be done about be-gated words in general, but perhaps to suggest that these are words that we should try to avoid bringing into the language intentionally.

I also accept the point you make about laziness in writing. My point was not that the contraction or creation of words was lazy, but that the (journalistic) writing style that coined 'tag' terms like 'spygate' was lazy in style, because of the assumed need to simplify and condense everything for the reader.

I'd also like to suggest that there are a couple of differences between the words that you suggested were introduced similarly, and -gate words. The first is that while all of the words you suggest have general meaning (anyone in any country in any time period could be hospitalised, or use a spork), the -gate words have very specific meaning, generally referring to a single event. I can't think of an analogous concept to this one really - a set of words that describe instances rather than abstract concepts - unless you could make comparisons with people's names, which are not general concepts, but refer to specific instances (of people).

The second is that I would contest that words with the suffixes -ise or -oholic (or -aholic) are instantly understandable. They can be applied to other words in the english language, and provided you understand that word, you will understand the new word. With -gate, on the other hand, there is no frame of reference. I know what 'spy' means, but that does not help me if someone refers to 'spygate' in a conversation. Whereas, although I've never heard anyone use the word 'sproutaholic', I would know what it meant (assuming context), because it is a word describing a concept, rather than one describing an instance (of an event).

These differences, I feel, are the crux of why I take more issue with -gate suffixes than other (equally nonsensical) ones. But, my problem is less with the words themselves, but with those who create and use them without thinking about what they are doing and why.

As far as pissing on people's posts, as long as a point is well argued, it's never pissing. Plus I'm sure I have done worse to other people in the past and so probably deserved it.

N.B. Were I to use a '-gate' word on this blog any time in the future, it would, of course, be an ironic reference to this post. Ahem.

"Gate"-aholics

Having read my partner-in-blog's most recent entry, I felt it necessary to respond. I don't agree with everything he said. But first, the parts that I do agree with, so I don't get bogged down in them:

1. The suffix -gate is definitely being overused.
2. The vast majority of the media love anything that helps them sensationalise a story or make it soundbite-worthy. For example, if suspicion of the parents in the Madeleine McCann case continues to mount and they end up going on trial, I am fairly certain we'll start hearing about "Maddygate".
3. The F1 investigation Telf linked to is not worthy of being a "gate", and the moniker it has been given ("spygate") appears slapdash and badly thought out.

However, when it comes to the emergence of the -gate suffix in general, although I'm not particularly fond of it, I have no problem with it whatsoever. When used effectively (i.e. not "spygate") and not in excess, it can effectively and concisely encapsulate the general feel of a scandal by juxtaposing it with the sleaze and underhandedness of the Watergate scandal. Admittedly, most will not seem to be of as great a magnitude as Watergate, but if that had not been one of the biggest scandals of the 20th Century, if not the biggest, the -gate suffix would most likely have never come to be in the first place.

The fact that as a grammatical construction it doesn't make sense is not really an issue. If "spygate" is out then so are "telethon" and "workaholic", which take their prefixes from "marathon" and "alcoholic" respectively. The suffix -thon has nothing etymologically to do with doing something for a long time, nor does -holic (although almost always -aholic, despite the fact that the original word ends with -oholic) have its root in having an addiction to something. You could argue that these two, along with -gate, are only colloquialisms at the moment, but their widespread usage and understanding surely means that they are destined to be part of some future generation's technical terminology.

The formation of the term through laziness is also something that I take issue with; not because I disagree with that fact, but because a significant amount of words used every day in English were formed simply through laziness. Why else would we have "don't" and "can't"? If it wasn't for laziness we wouldn't be able to say "goodbye" (originally a contraction of "God be with you"), or go scuba-diving without saying we're going self-contained-underwater-breathing-apparatus-diving (possibly stretching the point a bit, but scuba is now an acceptable word and not an abbreviation). By the same token, laziness has given us the "spork" (a portmanteau of "spoon" and "fork") as an easy-to-remember name rather than inventing a completely new one. Biro and hoover, both originally brand names, are now synonyms for ball-point pen and vacuum cleaner respectively through laziness. Even "today" and "tomorrow" used to be "to-day" and "to-morrow", with the hyphen dropped simply for ease. The list goes on, and there are I'm fairly certain examples of laziness forming words back through the centuries even though most of the ones I've mentioned here are mostly from this Century and the last. Laziness is one of the key ways that English grows and changes as a language, and on the whole I embrace that, -gate's and all.

