A few years ago I had a regrettable email exchange with an author I admire. At the time he’d written a few online-only stories, and was searching for a publisher.

I emailed to say I’d enjoyed his first novel-length piece; he replied and, noticing my email address, asked whether I had any tips for publicity in the uk. I couldn’t think of any, but didn’t want to reply as such, so said something like “most people I know can’t resist the 3-for-2 tables”. He tersely replied that he was a long, long way from those. Which was obvious when I thought about it, and I felt rather stupid. The conversation disintegrated from there, with me trying to be witty and him thinking I was insulting his dog (don’t ask). This exchange occasionally pops up during internal debates on the subject of Why I Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Talk to People.

This afternoon in Waterstone’s I saw his now-published novel on the 3-for-2 table. Clearly I am a genius.

The BBC win the day with this video of a penguin being knighted. I love how, but for being a penguin, it could be Prince Phillip.

I have to p-p-pick them up on one little thing, though:

A penguin who was previously made a Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian Army has been knighted at Edinburgh Zoo.

Penguin Nils Olav has been an honorary member and mascot of the Norwegian King’s Guard since the 1972.

Over the years, he has been promoted through the ranks after being adopted by Royal Guard who visited the zoo.

then, at the end:

However, the penguin honoured on Friday is unfortunately not the original Nils Olav.

He died in the 1980s and was replaced by a two-year-old penguin at the Zoo.

Right.

Twitter have turned off SMS updates for anywhere outside the USA, Canada or India, because they can’t afford it. Mobile networks charge per SMS, so Twitter have been footing a bill they say averages to $1000/user/year¹. They’ve negotiated deals in the aforementioned areas, but elsewhere it’s just too much. So here in the UK we’ll still be able to update via text, but we won’t receive anything. It’s a shame.

I don’t blame twitter at all, but it’s irritating to go backwards - I regularly have impromptu five-minute twitter exchanges, and they’re fun. And sometimes useful, too. A general I-have-a-problem tweet can reach lots of people, and often there’ll be someone who can help.

Having said that, the solution is on the horizon. 3G speeds mean modern phones can just use the Internet to exchange tweets (or whatever), and so bypass the operators’ extortionate methods. The data in a text message is insanely expensive: a 5p 150-character SMS adds up to £374 per mb.. But mobile broadband costs are far more reasonable: Three have a 3G tariff that’s £15/1gb/month². There are already numerous twitter clients for mobiles³, so that’ll take over eventually. But for now: bummer.

1. which, given their 250 weekly-limit, implies $4 per SMS. Seems high. talking nonsense. Actually implies ~$0.08 per sms, as pointed out in the comments. [↩]
2. My current provider - Orange - have nothing comparable, but they’ve always been a bit behind the times [↩]
3. particularly the iPhone, which I’m still lusting after, but the contracts are too much atm [↩]

I’ve never seen a cinema so busy. It’s years since I’ve struggled to find a seat, but Orange Wednesdays + Mamma Mia had the place heaving. It’s been out a few weeks, so I guess word of mouth must be pretty strong. I can understand why, as I really enjoyed it.

I’m very fond of ABBA, which obviously helps, but the effort and imagination put into the routines was everything you’d hope. ‘Dancing Queen’ was the highlight, for me, but I rarely stopped smiling. It’s also hard to dislike something in which the cast are clearly having the time of their lives - Julie Walters and Christine Baranski, particularly, seemed on top of the world for the entire film. The whole thing was just fun, and as such it didn’t matter at all that some of the cast were better singers than others. Deeply endearing.

Just because it’s pretty, a wordle showing the 150 most used words¹ for this blog in the last month:

Like?! I clearly need to find new verbs to express favour. Unless I’m, like, using it in other contexts.

1. non-trivial. To the extent that any are non-trivial. [↩]

I can’t get through it without laughing:

If they think this is the way to go, we will end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness

It’s ‘unmentionable awfulness’ that gets me.

I just finished Cory Doctorow’s ‘Little Brother’, his surveillance-state novel for young adults. I read it for free, because he wants me too - it’s published under a Creative Commons license that lets me download and print the PDF¹. I read the last page this evening, and wanted to jot down my initial thoughts. Basic overview: I liked it a lot, except for the parts I really didn’t. The following contains minor spoilers.

The setting is a not-too-distant San Francisco, where the surveillance is constant, even in schools. After a terrorist attack it gets far worse, and a group of students use all the technology at their disposal to fight back.

