Speaker to Assholes

A Series of Tubes Redux

2014-01-15T09:25:00.001+00:00

Last night (as of this writing) I found myself at a rather interesting talk; the Alchemist Café was hosting Conor McGinn, PhD Candidate and Robot nerd. In the course of the Q&A he was asked whether Ireland was a good place to be doing research into robotics. A fair point; the Americans have Curiosity and the Japanese have Gundam, after all. No, quoth he, Ireland is a great place. And we could all see his point. We've constantly heard how Ireland is replete with educational magnificence, how companies the world over are setting up here to take advantage of our massive erudition. We all left happy.

But as I arrived home, I saw that our public representatives have been hard at work keeping the country safe for democracy. Specifically, Limerick TD Patrick O'Donovan issued a press release that was the most profoundly clueless thing any politician has said about technology in weeks.

To a certain extent this is a pointless post; he's attacking open source, after all, and that very fact means the world's nerds will be queuing up to attack him, a great many more eloquently than I could ever manage. Even so, as a modern, 21st century guy, I must perforce do my own bit for democracy in what's universally accepted as the most effective way; complaining on Twitter and on the web.

So what's our Limerick chum saying,and what's he trying to say? We can safely assume that he's going after the dark web in general, and the Silk Road and Tor in the specific. And bitcoin, of course. Nothing says 'technical cutting edge' like using a technical term that didn't exist five years ago.

I could make a lengthy defence of both bitcoin and tor, of course; anyone could (anyone, of course, who knows even the slightest modicum about the subjects at hand). I won't do that; I'll leave it to the myriad others with far more technical nous than I.

No, my problem isn't with his attack on the very things that are acting as a bulwark (however permeable) against the forces of tyranny the world over. My biggest problem is that he's in the fucking government. And Fine Gael, the party of government, are quite happy to put his ill-informed words on their website and, presumably, stand over them.

Seriously: does no one read these things before sending them to the outside world? Is proof-reading these days limited to running a spell checker? (spoiler: yes).

In conflating Firefox (an open-source internet browser, to use a phrase that appears more than once in his screed) with (I assume) Tor, he's betraying a fundamental lack of clue about anything related to the internet. And in order to get from his pen to the party of government's official web page, it surely must have passed by a number of eyeballs, not one of whom said "hang the fuck on a second".

Of course, nothing will come of it. He'll be ridiculed on the news for a day or two, slashdot and ars technica will get a hold of the story and sneer for a while, and then it'll all be forgotten. Except, I hope, by the people of Limerick. I hope they'll remember at the next general election that this dolt has held their constituency (and their country) up for the world to ridicule, and turf him out where he can go back to street corners, offering tin foil hats to passing motorists.

Particles have mass; we didn't just imagine it

2012-07-04T13:43:00.001+01:00

It's been a good morning.

What better way to spend a summer's morn than by rising early, wandering into the science gallery to be plied with danishes and coffee, then watch as the nerds in CERN tell us that they've discovered the Higgs? Having a bunch of particle physicists there to answer questions was a bonus, too.

Okay, so technically they've discovered a particle that might be the Higgs. But let's face it; it is.

I confess that in recent years I've been hoping they wouldn't find it, that something weird(er) and wonderful(er) was going on with nature. But since the results last year, that hope vanished and instead I got to look forward to the day of the discovery. And though that discovery itself was cool beyond measure, what really made if for me was being able to watch it in the science gallery, surrounded by nerds.

So there I was, watching CERN tell the world about the hole they'd (probably) plugged in the standard model, and doing so via a technology invented at CERN. And that technology – the web – has allowed us to do far more than watch live the announcement of a new particle. Over the years it's let us participate in the landing of Pathfinder and the plummeting of Beagle II; next month millions will watch with bated breath as we share seven minutes of terror with the NASA boffins. We have access to data from Cassini, from Hubble, from the countless telescopes on Earth and outside it. If the boys and girls at CERN start sifting through the petabytes of data looking for supersymmetric wackiness, we'll find out on the web when they find it (actually, there was an intriguing bump in the Atlas results that was sort of glossed over at the time as unrelated to the Higgs). It's that technology that means that the Science Gallery can host the webcast at 8:00am and be sure of the gratitude of many attendees.

But enough about CERN's spinoff technologies; back to the particle of the day. I'll just digress very briefly to raise a hearty middle finger to the thousands who apparently felt that the most significant point of the day was that the Atlas presentation used Comic Sans.

What struck me at the end of each experiment's presentation was the sheer number of people and organisations who had a hand in this; there were thousands of 'em, from all over the planet. This truly was an amazing piece of work, in every sense of the word. The magnitude of the task (and the facility) are breathtaking, and the results are something the human race as a whole can be proud of. It took us ten thousand years to go from agriculture to the industrial revolution; only 150 to go from a periodic table with holes in it to a standard model of particles with the last hole (that we know of) plugged. Yes, there's still that pesky 96% of the universe left to explain, but that too will come. And with the relentless march of Moore's Law and with organisations like CERN, ESA and NASA (amongst many others) so involved in the quest, that day can't be too far into the future.

Thank You Ridley Scott

2012-06-08T03:57:00.001+01:00

Last evening (as I type), I alluded on IRC to the fact that I was going to watch Prometheus, Ridley Scott's latest opus. I was, I confess, somewhat trepidant, and expressed this in a way that led me to wonder: can one legitimately use the phrase "I expect to be disappointed"?

Certainly one can expect the movie to be bad; but if one's expectation turns out to be correct, can one truly claim to be disappointed?

It's also possible that one's expectations are confounded, and that the movie turns out to be great. Should one call this disappointement, inasmuch as one isn't as good a predictor of movie quality as one hoped?

It's with these conundra rattling around in my head that I headed of to the Savoy.

Two hours later, Ridley Scott had answered all my questions.

Yes, I could expect to be disappointed. Scott made sure that my casual sentence - one that could so easily be assumed to be illogical - was perfectly valid.

I wasn't expecting much. I got much, much less than I was expecting.

Friends: if you're going to see Prometheus, have no worries on this score. If you to are afraid of muttering phrases such as "expecting to be disappointed", you can rest assured that however bad you think this film is going to be, it's actually much, much worse. If you're expecting it to be vacuous nonsense masquerading as depth, then you'll be disappointed to find that there's also many a scene that makes no sense whatsoever. If you're expecting that too, you'll be disappointed by the thoroughly idiotic dialogue. And so on, ad infinitum.

So as you head off to the cinema, walk with your head held high and with the full knowledge that Ridley Scott has your back. He's gone out of his way to make a film that's so risible that you can wander into any cinema with your head held high and say in a loud, steady voice "I expect to be disappointed."

What a guy.

The Future is Now

2012-05-25T21:23:00.000+01:00

My friends, as I sat here today in front of my computer, tracing the progress of the SpaceX Dragon as it approached the ISS, I sensed... something. A presence I hadn't felt since... it's been too long to remember. So long has it been, in fact, that it took some time to identify.

I was excited about the future.

Call this a blinkered and slavish adherence to one tiny aspect of the future if you will. Certainly, for those fortunate enough to have been born in the right spots on the globe, technology has brought us true wonders in recent decades. The fact that the phone in your pocket is so far ahead of anything Captain Kirk could dream of back in the 60s is but one example. Look at any science fiction film from before about 2005. If it's got future tech, the chances are that future tech is laughable. Sure, they had their fancy ray guns and their teleporters. But the computers? Pah!

Of course, they did have one thing that we don't; one thing that we should have. A space programme. Captain Kirk may have a crappy communicator, but he works in outer space.

Oh, we have NASA doing its bit; no one can deny that Hubble and Cassini, to name but two, have done more than their fair share. They've given us just not data that are incalculably valuable in terms of understanding the universe, but images that are just astonishing. I say this without hyperbole: the Hubble Deep Field is the greatest photograph of the twentieth century.

For all NASA have done, though, there is one inescapable fact hanging over them: the high point for manned exploration is now decades in the past. It's been forty years since we went to the moon. We've never been to Mars. We've never been to the asteroid belt. Even those of us who can't have remembered the first - or the last - moon landing, there was the knowledge that such things were possible, that the twenty-first century would be the century in which humanity moved from being a one-planet species. As the years went by, though, that dream drifted ever farther away. In many ways I envied the youth; they didn't grow up thinking that this could be done. For these lucky, callow children, the space shuttle is the height of rocket technology, and the ISS a shining example of what can be done if nations work together. Never mind that the station is but a shadow of what it could have been; that budget cut after budget cut have stripped it of all meaning except the symbolic.

