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.

letter to the Times on 12 Aug 2004 - unpublished.

12 Amberley Court,
Overton Road
London
SW9 7HL

(020) 7274 3989
07710 864 775

Sir,

Your business supplement yesterday on the proposed European Community Directive on intellectual property omits to mention that the directive will permit the patenting of "computer implemented inventions" or, in a word, software. Under existing law software is basically protected by copyright - you write it, you own it, and then you get to use it or even be paid for it.

Under the new proposal software will be patentable as an invention provided it has a "technical effect". This could apply to any aspect of a system, from screen layouts and interfaces to algorithms and file formats, and at any level of abstraction, from byte compression to business protocols.

Defending the ownership of "your" software against EBP (expropriation by patent) involves research, legal advice, and course much time and money. There is no presumption of innocence. You may try to prove that the words of a patent do not apply to your code, or that the claim is invalid because it is obvious, or there is relevent "prior art". None of these steps is as simple, clear or cheap as simply proving that you or your supplier wrote the code.

Who benefits from the introduction of software patents? In the US, which has had software and business process aptenting for some time, large companies like Microsoft have substantial patent portfolios and the resources to offer their customers IP indemnities. Smaller beneficiaries like PanIP are not software developers, but lodge or buy patents and then target larger or smaller businesses depending, it seems, mainly on how plausible a threat they can muster.

Who loses? Any business which relies on a clear title to software which they have developed or licensed, and on which they daily depend.

The potential costs of software patenting to British business are, I suspect, almost unquantifiably vast. This doesn't mean they should be ignored.

Francis Norton.

Free Mojtaba and Arash Day

If you're spending your valuable time reading this this blog, you either share my belief in free speech or at least know what to expect.

Democracy without free speech is a recipe for government by spin and deceit. Is Iran truly a democracy? Its censorship of media and the internet suggests that democratic values don't run as deep in the government as amongst the people.

And is the blogosphere is as overblown and ridiculous as its critics suggest, or maybe something that will make a change for good? Now is the time to find out.

Perseus gets a hand

Forget Sisyphus and Oedipus, my personal favourite re-interpretation of a Greek myth would be Perseus, using his shield as a mirror to kill the snake-haired gorgon Medusa without letting her eyes turn him to stone. As a software guy I think this could be a founding myth - the use of a model (incorporating real-time position and motion data, but abstracting out the metamorphic gaze) to solve a particularly "hairy" problem.

Two problems with models. One, they are always approximations, simplifications. There's not much point to a model that is just as complicated as the reality it models. Two, the modeller gets to determine the purpose and value of every component. And sometimes these components are sentient, are in fact us.

But every public policy, and every law, incorporates some kind of model of the field in question. All laws and policies are potential instruments of ruin to real people. So accurate and timely feedback on their consequences is essential for humane and effective governance.

Now, from the 1st of January 2005, we have the Freedom of Information Act here in the UK. It will be evaded and abused, of course. But that is why I think it's a step in the right direction.

Straining at gnats? Trying to define "technical contribution"

I want a definition of technical contribution which will exclude most forms of software. Trickier than it sounds. Here's my best bet so far:

technical contribution

A technical contribution is that part of an invention which cannot be defined as a purely logical or mathematical extension of an existing technical environment because it depends on properties of the physical world which did not contribute to the existing arrangement.

All comments gratefully received.

[Immediate feedback - See the FFII version, which is based on the EP version, at
http://kwiki.ffii.org/UkpoWorkshops0503En]

the reluctant activist, part 2: how to recruit your boss

Dear <boss>,

I have been invited to a workshop on the implementation of the EU "Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive" (http://www.patent.gov.uk/about/ippd/issues/cii-workshops.htm).

As I'm sure you know, copyright protects a software author against unauthorised copying of their work, whereas patenting protects against independent re-invention.

My concern is that as a company we can be reasonably certain that we are not infringing anyone's copyright, but there is no obvious way of checking that we are not infringing anyone's patents, as several companies and standards bodies have been discovering over the last few years. And since (like most software SMEs) we hold no patents, we have nothing to gain and plenty to lose by this step in the legalisation of software patents.

There is a loophole. In principle "pure software" is not and will not be patentable, but "Computer Implemented Inventions" - anything involving software but which also involves "technical effect" - are.

I intend to argue that this "technical effect" should be defined in such a way that the kind of systems we write will be classed as pure software rather than as computer implemented inventions, and therefore not at risk of expropriation by some patent-swapping cartel or litigation enterprise.

I am happy to do this workshop on my own time, out of my vacation allowance, but the application form invites me to state my affiliation. May I state that speak for <us> - our shareholders, customers and employees - on the lines that I have outlined?

Thanks -

Francis.

