Sam Kington

Taji has noticed.

Last summer, when we took the dogs to France for the first time, we put up a quick and dirty fence to keep them in. It was a temporary job only, and in any case wasn’t sturdy enough to keep Taji in; if he ran straight at it he could probably send it crashing down.

When I was down last spring I talked to our builders and arranged for them to put a fence in. It wasn’t up when we arrived yesterday, but a couple of guys turned up this morning and the fence is now up.

We let the dogs loose, and they ran around like crazed things. Soon enough Taji came bounding towards the fence - and crashed straight into it. He’d clearly seen the posts, but not the netting. Epic fail - or, from our point of view, epic win, given that the fence didn’t budge, and he now doesn’t want to go anywhere near it, looking at it with distrust.

One of them may be less authentic than the other.

Diagnosing how and why The Sims 3 kept on regularly crashing.

I recently acquired The Sims 3, which all in all is fantastic fun. I should clarify that I first downloaded a pirate version of it, because I didn’t want to wait until it finally came out, then bought a legit copy as soon as it was out in this country. (I’m even more legit than that, in fact; Cleodhna had vicariously pre-ordered it for me - her machine isn’t new enough to run it - so we soon shall have two copies.)

And the funny thing is: the pirate version worked better. After I wiped the old copy of The Sims 3 and installed the new one from the DVD, installed the patch, downloaded the new neighbourhood and started playing from scratch, the game started randomly crashing.

And this is where IT guy mode kicks in.

I’d downloaded an application to run Windows games on Mac OS X natively, and I saw its window popped up after the Sims 3 crashed, asking me whether I wanted to run the installer on the DVD. “Maybe this app is interfering with The Sims 3’s own Windows-emulation stuff”, I thought, so I deleted said application (the fact that I can’t remember its name indicates how much I was using it), and removed a random start-up application which looked related just in case. I installed some software updates, rebooted, and tried again - and the game kept on crashing.

OK, time to get serious. I was starting to wonder why Mac OS wasn’t complaining about applications having unexpectedly quit, so I started looking around in the belly of the filesystem for recently-updated logs. /var/log/system.log and /var/log/secure.log had both recently updated, so I started tailing them in a Terminal window (i.e. showing the most recent updates as soon as they happened).

Right, back to the game, saving regularly. Sure enough, I’ve played maybe half an hour or something and I’m suddenly unceremoniously dumped back to the desktop; and the logs are saying something that I’d seen previously when looking through them, but hadn’t wanted to ascribe culplicity to because I wasn’t sure exactly when The Sims previously crashed, and it could have been a coincidence.

“Ejected Time Machine disk image.”

I realised that this wasn’t The Sims 3 crashing. This was The Sims 3 quitting. My best guess is that this is another example of copy-protection being badly implemented and stiffing legitimate customers who happened to have not exactly the same setup as the testers. (Although Time Machine, touted as one of the main features of Mac OS 10.5, is pretty damn common, so you’ve got to fault the testers as well.)

The Sims 3 requires the original DVD to be in the drive, or it won’t start. (My pirated version came with a crack to remove or disable this code.) Apparently it also checks whether the disc is in the drive at regular intervals, to make sure that you don’t sneakily eject the disc and then run the game on someone else’s machine. It doesn’t poll the drive itself, possibly because that might involve the CD spinning up for no obvious good reason, which makes an annoying noise and reduces battery life or laptop users. Instead, it listens for system messages saying that its disc is being ejected. If it sees one of those, it up and quits, plain and simple, which, from Mac OS’s point of view, it was perfectly entitled to do, which is why there was no crash report.

The problem is that whoever wrote this was lazy. They assumed that the only volume anyone could eject would be their own disc, so didn’t look any closer.

So Time Machine does its thing, while the game is running, and having backed up the latest bunch of files, disconnects from the Time Capsule - and The Sims 3 thinks it’s being hacked. It doesn’t even tell you “you know you can’t play this game without the disc, you know” or anything useful like that, it just quits with no explanation.

To test this, I switched off Time Machine and started the game up, and it’s behaved as well as the pirated version ever since. Except that I can’t back up my machine.

(In a supreme example of the Internet’s version of staircase wit, once I knew what the problem might be, searching for “sims 3 crashes time machine mac” on Google resulted in http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=7732700 as the fourth hit.)