That's not to say I don't see where Telf is coming from. One of the overused suffixes of modern times I dislike is -ise - quite often exclusively -ize, as many of the versions I dislike come from American English. Two such examples are "hospitalize" (to put into hospital) and "novelize" (to turn into a novel). There's no grammatical or etymological reason I dislike these -ize's; I just find them over-sanitary and, on the whole, ugly words to use. But I accept that they are here to stay, as English has to continue developing, and will go in whichever direction it chooses whether I like it or not.

Apologies if you feel I've pissed all over your entry, Telf. That was not and is not my intention. Essentially, I agree with most of what you said about the media, but just felt a need to clarify how I feel about suffixes such as -gate and the other linguistic devices I mentioned, and show that hostility towards them is generally not necessary, but more importantly on the whole pointless. If history chooses to retain the -gate suffix there isn't a huge amount that can be done to stop it.

Suffixgate

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/6994416.stm

It distresses me that the suffix '-gate' meaning 'scandal associated with' has become so deeply seated in my mind that I don't think twice when people use it. I find it distressing both because as a grammatical construction, it doesn't make any sense and because it's symptomatic of the media trying to simplify and sensationalise a story rather than just passing on the facts.

Why call the current F1 investigation 'spygate'? Firstly, it adds nothing to the story, other than giving lazy writers a convenient handle to use, and secondly it's a poor description of the scandal itself. 'Spygate' could (and probably has been used to) refer to any number of espionage-based scandals over the years, and will also be used in the future. While 'Watergate' instantly identifies one event in time, in 3 or 4 years, who is going to remember what 'spygate' referred to? Especially given how many '-gates' are apparently being coined in recent years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-gate).

Ultimately, there's no reason to ever coin a '-gate'. It was originally a pun on Watergate [citation needed], and it should have remained as such. I don't know why it grates so much when I hear -gate suffixes. Maybe I wish journalists were less interested in finding a catchy tagline for a story and more interested in the story itself.

I wish I could link to a clip of the Mitchell and Webb sketch about adding '-gate' to words, but I can't find it online anywhere at the moment.

I has syntax error?

Posting links without real discussion is somewhat poor form, but firstly, I'm at work, and secondly, there's not a huge amount more to say about this, other than it's the funniest idea I've seen in a long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

20/20

Found via Kill Ten Rats:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/hindsight-deval.html

Really interesting article talking about the way our brains automatically devalue statistics. The main point being that if you present people with a statistic and a mentally comfortable reason for that stat to be true (e.g Men are involved in proportionally fewer car accidents because they have better spatial awareness), then accepting the stat becomes much easier because the reasoning has been provided. Most people, especially when not actively engaging the cynical portion of their brain, will take the easy route of:

Do I agree with the premise (men have better spatial awareness)?
Do I agree with the reasoning (better spatial awareness -> better driving)?

If both those boxes are ticked, the stat (Men are involved in proportionally fewer car accidents) is automatically filed away as accepted.

The only way round this is to actively consider whether the reason given is the only factor. In the case of my rather hasty example, it is clearly not - there are a huge number of factors affecting driving ability and road safety - but it would be equally dishonest to say 'Women are involved in proportionally fewer car accidents because they are less aggressive drivers'. One of the two positions must be true, but to present it in such a simplistic manner is misleading.

Basically, next time you laugh at the 'obvious' conclusions published after research, it may be worth considering how obvious it is. And, more generally, applying this rule to any situation in which a statistic is used. Clearly it's not possible to question fully every statistic you read, but being a little cynical never hurt anyone*.