Telegraph | News | 'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

I recently read a comment to the effect that to tolerate something is to make it compulsary, which I thought at the time was obvious nonsense. Now I'm starting to understand how the problem can arise.

A friend raised the interesting question - is religious sanction all that comes between us and compulsary prostitution, as an inevitable consequence of tolerated prostitution?

My boring answer would be, in a word, no. The penalty cuts in benefits are presumably intended to prevent the benefits going to people who did are not genuinely seeking employment. The fact that a person has turned down work as a prostitute is not compelling evidence that she is work-shy, any more than a vegan declining work in a slaughter-house or, similarly, a pacifist refusing military enlistment.

So what happens when there is a gap between the acceptable moral argument and an unacceptable adminstrative reality? If you believe, with Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things then we - and she - should stand side-by-side with the vegan and the pacifist in a common fight (obviously non-violent, involving no harm to animals and with no trading of sex for favours) for the law to be amended to permit all to exercise their various credible moral convictions.

But what happens if I have a credible conviction that I should not pay tax? Or that there should be compulsary eugenics (as opposed to merely supporting unrestricted advertising for fast food and tobacco companies) - perhaps some of these convictions are more tolerable than others?

Ah, tolerance again. Like the dust under the carpet, you can move it round but the bump remains. The price of freedom may be constant vigilence, but price of tolerance seems to be constant moral choice and debate.

What's better than booze for beating the blues?

After a long hard week I had a few drinks on Friday night and a run round Brockwell Park on Saturday morning.

I have to say that I was still feeling the red wine when I woke up, and I really noticed how much better the run left me feeling than the drink did.

So here's a list of reasons why I love my crazy sport:

1. It's social: runners tend to appreciate and offer encouragement. Especially the nice crowd at Dulwich Runners.
2. It's exciting: enter a road race and the tension mounts from the moment you get to the start. Give yourself a realistically challenging target time and the satisfaction and frustration at hitting or missing it can be enormously motivating.
3. It's brilliant stress-management: like a good night's sleep or a hot bath (but unlike booze or gluttony) it not only takes you away from your worries, but leaves you feeling better to deal with them on your return.
   
4. It can be euphoric: many runners will tell you about the pleasant, unexpected bonus of a "runner's high", and even an ordinary run leaves a feeling of satisfaction and well-being.
   
5. It's patches up your self-esteem: I never knew I had the discipline and commitment to maintain such a good habit. I may feel a bit of a fraud when people congratulate me on it - only I know how many times I haven't gone running when I knew I should have - but I still enjoy it.
   
6. It's constructively competitive: most of the time you're running against yourself, but on any club run - and especially in any race - there will be someone you'll feel you should be able to catch. And if he or she accepts the challenge you'll both run harder as a result.
   
7. It embodies a practical and positive philosophy: in a world where £17.2bn was spent on advertising in the UK in 2003, all with the implicit message that "you are what you buy", it's good to spend time in a more rewarding world where "you are what you do".
8. It's cheap: all you need to buy is a pair of shoes. The will to do something about your life, the vision to see how much better even a foul-weather run will leave you feeling than the same length of time slumped in front of a TV, and the determination to keep running even when your lungs are rasping and your legs moaning are each a bit like true love - they can only be given not bought, and they will enrich your life forever. Are you generous enough to give yourself one pair of shoes, a little will, a glimpse of vision and a pinch of determination?
9. It may lengthen your life: according to a recent study "The performance of the heart declines steadily as men get older. The hearts of our inactive older volunteers showed a 20% fall in their pumping performance compared to the 20 year-olds, but the veteran athletes have the cardiac performance that is the same if not greater than the inactive 20-year-olds."
   
10. It makes you fitter: and being fit just feels good.
    

the reluctant activist part 1: a visit to faxyourmp.com

Francis Norton
12 Amberley Court
Overton Road
London
SW9 7HL
(020) 7274 3989
francis@redrice.com

Miss Kate Hoey
MP for Vauxhall
House Of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
Thursday 23 October 2003

Dear Miss Kate Hoey,

Re: EU’s Competitiveness Council of Ministers Meeting 10/11/2003

I am very concerned that this meeting will set aside the work done by the European Parliament on 24/09/2003 to define and exclude the patentability of pure software. I hope you will share my worries with the minister for e-commerce, Steven Timms MP.

As a Senior Software Architect for a AIM-listed software company, and co-author of three software books, I have become seriously worried about the implications of software patents, mainly because of the way they undermine the concept of software ownership and provide ’perverse incentives’ that penalise implementation to the benefit of having ideas. Let me ask the following questions:

First: What, as a matter of public policy, is the optimum number of patent lawyers per software development department for a healthy and thriving economy?