Which side of it you are on matters a great deal.

It’s 9:40pm, and it’s still light. The train has just passed Carluke, and, before that, fields full of cows and horses happily eating grass. I’m now gazing out at a field full of sheep and lambs.

Just a couple of months ago, on pretty much the same train journey, I’d have had nothing to look at but darkness and the occasional cluster of lights. This time, though, as the train slows, getting into the Greater Glasgow area, I get to look at Hawthorns in flower. Oh look, there’s a couple of swans.

Two months ago, coming up from a London in the throes of spring towards a Glasgow still shrugging off winter, barely North of Watford suddenly all the lights went out. This time around, thanks to a change in season, I got a double-whammy.

In a summer-ish time of year, getting on a train at London and travelling North, the passage of time is nothing compared to the change of latitude. The remaining length of the day locally increases significantly faster than the total amount of time spent in the train. Thus, almost four hours since the train left London in mid-afternoon, it’s barely twilight.

If only the nice steward guy had refilled my glass, this would be a perfect night.

Don’t miss the mouseover jokes.

I keep on meaning to buy some of the guy’s greeting cards.

It’s stupendously easier than it used to be.

Vali is back. She’s sitting on my lap, and from my current angle you wouldn’t know that anything had happened. In a bit she’ll shift herself and lie on the other side, at which point I’ll see the vast expanse of shaved skin, and the ugly stitches that are an unfortunate but necessary result of having a leg amputated.

She gets around fine on three legs; indeed, as per the vet’s suggestion, she’s probably doing better on three whole legs than on three legs plus a useless leg that hurt. A couple of days ago she was sleeping on the bed close to me as I read, and had what I at first thought was a fit but I think was just epic annoyance (I imagine those stitches itch); otherwise she behaves as it nothing happened, other than I took her to the vet’s for a few days and they lopped her entire front-right leg off. She was back at the vet’s for a check-up, and everything’s fine; no unusual swelling or complications. Even better, she’s quite happy for me to grind up her antibiotics and mix them with her normal food, so I don’t have to worry about forcing it down her throat.

At the vet’s, they asked me how old she was, and I couldn’t tell them. I know that we got her mother Helen in the summer of 1994, but that’s because we used to name cats with date-sensitive names. I know Vali was born shortly afterwards, but when exactly? I have no idea.

What’s fascinating is how this is no longer a problem that we have these days. People tweet, blog, or post to Facebook this sort of thing (e.g. Habibi or, at most, some months after the fact, Taji). I found a shoe box of old photos in the attic here at Merlhiot; a fair few of the photos meant nothing to me because I had no idea who some of the people in them were, and in a generation’s time even more of them will be unfathomable because the only people who could have told you will be dead or significantly difficult to get in contact with. Hell, for the vast majority of them, my family hadn’t mastered the fiendish art of writing names, places and dates on the back of the prints. These days, all photos are automatically dated, and probably tagged, either by the author or by nosy busybodies on Facebook.

With a few rare exceptions, incidentally, the photos in the shoe box do not include any that I took myself. This is almost certainly a good thing, as when I was a teenager I decided that taking photos of people was cheesy and a waste of time, so decided to take photos of interesting things instead. In retrospect, this was a bad idea, as a) I’m not a good photographer (and was an ever worse one then), but b) I’d quite like to remember what people looked like back then. Bah. Stupid spotty self-centred teenage me.

These days, of course, it would all be on Facebook or Twitter, and even if you didn’t take photos of people, other people would, and you’d end up linked to them. I love living in the future.

“Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war.”

Via Hilzoy at the Washington Monthly, The World’s New Numbers talks about current demographic trends and how they’ve suddenly changed. For instance, Britain and France are both seeing their birth rates skyrocket - in part thanks to 30- and 40-year-old mothers belatedly deciding to have children - and should catch up Germany by the mid-21st century (a situation that should be familiar to everyone who was aware of population statistics before Germany cheated by annexing East Germany). And this isn’t because of immigration, recent or semi-recent: “Broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations.”

Meanwhile, though, Italy is still screwed.