In many ways I think it’s everything a modern young-adult novel should be. For starters, it assumes readers can understand anything explained clearly enough - it goes into some fairly odd cryptographic concepts, for example. Which you’d think risky - public and private keys aren’t very intuitive - but there’s no hesitation or couching in ‘don’t worry if you don’t understand this’. Mr Doctorow just dives right in, using his considerable writing skills to render the topic comprehensible, and none of it seemed patronising. He was also telling it straight - I know a little about cryptography, and I didn’t notice any glaring oversimplifications. The plot relies heavily on technology and modern networks, and to my eyes it was easy to follow (and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be).

The novel also doesn’t shy away from sex, violence or bad language - it doesn’t dwell on any of these, but the plot revolves around a 17-year old fighting a fascist state: such topics are going to come up. And, again, they’re handled truthfully. People get crushed in stampedes, and the government tortures people. People on the Internet swear, because they do. Sex is new and odd, and unleashes a torrent of emotions that confuse the hell out of the young characters. It’s the way things are, and I don’t think young-adult books should pretend otherwise.

I also found it compelling. It’s not long, but I nevertheless raced through it, despite having 155 loose pages. The plot moves fast, and is full of interesting asides. From freegans, to ARGing, to the flaws of planned cities as opposed to those which grow organically (with nods to real books on the subject), there’s a lot to learn, and I suspect I’ve forgotten much already.

Each chapter is headed with dedications to a particular bookstore, with brief descriptions. Mr Doctorow’s love of books shines through, and you find yourself wanting to visit every one, just to hang out. There’s an extensive bibliography, showing that most of the technologies mentioned already exist, and which are the best books on the subjects. My wishlist expanded substantially. There are also two addenda, written by Xbox hacker Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang and security expert Bruce Schneier. Which brings us to the politics, which is where I start to get twitchy.

I didn’t go in blind - I’ve been on Cory’s mailing list for years, and followed Boing Boing for longer. I know his current positions on surveillance and security etc., and I often agree. But it’s a book designed to introduce such concepts to young adults, and right out of the gate it pissed me off with its use of ’snitching’.

I hate that word. It’s a bully-word, and a bully-concept. I have never, in real life, heard it used by anybody with a moral case. But the novel’s definition broadens it - any technology that spies on you ’snitches’ you to the police if you do anything wrong. It’s loosely linked to the database-state, but the implication is that giving the police any kind of information, even if it’s actually about a crime, is ’snitching’. And there’s therefore something wrong with it². Which is just bullshit.

I’m happy to listen to the arguments about surveillance. I’m happy to agree that imploring people to report ’suspicious activity’ is stupid, when ’suspicious activity’ means ‘using an SLR’. But that’s not the same thing as reporting crimes to the police. It’s almost always a moral duty to ’snitch’ if you have knowledge of a crime. Because the justice system isn’t, actually, totally corrupt, and the police aren’t out to get you.

Which is another problem: in this novel, the police are evil. No question. And this was where I started to get annoyed. It starts off with the main character railing against surveillance and anti-terror tactics in his school and city, with many well-argued points. But this is then conflated with fascism. The police beat people up willy-nilly; they gas kids at a rock concert; there is not a shred of decency about a single officer. The government is the same - towards the end they find video footage of a Karl Rove-like³ figure calling the people of San Francisco ‘fags and atheists’ and revealing the government knows of a terrorist plot, but is going to let it happen before the mid-term elections. There’s even a brief nod to 9/11 conspiracies. I know Cory isn’t into that crap, but it’s there nonetheless. And I found this cartoony and disappointing.

The reader is clearly meant to draw parallels with the modern USA in terms of surveillance, but the subsequent unambiguous evil of authority isn’t realistic, despite the obsessions of the 1984 crowd, and conflating the two is dishonest. Perhaps the point is that 100% surveillance will lead to this kind of thing - absolute power corrupts and all that. Perhaps the point is that anything with the potential to create such a world needs to be stopped. But the book doesn’t suggest why either of these should be the case.