We are currently digesting the implications of Microsoft having lost a Web browser patent case to Eolas. Microsoft now have a page[1] instructing developers how to code their web pages in such a way that they do not contravene the Eolas patent. Bill Gates of Microsoft said[2] ’If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today’. The US now appears to be moving towards that ’standstill’. As a software developer, I want to use my technical competence to meet my customers’ requirements. ’Working round’ existing or anticipated patent claims does not help us or our customers to do better business sooner. The EU Parliament’s amendments would go a long way to help ensure that we don’t follow the US in turning a fast-moving and innovative industry into a slow, demoralising legal quagmire.

Second: What is the cost of establishing that the developers of any complex software system actually own the right to sell or even use it?

The EU Parliament amendments, by giving a strong definition of ’technical effect’ and other steps, will have the effect of preventing most ’basically-software’ patents. But if such patents are allowed then they can apply to many levels of software design, from the network layer to reports and the user interface. The scope of each patent claim is blurred by the double hazard of legal and technical language, which can normally be resolved only by one or more defendents being taken to court. I do not believe that it is possible, at any price, to prove absolute ownership over any reasonably complex piece of software, but I would like to know how much it would cost to provide reasonable confidence. The thought that my employers might not - due to patent infringement - own the code that I and my colleagues have written for them, and which we sell to our customers, frankly terrifies me.

Third: Will there be any relief from ’submarine patents’ where patent holders wait - intentionally or otherwise - for ideas which they claim to have patented to be used (in formal or informal software standards, major public or private software systems or the products of companies about to have their IPO) before suing the owners and users and, if winning, having the opportunity to demand as economic rent anything up to the cost of re-implentation, regardless of how mission- or even safety-critical the system?

This is an absolutely live question - the de-facto graphics file standard of the Web, the GIF, was first subject to patent claims by Sperry[3] an astonishing seven years after it had been created and adopted by the internet community. The W3C, responsible for many web standards, has found it difficult to get even the participants in standards development to agree that they will not subsequently make patent claims over the standards that they have helped create. And an American company, PanIP, claims to have patented the use of software to do e-commerce, and is suing small companies[4] that do business over the web, and do not generally have the resources to fight law cases.

Fourth: How will the government and other software users protect themselves against the consequences of accidental patent infringement without discriminating against small software vendors?

The sensible reaction to threatened patent suits will be to ask vendors and contrators to indemnify the customer against patent or copyright infringement. In the current SCO copyright case against Linux, both Sun and HP have offered their Linux customers indemnity[5][6] against the SCO law suit. Microsoft were able to offer their customers indemnity while being sued by Timeline over a patent concerning SQL Server. You will notice that these are very large companies whose offers of indemnity carry credibility. Smaller companies who have to compete more on innovation than on marketing will be more exposed to patent cases, and less able to reduce the harm by indemnifying their potential customers.

Finally, as someone who has been involved in implementing and writing about new technologies it is my experience that ideas are cheap and implementation - design, specification, coding, testing and documenting - is expensive. Implementation is what needs to be encouraged for a healthy, competitive economy, and the most direct means to encourage implementation is a strong copyright regime that has not been dangerously undermined by software patents.

The only winners from software patents in general will be large companies with patent portfolios to exchange with each other who gain a legal barrier to prevent competitors from interfacing to their systems; and small predatory companies which do not actually produce any product and therefore do not need to exchange patents with anyone. The losers will be small innovative vendors[7] and any body, private or public, that depends on having the right to use software that it has purchased or developed.

I hope you can now see why this issue is so important to me, and why I urgently hope to raise these concerns at the most appropriate level to influence the upcoming meeting, after which I believe it will impossible to amend the council of minister’s proposal without an absolute majority of the the 623 elected members of the EU parliament.

Yours sincerely.

Francis Norton.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/activexchanges.asp#fix
[2] http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
[3] http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/giflzw.php
[4] http://www.youmaybenext.com/
[5] http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5074012.html
[6] http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5081407.html
[7] http://www.vrijschrift.org/swpat/030508_1

fun with webcams

I find I am a voyeur. There is something enormously gratifying about finding this list of intentionally or - more excitingly - unintentionally public web cams and watching something at random. A shoe shop - why not? A little detective work and Piggy's of Stamford turn out to be the owners. (A little more, and it turns out to be public anyway)

There is a thriller here, waiting to be written. Or a romance, or a comedy. Let's hope it's not a tragedy, involving the death of privacy. Though to be fair, the idea of a modern Oedipus plucking out his own webcams is somewhat less appalling than the original.

Cassandra cries again

But still they bring the wooden horse through their gates and into their city. And now the the European directive on software patents is another step closer to being adopted.

And on the same day we hear there will be no more debate on EU patents directive draft we get in today's Register:

Autodesk and Microsoft have signed a cross-licensing agreement that will give each company broader access to the other's patent portfolio.
[...]
This agreement is part of a larger effort from Microsoft to extend its intellectual property portfolio. The company has several other cross-licensing deals already signed, including agreements with Cisco, SAP and Siemens. According to CNET, it is currently in talks with more than ten other companies, and wants to sign up to 30 more deals over the next five years.