But now we have Dragon which, as I type, has just docked with the ISS.

In and of itself, I suppose, one could argue that it's not a big deal. ESA's ATV has been doing a fine job, both as a technology test and as a delivery vehicle. Spaceship One has claimed the X Prize. But this is different.

It was the accomplishments of Gagarin and Armstrong that originally gave us hope. In recent times we've had Yang Liwei raise a flutter of excitement but the Chinese programme is, like those of Russia and the US, subject to the whims and caprices of government and budgetary committees. One should also consider that no government project is ever going to result in anything more than a small temporary outpost, ready to be abandoned at the next budget review. If we're to take the next giant leap, it's up to the citizens of the world to do it themselves.

With the docking of Dragon, that glorious next step is underway. SpaceX have shown us that it can be done. For the first time since the 1970s we can look forward, in the couple of decades or so, to humans whizzing around the solar system. The asteroids are just sitting there ripe for the plucking, and now that google lad has another option for getting his mining equipment out there.

Yes, I know. This is just an unmanned tin can docking with something that's barely outside the atmosphere. Sending a crews to Mars is on a completely different scale. But that doesn't matter. What matters is we have multiple companies and individuals trying to get into space. Spaceship One has made it into space twice, and now Dragon has proved itself. It's a genuinely useful, much less expensive alternative something that ESA and NASA need to keep the ISS supplied. It's not unreasonable to extrapolate, to say that this time we won't just give up. The opportunities resulting from - and created by - these technologies have the potential to send us further and further afield. A radio telescope on the far side of the moon. An orbital fuelling station. We can now say that we might - just might - live long enough to see a child born on Mars.

Some time, whether years from now or tens of thousands of years, humanity will suffer an extinction crisis. Be it through war, disease, supervolcano or just plain old-fashioned big huge rock from the sky, the human race could disappear from the face of the planet. If the species is to survive, it must have people somewhere else. We need to live in the Future; the future promised by Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein. A future where the spaceports are busy with traffic to and from Earth's colonies. If we're supremely lucky, a future in which space pirates sail the asteroid belt.

Today feels like the beginning of that future.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right

2012-04-05T00:47:00.000+01:00

It's been a good couple of weeks for attending things and learning stuff. In the National Museum there was a day-long seminar on matters geological, where I learned all manner of fascinating facts about rocks. The National Library had a talk on Robert Boyle, which elucidated on his work in the field of medicine, of which I previously knew nothing. And yesterday I was in the Science Gallery, listening to a debate on the future of copyright. At that I learned I should buy shares in EMI.

Attended as it was by our beloved minister for innovation, Sean Sherlock, I was looking forward to a bit of haranguing of the poor fool. But there's no point in uninformed haranguing, so I spent the evening reading up on the various aspects that I felt worthy of mention. I even reread the damn consultation document on copyright (pdf on DJEI website), and it was boring enough the first time around.

Of course, Sherlock wasn't making it easy for himself; the day before he said he wouldn't be there if one of the scheduled participants was allowed. It was a foolish thing to do, but this was obviously pointed out to him and he withdrew his objection. Which was nice.

Anyway, the plan was for the four speakers to have their say, then open it up to the audience. And so it went. Really, though, it was just the Minister and Tom Murphy of boards.ie ; everyone else was just along for the ride.

Unfortunately, they were talking about two different things.

Sherlock was there to talk about the consultation document on copyright; Murphy was there to talk about the statutory instrument that Sherlock previously signed into law. And to have a go at EMI.

In fairness, Murphy's points were well made, and it was obvious that his concerns were legitimate; the SI is an appalling text, a half-arsed transcription of an EU requirement. No thought went into it, and it kept boards.ie and other facilitators of internet speech in the same legal limbo they were in previously. Sherlock kept trying to frame his answers in terms of the forthcoming rewrite of copyright law, and as such his answers satisfied no one.

Oh yeah. There were two other speakers. They said something vague and platitudinous, but no one remembers what.

Anyway, on to the audience questions. This was what I was waiting for. Surely among this crowd there were a few people with enough technical nous to be able to frame some proper questions? There were certainly enough fingers tapping on twitter feeds throughout.

First question came from a reporter for the Metro. Given that we've seen rights agencies in other jurisdictions sue grannies who never heard of bittorrent for downloading porn and send threatening letters to networked printers, surely this was going to be a hard-hitting question about the dangers of getting it wrong? Given that there were only about twenty minutes scheduled for questions and answers, he wasn't going to waste our time on something trivial.

Not a fucking chance.

Given the choice between asking about, say, how we could protect ourselves from media companies who'll cheerfully remove stuff they don't own from the internet and asking a pointless question about the Minister's reversing his decision on attendance, which do you suppose our friend decided to waste everyone's time on?

No wonder the fucking paper is free. If this is the level of reportage on which it has to rely, I only hope the prick with the question wasn't getting paid either.

Sherlock gave a reasonable answer, but the muttering had begun and my heart was sinking. This was going to be a fiasco.

And lo, it came to pass.

Next question was from a woman who represented a bunch of musicians. If her members didn't like the law, she asked, would the minister change it? Being a minister of the government and a public figure, of course, he couldn't give the obvious answer: "don't be fucking stupid." Instead, he tried to explain in reasonable terms why she was being fucking stupid. The dipshits in the crowd started calling out "say yes or no!" and I knew all hope of a debate - or even a reasonable question - was gone.

As the hour wore on, it became increasingly obvious that a twitter account doesn't confer sophistication; it just turns retarded chimpanzees into retarded chimpanzees who can type on a phone. The same points were made and remade, with Murphy being quite entertaining, albeit with little to add to his original speech. Sherlock, naif that he is, kept trying to return to the point he was trying to make, with little regard for the change in circumstances. The gobshites, though, just kept their ill-informed catcalling going. I was a little pissed off a Murphy's implication that there was no point in making a submission to the consultation panel as they weren't going to be listened to, but I was obviously the only one; everyone else gave him a round of fucking applause.

So: was it a success? For many, it doubtless was. As we left, I was surrounded by self-satisfied pricks who were preening as they thought about how they'd stuck it to the Minister. If you were hoping for any mention - any mention at all - of the fact that the graduated response process is heavily weighted against ordinary users, of the fact that the rights agencies continue to use a process if identifying copyright infringers by IP address that they stated themselves didn't work, then you were going to leave bitterly disappointed.

If I were the head of EMI watching the proceedings being streamed, I'd have been sitting there chortling, rubbing myself frantically at the thought that the Irish people were more interested in hassling a well-meaning but clueless minister than they were in ensuring that any control over copyright was put into law.

If this is the best we can do, we all deserve to be fucked over.

The headline should really have been... um...

2011-10-13T00:18:00.000+01:00

Getting the Irish Times via RSS as I do, I occasionally suffer some slight bemusement when I see a headline without context (I've sort-of mentioned this phenomenon previously). The headline on this particular occasion — Over 51,000 illegal drugs seized — caused confusion for slightly different reasons; I just assumed (but wasn't entirely sure) that it was a bad headline.

"Pah!" quoth I to no one in particular. "Fifty thousand drugs? Surely not. They must mean €50 000 worth of drugs, or perhaps fifty thousand, er..."

Okay, that's why they did it. There was no pithy way (that sprung to my mind) of saying "tablets or other similar items". The nearest I could manage was "units of illegal drugs", and that could generously be described as "inelegant" in the context of a headline.

So the sub ed failed in his job, and gave us a crappy headline.

Except he didn't.

As it turns out, my initial interpretation was indeed correct. There were indeed 51 000 individual tablets, potions and unguents. Responsibility for this inexactitudinous abomination, however, lay not with the headline writer, but with he who penned the article. This phraseology is inflicted on us throughout the entire length of the piece.

By the way, you're invited to make your own comments on the fact that a story about illegal drugs was written by someone called "Charlie".