Like I said, I am happy to listen to arguments against the surveillance state. They’ll probably convince me. But, as far as I can tell, data-collection atm has the potential to be used for evil. It’s not actually ruining our lives, right now, today. For all the complaining about store-cards, airport security measures and 42-day-detentions, the real world with all its problems is incredibly benign compared to the situation in the book. Of course an evil government and violent police force are bad things, but they don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with surveillance. You need to make your case without invoking them. I have the same problem with anti-DRM campaigners talking about how DRM doesn’t work - if it did work it’d still be stupid, and going on about how it doesn’t makes you look like anti-phone mast campaigners who claim their local mast won’t be a good business strategy. They look like they’re hiding something. Show me why a totally benign surveillance state is evil - and I’m not saying you can’t - and I’ll be more impressed. The book does this a little with discussions of the need for privacy, but it’s fairly subdued compared to the anti-authority stuff.

So I didn’t like that aspect. But the book, while obviously a polemic, isn’t totally one-sided. The main character’s social studies class is a good forum for debate, and the political aspects are no less clear or watered-down than the technical explanations. There are a few right-wing nutcases thrown in as foils, but also numerous less-extreme viewpoints from characters trying, albeit briefly, to figure out the best approach. The main character is also not a superhero - he regularly doubts that he’s doing the right thing, and things don’t always turn out ok.

I learnt a lot. It was particularly penetrating, for me, on privacy issues. I tend to be on the oh-do-shut-up side when it comes to privacy debates, because I generally don’t give a damn what people know about me, but various points made me pause. I suspect they’ll play over in my head for quite a while. The arguments surrounding the right to dismantle things, and freedom of information, and the trade-offs of security, safety and freedom are all relevant and compelling. I’d recommend it to anyone wanting a decent introduction to these issues, or even people - like me - who think they know it already. I’d even recommend it to young adults (not that I really know any). But the unambiguous authority = evil, as opposed to just something that needs to be closely watched, is a shame. I wish there’d been one policeman character who disagreed with the way things were going, but still emphasised the need for a fair police force. There was just a little too much paranoia.

And all this for free. I feel bad. I’ll certainly buy a copy, or at least contribute appropriately to his library-donation program.

1. I’m looking forward to the inevitable e-paper Kindle clones that’ll be better for the environment [↩]
2. I can’t believe Cory actually thinks this, but this was still the impression I got - maybe the word has a different connotation over the Atlantic. [↩]
3. Kurt Rooney, his name is [↩]

I’ve just discovered Newsweek’s blog devoted to Olympic photographers - they’re detailing everything that goes on behind-the-scenes, and it’s fascinating. The amount of effort needed to get decent shots is ridiculous. They have to pre-approve and sign every bit of kit in and out of the country, to start with (this guy took a month to plan and a day to pack all his gear, which is apparently normal), then there are forms for everything, vast numbers of officials to negotiate, and if you want to set up a remote camera, you sometimes have to put it in place a week beforehand - with all the correct safety precautions, of course. In the first two days one of the main photographers got 7hrs sleep.

I love the fencing shots here, both technically and aesthetically. That can’t have been easy - the sport is so fast that snapping the moment of contact must be a nightmare. I always enjoy watching the fencing, but I’m guessing I’ve already missed it…There are also great shots showing the violence of judo.

The current top post is devoted to women’s beach volleyball. It’s possibly telling that my eyes went straight to the tech details:

Shot on an 85mm f1.2 at a 1000th of a second

Ye gods. I’d have to sell my car to get a lens like that. Via Shoot the Blog.

Stephen King calls Neal Stephenson ‘a god’, and I agree. He seems to have a good idea every paragraph - it’s practically Shakespearean, and frequently exhausting. Snow Crash is still one of my favourite books, although I admit I haven’t yet finished Quicksilver. The latter is so crammed full of interesting bits and pieces that I like to read it when I can concentrate, which means not late at night. And it’s bloody enormous (and only the first of a trilogy), so is taking a while.

I like the story of how his first novel came to be written:

It was a hot summer in Iowa City. Neal Stephenson had a regular job, and yet had a hunch that writing might be for him. He had written a “query” — a plot summary, the outline of a book, biographies of characters, and a few sample chapters — and started to send them to editors, which he picked at random from trade directories. Many rejection letters followed. Finally, one editor wrote that he was intrigued by the outline and the sample chapter and asked for the rest of the novel. After a brief exhilaration the reality set in: there was no novel yet. He had to write it. With all his vacation time and the 4th of July holiday there were 10 days, in which to write a novel. He rented a modern typewriter, secluded himself in his apartment and started to type. Soon a problem appeared: the typewriter had a modern plastic ribbon. The plastic mellowed and became sticky: it was July in Iowa City, and the apartment was hot. The only way to prevent the ribbon from getting stuck is to keep the ribbon moving. And the only way to keep the ribbon moving is to keep pressing the keys. That discovery did wonders for his productivity. He didn’t have time to think: he had to keep pressing the keys and write the first thing that came into his mind. He sent thus created manuscript to the editor. The latter replied that his publishing house can’t print that — but the work was interesting and should be published. Eventually, Neal Stephenson got an agent, a publisher, and his first published book, “The Big U”.