And what is the Cassandra Syndrome?

a term applied to predictions of doom about the future that are not believed, but upon later reflection turn out to be correct. This denotes a psychological tendency among people to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial. The person making the prediction is caught in the dilemma of knowing what is going to happen but not being able to resolve the problem.

Supper with Matt Wates (without the Sextet)

This band needs a website!

Sink or swim time for mini_CSS

I contributed a small grammar for parsing CSS to Grammatica - I always wanted to use a parser generator and the experience was just as mindwarping, challenging and satisfying as I'd hoped.

Unfortunately the owner of the project I'd hoped might use the CSS parser came up with a different solution, but I wrote mini_CSS in my own time, it works surprisingly well (eg no problem parsing the stylesheets for the wonderful CSS Zen Garden) and it seems a shame to waste it, so time to let it loose into the wild, to sink or to swim.

The opposite of torture

I've been doing some random reading to try to work out what makes a good story, in impro and in life, and bought Jerome Bruner's Acts of Meaning on impulse from a bookshop.

I'm far from expert in psychology, but this book's 200 pages gripped me as Bruner explained exactly where he feels the Cognitive Science revolution went wrong, and where it could and should be going.

Bruner blames the power of the computational metaphor for the new science's seduction - "very early on, for example, emphasis began shifting from 'meaning' to 'information', from the construction of meaning to the processing of information." By contrast, he seeks to rehabilitate folk-psychology and culture as an appropriate level for understanding humans. He argues that it is impossible to understand human psychology independently of the culture in we live, and have indeed evolved to live; that our culture provides the values and categories by which we explain the meaning of our acts and words; that folk psychology deals with the "beliefs, desires, intentions and commitments" that most scientific psychology dismisses, and that folk psychology uses narrative for "resolving conflicts, for explicating differences, and renegotiating communal values".

He illustrates this with a case study in which the Goodhertzes, a blue-collar family from a Brooklyn neighbourhood, were invited to talk about themselves. What emerges is a narrative about narratives - a desciption of how the Goodhertzes pride themselves on eating together round "the big round table" at least once a week, how anything can be discussed there, and the stories they tell that express and embody the difference between the intimacy, trust, mutual aid, forgiveness and openness within the family against the harsher values and "street smarts" required for success in "the real world".

Although the book is written as a work of persuasion it is studded with notes and references that outline a wealth of follow-up reading. One fascinating if somber note is to Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain", which describes the power of pain, as in torture, to obliterate our connection with the personal-cultural world and to wipe out the context that gives direction to our hopes and strivings - in a way, to render humans in reality as simple as most scientific psychology models them.

This made me wonder what would be the opposite of torture? Up to now I'd have assumed pure pleasure, but on reflection being a lab rat with electrodes stimulating the pleasure centres of the brain could be almost as ruthlessly coercive. So where can I find a more personal, cultural opposite of torture? Perhaps in the details and the meanings of everyday life, like the way I feel looking at the black plastic herb pots on the window-sill of our Brixton kitchen. My lovely Hungarian mother-in-law, Maria, gave us some paprikas, home-grown in Pápoc. Éva planted some of the seeds, watered and cared for them, and now we have green wisps stretching innocently towards the tower blocks of the Loughborough Estate, several bearing buds and one tipped with an as-yet pale red item which will eventually, all being well, ripen into a tongue-scaldingly hot paprika. Is this an opposite of torture in a Jerome Bruner sense? I think so, I hope so.

The morality of a good wife swap

I enjoyed an American episode of Wife Swap the other day. There was a real contrast between the wives, Jodi the heiress with her multi-nanny family and Lynn the self-employed, hands-on mum. The satisfaction of seeing Jodi and Brad overcoming their initial antipathy to become good friends was balanced by the real-world failure of Lynn and Steve to get on.

Wife Swap can get stuck in the obvious UK class warfare rut, but at its best the participants overcome prejudices and preconceptions, and learn to value their relationships and other people in general over the more superficial attractions of ostentatious consumption, ideological correctness, or slobbing out.

I think that humans hunger for morality. I don't agree entirely with Chesterton that "[W]hen people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything", but I do think that when people stop taking their morality from authority they'll look for it everywhere else in life, discounting the didactic, seeking whatever is vivid, real and shared.

Wife Swap is a perfect match for these needs - the basic conflict in each episode may be a setup, but whatever happens next is down to the participants. The values and personal skills that emerge are perfectly suited to a secular, diverse society - real, non-vacuous and admirable to believers and skeptics alike. It can only be a matter of time before Wife Swap appears on the Today Programme's Thought for the Day. And why not?