Anyway, normally I wouldn't bother mentioning this sort of thing, but this is a special occasion. Words mutate all the time, but rarely does one take note of the first instance of such a mutation, and this is indeed the first time I've encountered the word "drug" being used this way. In everything I've heretofore read, the word was used to name the product or the active ingredient; one could have as many of one item as one liked, but still have only the one drug. To take a simple example, ask your average smoker how many recreational drugs he has on his person; he's unlikely to count his cigarettes before giving an answer.

So is this just a simple case of one journo taking liberties and/or the piss? I don't know. I do know one thing, though; I don't like it. Yes, this could merely be because it's new and different, but I like to think that there's more to it than that. The intellectual rationale for decrying the new meaning, though, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

By the way, this article is not part of the forthcoming 8 000-part series called "Things that illustrate why the Irish Times has no clue about how to use the web".

I agree with The Bloodhound Gang

2011-08-14T12:24:00.003+01:00

Did you know about google's http://wdyl.com ? I just found out myself, but it could well have been around for a while. It's a fascinating page, and one that lets our searchy friends help us find out all about topics that we love. Try it out. I'll wait.

So you're back... welcome. Now that you've typed in 'unicorns' or whatever the hell it is that you like, you're probably quite impressed. The thing is, though, you're probably wondering what other people are typing in. Because those others are on the internet. And that in all probability means that they're horrible, horrible people.

The sort of people that would type 'bestiality' into the site.

And what do they get? Kittens. What kind of sick bastards are there in google that assume that you want to fuck kittens? I mean, we've all looked at sheep with a wistful eye, and even a llama can look alluring in the dusk with a light behind her, but kittens? I may have to go back to using whatever search engine I was using before google. Is hotbot still around?

But fret not, gentle reader. You may sit back, secure in the knowledge that your friends in google are only looking out for you. They've kindly fixed it so that if you type in something your mother wouldn't want you looking at, you're given kittens instead. And you may rest assured that however relaxed you think your mother is about such things, and however cute those little porcine eyes are, she doesn't want to be known as the "mother of that pigfucker".

At this stage, I can see panic setting in. "But what", you ask, "do I do when in the presence of someone who hates kittens with a passion?" Perhaps he's seen too many lolcats, or maybe he was caught one night by ceiling cat. Whatever the reason, that antipathy is there and you're right to be concerned.

But help is at hand.

One kind soul as done some digging, and managed to find the list. And a fascinating read it is, too.

For one thing, it shows that google's nerds are obsessed with boobs. No looking at boobs for you! Or, for that matter, booobs! Or boooobs! Or... well, it goes on. Up to boooooooobs. If you want to search for booooooooobs, you're fine.

(And before you ask, b00bs is on the list, too. But not b000bs).

However...

As of this writing, 'boobies' isn't on the list. One can search for boobies. This, of course, is a good thing. I don't know about you, but I really love boobies.

This begs the question¹: is google populated by a bunch of nerdy virgins who just can't live without access to virtual boobies? Or are we to infer that the nerdy virgins who work in google are so naïve in the ways of the world that they never heard of boobies? We may never know. We must, however, be grateful to them.

So grateful, in fact, that we can overlook their shamless efforts at getting us to install Chrome. As shameless efforts go, though, you've got to admit that it's an impressive approach. Who doesn't want their boobies faster? Evolution is more than natural selection, you know; sexual selection plays a role too, and the allure of the boobie has over the millennia driven us ever onward in our quest to bury our faces in an ample pair all the quicker.

Of course, electrons are all very well when the real thing isn't immediately to hand, but what of a power cut? That laptop will only last so long, and even the "smart phones" that you kids use are constrained by the need for power. Don't worry; google has your back. Whether your particular predilection is for hentai or for women with blue feet, google will help you find the tome that will help you through those dark winter evenings when you can't go outside to restart the generator for fear of the zombie horde.

At this stage, one has to ask oneself whether google is making it too easy for us. You have to remember that when you read about humanity being immune to the effects of evolution, it's natural selection the author is talking about. Sexual selection is still very much with us, and if one can scour the earth for boobies from the comfort of one's own chair, humanity could well be doomed. It's all very well being able to play World of Warcraft for six days straight, but is that going to help us reach the stars? If we're still all on the one planet when the next big asteroid comes, the last human alive will raise an adipose fist to the heavens and cry "Damn you, Google!"

Now I'm worried. These boobies are turning out to be two-edged swords. Learn from my bitter experiences, gentle readers; emailing someone about boobies rarely ends well. A simple, innocuous subject line like "I love boobies" can lead to situations fraught with misunderstanding, shouting, restraining orders and, most relevantly, an elimination of all hope of access to the orbs you so fervently desire.

I'm not suggesting, of course, that there aren't situations where such emails are appropriate, necessary even. But the formula for calculating the cost/benefit ratio is a complex and imperfect one, and it's kept many a game theorist up² at night thinking about it. Be careful, that's all I'm saying.

Fortunately, there's a better option than the email; the venerable phone call. We live in an internet age, and most people find themselves increasingly dissociated from their fellows by dint of the lack of personal, real-time communication that's not constrained by typing speed.
The chances are the owner of the boobies you're interested in has never had someone phone her up and ask her about them. So go on. Women like nothing better than discussing their boobies; she'll appreciate both your interest and the time you took to phone her up.

Now you're talking!
This, after all, was why the internet was invented. Oh, sure, today there are all sorts of other options available to the connoisseur. One can find animated boobies, from the simple jiggle to the pendulous swing. Those with and interest can find all manner of boobie-related activity too bizarre for the normal mind to contemplate. But in offering this, google is bringing us back to our roots. Pictures of boobies; they've united the y-chromosomal since time immemorial, and will continue to do so until the sun explodes and, one hopes, beyond.
Surely google have reached the pinnacle, and we can't expect them surpass this magnificent offering?

Yes we can!
By jingo, they've done it. I haven't explored boobies in 3D yet; I'm waiting for the right time. A bottle of Irn Bru on ice, a fire roaring in the hearth... it'll be a magical evening.

There's more, of course; much more. And google have promised us more still. The "find boobies near you" feature looks particularly intriguing, and I look forward to exploring it to its full potential. However, there's little need for me to go on; you've got the point. Google have done us all a great service, even if we can never know their rationale.
Or... can we?
Notice the absence of results in the oh-so-enticing "watch videos of boobies". Nothing. But upon wandering over to youtube, one will find countless videos of boobies. Sure, 90% of them will be rickrolls, but that still leaves an abundance of jiggly giggity to enjoy. Once can only assume that there's some manner of filter in place. Which means that our friends know all about boobies, and don't want to deny themselves the pleasure. And who can blame them?

As we reach the end of our exploration of google's finest feature, a question has doubtless occurred: surely the average number of testicles for a google nerd is quite a bit below 2? It's probably greater than one, but certainly less than two. And, indeed, what of our brothers whose interests lie in other anatomical areas? Surely these demographics are catered for too? Perhaps they are. But there are others who'll be far more enthusiastic than I about that particular quest, so I leave the matter to them.

Notes

1. Yes, It begs the question.[Back]
2. Fnarr fnarr [Back]

Your Majesty is Like a Stream of Bat's Piss

2011-05-29T20:09:00.004+01:00

The Irish Times has a breaking news RSS feed that, I must confess, is quite annoying; sports results count as breaking news these days. In terms of Irish news it's far from the worst; that accolade belongs to breakingnews.ie and its insistence on including drivel about celebrity diets in its top stories. But the sports thing annoys me, inasmuch as I have practically no interest in sport.

I say 'practically' as I periodically watch Formula 1 Grands Prix. Every once in a while I'll watch the entire season, and possibly keep it up for three years or so. I almost did this year, but as soon as the first race was over the result made it into the headline. The fucking headline. The thing I see which makes me decide whether I'll read the story.

So if I want to watch the race, I have to watch it live. Even if it's in Australia. That or avoid my news reader for most of the day.

So fuck that.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, because it's been festering in the back of my mind for a while. And because I saw this sports headline today. And lo, I did titter.

The headline, reproduced below in all its jpeggy glory for when the page evaporates, gave me pause for thought.

Really? Every sense? There are those out there who are now thinking "wow, he's the executive officer on a starship!". I know this blog has a great following among the Pythagoreans, for whom Number One is the monad, the creator. Yeah, I know. He thinks he's god; what do you do with fuckers like that? Nail him up, I say.