* This statement may not actually be true.

Linkage

I don't really have the time or the mental wherewithall at the moment to write about this properly, but hopefully I'll come back and say something meaningful shortly:

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/godfuse.html

Read some of the other stuff that guy's written if you can, even if the original article doesn't appeal, as from what I can see, it's all pretty awesome.

Up for a debate

I enjoy reading discussions on the internet, political, philosophical, abstract, whatever. The presence of a ubiquitous, anonymous, hugely varied community makes for interesting (if not always erudite, coherent or intelligent) debate. The BBC have a couple of good discussion boards that I read from time to time, and over the last week or so, during my few brief free moments at work, I've been glancing through this particular debate on anti-social behaviour, and how to fix Britain's youth.

Reading through the (incorrectly apostrophised) Readers Recommended listing, which sorts the posts by the number of users who have registered their 'agreement' with the contents of the post, a couple of things become clear. Firstly, that the vast majority of highly rated posts have not only a distinctive right-wing slant to them, but also a distinctive anti-liberal slant. I don't want to get too much into my personal politics and any left vs. right business, but I felt that it was an interesting distinction to make. Secondly, the majority of people who top the readers' recommended list are ones proposing simple solutions. Among the most often suggested solutions are:

• Punish the parents.
• Punish the kids properly (inc. bring back capital punishment)
• Zero Tolerance
• Make prisons more undesirable places to live

I think a full discussion of my views and opinions on these suggestions and the underlying problems would be something that would be long, waffley and ultimately pretty uninteresting to read, so in the spirit of Bambi's last post (and as a consequence of my own tiredness), I shall attempt to condense my views:

You can't treat people like animals and expect them to then behave like humans. To train animals, certainly in the traditional sense, you reward them for doing the right thing and punish them for doing the wrong thing. While this method is in general the basis of teaching anything to behave in any particular way, it is too simplistic to really be applied in the same way to humans. The complexity of human interaction and human society along with heightened feedback (you can ask a child what they are thinking, but you can't ask a dog) mean that simply providing rules and then enforcing them with a carrot-and-stick mentality can easily fail.

If a child talks out of turn in class and is caned as punishment, the child will probably not talk out of turn in class again, certainly in the short term. However, the child will also pick up the message that to stop someone doing something you need to cause them pain.

If a teenager steals a car and gets sent to a prison for 6 months, where he is treated like an animal by the other prisoners (and possibly the prison authorities), all he learns is that he really doesn't want to get caught again. The only thing that has changed when he emerges from prison is that he has more fear and hatred for authority. He has the same life situation that drove him to steal a car, the same group of friends and family that failed to prevent him stealing a car and the only difference will be that next time he gets caught with a stolen car, he'll be driving twice as fast to get away. I'm sure that's something we all want to see.

If the child's parents have their benefits cut (assuming we bend, for the moment, to the stereotype that his parents are on benefits), they will be less able to provide for themselves and for the child. This change will not make the parents more likely to teach the child good life lessons, it will not make them spend more productive time with the child. It will almost certainly lead to a decrease in the child's quality of life, in the same way that any legal punishment would, but with the disadvantage that the 'punishment' goes on behind closed doors and without any regulation.

More importantly, by the time the child has turned 11 or 12, if they are already causing trouble and behaving anti-socially, it is very difficult for their parents to actually have any effect on them. By the time a child becomes a teenager, it is almost certain that their friends will have more of an influence on their actions than their parents will. Punishing the parents in this situation is unjust and detrimental to both them and the child.

I'm already starting to waffle, so I'll try and wind it up now.