And Russia is even worse off: an unholy trifecta of HIV, alcoholism and bad health care mean “a very large question mark must be placed on the economic prospects of a country whose young male work force looks set to decrease by half.”

Meanwhile, the epicentre of the population explosion is shifting from asia to sub-Saharan Africa, and China’s one-child policy may result in India overtaking it by mid-century. And here’s your grim meathook future moment:

There is another development that could affect future Indian and Chinese birthrates: the use of sonograms to ascertain the sex of a fetus. Wider availability of this technology has permitted an increase in gender- specific abortions. The official Chinese figures suggest that 118 boys are now being born in China for every 100 girls. As a result, millions of Chinese males may never find a mate with whom to raise a conventional family. The Chinese call such lonely males “bare branches.” The social and political implications of having such a large population of unattached men are unclear, but they are not likely to be happy.

[…]

In a recent paper Hudson and den Boer asked, “Will it matter to India and China that by the year 2020, 12 to 15 percent of their young adult males will not be able to ‘settle down’ because the girls that would have grown up to be their wives were disposed of by their societies instead?” They answered, “The rate of criminal behavior of unmarried men is many times higher than that of married men; marriage is a reliable predictor of a downturn in reckless, antisocial, illegal, and violent behavior by young adult males.” Resulting cross- border “bridal raids,” rising crime rates, and widespread prostitution may come to define what could be called the geopolitics of sexual frustration.

On a more positive note, the article posits one justifiable reason for putting back the retirement age (and thus saving money on paying for people’s pensions): people are living longer because of better diets, general health, and medical technology, but that also means that people aren’t as decrepit as they used to be when they reached 60, 65, or whatever the retirement age is in your country. So, rather than this being an attempt by corporate-friendly governments to claw back your hard-earned pension, it’s merely a reasonable correction to policies established in days where people died much younger. i.e. this isn’t just “Oh fuck, the Baby Boomers are all retiring at once”, it’s a far more interesting “hey, 60 isn’t when you punch out for the last time and expect to die soon any more” problem.

Which is not to say that evil corporate lobbyist scum whores aren’t out to get our pensions, of course. Of course they are. But consider this: many retirees look for new things to do after they retire (or adamantly refuse to retire), because they feel that if they stopped trying to do new things with their brain, they’d wither away and die. Is it so wrong to say “maybe you should carry on working, given that you can”?

And failing that, perhaps should we consider the flip-side of things like AmeriCorps and other schemes where we get young people to volunteer. I expect that when I’m 64 whoever was previously employing me may no longer need me around, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t have anything to give back to society; and after years of the rat race where Gordon Gecko-style levels of greed are only mildly condemned, rather than pilloried from a great moral height, perhaps some gentle nudging along the lines of “Why don’t you help this worthy project with their web site, rather than sitting at home ranting at bloggers?” would be a useful thing to attempt.

They’ve been a fixture at Merlhiot for the last 15-odd years.

People from the generation before mine have a flashbulb memory: they remember where they were when they heard JFK was shot. For (then-) Labour voters of my age, it’s John Smith. I remember walking down Kirklee Road on a bright sunny day in Glasgow and seeing a newspaper headline saying John Smith was dead. I don’t have any memories like that for e.g. Princess Diana (but then, while England went to pieces, Scots didn’t care). It’s just John Smith.

When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you and umption.

I did a lot of travelling around as a teenager (I lived in France and my best friend Tom still lived in London), and I made a lot of mistakes. I missed trains, lost my wallet, ended up in the wrong station (Margaret and Bruce drove down to Toulouse station to pick me up, only to find me happily asleep in a parked train after a railway worker took pity on me). Fair enough; it’s only by making mistakes that you learn anything, and I think my parents reckoned that me making them early was a decent investment; once I started travelling around as an adult, I’d know a lot about how things work, what to look out for, and what to never, ever do.

This guy delivers

It’s the little things, like the fact that the llamas on the roof are apparently strapped down with bungee cords, that make this for me.

Be sure to click through for the comments on theweaselking’s livejournal, which is where I found this.

Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester

John Scalzi mentioned Max Raabe over the weekend, and I finally got around to listening today. ‘Max Raabe performs Tainted Love as if the Weimar Republic somehow made it to 1981’ is his description, and it’s pretty accurate. There’s a fair few Youtube “videos” of his songs around; my favourite of all his covers is (currently) Super Trouper. The Apple Store has some more tantalising covers, including what, from a 30-second clip, sounds like a fantastic version of Eurythmics’ There must be an angel.