For most of us, though, having a number one does not mean shagging Commander Riker. No, it... look, do I have to spell it out? You know what number one is. I know what number one is. The guy who wrote the headline knows what number one is.

And the guy who wrote the headline things that this golfer, who is by all accounts quite good (where all accounts for me means one breaking news article), is a puddle of urine.

Damn.

I mean, I don't like golf. I don't actively dislike it; I just don't care. At all. But there's an Irish Times sub-editor out there who must really, really hate it.

I don't care

2011-04-10T09:19:00.000+01:00

So LOL has made it into the dictionary. BFD.

I have a lot of problems with LOL as an acronym (or, for the minority, an initialism), but as for making it into the dictionary, it was inevitable. The BBC tells us that language purists are up in arms, but what does that tell us? That language purists are dicks? We all knew that already.

We all think our own attitude to language is the correct one, but if I may be so bold, I'm different; first of all in that I've considered this -- most people have no reason to -- and secondly, because I don't just believe it; I know I'm right. It doesn't happen in many fields, but when it does, by jingo, I'll cheerfully abuse those who differ.

Not, you understand, that I'm suggesting that the world is riddled with simpletons whose doltish utterances are riddled with appalling grammar and egregious misconstructions. None of us uses the language perfectly inasmuch as the rules are fluid; some of us slavishly follow rules that don't exist, and others misunderstand them. Most just don't care.

When I say I'm right, I mean in that I don't give a flying fuck how people speak. I'll correct someone's language in one circumstance only; when they err when correcting someone else. When I see some fool sniffily correcting another's grammar or spelling, I'll examine their comment in the minutest detail, looking for something -- anything -- wrong. 90% of the time I'll find that the sanctimonious fucktard made some mistake.

Purists are just wasting their own time and everyone else's. Guess what, assholes? "Begging the question" doesn't mean what you think it does. Not any more. And as for LOL, if people use it, it's a word. Just like "ain't". Get over it.

Not that it isn't egregiously overused. If I had my way, it'd be illegal to use it without a webcam. Every time you typed LOL on the internet, the LOL police would check your webcam and if you weren't actually laughing out loud, they'd come around to your house, confiscate your computer and punch you in the face.

Yes, I'm being a bit of a purist here. But only because there are countless gobshites out there for whom LOL is punctuation. I've been in IRC chats where some fool ended every sentence with LOL. Every. Fucking. Sentence. It gets on my nerves. However, I recognise that this is my problem, not theirs. I could just leave chat rooms alone, because I know that if you want to see the worst the internet has to offer in terms of language, you need look no further than IRC. Yes, facebook can be horrible, but at least it's people you know. But irrespective of whence it comes, there's no point in correcting this sort of thing. It just makes you look like a fool who's trying to show off your linguistic prowess and in all probability won't change a damn thing with regard the source of your righteous indignation. The point of language is to communicate. It doesn't matter how it's phrased; if you know what they're trying to say, then mission accomplished.

Paradoxically, and to belie my own words, LOL no longer means Laugh Out Loud. If someone wants to tell you that they laughed out loud, then LOL won't cut it. They'll have to say "I LOLed" or something like that.

So I really don't care that LOL made it into the dictionary. It's just a shame that the rate of evolution on the internet is so fast that it's out of date even before it's been added.

What's Wrong with Dog Day Afternoon?

2011-04-10T00:03:00.001+01:00

Sidney Lumet died yesterday (as I write this). He's made some great films over the years, including Serpico, Network, The Anderson Tapes and many others that I really enjoyed.

Yet when IMDB reported his death, at the time of this typing 3,000 people had clicked the facebook 'like' button.

Bastards.

A Game the Whole Family Can Play

2011-03-29T02:36:00.000+01:00

I've recently discovered an interesting game, and one that I've been playing for a while now without realising it. It's best played with an RSS feed, but there's a simpler version, too, suitable for younger readers.

The source of this game is the rather entertaining Out of Context Science, which offers a highly selective quote from various papers or articles. The game? Just guess what the quote refers to.

Some of 'em are easier than others; "searching for blinking white dwarfs could therefore be an exciting study", for example. In fact, that's an example of one that I had to read twice, as it seemed perfectly innocuous the first time around. It's a sorry state to be in, for one such as I who's read so many fantasy novels and seen so many sword'n'sorcery movies, to read "blinking white dwarf" and not think of a grumpy, bearded, short lad emerging from a mine. This can only mean it's time to read Lord of the Rings again.

Of course, some are a lot trickier. "the reward of a happy face made it harder for them to control their impulses", goes one. Some manner of sociological paper seems to be the source, but I was unable to narrow it down further (to spare you the pain of not knowing, it comes from here).

Been reading the science news lately? Then you'll probably know what "combine the right dosage of chemicals that will provide nourishment to testes in a petri dish" refers to. And if you don't, then at least you got to read the word 'testes'.

If you subscribe to the site's RSS feed, you'll just get the quote. No idea? Just go to the web page, and you'll get the source's title. If you've still no idea, just click on the link. If you want the simpler version, then skip the RSS and go straight to the web page.

But what, you ask, about a prize? Well, studies have shown that young children view knowledge as its own reward, and offering bribes serves only to diminish their interest in study for its own sake. So there's no prize. It's for your own good.

Soon... Soon...

2011-03-23T13:37:00.000+00:00

A couple of news stories that seem entirely unrelated caught my eye in the last day or so. In one of its increasingly-frequent moments of press-release-publishing vacuity, breakingnews.ie reports that... well, just read the headline.

It's nonsense, of course. The very words 'online survey' are enough to confirm that. The only distressing part of the story is that it seems that 67% of respondents took it seriously. But why is it nonsense? Why shouldn't we treat it seriously? The country has a long history of believing such things. In fact, in the introduction to his Book of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry published a little over a hundred years ago, WB Yeats recounts his asking a Sligo man if he believed in fairies. "Sure, amn't I annoyed with them", was the answer.

Even today, such beliefs still exist, but for most people the belief is in a magic man who lived two thousand years ago rather than wee folk sitting on pots of gold. There is some hope, though.

The BBC is reporting that Ireland is one of nine countries in which religion will in time become extinct. One's first thought is, of course, that in time it should become extinct everywhere; we can only assume that they mean the relatively near future. Reading the paper they cited (pdf) was to a certain extent futile for one as lacking in erudition as I, but I was able to glean a certain amount from it; enough that I think they were being optimistic, but not overly so. Furthermore, in the specific case of Ireland, there are also other reasons for thinking that it might be a distinct possibility.

There's no doubt that the church has always been in a powerful position in Ireland, but it was really only with the advent of the Free State that they were directly able to affect policy (one thinks immediately of Dev and his relationship with Archbishop John Charles McQuaid). And although their behind-the-scenes power gradually decreased, it's really only since the turn of the millennium that they've seen their temporal -- not to mention moral -- authority diminish significantly.

And now we find ourselves in a position where Fianna Fáil, a party that's corrupt to its core, yet one that has ruled more or less continuously since the days of De Valera, has been eviscerated. Curiously, this was only peripherally related to their pernicious greed, and more to do with their staggering incompetence.

Could the church suffer a similar fate? It certainly deserves to. As more and more details of their atrocities come out, it becomes more and more obvious that any hand-wringing or mealy-mouthed apologies are intended only to save the church's position (or 'special position', as the constitution had it until 1972). If the details hadn't become so public via the church's many victims, would it have volunteered them? The can hardly be a single individual in the state who thinks it would.

And so, coupled with the appetite for change (genuine change, and not the vacuous change espoused by the former opposition), there's the distinct possibility that the rate of abandonment will accelerate. The generation currently in school could well be the last to grow up in a state where the church controls most primary and secondary education, where the church is seen as an arbiter of morality rather than a malevolent organisation dedicated to the protection of rapists, where the prevailing thought is "suffer little children to come unto me" rather than simply "suffer, little children".

All this is cold comfort, of course, to the church's thousands of victims. Enlightenment was always going to come at a price, but it's unlikely that even the most pessimistic expected it to be this high.

Why do you ask, Three Cops Spanking?

