There was a review in Saturday’s Guardian of a book by a philosopher who disputes the new authoritarianism with regards to childrearing. (Sorry, I’ve thrown it out, I can’t check his name or the name of the author of the article)

However, to the best of my recollection (which the evidence above shows to be possibly faulty) he was taking issue with the supernanny style of bringing up children. I  certainly do so myself, in the strongest of terms. There is clearly a return to 1930s (Truby King et al)  ideas about bringing up babies.  Even worse, now that both parents almost always have to go to work, most toddlers barely see an adult who isn’t paid to care for them, for more than an hour or two a day. If that adult is held in thrall by the emotionally crippling theories of the day, the baby might as well be in an orphanage.

The whole supernanny style approach is based on the belief that professionals are better than inept parents at looking after kids. That’s obviously why kids in care do so well then, is it?

Biological determination holds the centre stage in well nigh every other social theory nowadays.  So why are genetics and mammalian biology miraculously absent from our beliefs about childcare.  Mothers and babies are supposed to dispense with their instincts and pay attention to wherever the childcare pendulum has swung today. And the childcare pendulum is rapidly advancing in the direction of authoritarianism, without even the belief in a shared social project that might have mitigated the 1930s approach. This approach made a generation of parents and babies infinitely miserable – the babies because they were forced to conform to unnatural rules at a pace they did not choose; the parents because they could never live up to the expression of hatred implicit in these rules, unless they genuinely hated their kids. 

The only saving grace was that real people sneakily behaved as human beings in the face of the rules.  What a mercy human fallibility can be.

Current thinking seems to be – Put your baby in a nursery and go to work to buy more and more consumer goods.  Put your school child through endless standard tests that value and enforce mediocrity.  Pressurise your kids from the moment of birth or they will fall behind in the league tables of life. When your offspring  becomes a demanding consumerist nightmare child, who prefers products to genuine attention, who would have expected that?

Deep apologise for failure to rant incoherently. Will put right asap.

Does anyone have any idea (a) why MsnMessenger randomises my display picture and (b) how I can stop it?

I got fed up with having odd images as my display picture and decided to put an actual photograph.

The photo was chosen because it was reasonably flattering, but in an odd way – anyone who knew me would know it was me but noone who didn’t know me would recognise me from it. So anyone who accidentally came across it wouldn’t really recognise me if they saw me on the bus.

However, there are about half a dozen pictures in the folder it’s in. Some have been used as my display picture. They would however only be recognisably me if I could be mistaken for a castle, Dolph Lundgren in the Starman film he made years ago, a hindu goddess, a baby wearing goggles or a toilet (and so on.)

Every time I log on, it’s pure chance which will come up, however. Sometimes the picture will change a few times in the course of an evening. Other times it will stay as it is for a few weeks. Rebooting the PC or reloading Messenger seem to bring on a higher than average rate of change but the change isn’t inevitable even if both of these things happen. Nor, as I explained before, is the changing process absent if I stay logged into Messenger for weeks.

That was a gratuitously long-winded way of saying. I have no idea why Messenger does this. It doesnt seem to happen to anybody else I know.

Before you ask, I don’t have Dynamic display selected.

As an aside, I think the new add-in features of the latest Messenger are mainly pesh of the highest order. Some even put loud intrusive adverts for things like McDonalds on and change your Messenger wallpaper. The Knock thing is quite useful. Everything else is nothing but aversion therapy in terms of making me switch off Messenger.

Just a brief rant, old-codger-style.

1 – Usability gurus never have usable – or bearable – web pages.

2 – Web pages are generally getting uglier and they all look the same.

3 – All those technologies that were supposed to transform the web – like vrml and flash – never became better than the rubbbish they started out as. Well nigh nobody uses them. The few sites that do are almost always horribly annoying.

4 – Why can’t we have holosuite web pages? Seems simple enough.

Lots of tv programmes this week claiming that Star Trek inspired all sorts of fantastic tech advances. Even if this silly claim were true- guess what – we wanted the beam-me-up device and the holosuite. Nobody would have asked for the mobile phone ffs.

