Chinese activist "Beat himself up" - whatever next?

This could be farcical if Fu Xiancai hadn't been beaten up so badly - when returning home after being summoned by the police - that three vertebrae in his neck were broken, and he is unlikely ever to walk again.

His issue? He campaigned for people displaced by the Three Gorges dam. In effect he was hindering economic progress in the name of human rights - the property rights, presumably, of people to their homes and farms.

At the end of the 19th century The Economist famously forecast that the USA would overtake the UK as the world's leading economy in the next century. The equivalent forecast now is that China will overtake the USA in this century. It's hard to view this with quite the same degree of equanimity.

Whatever you might think of US conduct in Guantanomo (and I think it has undermined both the reputation of the US and respect for international law) and of the invasion of Iraq (and I went on two demonstrations to express my views on that) the fact is that having the USA as the world's greatest economy did, at least, show that being a society based on democracy, free speech and individual rights was compatible with economic growth and national success despite the temptation for incompetent and corrupt governments everywhere to argue otherwise.

Until or unless China is mature enough to have evolved a system of law which protects its citizens and their rights, I'm pinning my hopes that less-hyped dark horse in the economic growth stakes, India. What's more, I'll bet that if India does succeed in outgrowing China, it will be because of the greater social stability and freedom from expropriation provided by a free press and the rules of law, not despite it.

Poetry and science

Came across this quote from my favourite poet, Philip Larkin, in The Week (itself quoting The Independent)

I search myself for illusions like a monkey looking for fleas.

Two days later I found myself browsing Edward Tufte on the Columbia disaster, where he quotes Richard Feynman's famous (and, it apears, sadly ignored) conclusion to his appendix to the Challenger commission report

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Just one of those pleasing coincidences.

This morning

I checked that Johnny was still cuddled up to Mr Monkey in his cot in the sitting room, and had a bath. Pulled on some clothes and went back in to the sitting room, have a look into the cot. Johnny's now wide awake, giving me his usual big smile from the bottom of the cot, both arms stretched out. As soon as his shoulders are off the sheet he straightens his back and legs to get on to his feet as soon as possible - this is new in the last couple of days, he's so keen on being vertical that he'll pretty well refuse to sit down or lie down. He sits in my left arm as I pull back the curtains. It's a London kind of day, nothing special, a bit grey, but as usual we inspect the world quietly for a bit, cheek by cheek. I like the way that someone normally so full of beans can appreciate the quiet moments too. Then it's time to switch on the radio (without letting Johnny grab the remote control), change a well-filled nappy, feed him, chuck him in bed with his sleepy mother, and head off to Brixton tube station.

Why am I writing this here? In case I should ever forget.

and now for something completely different

Not sure this should be on the blog, but here goes...



Family life, raw and unedited. Enjoy.

Fire in the Embers

Went with friends to see Embers on Tuesday, to celebrate Eva's birthday. I was a little worried - the early reviews were mixed, emphasising the near-monologue second half as a challenge that Jeremy Irons either surmounted or failed, depending on the reviewer.

The other challenge of the play to an early 21st century English-speaking audience is that it Sandor Marai's story is, well, so un-English. It takes friendship, love and the betrayal of both seriously. Irony is used to intensify, rather than to diminish, involvement. And back we come to the fact that the second half is pretty well a monologue. Where the play succeeds so well is that it convinces us entirely that this intensity is not ridiculous but real, so much so in fact that someone behind me called on her creator at least a couple of times as the story unfolded.

Are we right to accept such high-flown drama? Isn't this the the slippery slope to melodrama and Victorian hypocracy? Not, I think, in case of Sandor Marai. Take a look at his US journal. I laughed at how the first line of the programme's entry on him started with the date he shot himself, and joked that was how all good Hungarian biographies started, but just read the journal. The intensity is all there - it is natural, it is moving and it is entirely real. I am not at all embarrassed to be moved by the play or the journal.

Calling out around the world

A nice surprise to be mentioned by Gail Ilagan in the Phillipines last week - especially from someone who not only has such sound views on Eowyn and Aragorn, but uses passion and reason to write truthfully and movingly.

I was gently lobbying her to get a blog so it would be easier for lazy folk like me to keep up with her pieces - like this, which as a new father, I especially responded to.

Her response - in effect, that the further into the rootless internet she moves from her on-line regional newspaper column readers, the more communication with readers tends to be polluted by ignorance, misconception or prejudice - is hard to argue with.

But I like to think that anyone (anyone - is there anybody out there?) reading my blog would probably be an exception to that rule. So I hope she'll forgive me tugging her into the blogosphere with this entry - after all, she proves what we all hope, that personal reflection can be of universal interest.