I love this sort of stuff. Playing 80s pop songs in the style of a swing band from the 30s is a form of educated musical humour that is a sign of health in our cultural discourse. And it’s also the sort of thing that was almost impossible to get a decent audience for before the Internet and the realisation that, no matter how obscure your chosen interest, there are probably a thousand or so people somewhere that agree with you completely and want to find out what you’re going to do next.

Oh, and their cover of Let’s talk about sex is pretty damn good also.

The only sensible response to disease and mayhem is to make egregious puns.

Cleodhna came down with a cold last weekend; a particularly nasty one, which gave her a tremendous earache, and then gunged up her ears to a point where she was almost or completely deaf in at least one ear for a couple of days. It looks like I’m coming down with it as well.

Douglas Adams and John Lloyd wrote a book called The Meaning of Liff, which was about finding place names nobody uses, and using them to describe concepts that we all know about but haven’t found a word for. For instance, “Massachusetts” are the things we’re looking for when we blow our nose then open the handkerchief; “nice and Kentucky” refers to a situation where you e.g. slot a book into a remaining space in a bookshelf and it fits exactly and nicely.

Well, in the last couple of hours my nose has decided that what the world needed above anything else was more snot. I’ve found a random supermarket plastic bag, and a gap in the corner of the office between the book shelf and the disused old PowerMacs where the plastic bag does indeed fit nice and kentucky. To add to the veneer of sophistication, I have a roll of aloe vera-infused toilet roll on the desk. Occasionally I’ll tear a piece off, blow my nose, and deposit the resulting offering into the plastic bag, like a ticket for a Fungus the Bogeyman-organised raffle that nobody wants to win.

Now, given that on Wednesday Cleodhna and I are due to go to Brian’s for a game, and either of us might still be contagious, and the last thing a parent of a 5-month-old baby wants is for it to catch a cold that causes earache (because a baby with earache cries all the fucking time), this is arguably shitty timing. By the weekend we both should have recovered (my immune system, and my lack of asthma, means I don’t have to worry about coughing up interestingly-textured goo), which is good because that’s Jamie’s wedding, and the last thing you want to be at a wedding is an unhappy, no fun, Plague Mary. On the following Monday I head off to France for a fortnight. They’d better not have swine flu when I arrive.

(If you’re worried about swine flu, check out Making Light. See also a commenter’s link to a possible link between industrial-level pork production and disease, and another diary from dailykos on the same subject. Note that so-called moderates stripped pandemic funding from the recent US stimulus bill.)

Then again, perhaps I’m lucky after all. They say that when there’s a real bad-ass flu epidemic, healthy young people die disproportionally because their immune system reacts to such a degree that it ends up killing the host. In which case already being slightly ill might be a good thing. (Certainly xkcd agrees.)

In which case we have nothing major to worry about, and I should forward a few sick jokes (something that email stopped doing a few years ago). e.g. RT@ArianeSherine “If we’re calling Swine Flu an “epigdemic” & “hamdemic”, am I allowed 2 talk abt having the trots & being cured by oinkment?”

Or, from Warren Ellis: “Adult film industry invades swine-flu decimated Mexico, converts empty homes into sets, establishes the pornocracy of Sexico”

Or, my favourite, “Don’t worry, I’m only giving sinners the swine flu.”

How do I know this? Because I’m following God on Twitter.

Part 94 in an occasional series.

Taji is not a bad dog. Well, not inherently. He was just badly brought up. He jumps up at people, we still can’t trust him around joggers and other dogs so he has to be on lead all the time, and he just doesn’t understand the concept of not being allowed to take things off surfaces. This is something you have to teach a puppy at an early age or they just won’t ever grok it, and his previous owners clearly didn’t teach him this valuable distinction. They taught him to wrestle, though, and to drink alcohol, which is nice.

(Our next dog, after a rescue dog that barks at any black dog, ever, and another rescue dog that takes things off tables and likes to drink out of Cleodhna’s wine glass? Definitely a puppy from a reputable breeder, that we can train properly. I think we’re due that.)