2010-12-09T13:03:00.000+00:00

Headlines are wonderful things; subheads, sometimes more so. My favourite crash blossom of all time appeared in Dublin's Evening Herald many, many years ago, but it's one that stayed with me to this day. The story revolved around rabbits' famed proclivity for reproduction, and alluded to a report that suggested that we humans were just as prolific in that department. The headline? Man Beats Rabbits in Sexual Activity. I really, really wish I'd kept a copy of that paper.

These days, though, we still have many to choose from. The tabloids aim to have the best headlines, but given that they try to have a good one every day, they inevitably fail a lot more than they succeed. The Mirror's recent front page is a case in point.

Hahaha... they said 'snow' instead of 'no'. That's brilliant. Except it isn't, and it gives the sentence a meaning that's diametrically opposite that of the intended one. Yeah, I know, no one's going to be confused, but really: is this the best they could come up with? I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with a better one, but shitty puns based on 'snow', 'flake', 'drift', etc, abound.

Fortunately, we have the Register to fill the void. The Reg adopts a certain tabloidy tone, but is ~~always~~ usually an entertaining and informative read. Their language, though, contains quite a bit of jargon; stuff that'll be familiar to long-time readers, but utterly bemusing for the rest of the populace. The occasional reference to Bulgarian Airbags, for example, could well have hapless readers runnng in vain to the dictionary, and one must take pity on the poor soul who looks for reviews of the UK's broadband providers only to come across the headline Three cops spanking in mobile user ranking. Makes perfect sense if you know how to read it.

For sheer class, though, the Reg is unparallelled in the world of the Subhead. I tip my hat to the great mind that came up with this or this.

Of Course We Should Call It a Bailout

2010-12-08T17:54:00.000+00:00

Looking back on the past few weeks, it's strange to see how naïve we were as a country. The fear was palpable as the spectre of the IMF loomed over us. Repeated assurances from the government that no digout would be necessary were ignored by everyone; we knew we were fucked. Fianna Fáil were in a position that may well have been unique; we've spent decades assuming that they were all crooks, but now we're not so sure. Can it be that Biffo and his minions were merely being incompetent? That rather than being the mendacious fuckers that tradition and experience would paint them, they were simply incapable of doing anything even remotely effective?

The prevailing wisdom is that Fianna Fáil's legendary cronyism lay at the root of the problem; that they bailed out the banks simply because they were so intimately connected to the country's leading bankers. I find myself demurring on this point; I honestly believe that when he made those unfortunate guarantees in September 2008, Lenihan was doing what he thought was best for the country. He wasn't, of course. He was just laying the groundwork for national penury. Fianna Fáil's crony culture is a toxic one that damages the country and is absolutely inimical to democracy, but in this case it served only as an easy target for those looking for reasons that we got into this mess. Biffo's government simply wasn't up to the task of dealing with the crisis.

But there's no point in talking about democracy to Fianna Fáil; their assertion that they still had a mandate to govern was so ridiculous that even Charles J. Haughey would've been hard pressed to say it with a straight face.

And so it is that we find ourselves with the most austere budget in the history of the state. Why?

Two reasons; first of all, Fianna Fáil were incapable of doing anything. Secondly, because we were fucked in the arse by the ECB.

It pains me to say this; I've long been a fervent advocate of European union, and I've been looking forward to a common currency ever since I first heard the idea broached all those decades ago. Why exactly a ten-year-old should get excited by monetary policy I'm not sure, but I was enchanted by the idea of the ECU (as it was then), and up until a few weeks ago I'd lost none of that enchantment.

I'm still absolutely in favour of the EU and Ireland's continued membership in both it and the euro, but it's not as easy as it used to be.

When the trinity of initialisms that comprise the ECB, the EC and the IMF came to town, we all pretty much knew what was going to happen. The Irish Times' invocation of 1916 may have been slightly over the top, but not by much. We were giving away our sovereignty. More specifically, Biffo was giving away our sovereignty.

It now seems obvious that before negotiations began, the Irish team were given one and only one instruction: protect the corporation tax rate. And this they did. But in doing so, they gave away everything else. Biffo could announce that the lynchpin of the country's FDI programme was intact, but there's little else he could offer us. The pension reserve was eviscerated and we were lumbered with an interest rate that by any objective standard was ludicrous.

What was truly bizarre, though, that it wasn't the IMF that was the main culprit; it was the ECB. Lenihan was basically ordered by Trichet to stop the banks failing, and while Fianna Fáil and the Irish regulators do bear a lot of the blame for failing to curtail the banks' excesses, the ultimate arbiter of such behaviour is the ECB. It was just as guilty -- if not more so -- than the local fuckwits.

So why don't we just default? Quite simply, because it would cause unknowable problems -- if not death -- for the Euro. Those who suggest that we should call this imposition of debt a loan and not a bailout are missing the point. It absolutely is a bailout. We're bailing out the ECB. And we'll be paying for that largesse for generations.

An Entire Generation Brainwashed

2010-11-15T01:33:00.000+00:00

It may have been earlier, and it may have been someone else, but I say Carl Sagan did it, on the BBC in the 80s, with Cosmos. I refer, of course, to the pernicious mispronunciation of 'Uranus'.

Sagan is one of those people to whom I can't offer high enough praise; Cosmos is truly one of the great television series, one that should be watched by everyone. His books, too, are great, and it is he we have to thank for the legendary 'pale blue dot' photograph of earth taken by Voyager 1. But there are several reasons to think that he was a little lacking in the sense of humour department; primary among these is his pronunciation of Uranus.

Before Sagan, we had "Your anus" (he alludes to this in one of his books). Well, we also had the (probably) unintentionally hilarious film Journey to the Seventh Planet, where the interplanetary voyagers go to great lengths to avoid using the planet's name. When they do, it's "Your-ah-nus". But to everyone not involved in that film, it was "your anus".

Then we got Cosmos. And we got "OO-ranus" That deadly double schwa has since infected the public consciousness, and as time goes by fewer and fewer people are giving it the correct pronunciation, except as a joke (Hooray for Animanics).

It's always bothered me, but today I read a description of the 70s film The Groove Tube. I quote:

It also features a skit involving crude bodily functions that are part of a commercial for a mythical corporation called "The Uranus Corporation" (with the name pronounced "ur-AY-nuss" in the film, which is part of the skit).

Maybe I'm being sensitive here, but I get the impression that the poor reviewer actually believes that it's being pronounced wrong. I've since texted a couple of people, and it seems that it's a common misconception. In other words, Sagan has flim-flammed an entire generation. The bastard.

Over the years, I've been trained, Pavlov-like, to perform the dance of happiness whenever I hear the correct pronunciation. Alas, this is getting more and more infrequent. I recently listened to a lecture on Greek mythology, where the lecturer used the wrong pronunciation most of the time, but on one or two occasions got it right. To my mind, this suggests that he has tried to force himself to use the new, bowdlerised version, but slipped up. If that lecturer is reading this (unlikely, I know): You, sir, are a sellout.

It may not be too late.

If we're to save this word, we need you. And by 'we', I mean humanity at large. Irrespective of how the Greeks may have pronounced it (I honestly have no idea), in English it's always been "Your anus". And it's time it was again. Whenever you have to use the word, pronounce it thusly. Make jokes as you do so if you must, but always -- always -- pronounce it "Your anus". We must put a stop to this nonsense. A line must be drawn.

Mr Gorsky Was Obviously Behind it All

2010-11-11T02:03:00.000+00:00

Earlier today, I went to a talk in the Science Gallery which asked a simple question: were the moon landings real? Given the location of the talk it was obvious that the answer to this was going to be "yes". I confess, though, that I was holding out a small glimmer of hope that our esteemed speaker was going to try and convince us that it was all a hoax. Alas, 'twas not to be, so I'll have to continue waiting for an opportunity to verbally abuse a guy at a lectern.
Given that I've spent a fair amount of time over the years reading about -- and sneering at -- conspiracy theories of various types, I didn't expect to learn a great deal. In this I was slightly surprised; not by any facts presented, but by myself. I realised that in all the stuff I've read and watched over the years, a simple fact never occurred to me.

The Moon Landing Hoax is the lamest conspiracy theory ever.