On the psychology of group incompetence

We watched Real Story: The Ripper Hoaxer last night. I hadn't expected it to be so moving - Beryl Leach in particular, describing the loss of her only daughter, gave back the human reality behind the "Ripper" headlines.

I also hadn't expected it to be a story about a massive police hunt being led astray by group-think. The police team were so convinced that the hoaxer was in fact the murderer that they had a policy of ignoring suspects (including Peter Sutcliffe, the real murdere, on nine occasions) who didn't have a Geordie accent or matching hand-writing. This despite there being little convincing evidence for the hoaxer's veracity, despite one of the ripper's survivors - who'd talked to him for half an hour - stating firmly that he had a Yorkshire accent, and despite two of the voice experts putting their reservations in writing - the reaction to this last was to lean on them to shut up.

Anyone who has read Norman Dixon's excellent On The Psychology of Military Incompetence will recognise patterns here. Everything he descrives in the context of military history is applicable to non-military organisations too, and seems to have happened in spades in this case. And anyone who's read Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister's Waltzing with Bears will be asking themselves why the police didn't do a simple check to see if the hoaxer's supposedly unpublicised information (a reference to another murder as a potential ripper victim) had been - as it was in fact - published in the papers. Given the risks of over-committing to the hoaxer being real, a certain tolerance of skeptical thinking and a small investment in research would have been a reasonable insurance cost which might well have saved lives.

Time to start Getting Things Done

I keep an eye on Scott Hanselman's blog and a post yesterday finally got me off my backside and down to the local bookshop for a copy of David Allen's "Getting Things Done".

I've got an IT job in a small company, my own software and study projects, and Eva and little Johnny at home. I simply can't afford to keep spending time being disorganised.

So far the book makes a lot of sense. Right now my energy and confidence levels are rising, and I'm getting more done. I hope that this isn't just some kind of intellectual sugar buzz - I'm going to finish the book and try to adopt the habits, and I'm hoping for the best.

Darkness falling

I've been puzzled by how lightly our ministers seem to have been getting off when I hear them interviewed about the legalised kidnapping and torture that is extraordinary rendition. Chandra Sekhar has an excellent article on what is being done, and has ben done, and the laws that are being bent or ignored in the process.

And what is wrong with Extraordinary Rendition? Follow Chandra's link to the statement of Maher Arar...

a Canadian citizen, that a public enquiry in Canada has been found was tortured while in Syria, having been rendered by US agents in 2002.

(I'm not going to trivialise his words by doing some kind of executive summary. Read it for yourself.)

Everything is wrong with Extraordinary Rendition. The thought that we in the UK might be complicit in a process by which innocent people are effectively disappeared and (by any ordinary meaning of the word) tortured - which is what this Extraordinary Euphemism actually means - appals me. And the thought that our security services might be desparate enough to depend on the notoriously unreliable results of torture fills me with fear.

When is a Web Service not a Web Service?

(Written while waiting for DB2 v. 8 to uninstall itself... )

Excellent post on almost-Web Services. I've been there, seen (and suffered) that. Using MQ Series is not a problem, I've done more with that than with SOAP (which tells you a bit about our market). But what is it about XML that inspires host developers with an insane urge to write their own XML parsers?

I've had messages going back where half the content was going to a system with a home-brewed XML parser that rejected XML-escape sequences like "&". We had to skip the built-in .NET serialisation, write our own pseudo-XML formatter and leave ampersands unescaped. We then discovered that the other half was going to a system with a real XML parser that naturally rejects unescaped ampersands. In the end we simply translated all "&" characters in user data into "+" signs.

( ...Oops - DB2 uninstall finally came back, and wants me to close firefox amongst other apps. Back to the grindstone.)

New year, new music - new model?

A brilliantly simple idea - one new Creative Commons single every day, selected by someone who cares about the music. Who knows if I'll enjoy them all, but it may stop my eardrums rusting over.

Geek Dinner at the Texas Embassy

Saturday night was time to get back in to the flow. Ian Smith suggested I come along to the Geek Dinner and I'm glad I did. As a new dad I have limited time for reading (and writing) blogs, and I spend very little time listening to podcasts, but the blog/podcast focus of the evening had a feel very reminiscent of the early days of the internet: lots of geek enthusiasm, no clear business models, and a world still small enough that a newcomer can get to know people.

I left after dinner and missed the talk by Roger Scoble, but Hugh Fraser and I snagged each other as fellow geek diners on the way in, and it was good for me to get the picture from someone who's actually in the blog/podcast business - and while I may have missed the speech I caught Hugh's interview which is naturally available as a here as a podcast.

Just to prove I was there, I'm third from the right here, with Ian on my right and Sarah Blow in the near left corner.

