The Joys of Blogging

I've enjoyed writing this blog so far and I'm grateful to be given the opportunity to revive my writing career, develop my skill, scratch my itch, or do my thing. There was a period when I wrote letters to pen-pals; that was after winning a competition in Disco 45 in the 70s. I realised later that regularly writing builds the muscle.

I started the blog without feeling I had a lot to write about and I still don't feel there are loads of stories / posts inside me waiting to get out, but I find that if you start writing about anything, it can develop into something. The only time I've felt there were a bunch of things waiting to be said was when I came up with the idea of a theme - "Think The World's Bad Now". I've been doing it for three months now, so there's some momentum and I can get some purchase from updating old posts. Like I said, I've enjoyed it so far and I'm still waiting to see what happens.

CNet says a survey about blogging revealed that most people think the same rules should apply to bloggers as to traditional journalists, but also that most people don't trust blogs as much as traditional media.

Xbox and Wii Madness Road Painter

Waaah! Everybody is getting XBox 360s! Oh, and Wii madness is about to hit. This will change the way people use these games; I think they're very keen to get all sorts of new audiences involved (hence the range of different players in those videos). Apparently since the launch of the wii in Britain "Nintendo wii" has overtaken iPod as the most searched for toy. There's a review of the Wii here on the Register site with comments from readers (one has invented a new word - here comes the wiikend!).
Update: Looks like the wii is beating the Sony Playstation 3 in early sales in Japan. Another clip on the Daily Feed says that the Wii has sold 3.19 million consoles, half the total sales of Xbox 360s so far.
This is either the work of a sublimely indifferent road painter, or a Bhuddist road-painter (could they be the same person?)

Robot How Flickr Started Overheard

Back after a week in Wales. Here's one I did earlier: Someone has built a robot that can solve the Rubik's Cube! The story of how Flickr started Snippets of conversations Overheard in New York

Shoe Bomber

An article about the daily life of Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber" in a maximum security prison in the US. The Open Document Format is announced; see the Wired article. I posted a link previously to a lovely picture of a snowflake and now I've found some more at a website dedicated to snow crystal photography and research. There's also a "snow crystal primer" with interesting points about snow formation.

Pretexting

"Pretexting" is variously defined as impersonation of someone in order to obtain proivate information, or in a wider definition, creating a fictional scenario in order to persuade someone to do something they otherwise would not do. Earlier this year, the Chair of Hewlett Packard's board left after accusations that private detectives had impersonated members of the HP board in order to obtain their phone records (this was in pursuit of a leaker on the board). There was also a Congressional investigation at which HP management testified (and refused to testify). Because many authorities are quite slack in the way they implement security, often asking only for date of birth, mother's maiden name etc., pretexting is likely to continue. In the US California legislators introduced a bill aimed at stopping the practice, but Wired News claims it was killed by the Motion Picture industry, who claimed they used it as a method of tracking file-sharers.

Make a Paper Snowflake Map Game

Instructions on How to make a paper snowflake at WikiHow. Map game - see how many countries you can place.

Spend Some Dialog Time; Abuse by Proxy

You could spend a lot of time with this dialog! There have been a number of cases in the US where someone impersonating a policeman has called a restaurant (usually a fast food restaurant) and told the manager to detain a member of staff or customer. Because the manager believes the caller, they do as they are told. The caller then instructs the manager to put the victim through all sorts of humiliation and abuse, including rape. It's quite shocking what people will do when they believe in the authority of the person telling them what to do. I knew about this affect because I've heard of the psychlogical experiments, but I hadn't heard of this kind of abuse by proxy over the phone before.

10 Minute Email Address

Here's a cool idea. You go to this site and click on the link to automatically create a new email address. The address will work for 10 minutes and messages will appear on the page you bookmark. Any messages appearing there you can read and reply to, but when I tried attachments didn't work (there's a warning on the site saying attachments may not work but that they will be fixed soon). You get a countdown on the page and you can click on another link to allow yourself another ten minutes. I emailed the address from a yahoo account and it was fine.

Will You Upgrade to Windows Vista?

Scott Granneman at The Register thinks Microsoft is trying to pull a fast one in the EULA (license agreement) for Vista.

Gothic Posters, Be Careful When You Sell Your PC

Morbid, gothic posters by Franciszek Starowieyski, a Polish poster artist. Oh. My. Goodness. A story from Scott Granneman on The Register about the perils of being careless with your data when you sell your computer. Phew.

TWBN #8: Thatcher Years

Margaret Thatcher has been the dominant politician of the last thirty years. She was Prime Minister from 1979-1990. In 1979 (the first election I voted in), 1983 and 1987 she won the General Election against my wishes; I've felt out of step ever since. The Thatcher years changed a lot of things. Here are some of the things I believed that have been overtaken (some of them may need explaining later):

Council houses are a good thing
Buying your own house is for rich people
If you're rich you own a house and you pay rates
The Government should run utility (power, telephone, post) companies; how else can you get the same service all over the country?