'Zero-tolerance' is a term that sounds comforting: we've seen what'll happen if we give these kids leniency, so let's get tough on them now. If we're talking about teenagers (or even younger children), however, then we are talking about people who are still changing and learning as they grow. To teach them at this stage that they are so different from the rest of society that they need to be seperated from it; that there are no scales of grey surrounding acceptable behaviour, only legal and illegal; that the way to deal with a problem is to punish the person creating the problem; that there are easy answers to any social problem; even that the idea of 'tolerance', in whatever context, is an undesirable idea, is to push them even further away from what we want them to become. Assuming, of course, that we want them to become contributing members of society, and we don't just want them to go away.

That last paragraph was quite long and poorly constructed. In which senses it mirrored the whole of this post. I blame the late hour.

As a final point, I'd like to confirm that I'm not offering any easy solutions of my own (or indeed, in this post, any solutions at all). I believe there are things we can do to help reduce anti-social behaviour, but I don't think any of them are quick or easy. Maybe I'll even write some of them on here at some point.

I want to try and write more about this kind of issue (and other issues), and any future posts will probably overlap with this one and with each other. For the record, my views are complex and changeable. They will not be encompassed by any one thing I write on here, and they may change in the futue. Whatever I currently think, however, I'm always up for a debate.

Six little words

I've returned this evening from a five-day "knowledge booster course" intended to prepare me for the year-long Secondary English PGCE I will start in just over a week. My head is swimming with grammar, creative writing and children's literature, and no doubt I will share much of that in the next few days (maybe even here). But for now there's one thing I got from the course that I wanted to share as soon as I received it.

One exercise on the course involved us writing a narrative of a hundred words on anything in twenty minutes. We later returned to the narrative to edit and refine it, and one thing that was emphasised was the removal of unnecessary words to add impact to our writing. The course leader then posed these questions: could we reduce our story down to one sentence, losing as little of the meaning as possible? Could we reduce it to six words?

This led from something Ernest Hemingway was challenged to do - write a six word story. Many other writers have also attempted it. I'll tell you Hemingway's at the end, as I believe it's by far the most powerful, but first, here are all the other six word stories I was given this week:

"Forgive me!" "What for?" "Never mind." - John Updike

Eyeballed me, killed him. Slight exaggeration. - Irvine Welsh

Satan, Jehovah, fifteen rounds. A draw. - Norman Mailer

"Welcome to Moeshe Christiansen's Bar Mitzvah." - Andrea Seigel

Grass, cow, calf, milk, cheese, France. - Rick Moody

He remembered something that never happened. - A. M. Holmes

Saigon hotel. Decades later. He weeps. - Robert Olen Butler

"I love you..." "Love ya back" - Courtney Eldridge

She gave. He took. He forgot. - Tobias Woolf

You are not shit. You are! - 'Memoir', Jerry Stahl

All her life: half a house. - Jamie O'Neill

Poison; meditation; skiing; ants -- nothing worked. - Edward Albee

My nemesis is dead. Now what? - Michael Cunningham

I saw. I conquered. Couldn't come. - David Lodge

"Cyanide? Bitter almonds." He knew. How? - Brian Bouldrey

Father died. Mother triumphed. I left. - Mary Gaitskill

"You? Her? No dice, fat boy." - Pinckney Benedict

Oh, that? It's nothing. Not contagious. - Augusten Burroughs

Mother's Day came, doubling Oedipus' pleasure. - Bruce Benderson

Tossed remorselessly, whiffle balls sure hurt. - J. T. LeRoy

As she fell, her mind wandered. - Rebecca Miller

It's negative. Say hi to Mom. - Ben Greenman

Horny professor. Failing coed. No tenure. - 'A short history of academia' by Sue Grafton

Shiva destroys Earth. "Well, that's that." - A. G. Pasquella

Havana's no place for hockey, coach. - Nicholas Weinstock

As you can probably see, the point of the exercise is not necessarily what is said, but what is left out and inferred by the reader. On the whole, incredibly clever. Here's Hemingways:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

I wish I could blog like a pro

I link to my cousin's blog too much to really be healthy, but, well, she's just so damn good at blogging.