Quite simply, it makes no sense. At all. If you're familiar at all with the 'evidence' for such things, you're doubtless aware of the explanations that exist for each and every item our under-imaginative friends have to offer. However, when one sees the points lined up beside each other on a powerpoint slide, one can come to only one conclusion: this is bullshit. No one can believe this.

And yet they do. 20% of Americans, it seems. And fuck knows how many assholes in the rest of the world.

So what is this evidence? Well, amongst other items of contention, they'll point triumphantly to a few things, such as

the flag waves when it's moved
there aren't any stars during the day
shadows on different slopes will appear at different angles
etc

The one about the shadows is my favourite, actually. Our friends will point to two shadows that aren't parallel, and tell us that this means that there are two light sources. To a person with a brain, this means that each rock (or whatever) would have two shadows, but one can only assume that they're magical NASA rocks that only cast one shadow. Or something. A simpler explanation? The sun. The same reason you can't see the fucking stars.

It finally occurred to me. There is a hoax here, all right. But it was perpetrated by the original formulator of this conspiracy theory. Somewhere, someone decided to make a bunch of shit up and see who'd believe him. He was successful beyond his wildest dreams.

Honestly, I fear for the future. What happened to the proper conspiracy theories that we had when I were a lad? Aliens assassinating JFK. The secret base at the Earth's core. David Icke's fifteen-foot lizards ruling the world. Scientology.

These are all proper gibberish; backed up by nothing but a fevered imagination. But they at least have the decency to be ignored by more than 80% of Americans, and to not be invalidated by the fucking obvious.

We can only hope these fools get distracted by something shiny, and leave us all the fuck alone. That way, the next time I attend a lecture, it'll be one that tells us something that isn't blindingly obvious to anyone who can read and/or think.

Oh, well. At least I got to see a clip of Buzz Aldrin punching one of those pricks. That's always worth seeing.

The Perils of Pedantry

2010-11-10T18:31:00.002+00:00

For the second time this week, I found myself talking about a couple of things that had me struggling to answer. Not because I didn't know what I wanted to say, but because the questioner wanted a one word answer, and I couldn't bring myself to give one.

The questions were, in essence, "do you believe in UFOs" and "do you believe in aliens?" The answer to both questions is, of course, "yes". But an answer that better represented my thoughts would be "no".
A UFO is, as we all know, an Unidentified Flying Object. The key word here is "unidentified". Of course I believe in UFOs; there are countless examples of lights in the sky that weren't conclusively identified. To answer the question that I was asked, though -- do you believe that those unidentified objects where alien spacecraft -- I'd have to say "Of course not, you fucking tool. What kind of gobshite do you take me for?" Depending on how one interprets the initialism UFO¹, the answer could be yes or no. The correct answer would be "Yes, but..." followed by a long exposition that, let's face it, no one wants to hear. He who asks a casual question, I think you'll find, rarely wants a detailed lesson in semantics for an answer. However, anything less would be the truth and nothing but the truth, but hardly the whole truth.

The same applies to the other question: Do I believe in aliens? Again, I've no doubt whatsoever that the universe is teeming with life; the probability of our being alone is damn close to, if not exactly, zero. Equally, it's beyond question that those EBEs aren't visiting earth and sticking alludium probes up our arses. Beyond question for rational humans, at any rate.

Some day, I'll learn to overcome this pedantry and just answer the question that they want answered, rather than the question they actually asked. Some day. For now, though, I'll continue using "Yes, but..."

Notes

1. Or acronym. The Japanese, if anime is to be believed, pronounce it as a word

Hooray for Baen!

2010-11-09T02:30:00.000+00:00

The guiding philosophy of this blog since its inception has been "if you can't say something mean, don't say anything at all." However, the odd nice comment does slip through, and this is one of those occasions.

Baen have long been a publisher who've recognised the power of the internet and, indeed, of letting people read their books for free. When they first started letting people download their stuff, they made the first volume of a bunch of series available on the assumption that if the reader was suitably impressed, the likelihood of purchasing subsequent volumes (and, indeed, those that were downloaded) would increase. They've since expanded their range of freebies, so we can infer that they were right in their assumptions (have a look at their rationale on their Free Library page).

Now, they've gone and made the entire Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold available for download. Those who know me are doubtless sick of my constant raving about how good Bujold is; she's far and away my favourite author. Your humble servant has interviewed, dined with and generally hung around with some of the world's best and most famous authors, but upon meeting Bujold I was reduced to a gibbering, incoherent fanboy. My autographed copy of Barrayar is falling apart it's been read so many times; I really should buy a new one before it disintegrates completely.

Of course, I don't really need to; I've got an electronic copy. But as Baen guessed, I'd rather have an actual book.

Point your browser thisaway and revel in the delights of the best space opera writer you'll ever read. But don't just dismiss it as space opera; Falling Free is an amazing book in every regard (though not strictly a Vorkosigan book, it's set in the same universe, but not on the freebie list).

All hail Bujold; my year was made when I found out Cryoburn was coming out. And all hail Baen for making available not just this most wonderful of authors, but a huge range besides.

Did You Threaten to Overrule Him?

2010-10-30T14:11:00.000+01:00

I've been noticing for a while now a tendency among some interviewers towards a somewhat combative attitude to their guests when I'm listening to or watching political programmes. It has its place, of course, and some of Jeremy Paxman's interviews are highly entertaining for that very reason. However, it seems that all too often the point is not to elicit information but to get the guest to say something -- anything -- he doesn't want to say. And I regret to inform you that RTÉ Radio's political discussion programme The Late Debate has joined the hallowed ranks of programmes that have me yelling at the presenter rather than the guests.

The format of the programme is simple; five or six guests and one presenter. Those guests are generally a few politicians from various sides and a couple of journalists. It's an entertaining, informative way of spending an hour while doing stuff that doesn't require one's full attention.

Or at least, it used to be.

Cormac Ó hEadhra, the latest presenter, is no Rachel English. And he's certainly no Jeremy Fucking Paxman.

He likes nothing better than to wait until he senses a hint of vagueness, whereupon he pounces. However justified the original comment may have been, Cormac's in there and we've got five minutes of "Just answer the question, minister". Said minister will constantly repeat what he's just said, changing some of the phrases and possibly adding a vacuous sentence or two. It's a waste of airtime. The presenter knows the situation, the guests all know the situation and the audience certainly knows the fucking situation. Irrespective of whether the hapless civil servant is trying to equivocate or elucidate, the listener has to put up with ten percent of the programme devoted to this nonsense.

I suppose one advantage is that it's a cue for putting the kettle on. In days of yore there was a specific time for this; the ad break. But when the podcast eventually comes down the tubes, it's ad-free (late and badly named to be sure, but I'm still very glad that it's available). Anyway, without the ads I just have to wait for Cormac to get on his high horse and it's time for liquids to either enter or leave the body.

But I digress.

To an tÚsal Ó hEadhra and his many fellow presenters: relax. The point of the programme isn't to generate headines in the following day's Irish Times. And if it is, you're doing it wrong. This constant cavilling over trivialities is precisely what you're being paid to ensure doesn't happen. If a speaker says something stupid, there are three or four other people around the table to pick up on it. Any one of them would be delighted to offer -- and more than capable of offering -- a dissenting opinion. Your job is make sure it's orderly, and when appropriate to say "shut up". And to shut the fuck up.

The Nightmare is Over... For Now

2010-10-18T17:24:00.004+01:00

At last it's passed. The annual irritation; the month of bemusement when your humble blogger must constantly check the calendar to see if something he's reading about has yet to happen or if it's already passed. It's a pain in the hole, and it takes up about ten percent of every damn year.

By now, gentle reader, you'll have inferred that I'm talking about the date. Or, to be more specific, the format in which the date is written down. Those who do the writing broadly fall into three categories, depending on which format they do the writing...

Those Who Have Seen the Light
Blessed are those who adhere to ISO 8601, for they shall be understood.

Assholes
These pricks just make it up as they go along. Either they think of themselves as creative or they've paid someone to make shit up and give us a random string of numbers and punctuation masquerading as a date. The only thing worse that doing it in a misguided attempt at seeming artistic is to do so in a misguided attempt at seeming scientific. Irrespective of motivation, it's nonsense.

Assholes
It's a less egregious form of assholism, but it is one nonetheless. These poor fools write the date as they've been always taught; as far as they're concerned, that's how it's written. They give no consideration to the fact that they're addressing a global audience, and that some of the people they're addressing are used to a different format.