Now that’s a good way to motivate yourself. Via.

Ben Goldacre’s latest column starts off making fun of the Telegraph for publishing crap like this:

The resident homoeopath, Katie Jermine, quizzed me about my diet, stress levels and lifestyle. She then strapped on a wristband and plugged me into an electronic device called the Quantum QXCI, which scanned my system for vitamins, minerals, food intolerances, toxicity, organ function, hormone balance, parasites, digestive disorders and stress levels.

But his investigations into the Quantum QXCI machine reveal…well, I don’t have the words. But there’s a video. Oh, is there a video. Be sure to stick with it until 2:50.

I didn’t think the new X-Files film made sense. And not in an X-Filey everything-has-double-meanings way - it just didn’t hang together at any level. Here are some things that happened (spoilers ahead):

An FBI agent has been kidnapped, and a psychic dude claims he can locate her. Mulder, obviously, believes him, and demands they take a trip to the crime scene. They pull up to the house, but Psychic Dude knows they’re not in the right place. She wasn’t kidnapped here! And he trots over the road. To a house they’ve just driven past. A house covered in ‘crime scene’ tape. It turns out Mulder took him to the wrong place as a test, and look what happened! Everyone’s well impressed at this amazing display of psychic powers. This wasn’t an audience-knows-best thing either - I think they just arranged the scene badly.

They realise the kidnapper is choosing his victims based on blood type. Scully is on this like a shot - they’re clearly stealing organs to order. The FBI team should for some reason start by investigating local organ couriers. So they do, and they happen across Bad Guy immediately. And he has some tenuous link to Psychic Dude. Ra! Except, the plot turns out to have nothing to do with stealing organs. So Bad Guy was an organ courier by chance.

The worst FBI team in history raid Bad Guy’s office. Bad Guy wanders in, sees them, quickly hides, and leaves via the front door. But Mulder spots him, so Bad Guy runs off, in the process dropping Victim 1’s head, which he was carrying for no particular reason. Irrelevant shenanigans occur. Mulder then takes a trip to Psychic Dude, and asks him if Victim 1 is still alive. Psychic Dude says yes. Mulder = despondent, Scully = vindicated. Keep this in mind.

Mulder and Scully crack the case independently, and both do it using magical powers. After going on about animal tranquilisers for half the film, Mulder has the genius idea of asking the local animal supplies store whether they’ve sold any lately. But while he’s in there, he sees a truck pull up. Oh noes! A truck! Clearly, only he and the killer use said shop, so Mulder hides and follows him.

Meanwhile, Scully has announced to her hospital that she intends to treat a young boy with stem cell therapy. Being the amazing doctor that she is, the first thing she does is return to her office and google ’stem cell therapy’. She finds lots, and prints it all off. Later, she comes back to her desk and her eyes are drawn to something she’s printed but apparently not read. It details a Crazy Russian Doctor who’s been transplanting the heads of dogs. ZOMG. Everything falls into place - clearly this Crazy Russian Doctor is now trying his Crazy Experiments on humans! This has nothing to do with stem cell therapy.

So Scully phones (by now in grave danger) Mulder and says, inexplicably, “she’s still alive!”. Referring to Victim 1, whose head was found in a bag. We then cut to an operating theatre, where we see a man’s head on a woman’s body. When Mulder and Scully later burst in on Crazy Russian Doctor, they find a head, sitting on a desk, still alive. Just a head.

I could go on for quite a while. The weirdest thing is, it was barely an X-File. Psychic Dude did very little, and the rest was just crazy medical bullshit. The first film wasn’t particularly coherent, but at least there was a dirty great alien spaceship.

Oh yeah, there’s one more scene that should be mentioned: at the beginning we see Mulder and Scully waiting outside an FBI office. The camera pans left to reveal a portrait of George W. Bush. And the main X-Files doo-dee-doo-doo riff plays. Not as part of the background, or anything subtle like that, just loudly. The camera then pans back, and everything carries on as normal. I like a bit of Bush-bashing as much as the next guy, but this was just crap.