[added: 2005-12-15] A chance to pay my respects to two travellers that I met at the dinner - Nicole Simon, over from Germany just for the event, and Regular Jen who's made the big move to come over here from the US and get married to Neil Dixon (the kind of move I've never had the guts to make myself, but instead inflicted on my own wife).

Little Johnny and the friendly stranger

We were taking a bus back to Brixton when a man thanked Eva, me and little Johnny for moving the pram so he could wheel himself into the wheelchair space which we had been occupying. Nice, but he then complimented Johnny on "her" looks.

"Call little Johnny a girl again and he'll probably head butt you", I warned him, with some reason. Not only does the boy tend to go into woody-woodpecker mode when hungry, banging his head furiously against anything that looks vaguely like a human chest - male or female - but he has also started trying to throw himself head-first out of whichever arms are holding him.

We're beginning to wonder if the first words following his current kitten-wails will be not "dada" or "mama" but a lusty Scots cry of "Stitch that, Jimmy" as he administers the dreaded Glasgow Kiss to whichever doting adult has unsuspectingly come in range of his forehead.

How does a psychic website do THAT?

An amusing web site that correctly chooses a symbol matching the two-digit number you have chosen at random.

These things always raise two challenges - first: how does it work, second: if you can see how it works, can you explain it in such a way that others can too?

So don't read on if you'd rather work it out for yourself!

The instructions are

Take any two digit number, add together both digits and then subtract the total from your original number.

When you have the final number look it up on the chart and find the relevant symbol. [...]

First, the result of adding the two digits and subtracting them from the original is always a multiple of nine.

Why?

Well, try subtracting the left digit and the right digit in separate steps, eg

instead of
[1] 3 + 5 = 8,
[2] 35 - 8 = 27.

do
[1] 35 - 5 = 30,
[2] 30 - 3 = 27.

So the subtracting the right digit always leaves you with a round number, a multiple of 10, and subtracting the left-column digit subtracts 1 from each of those 10s, leaving you with a multiple of 9.

Now take a look at the table of symbols and note that each multiple of nine maps to the same symbol (a sun sign the first time I looked, a moon symbol the next).

Thanks to Andy Naughton for a great puzzle, and my apologies if you find this explanation far less amusing!

Always something new on the web...

Here I am, testing out writely.com as an on-line word processing site which happens to include a post-to-blog option.

The editing looks at least as good as blogger.com , and the fact that I can write stuff with a view to never publishing it makes it more suitable for work-related documents that I can access from my desk and my untrusted-on-LAN notebook.

It complements my other new registration, rememberTheMilk.com, rather nicely.

"Poison Parents" or "victims of circumstantial evidence"?

I see from http://www.emedicine.com/med/topic543.htm that the frequency of "Diabetes Insipidus" is - in the US, at least - about 1 in 25,000. Of these some 30% are idiopathic, in other words of no known cause.

So the appeal of Ian and Angela Gay against their conviction for poisoning a child by force-feeding him with at least four and a half teaspoons of salt on the grounds that according to a professor of neuro-endocrinology diabetes insipidus is a more likely cause has to be at least plausible:

Albeit improbable, it's still more likely than the even more outlandish diagnosis of salt poisoning.

And with Tony Blair trying to reduce the burden of proof these things are likely to happen more often than in the past.

CYA and barriers to innovation

My google alert on Advanced Transport Systems Ltd threw up this submission by them to a UK parliamentary committee.

I was struck by a couple of counter-intuitive points

if passenger km delivered by light rail are divided by primary energy used, then light rail is actually less energy efficient that the average car.

...

It is routine for transport schemes to be returned many times for additional consultancy studies. The cost of preparing major bids taking full account of regulatory and legal issues has also become a major barrier. These costs fund consultants, lawyers, etc at high fee rates and only contribute in the most marginal way to improved transport. It has been speculated, Jakes (2003), that in the area of transport "there are probably a few hundred consultants for every designer"". This balance is more likely to impede progress than to advance it. The principal barriers to the efficient delivery and construction of new transport systems have been erected by over diligent legislation.

In humans, there is a shortening over time of telomeres on the end of replicated DNA. We don't know exactly what part this plays in ageing, but there is a strong association. I wonder if the spread of CYA legislation and regulation plays a similar role in the senescence of societies.

They're learning, but too late?

European Telcos are joining the European Telecommunications Standards Institute to get it to change its standardisation rules to discourage participants from sneakily embedding their own patented technology in standards and then charging users exorbitant fees.

My argument with software patents has always been that they are in fact extraordinarily anti-corporate. The beneficiaries will be lawyers, companies that purely write software patents, and large software companies that can afford to invest some of their monopoly profits in tightening their stranglehold on the market. The losers will of course be ordinary software developers and anyone who uses software. By definition all non-software companies come into the last group, but by the time they realise how they've lost surety of title to their entire software investment, the bad decisions will be embedded in law and treaty, all neatly done without any public policy discussion since officially the policy never changed.