A case in point: yesterday I wandered into the kitchen to find a) Taji busy licking at something on the floor, and b) torn fragments of the wrapper to a pack of butter I’d bought only earlier that day. Meaning that not only had Taji wandered into the kitchen and grabbed an almost entire pack of butter off the counter, he’d also eaten half of the wrapper in his eagerness to ingest far too much fat than is good for anyone.

Earlier this evening, the inevitable second act of this cautionary tale occurred. Summoned by cries from the other room along the lines of “Get away from that!”, I hastened to the living room to find Cleodhna fending Taji off from a repulsive yellow pool of slightly butter-smelling dog vomit.

This is the sort of situation where human and dog psychology deviate. Most of the time we can agree on a few basic principles: sun, food, warmth, comfy beds good; rain, cold, annoying other people / dogs, pain bad; people stabbing needles into you bad if you know it’s coming. Cleodhna successfully distracted Fat Petunia at the vet’s the other day by feeding him very small treats very slowly (so he had to nibble), and he only bucked once, right at the end, when he suddenly realised “Oh my God, you’ve had a needle in me for how long now?” Similarly, I remember as a 10-year-old child suffering agony while a travelling nurse injected some evil substance in my arm, millilitre by millilitre, to check whether I need a BCG vaccine; when, a week later, it turned out I needed it, and we went to our family doctor, he had the needle in and out of my arm so quickly that I didn’t notice he was doing it while he was talking to me about other things.

At other times, though, dogs just think differently from us. We think “that smells foul”, they think “that smells lots!” and proceed to roll in fox shit, dead pigeon, rotting fish or whatever. We think “damn, that pile of yellow goop that Taji just threw up makes me want to throw up in turn, it’s so foul”; Taji thinks “hey, look, I threw up a bunch of stuff; I should eat it up again just in case it stays down this time”.

Which is why, while Cleodhna found a handkerchief, doused it with strong-smelling menthol oil of some kind, and proceeded to clean up the area of the living room bombarded with yellow fatty dog vomit, my job was to make hot water available to souse dog puke disposal utensils, hold bin liners open so Cleodhna could get rid of barf-infused newspapers, and most importantly physically drag Taji away from the living room and lock him in the bedroom to forestall any further valiant attempts at Operation Dog Chunder Plunder.

Taji is currently very happily sat on the sofa in the living room as if nothing traumatic happened - which, from his perspective, may well be true. He may well have forgotten all about it.

Sigh.

(Despite all of that, we’re still pretty lucky. See, for example, fucking sweet potatoes and dogs in elk. We got off lightly.)

Twitter shortens URLs even when it doesn’t need to.

I’ve started to use Twitter again, mostly as a way of doing quick linkdump posts that aren’t anything more than “Hey, I found this cool thing, go have a look”, but with occasional random chatty things as well. I was chuffed to bits when I randomly typed “I have achieved one of my goals in life. I have worked out how to play Dancing Queen in a minor key and have it sound creepy and disturbing.” and found that it was exactly 140 characters long. (Which doesn’t always happen.)

Twitter’s 140 character limit was originally a technical requirement imposed by the fact that the original idea of using SMS as a transport mechanism meant that a message, sending username included, could only be 160 characters long. 140 was, I suspect, derived by saying “this is the future, usernames are longer than 8 characters these days, and we need a colon; how about we say we reserve 20 characters for the username, colon, and future expansion”.

And these days a Twitter Pro with no post length restriction sounds plausible enough at a first glance, but was never likely to be anything other than a clever April Fool’s prank. There are other reasons for why Twitter made it big - one plausible reason is that by telling you when you’re being followed, but not when someone stops following you, Twitter avoids the problem earlier social networks had with the social stigma of being unfriended. But its enforced lapidary nature is surely a major part of what it means to tweet, and be twittered. So the 140 character limit is probably here to stay.