These latter assholes comprise a number of subcategories:

Assholes
These assholes use the date format dd-mm-yy (or dd-mm-yyyy). This is the most forgiveable, as it's a logical sequence and one that's been adopted by most of the world. Nonetheless, with our US cousins generating a significant percentage of internet traffic (both as readers and writers), the potential for ambiguity is, shall we say, non-zero.

Assholes
Americans: What the fuck? Seriously. First you try and take all the interesting bits out of spelling in a mania for simplicity, and then you adopt a date format that makes no fucking sense? I ask again: What the fuck? mm-dd-yyyy? Who's the dipshit who came up with that? Not only is it at variance with the system used by most of the world, but it's in no order whatsoever. Month then Day then Year? Someone really needs a kicking for letting that one through.

Assholes
It is with heavy heart that I must relate a tale of cultural oppression and pathological fence-sitting. Yes, friends, in reading up in preparation for writing this I discovered a most appalling fact; Canada, it seems, has three date formats. If you're writing the date in Canada, you can use 'dd-mm-yyyy', 'mm-dd-yyyy' or 'yyyy-mm-dd'. Doubtless many organisations and individuals have seen the light and insist on the last one, but in theory one can use any of the three without ridicule. This is truly a sorry state of affairs. One can easily imagine how a country with Canada's flux of geographical and historical influences could arrive at such a situation, but... damn. The revolution is overdue. Rise up, Canucks! Rise up and throw off the shackles of archaisms that infest your lives! Realise the dream of an unambiguous assignation on the eleventh of October!

So there you have it. Because of all this ambiguity, when I read of something on 10/11/10 I have to figure out when the hell it's happening. I have to look at other dates in the email. If there aren't any, I have to look for another hint, such as the day of the week. This shit happens every year between about the first of October and the twelfth of November. It is, as I suggested above, a pain in the hole, and a wholly unnecessary one.

Of course, some are worse than others. The Science Gallery in Dublin, I regret to say, is fond of sending out emails promising events at dates like "17:10:10.18:00" which a few seconds parsing will tell you is the seventeenth of October at six in the evening. But no parsing should be necessary (it's such a shit format they can't even keep it straight themselves, and the format can vary even among paragraphs in the same newsletter). '2010-10-17 18:00' is instantly readable.

Oh, and I booked a seat at an upcoming talk in the Science Gallery, and got an email with a wholly different format. The email assures me it's on "19/10/2010 19:30:24". I commend their specificity, and will object strenuously if the event doesn't begin until 26 seconds past the minute.

Of course, it's important for other reasons, too. Take RTÉ Radio's discussion programme, The Late Debate. I download the podcast of this programme, and it comes in with a filename like pod-v-12101055m25sthelatedebate.mp3. To make matters worse, they're shit at updating the rss feed, so some days three episodes will come hurtling into my downloads directory. I then have to figure out the order in which to listen to them, as sorting by filename or by date is pointless. All hail the BBC, who give their podcasts names like iot_20101014-1031a.mp3.

This started as a tirade, but will end with a plea. A plea to you, kind reader, to do the right thing. Don't stand idly by when you see someone drag us back to the twentieth century with their outdated formats. Remember, the twentieth century gave us Hitler; if you don't stem the tide of antiquated dates, you're just begging him to return. By writing the date and time as "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm", you're not just making yourself more easily understood. You're saving the Jews.

Ten Rants or Less

2010-10-10T19:03:00.001+01:00

I've alluded on previous occasions to the fact that I'm no longer annoyed by (most of) the lapses in grammar and punctuation that infest our daily lives. I'll give the occasional chortle when I see a particularly egregious example, but that's about it.

Try as I might, though, there's one thing that pisses me off. It's the ubiquity of the "Ten Items or Less" sign that one sees in every supermarket.

Yes, it should be "Ten Items or Fewer". We all know that. I've explained on many an occasion the difference between "less" and "fewer" (only to people who asked; I promise), but if I'm walking down the street and I see the wrong word being used, I cheerfully walk on by. I don't care. In nearly all cases, the meaning is clear; that's all that matters.

The same is true of the supermarkets, of course; no one is confused by the word "less". I'm sure some prescriptivist dolts work themselves into a semantic knot trying to justify their complaints, but let's face it; we all know exactly what the sign means.

So why get all worked up about it, then?

Quite simply, it's because there are so many prescriptivist dolts out there. There can't possibly be a single supermarket chain in Ireland (or, I imagine, the rest of the world) that doesn't regularly receive complaints about the outrageous flouting of the rules of grammar in these appalling signs.

And yet those signs persist. Why?

I can't think of a valid reason, but of the invalid ones, only one seems vaguely plausible.

Some marketing asshole has decided that "fewer" is too high-falutin' a word to be used with the public. Tesco is the Supermarket of the People, and to have a sign that says "Ten Items or Fewer" would be to suggest that they're above the hoi-polloi, and the great unwashed are unworthy of shopping in such an august emporium.

In other words, using correct grammar is a sign of snobbery.

To which I can only say "Bollocks."

Tesco isn't alone, of course; Dunnes does it too. So, I imagine, does every other supermarket. Is this a case of herd mentality; if one does it, the rest must too? I've no idea. In fact, I may be wrong, and that no one who's ever made one of those signs has any idea of correct formulation. But I doubt it.

To use the wrong word is forgiveable. In fact, I'm a little uncomfortable using words like "correct" and "wrong" in this context; they may be apposite from a grammatical point of view, but it suggests a value judgement that simply isn't there.

To use the wrong word deliberately, though, is just ridiculous. It's condescending, and suggests that supermarkets -- or at least the marketing departments thereof -- have a view of their customers that's downright insulting.

The Devil Cites Scripture for His Own Purpose

2010-10-05T22:15:00.000+01:00

I don't know whether it's arrogance or stupidity (or both), but ever since the Catholic church's kiddy-fucking proclivities became public knowledge, our clerical chums have shown a distinct lack of nous when it comes to their public statements. Most of these came from the lower ranks, but occasionally the higher-ups manage it too (this being my favourite from recent times). Even so, I was prepared (for some reason) to give the Most Rev. Diarmuid Martin the benefit of the doubt, and assumed he was the victim of lazy quoting by the Irish Times when they reported on his homily during the Law Mass yesterday. I was, it seems, a trifle naïve.

A brief aside: once again, the Irish Times makes me go in search of something that could've been easily linked to from the web page; there were no fewer than three instances of that in today's edition. Really, Madame Editor, can you not convince your minions in the online department that there's more to the web than just regurgitation of the dead-tree content? Is it so hard to provide links that'll provide context? Even when the story refers to a web site, there's no hint of a link.

Anyway, the homily made a lot of sense from an aspirational point of view, when he went on about the tower of Babel -- and in particular when he used the phrase "intellectual greed" -- I bristled. And so I had a quick read of the homily in its entirety. It was actually worse than I thought.

First of all, let's look at this appalling phrase "intellectual greed"; it harkens back to the good old days when the church regarded itself as the repository of all knowledge, and preferred to keep the people reliant on the priests. It's the sort of thing Vatican II was supposed to address. It seems, though, that old habits die hard. It may be that I'm misinterpreting the phrase, and he's talking about something other than a thirst for knowledge, but I'm at a loss to come up with a reasonable alternative.

Then he said this:

Those who set out to build the Tower of Babel hoped that they would be able on their own to build a tower which would reach God himself: “Let us build a tower with its top in the heavens”, they said, “let us make a name for ourselves”.

"Let us make a name for ourselves." In modern parlance, this of course means that our hapless builders wanted to be famous, that they were building the tower out of a sense of personal aggrandisement. But that's not what the passage says (it's Genesis 11:1-9, in case your wondering). It wasn't the Irish Times that was quoting out of context; it was the Archbishop.

The passage tells us that the tower was an attempt at unifying the people; to give them a common identity. God, being a dick, didn't like this, and especially didn't like the idea that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do". So one could imagine that the Archbishop was following God's thoughts on the topic, but imparted his wisdom in such a way that it seems like it was hubris that was being punished.

Another aside: the Holy Spirit didn't do much to stop this line making it into the text: "They loose contact with the reality of what human and societal growth is really about".