It's too late to actually comment intelligently on these, but great articles on facebook:
http://meish.org/2007/08/16/facebook-and-the-perils-of-prodigious-sociability/

and TV-watching-schedules:
http://meish.org/2007/08/21/media-consumption-little-often-or-feast-famine/

I may have used the term 'blog' too much in this post.

Ho hum.

It always irritates me when people describe themselves as bored. No, wait... not always, but sometimes. Let me try and elaborate.

Being bored is essentially being in a state where you cannot do anything of interest to you. As such, I have no problem with people who claim they are bored at work. I am sometimes bored at work (though not often, given a liberal workplace and a connection to the internet).

However, it seems like people (including my friends) describe themselves as having been bored during a weekend, or a holiday from uni, or even during a party or evening out. This seems pretty bizarre to me, given that since I got an internet connection in my room, I have had more things I want to do than I will ever have time for. Even without the internet, there are a huge number of books and films that I want to consume and will never have a chance to.

I accept that there are some times when you may not feel like doing a particular thing, but there is surely never a time that you feel so unenthusiastic about reading a book, watching a movie, browsing the internet, writing, drawing, learning a new skill, going for a walk, calling a friend or just sitting in silence and letting your thoughts wander that you are reduced to sitting sullenly in front of MTV, complaining about how dull your life is.

Don't even get me started on people who complain of being bored while at a party.

Ultimately, someone with free time and freedom of movement in the developed world who considers themselves bored, is just not trying hard enough.

I hate compensation culture

From yesterday's Metro:

The organiser of the world's only plank walking competition was baffled after insurers ordered him to warn entrants they 'might get wet'. John Nurden, chairman of the annual World Walking The Plank Championship in the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, was told he would have to cancel Sunday's contest if he did not ask contestants to sign a form accepting the risk of a soaking. 'It's unbelievable really but it's a sign of the times - the compensation culture', Mr. Kent said.

This story, and others that crop up fairly regularly, really help to demonstrate my loathing for compensation culture. When a walking the plank competition is ordered - not even advised, but told in no uncertain terms - to get its entrants to sign a disclaimer about getting wet, isn't it time to see that there's something very wrong somewhere? In a way I don't blame the insurance company. You'd think it would go without saying that in a competition where you jump off a plank of wood into water, you are almost certainly going to get fairly wet. But if someone decided to make a case that this wasn't made clear, and wanted compensation for their wetness, without the disclaimer I wouldn't be surprised if they won.

Compensation culture is one of my most hated things about the world today. Maybe it's because I'm planning to have a career as a teacher, and compensation culture dictates so much of what you can and can't do as a teacher to the point that you aren't allowed to comfort a child who has hurt themself or has received some upsetting news, in case you cause emotional damage or were seen to be acting inappropriately towards the child. Or maybe it's just because it's become elevated to ludicrous levels and is really, really annoying.

pwnt pt. 2

Incredible video of a battle between a pride of lions and a herd of buffalo in South Africa, and, as if that wasn't enough, a couple of crocodiles get involved. This'll teach the lions to try and mess with the baby buffalos next time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

pwnt

These pix have won teh interwebs.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goopymart/sets/72157594362502502/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/apelad/sets/72157594388426362/

Ship of Fools

Found this article via Enter the Jabberwock. The former is a very scary article about American neo-cons. The latter is a great site.

Edit: Also via Jabberwock, a while back, is this real/photoshopped comparison. Watch her left arm particularly.

thetelf 2.0

This post is partially intended to get that last post off the front page. Ich... cringworthy. It is also partially to announce that the new version of thetelf.co.uk is now available:

http://www.thetelf.co.uk/thetelf/new/new

It's not entirely finished (no comments, no profile editing, no IE support), but I figured that since no one was really using the old version, it would be worth moving the new version in earlier than I might. There's lots of cool stuff in it, assuming that you're using my computer. No guarentees on other people's systems, though.

Having said that, I forgot it was not IE compliant. Gah! Gonna have to get that sorted if it's going to be in general circulation...

Either way, yay for new web 2.0 thetelf.co.uk