Still, there are problems with this, mainly when it comes to passing around URLs. There are plenty of URLs that are longer than 140 characters - while the SEO-friendly Amazon URL for the 30th anniversary edition of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (to choose a random example from Amazon’s front page just now) is the fairly trim http://www.amazon.co.uk/Selfish-Gene-30th-Anniversary/dp/0199291152, the URL I get from Amazon’s front page is e.g. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0199291152/ref=s9topdgwtr01?pfrdm=xxxxxxxxxxx&pfrds=center-8&pfrdr=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&pfrdt=101&pfrdp= xxxxxxxxx&pfrd_i=xxxxxx (potentially personally-identifiable information occulted). Plenty of URLs are Enterprisy rather than friendly, and in any case if you want to talk about this cool website you found, chances are you want the URL to merely be a springboard for what you have to say, which means it should be as short as possible.

Twitter’s default solution is to turn URLs into shorter versions, via tinyurl.com. Tinyurl.com is a mature site, and lets you see where an otherwise anonymous link is taking you, but a number of URL-shortening sites have sprung up recently that are supposedly better. The problem is, these URL shortener sites are the wrong solution, with problems of their own: just as we were getting used to how URLs work, and learning not to click on suspicious-looking links in phishing emails, suddenly we’re back to having to blindly click on links, and in cases where we’re following links from a months- or years-old post, hope that the link still works. And that’s assuming that the URL shortener service is well-intentioned and benign, which is not always the case (Digg appear to be in the process of cleaning up their act since then, though). Hence why there’s an emerging standard for specifying canonical short URLs, so you can paste a huge long URL into Twitter, or a Twitter client, and it will automatically fetch what the remote site says is the canonical short URL, rather than generating a new one via a service that may not necessarily be reliable or trustworthy. (In Amazon’s case it might tell you that http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0199291152 is good enough.)

All of which is a very roundabout way of kvetching about the way Twitter’s website chooses to shorten URLs. I just posted the folllowing tweet about a fun Youtube video I found via Boing Boing:

How to make a baby: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luf6ZepNY6o (via http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/20/revealed-where-babie.html)

That message is 131 characters long. Yet Twitter decided to shorten it to

How to make a baby: http://tinyurl.com/dgxhup (via http://tinyurl.com/d35ltm

Twitter didn’t need to do that; the message was already within the 140 character limit. But in doing so, it made two adjustments:

1. It shortened the YouTube URL from 42 characters to 25 characters, but threw away the important information that this was something on YouTube.

2. It decided that the ending ) was part of the URL, so if you follow that link to Boing Boing, you get a page not found error.

And of course by turning the URLs into something else, your browser no longer knew that you’d seen that site already.

Of course, the savage, bitter irony is that I’m going to post to Twitter that I just posted this blog entry, and because I haven’t patched Movable Type to generate authoritative short URLs on illuminated.co.uk I’m going to have to use a third-party URL shortener.

#amazonfailfail; or, RT @oldcodger: You kids, get off my lawn!

Flame wars are endemic to the written Internet. With societal restraints removed, and far fewer audible or visual cues to pick up on to realise that someone’s not being entirely serious, one misunderstanding or less than artful phrasing can quickly cause a mild disagreement to snowball into a spittle-flecked mass outburst of opprobrium and hatred.

This much we’ve known for a while. I read somewhere that one mailing list operator prevented flame wars by the very simple method of delaying emails by 5 minutes. By the time you got the snarky reply to your snarky comment, you’d probably cooled down, and calm heads prevailed.

Of course, nobody emails any more; these days, all the cool kids are using Facebook and Twitter. And we find ourselves needing to learn the same lessons again.

Last Sunday (Easter Sunday, when pretty much everyone at Amazon was on holiday), some people on the Internet suddenly noticed that a metric shitload of gay- and lesbian-themed books had suddenly effectively vanished from Amazon’s searches and sales rankings. Twitter was suddenly engulfed by a flurry of #amazonfail posts; for more information see Making Light and its comment thread. See also Moments in Time - and again - for a whole plethora of other links.

As soon as Amazon management got back to work, it became apparent that the whole thing was in fact a stupid mistake caused by a data entry / business logic over-reaction that went horribly wrong. And in retrospect, although you can argue that the very fact that whole sections of gay- and lesbian-friendly literature were catalogued the way they were made them peculiarly vulnerable to mass-delisting, this is arguably something that could have happened to any company. One mistake, no matter how dramatic its consequences, doesn’t automatically turn a previously reasonable and tolerant company into a seething morass of homophobia and bigotry.