If you'll pardon an allusion to the Fast Show, pointing out hypocrisy in the Church is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. You get all worked up and spend a fair amount of time giving it your all, looking for just the right way to use your tongue (or, indeed, fingers) to maximum effect. You soon realise, though, that you're far from alone in this activity, and that all over the world, millions are probably engaged in that self-same activity at that moment.That knowledge, though, doesn't stop you from carrying on, or from making it any less satisfying.

No way of determining, huh?

2010-10-05T19:25:00.002+01:00

At first glance, this story looks like a victory for rationality. And, indeed, it is. But really...

The City Council says it will not be providing them with another property because it has no real way of determining if the claims are true.

I'd be a lot happier if this line read "The council told them not to be so fucking stupid, and to stop living in the middle ages."

They're right, of course; there is no way of proving the non-existence of ghosts. Just like there's no way of disproving the presence of gods, trolls or telepathic centipedes. But it'd be nice if they just told this hapless couple to cop the fuck on.

I'm Going to Coin Another Word

2010-10-03T18:17:00.000+01:00

It can be argued that when someone such as I resorts to making up a word, it's due to deficiencies in his own vocabulary. With so many words in the English language, with so much nuance possible, there must surely be a word already for the concept our hapless neologificator is trying to convey. I don't deny it.

On the other hand, that's not going to stop me. If, as you read this, you find yourself muttering dark imprecations at my lack of erudition for not knowing x, then by all means add a comment. Be as abusive as you like (as long as you include the word).

Let's face it; there are too many words out there for one man to know them all. I feel confident in saying that there isn't a person on the planet who knows every esoteric and technical term in the English – or any other – language. I've no idea how many words there are in English (nor does the Global Language Monitor, despite claims to the contrary), but irrespective of the number, we can rest assured that the more words one knows, the more likely one is to frequently encounter new ones.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's get on with our New Word of the Day (for a fairly broad value of 'day').

Today's word, boys and girls, is 'asignifier'.

'Asignifier' can be defined thusly: a word in common parlance that is entirely devoid of meaning. Such a word is used regularly, but those who use it – and those who hear it – accept that it has some significance, but would be hard-pressed to give a definition that neither lapses into self-reference nor spirals into vague inanity.

This doubtless applies to many, many words, but I'm thinking of one in particular: 'spiritual'.

Now, there are many valid meanings to spiritual; I'm not talking about them. A swift perusal of my current online dictionary of choice reveals many definitions. I've no objection to any of those. However, there are many people today who consider themselves spiritual, but have no real religious faith; they merely consider themselves to be one with the cosmos. Or something. If you visit someone who has a wind chime or a dream catcher in their house, there's a distinct possibility that they think of themselves as spiritual. Alas, because you're visiting their home, it'd be rude to some out with a 'what the hell are you talking about?', so the question usually goes unasked.

So it's fairly easy to define the word in terms of those who use it; a spiritual person is one who believes in some or all of the following, but without any formal religious underpinning of those beliefs: reincarnation, homoeopathy, chakras, auras, astrology. They'll be vaguely anti-science, and almost definitely anti-GMO. They probably don't believe in a specific god, but they've no problem with phrases like 'playing god'. They'll readily accept scientific concepts like anthropogenic climate change, but equally they'll be sure that vaccinations are nothing but a tool of the corporations. There's a significant chance that they're vegetarians. For them, Gaia isn't a metaphor but a physical presence. They hate chemicals (or at least those chemicals that fit their own amorphous definition of the word). They've probably read at least one book by Deepak Chopra, and possibly a book utterly unrelated to science that misuses the word 'quantum'. They'll accept anything that suggests that mankind is the worst thing that happens to this planet.

In short: hippies.

I can't fucking stand hippies.

So why hippies? I've no great problem, after all, with religious people in general, unless they try to inflict their drivel on me.

Part of the reason, I suppose, is that I fulfil a few of the above criteria myself. I'm a vegetarian. I've little problem with current climate-change models. I've always had environmental tendencies. I consider vaccines to be vital to the continued well being of millions – if not all – of us, but I've no doubt that pharmaceutical companies, at their upper echelons, comprise mostly fuckers who subvert science and the scientific method for short-term profit (case in point).

But I'm not a self-hating vegetarian. It's 95% of other vegetarians that piss me off.

Anyway, that's spiritual people. But as definitions go, it's rather unwieldy, and addresses the symptoms, but not the root disorder. What does the word 'spiritual' mean? I've struggled with this for some time now, and all I've gotten from that study and reflection is an automatic irritation towards those who use the word to describe themselves.

Yes, this could be hubris. I realise that I'm saying that because I don't know what the word means, it doesn't have meaning. I've tried, though. Oh, how I've tried. I've listened with an open mind to these hippy fuckers prattle on, but their sound and fury inevitably comes to naught.

Actually, 'meaning' probably has a lot to do with it. People want their lives to have meaning; they want to be here for a purpose. I don't understand this at all, but I accept that there are many, many people who feel that way. And one could argue that by accumulating their own set of beliefs rather than accepting a job-lot of crap from one religion or another, they're a rung above the traditional adherent. But they're still a couple of steps from the bottom of the ladder.

Where to start?

2010-10-01T06:31:00.000+01:00

I meant to post this a couple of days ago, but I got distracted. Blame the Irish Times. Or the EU.

Actually, that's not fair. Maybe. I'll let you decide.

It all started, you see, when the Irish Times reported on, um, a report to the European Parliament on the future of e-commerce in this happy bloc of ours. I was, I confess, a trifle sceptical about some of the figures, and went off in search of the report. That took a while. Then I read the first half of the report. That took two minutes, plus scrolling time. Then I got to the human-readable part, which took another while. Then, er, I forgot to write this.

Anyway, enough of this circuitous prattle. I'm here to give out, and you're here to read my giving out. Unless you're my mother, in which case you're just here because you feel it's your duty. It isn't really, ma. Besides, I may well be saying 'fuck' later, so feel free to stop now, before I disappoint you again.

But I digress.

My raison de chialer¹ on reading the Irish Times piece was related to their lack of links (more anon), but a few other thing cropped up, so I might as well unburden myself as completely as possible in one post.

First of all, there's the contribution by our beloved MEP, Seán Kelly. What the fuck do All-Ireland tickets have to do with this? Nothing. It's just another Fine Gael politician prattling on an irrelevant subject without anything substantial to add to the debate. The same thing we hear every time one of those vacuous fools decides to bless us with some words of wisdom. It'll be something that sounds vaguely reasonable until you think about it for a quarter of a second, at which point you realise that it's full of sound and fury, but signifying fuck all. The one bright side of those dipshits gaining power after the next election will be that they'll have to come up with new way of inflicting their petty cavils on the nation.

My second and third points are related, so I'll cover them together.

As I said, I wanted to read the report. As has happened so many times in the past weeks, I decided to look at a source mentioned in an Irish Times article. Sometimes it's a survey, sometimes it's a press release, this time it's an EU report. Every time, I have to go looking for it. Is it so bloody difficult to provide a link? The Irish Times is particularly bad in this regard; they seem to just take the text of the paper and dump it on the web. Often, there aren't even links to related stories in the same day's paper. It's a pain in the hole. I have to wander off to the relevant web site and find it myself; sometimes it's easy, sometimes it isn't.

Which brings me to the point 2(b); I wandered over to http://europarl.europa.eu to read the report. Couldn't find it. There were, it seemed, no reports by Pablo Arias Echeverria. Eventually, I had to go to the home page of the EPP, the party to which the author belongs. Thence, back to the European Parliament web site, where I finally got my digital hands on the report (it's here, by the way).

Yeah, it may be my fault. It may just be that I'm not fully conversant with EU terminology, and that with practice I could readily find whatever I'm looking for. But I like to think of myself as being above average in terms of internet nous, so if I couldn't find it without resorting to external web sites, neither will half of Europe.

So there you have it. A pox on Seán Kelly. And on the Irish Times. And on europa.eu.

Notes

1. My original intention was to use "raison d'être" here, but it didn't really suit, so I asked a Quebecois Pixie for help. If you Francophones object, it's either because you're not in Canada or because I didn't fully explain what I was looking for. Either way, it's your own fault for expecting perfect French from an insular Irishman.