The wiki page for her portrays a more liberal politician in the early years than I remember later; maybe she grew out of it, but she supported David Steel's Abortion Bill and Leo Abse's bill to decriminalise homosexuality. On the other hand she supported capital punishment and supported the reintroduction of the birch.

These are some of the highlights of the Thatcher Years:
Falklands War 1982
Miners' Strike 1985
Section 28 1987

I thought she and her pals were awful and I was very glad when she was defeated, except that she was replaced by John Major, another Tory, who then proceded to win another election against Neil Kinnock's Labour Party. What a nightmare.

TWBN#7: Bhopal, Chernobyl

I vaguely remember Chernobyl. It happened on 26 April 1986 and it was the worst nuclear power plant disaster so far. Since then nuclear power production has greatly reduced (or at least western nations are not building new ones) and more safety procedures have been introduced in existing nuclear plants. An informative article at the BBC H2G2 site says there was never any danger of a nuclear explosion; this is a misunderstanding that many people have about nuclear power plants; reactor fuel is not explosive like nuclear weapons. It is very dirty though and surrounding countryside (and some surrounding countries) were affected and continue to be affected for years.

Strangely I remembered Bhopal as being more recent, but in fact it happened in 1984. It was also a much more serious accident than Chernobyl in its immediate effects on the surrounding population. A poisonous gas was released from a Union Carbide pesticide plant and spread to the nearby city of Bhopal, exposing half a million people. There is much more serious disagreement about the handling of the accident and what happened later than in the case of Chernobyl. Union Carbide claim that the accident must have been the result of sabotage, since they had safety procedures in place, whereas The Bhopal Medical Appeal gives a more believeable account from the victims' points of view, including eyewitness accounts. Union Carbide passed on responsibility for the plant to the local government in Madhya Pradesh. The Union Carbide site reads like an effort to wriggle out of any responsibility.

Police Shootings

I think the US should outlaw gun ownership for most people. That stuff about "Right to Bear Arms" is crap; it was written in other times for a totally different environment and wasn't meant to encourage (I guess) an armed populace. There's an article on the Agitator about police shootings in America, and the poster in an associated comment says: "The solution seems simple; stop invading people's homes for non-violent offences". I disagree. Surely the answer is to get rid of the guns in homes and make it much more difficult to get hold of them. The number of mistaken shootings would decrease in proportion to the perception of the police that they are likely to be met by a gun-toting maniac every time they break into a house.

Clever Guy, Very Cool Job

Google do Tech Talks and publish them on Google Video. I found a very interesting talk called (video link) "Human Computation" about how they are going about the task of tagging / labelling images so that image searches can retrieve accurate results. The clip is over 50 minutes long, so I'll give a summary, but if you're interested it is quality stuff, definitely worth watching the whole thing. The solution they've come up with is to get people playing games that use image tagging as part of the game. Ingenious idea, well actually there are several creative solutions to problems in this talk. Clever guy Luis von Ahn, but they still spell his name wrong (Louise!?) in the subtitles.

In the video Luis talks about "captchas", which are those images of text that you have to read and copy in some web forms in order to prove that you're not a software agent trying to hack the form. He says that spam hackers have found a way to hack the forms, which is they pass the image of the text back to a porn website and interrupt users with a message saying "you must copy this text before you can continue watching". When the user enters the text it can be passed back to the form. So that's a hacker solution that gets humans cooperating with computers, albeit unawares. Luis uses games to involve people in the task.

So anyway, Luis and his team have built a game where an image is displayed on the screen. Two players are teamed together by the system and they get points when they both tag the image with the same word - thus tagging the image. The only communication between players is when they win a round because then they know the other player used the same tag. Several tags can be useful for one image, so Luis and co. have started to make some tags "taboo" for each image after it has been labelled with the same tag several times.

Luis says that the game has been very popular and a lot of images have been tagged. His team can now also use tagged image as a second level check that players are genuine. In theory a group of sabateurs could join the game together and respond with the same tag to every image. That would damage the accuracy of the tags if it was successful, so the team have started to include test pictures; images that most people label with the same tag; if players gets all these wrong, their tags may be treated as suspect.

There are several other cool solutions to sub-problems of this general area in the clip. That is one clever guy.

Michael J Fox

Michael J Fox appears on tv, but this time is different. Apparently he has Parkinson's Disease. I don't know much about Parkinson's, but the clip made me feel respect for Michael J Fox. He looks like he's been pretty badly hit by the disease; I didn't know he had Parkinson's and at the very start of the interview you're thinking "What's going on?" because the interviewer doesn't say anything and mjf is trembling a bit. It looks pretty humiliating to let the public see you like that, but he's trying to stand up to it. The interviewer mentions a cheap shot from Rush Limbaugh because Fox was doing pro-Democrat commercials; Limbaugh said he thought maybe Fox had not taken his medication in order to be more obviously suffering on the ads, so that he would get more public sympathy. Sounds like you just don't get an easy ride from everybody no matter what.