Clay Shirky reflects on the whole debacle (via Daring Fireball):

I have been thinking about the internet as hard as I can for the better part of two decades, and for the latter half of that time, I’ve been thinking about the problems of categorization systems, and it never occurred to me that the possible explanation for systemic bias might be something having to do with a technological system instead of a human one, that a changed classification in the Amazon database could trigger the change in status of tens of thousands of books.

I assumed (again, vaguely) that Amazon themselves had not adopted an anti-gay posture, and I recognized the possibility that this might be a trolling attack, but the idea that this was an event of mainly technological propagation, rather than a coordinated bit of anti-gay bias, simply escaped me. This isn’t because I am a generally stupid person; it was because I was, on Sunday, a specifically stupid person. When a lifetime of intellectual labor and study came up against a moment of emotional engagement, emotion won, in a rout.

As the old-school bloogers say, read the whole thing. I mean, you should read Clay Shirky if you’re at all interested in the Internet and smart people anyway, and I’m not entirely sure why I don’t have him in my RSS reader didn’t have him in my RSS reader until just now.

I found myself seeking out friends or colleagues of mine that were on Twitter today. I can see the appeal (and the time-sink) of microblogging, but I think we need to be aware of the limitations of the medium. And not just because URL shorteners destroy the Internet.

NSFW if you know what it means. If you’re a Republican, go right ahead.

(LiveJournal ate this entry. Here's the entire thing.)

Exhibit A: the Rachel Maddow show.

Obviously.

The constant repetition of the poor guy’s grisly demise is oddly fascinating. It’s like that joke about how someone is mugged in New York every 5 minutes - must suck to be him.

In the comments, someone finds this Youtube clip which makes even less sense (it doesn’t help that the YouTube logo overwrites some of the crucial parts of the subtitles):

You won’t read it anywhere else, and it appears to be true.

A few days ago I read a widely-blogged article by Johann Hari about the dark side of Dubai: the glittering towers have been built by effectively slave labour, financed by a non-renewable source of debt, run by an archaic government that tolerates no opposition, in a desert environment polluted by sewage that is fast running out of water. The most striking theme of the (long, but worthwhile) article is the sheer number of people that he talks to who either don’t see, or don’t care about, the monstrous level of exploitation and racism this society is built upon.

Today I read that the pirate problem in Somalia is also not what it seems (via jwz. Amongst other things, in the absence of a proper government, Europeans are dumping nuclear and chemical waste off the shores of Somalia (this much is backed up by an official UN report (PDF) someone posted in the Independent comments, and reposted in jwz’s comments - page 10 in the PDF, labelled page 135), and looting their fishing resources at an unsustainable level (not documented as yet, but given the EU’s past history in e.g. Mauritania, that doesn’t sound at all surprising).

And it turns out this is the same guy that interviewed Tony Blair for Attitude magazine (they’ve put it behind a subscription paywall, so here’s Hari’s take on it).

All in all, I think this is someone worth reading. Bookmark the Independent’s link to his columns, or put the related RSS feed into your feed reader.

Russell T Davies’s plots continue to have major, fundamental holes.

It seems that Russell T Davies is at it again. Tonight’s Doctor Who special, “Planet of the Dead”, was immense fun, had a great companion, and was in many ways classic Doctor Who (the Doctor’s stuck in a red double-decker bus in the middle of the desert, and the Big Bad is only minutes away - unless the Doctor can sort things somehow). But many, many things appear to have been stuck in the plot because they sounded sort of cool, without much, if any, thought to the ramifications.

First of all, what sort of half-arsed security system do they have for the gold cup that Lady Christina steals? Count the security flaws:

There are four static guards, who can see neither any other guard (so won’t know if the guard gets knocked out) nor the cup they’re supposed to be guarding (so don’t realise it’s stolen). There aren’t any guards patrolling to add some random element; the guards are in a routine, predictable situation. The laser barrier starts above a guard’s knee-height and is therefore trivial to slide under, or for that matter jump over if you’re good enough (the high jump world record is just over 8 feet); it’s not a complex barrier stopping anyone getting in from either side, it’s just a fence. There are no motion detectors or infra-red heat detectors or anything like that. There are no cameras. The cup is stolen using the exact same method as Indiana Jones uses to steal the Golden Idol from a pre-industrial dungeon in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Our heroine steals the cup by abseiling in, in exactly the same way that Tom Cruise did in the first Mission Impossible film, except that she doesn’t have to worry about body temperature or anything. In truth, though, any passing vandal could have had a similarly devastating effect on the value of the cup by merely wandering in with a crossbow and shooting the damn thing (gold, remember, is remarkably soft for a metal), as there isn’t even a glass case around the damn thing, even though it’s supposedly on public view in the middle of a busy museum. What’s to stop some random member of the public grabbing it and doing a runner? Apparently nothing, unless they had a perfectly serviceable glass case and velvet rope during the day time, but took them away just after closing time so they could wheel out the world’s most easily-penetrable laser field system.

The aliens, though, are even worse.

They’re supposed to be 100 miles away, and are so fast that they’ll “be here in 20 minutes” (i.e. fly at 300mph), but when we actually see them they’re moving at 30-50mph tops. Oh, and they’re moving with a swimming motion (like the stingrays they’re based upon), as if they didn’t have to worry about pesky gravity, despite us being informed that, to armour themselves against the damage they’ll take by passing through the wormhole, they’ve infused their exoskeleton with metal. The wormhole is some sort of emergent property of there being billions of these things, going faster and faster around the planet until they go back in time and rescue Lois make some magic door happen, but why aren’t they creating wormholes all over the place? What’s so special about the place they’ve created this one?

They turned up less than a year ago and started eating everything they could find until an advanced civilisation of 100 billion people was completely wiped out, yet they’re vulnerable to bullets. How come the native civilisation didn’t realise that a whole bunch of flying creatures had suddenly appeared and was e.g. eating their skyscrapers?

For that matter, how come the ant-headed guys didn’t think, when they turned up in orbit around the planet, “Hang on, this planet’s supposed to be green, but instead it’s orange”? And how likely is it, given that they had an entire planet to choose from, that they’d have crashed just two sand dunes over from the bus? Even assuming that there’s something special about the capital city of this planet, which is why the wormhole apparently turned up there, how come the flight path, and subsequent crash path, took them right to the centre of the city? (Even if you assume that they somehow managed to go straight down from orbit, which you can’t do without burning up, I’m guessing they put the space ports for this sort of thing somewhere other than in the middle of the most important city on the planet, which, on a planet of 100 billion people, must be pretty big.)

The thing is, there are a number of ways you could have explained at least some of these, if you cared about basic science, but as we’ve seen before, Russell T Davies hates science. You could talk about their flight patterns generating waveforms, and at the point where they all harmonise, there the wormhole appears. (There could of course be multiple possible wormholes, but maybe they’re too far away for us to get there, and this one happens to be the most advanced.) Given that there’s talk of life cycles of what is clearly a hive species, you could easily have a large number of very, very fast fliers creating the conditions for the wormhole, and the actual dangerous creatures being the queens of the species, who move slower but are armoured against the crossing. You’ll still have the problem of explaining how these creatures can find enough food to feed billions of themselves (or, conversely, if they can feed off anything, including metal, why they aren’t burrowing into the tasty, tasty metal core of the planet), but at least you’ll have shown some sort of effort.

Incidentally, one area where I’m inclined to give Russell T Davies a pass is the whole Faraday cage thing. When the protagonists discuss why it is that they could come through the wormhole intact while the bus driver got skeletonised, both Lady Christina and the unemployed kid postulate that it’s because the metal chassis of the bus forms a Faraday cage. The Doctor them promptly dismisses that idea, saying that the science of wormholes doesn’t work like that, but they’ll be safe in a bus anyway. I originally thought “This is RTD in another of his ‘fuck you, science’ moments”, but if you watch Doctor Who Confidential for this episode, it turns out that the bus was supposed to be intact.

The only way to get a double-decker bus from the UK to Dubai, where the episode was shot, was by ship; and, being significantly bigger than a standard container, that meant the bus had to be on the deck of the ship. This isn’t something that happens often, so you can understand, if not forgive, a crane operator smashing the hell out of the upper deck of the bus with a container by mistake. Cue a last-minute script rewrite.

Anything you can do, I can do better.

It’s a harsh life they live.

(And yes, that is a bone on the bed.)