Sense from the Vatican

Nice to see the Vatican's chief astronomer, the Rev. George Coyne commenting that intelligent design "isn't science, even though it pretends to be."

I don't even have a problem with Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn stating

it should not be seen as "an offense to Darwin's dignity" for people to offer criticisms of evolutionary theory. "The theory of evolution is a scientific theory," he said. "What I call evolutionism is an ideological view that says evolution can explain everything in the whole development of the cosmos, from the Big Bang to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

I'd agree that "evolutionism" exists - though I'd call it an attitude, rather than an ideology - and that as such it's not a scientific theory. In fact, as a card-carrying evolutionist this is just the kind of well-adapted analysis that I would hope for from such a highly-evolved religion as my former Church.

How to check up on a UK charity

I'm all in favour of charities. I'm also in favour of favouring the better run ones, in the interest of both their official beneficiaries and the credibility of the sector as a whole.

So here's where you can check the accounts of UK charities - see if their accounts are up-to-date, and work out their ratio of charitable expenditure to costs of raising funds.

PRT - a slow swell coming to shore?

I dislike urban driving whether as a driver, a passenger, a cyclist, a pedestrian or even as a resident; so I'm all in favour of Personal Rapid Transport, even if it doesn't yet exist.

I particularly like ULTRA, as a techie it seems to me that solving public transport problems by building a packet-switched solution over well-understood technologies is a highly realistic approach and could be a real winner.

I've had a google alert on ATS Ltd for some years, but it's only just got round to letting me know that they've struck a deal with BAA and Arup to implement ULTRA at Heathrow,

Heathrow has ordered 18 of the pods for a year-long test on two miles of track starting in 2008. At first they will be used to link a car park on the perimeter of the airport to Terminal One[... ] the one-year trial could merely be a taster of a far more radical scheme, which could be in place by 2012 if all goes well with the Terminal One experiment[... ] Taking in the new terminal five and all car parks, the scheme will need 30 miles of track and up to 500 capsules.

According to Arup the "The BAA contract is the first commitment in the world to a PRT system". Good for them. I think it will work, and be the start of something that makes our cities far more civilised. I certainly hope so.

Life imitates art - sadly.

I thought I was taking the mick when I wrote this entry this time last year.

I've got far more important - to me - stuff to be writing about, but something is really wrong. It is madness to be going in this direction. And if the USA goes there now, we shall too, eventually.

Ringtone Blues

I'm tired of the built-in Nokia ringtones, but I'm too old and snobbish to buy over-advertised chart-crap.

Now I have a little plan for the ultimate classy, unobtrusive but exclusive ringtone - find a MIDI file of the 11 notes making up the theme to the track Proverb on Steve Reich's City Life and convert it into a ringtone.

But I can't find such a file, and anyway, how would I escape a well-justified lynching at the hands of the first true music lover to hear this pretentious trivialisation of such meditative and beautiful music?

Oh well, back to "Ring, ring".

Time for a British EFF

I'm on the mailing lists for FIPR and FFII-UK (and have lobbied my MP for both) but it's pretty clear that the UK needs a funded, mass-membership body to represent the interests of the UK digital citizen, a role played by the EFF in the USA. Following a debate at Opentech 2005 it looks like something may be happening at last.

Danny O'Brien reports that a Pledgebank page has been set up where you can pledge to set up a standing order of £5/month to support a UK Digital Freedoms organisation provided at least 1000 others do too.

It seems I am number 442.

IDFYP - I don't feel your pain

Something that happened in Holland on July 12th is helping me to make more sense of the troubles raised here in London by July 7th.

In a Dutch court, Mohammed Bouyeri turns to Anneke van Gogh, the mother of the man he murdered for attacking Islam, and tells her "I don't feel your pain. I don't feel any sympathy for you. I can't feel for you because I think you are a non-believer."

Meanwhile here in Britain, Islamic clerics find themselves thrust in front of the cameras, trying to make the clear condemnation of the bombers that may help defuse a backlash against their communities, a task made difficult by the fact that the same hatred of British and Western foreign policy which drove the bombers is shared to some degree by so many in their community, and that pretending otherwise would reduce their credibility with Muslims and others alike.

Perhaps Mohammed Bouyeri could help them. His words seem to me to offer the clearest definition I have ever seen of unacceptable belief-based extremism. Extremism itself is just a label, and I know from my own experience that fundamentalists can be very decent people. But IDFYP-ism is something that means something, it is something that can perhaps be identified and condemned regardless of your attitude to British involvement in Iraq, and that condemnation could serve the Islamic and wider communities alike.

And as a true non-believer, aware of the fate of non-believers through most of history, I could feel a little more faith in the non-transience of these tolerant times.