Cost of Ink, non-attack advert, Female Circumcision

Have you got an HP printer? I've got a 960c and the cartridges cost a bomb. There's a graph here which compares prices. That made me laugh. This is a clever political advert. Not seen that trick before. It's good to see a political advert that isn't a personal attack on an opponent.

A conference about Female Circumcision in Egypt; not a common subject in the news. The conference included some muslims who spoke against the practise.

Update: Since I wrote the above, there have been developments.
Scholars at the conference agreed that Female Genital Mutilation (also called "Female Circumcision") was un-islamic and should be treated as abuse. Sweet progress.

The Yorkshire Ripper

Between 1975 and 1981 Peter Sutcliffe killed thirteen women and severely injured seven others in horrific attacks in Northern England. The attacks betrayed Sutcliffe's real nature as a deeply disturbed man, a nature hidden to his wife and both of their families.

Sutcliffe's attacks actually began early in 1975 when he attacked women on two separate occasions with a hammer, but the police didn't link them to the other attacks until years later. It was later in the year and then in January 1976 when two women were killed in very similar circumstances that the police knew they were chasing someone who had already killed twice in very disturbing ways.

The first woman he killed was drunk after a night out in Leeds. He then killed several prostitutes, so the prostitutes in the area started to go around in couples and make notes of clients' car registration numbers. Cooperation between prostitutes and police was not good though, and general public awareness of the crimes remained low until June 1977, when the newspapers reported that an "innocent" young woman had been viciously killed. In fact four other women had been killed between the first and this latest one. The press and public had not shown much sympathy for the victims of the killings so far because the victims were thought to be all prostitutes. They had not yet linked these murders to the first two attacks, which were not on prostitutes.

Once the news of the latest murder got out, the police were drowned in information.

Some of Sutciffe's victims survived, though they were often disabled for life or suffered depression following the attack. One woman attacked in Bradford in 1977 had major surgery and six weeks in hospital before she was able to go home. The following year she appeared in court charged with stealing from shops because she couldn't make ends meet.

The police were thrown off course by some anonymous letters and later a tape from Sunderland which claimed to be from the killer. The speaker on the tape had a geordie accent and police later issued instructions to their forces that they should be looking for someone with a geordie accent.

I remember hearing about the Yorkshire Ripper at the end of the 70s and 1980-81. In November 1980 Sutcliffe killed a woman who was studying at Leeds University. Around this time I was at university in London and I remember women marching at night in "Reclaim the Night" protests.

Sutcliffe wasn't very careful to hide his tracks when committing the murders and over the years left several clues which detectives followed up, but they never got anything that would single him out and they were not good enough at handling the information (computers were in their very infancy) to piece together the bits that they had. They were also distracted by the hoax letters and tape. Sutcliffe had given the police alibis that were backed up by his wife. A friend that visited red light districts with Sutcliffe had written to the police and got no response. In the end it was just luck that he was stopped in a car with a prostitute and the policeman who stopped him radioed in the registration number of Sutcliffe's car. It was still lucky that one officer was sharp enough to go back to the scene where Sutcliffe had been picked up, because that officer found a ball-pin hammer and a knife, weapons that Sutcliffe used in the attacks.

Extensive article about The Yorkshire Ripper at the Crime Lab

Autistic Savant Global Orgasm

The strange things kids write is a cliche, but these suppposed real high school essay quotes made me laugh out loud, so who am I to complain? Numbers 23 and 24 were really making me shake and "The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while" is short enough for me to remember. I remember a television programme about Stephen Wiltshire some years ago. He's an autistic savant. He has a particular skill, which is that he can look at a real scene for a few minutes and later draw it in great detail. This programme puts him through a (video link) huge test - they take him in a helicopter for a ride over Rome, then he draws a huge panorama of Rome from memory. The programme-makers check the details and he is amazingly accurate. Oliver Sacks wrote about the guy in his book "An Anthropologist on Mars". Here's an article in the Guardian about Daniel Tammet, another autistic savant who can also do extraordinary things, but he's unusual in that he can describe what goes on in his head when he does it (check out the descriptions of handling large numbers and remembering pi to a record number of places). If you feel a little rumble on December 22, it may be because of a worldwide campaign to add enough positive energy into the energy field of the Earth to reduce the worldwide levels of violence and agression. It is hoped that this energy will register on the monitor system of the Global Conciousness Project. Perhaps the impression will be a huge phallus (nsfw) - my first nsfw link, though you have to click on the picture to see... the... enlarged version ;-)