But my main gripe is what they did to Scully. She’s gone from uber-cool Agent of Rationality to whiny religious housewife. She and Mulder had 25 identical conversations, all of which involved her telling Mulder to give up. At one point she complains they they have a home now, and she doesn’t want this kind of darkness in their home. She also ends up completely obsessed with Psychic Dude saying “don’t give up” to her. What could he mean? How can he have such insight into her life? How amazing! Scully now has the analytical reasoning skills of a badger, and has clearly never read a horoscope.

Scully is also suddenly very Catholic (was she always religious? I don’t remember) and spends lots of time having strops over Psychic Dude’s claims that God is speaking through him. How does he know it isn’t the Devil, she asks. And she eventually attributes the whole plot to God’s will. Sigh.

She does at least save Mulder, for possibly the first time ever.

The X-Files always had a great premise and great actors. But the series pretended it was unravelling some great plot, when actually they were making it up as they went along. And despite having six years to write a film script, they apparently couldn’t think of any storylines. Shame.

[headdesk]

[headdesk]

[headdesk]

I have a long draft post that’s mostly unreadable rant. I don’t know how you take two actors as good as Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, with a premise as good as the X-Files, and end up with that.

[headdesk]

[headdesk]

[headdesk]

It’s a universal constant that any writing on the subject of spelling or grammar will contain ironic mistakes. As such, I apparently don’t know the difference between ‘alternate’ and ‘alternative’. Ho hum. “Thanks” to those who corrected me.

A lecturer¹ has suggested that commonly misspelled words should be accepted as correct:

“The spelling of the word ‘judgement’, for example, is now widely accepted as a variant of ‘judgment’, so why can’t ‘truely’ be accepted as a variant spelling of ‘truly’?”

Mr Smith also suggested adding the word “misspelt” to the list and all those that break the “i before e” rule - weird, seize, neighbour and foreign.

Sounds pretty sensible to me. What does it matter? Plenty of words already have alternate spellings, and the ‘correct’ version of ‘judgment’ is arbitrary - it’s not like English is phonetic. Why not accept both?

What difference does it make, as long as the meaning is intact? I tend to think the language battles worth fighting are always over meaning². The classic example is ‘disinterested’ being used as a synonym for ‘uninterested’. There’s a subtle, but important, difference, and I think this is worth bothering about - the loss of ‘disinterested’ is the loss of a word to describes a particular concept, and language as a whole is worse off. Using ‘wierd’ in addition to ‘weird’ loses nothing other than mild anxiety over whether you’ve remembered correctly.

Grammar’s similar. Some of it matters, some of it doesn’t. Possessive apostrophes are important, because meaning changes with their (lack of) use, although admittedly it takes some contriving: Kingsley Amis came up with “those things over there are my husbands”. So that’s important - breaking the ‘rules’ makes things less clear. But split infinitives, or endless arguments over the perfectly clear ‘you and me should go spelunking’? Pointless.

The only argument I can see is that ‘new’ spellings will make writing harder to parse, when reading. But I’d say this is pretty minor - the advantages far outweigh the temporary annoyance of linguistic breakpoints.

Having said all this, it’s not like there’s a Language Tsar we all worship. The Oxford English Dictionary can ‘allow’ variant spellings all it wants, and in-use-language will merrily fail to give a damn. But I suppose it’s referring to education - I can get behind the argument that it’s unfair to penalise people for spelling words wrongly, when the meaning is clearly intact.

In fact, now I think about it some more, hell yes. I’d imagine there’s a close-enough-is-good-enough policy for younger kids, but I bet it goes away. But if someone’s obviously trying to use the right word in a university-level essay, why should it matter if they spell it wrongly? I suppose there’s a balancing act between clarity and meaning, but maybe marking schemes should separate the two. If an essay takes twice as long to read, it’s reasonable to say it’s less effective than an identical paper with correct spellings. But since it is saying the same thing - and usually it’s the meaning that’s important - that should be recognised too.

I think I’d only be Minister of Education for a week. But what a week.

Update: vaguely related: why does English capitalise ‘I’? The NYT article is interesting, but then says:

So what effect has capitalizing “I” but not “you” — or any other pronoun — had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot.

Gah. Are there any concepts which cannot be related to how much society supposedly sucks?

1. in criminology, but whatever [↩]
2. and clarity, but that’s more stylistic [↩]

Forgot to mention I saw WALL-E. My review is thus:

It made me cry. I now require a toy WALL-E to roll around the desk. It is a necessity.