This is a really good site. I picked the URL up from other blogs on this page. http://archaeoastronomy.co.uk/

However, as well as confessing to being utterly baffled by the technical stuff on the Bosnian pyramid, I have to take issue a bit with the article on the Brazilian megaliths. This is just because it talks about there needing to be something aligned to the midsummer sun, if it is to be accepted as an astronomical thing, because of the crop cycles etc.

It seems to me that anyone who has been anywhere near the tropics knows that people living there don’t care about annual sun cycles. It’s always more or less twelve hours day and 12 hours night near the equator. There are no annual crop cycles of the sort we are familiar with in temperate zones. In the Amazon, it seems unlikely they’d even have to think about when the rainy season is – it’s a rainforest, isn’t it? 🙂

So – why would there need to be a midwinter/midsummer marker for it to be an observatory?

I don’t know if the irony seemed to have passed a lot of people by. I thought that Ben Goodacre was saying that some of the supposedly scientific research behind new medicines is so spurious that it might as well be homeopathic rubbish that they are selling. At least that is not going to make you sick from the side effects.

I can’t see how anything he said could be taken as saying homeopathic remedies are good.

Is it 1984? Is it Germany 1936 again? I keep asking this and the answers get more depressing every time.

The front page of the Guardian today (19 May 2006) has an article on a plan to give council staff access to police intelligence to monitor criminals. The council staff include a huge swathe of people, inclluding park keepers, housing officers and community support officers. (Park keepers? Are there any left?)

Apart from people that you expect to have problems with this, such as the organisation Liberty, even the Police Federation are understandably disturbed, according to the Guardian article. Their spokesman pointed out that the data protection issues are huge. The police are trained to observe high standards in keeping their information secure. Leaks are traceable and should be dealt with seriously. Not only will the myriad council employees not have the training to evaluate information, they will not have the same constraints on their divulgence of it.

When this gets put into operation together with the implementation of the Identity Card fiasco, no one will have anything resembling privacy. It will also be impossible to obtain redress against people spreading malicious tales about you because it will be well nigh impossible to know who is responsible.

If a police officer misbehaves – as of course they sometimes do – you can hold them accountable. If a bin collector or school dinner worker misuses information about you, what possible redress can you have? It won’t even be in their job description that they can’t misuse personal information. Is there reason to think that police training and accountability are a complete waste of time and that networks of neighbourhood spies would be much more efficient?

Diidn’t this sort of thing used to be the responsibility of the STASI or the KGB in what were supposed to be the bad old days before freedom came to Eastern Europe?

To anyone, who served in World War II on the Allied side – my deepest and most sincere apologies. We seem to have thrown away the lives of the people who died then just so that we could set up our own proto-fascist state sixty years later, and under a “Labour” government no less.

It’s really hard to choose a decent sig. Anything anyone with taste might reasonably want has already well gone.All the same, there is little excuse for some of the ones I’ve seen recently.

MSN messenger provides emoticon images for sticking in your Msn messages, not for sticking hearts and smileys in a huge string as your user name. This is barely acceptable from kids. Anyone over the age of 16 had better have a good reason for it and I find it hard to think of one.

There is absolutely no excuse for a smiley face in your sig.

I’m not going to go on to a second point because there will be no stopping me. You know who you are.

I’m not claiming the moral high ground here. I  have rubbish user names for everything I do and I can never even remember them so I set them up and then can’t remember them to get back in to whatever i joined. All I can say is that I have never knowingly used any silly pictures or deliberately soppy names,

Sorry about this, it’s not ground-breakingly brilliant but it’s entertaining. There is something good about having a mathematician and his physicist not-quite girlfriend as the relatively glamourous heros of a cop show. This makes a change from scientists always being portrayed as total geeks.

There is an odd physicist as well – the short guy from Ally McBeal – but there are odd non-scientists – liek the man who used too be the central character in Taxi. The programme doesn’t necessarily assume that having mathematical skills makes you a social outcast, which is nice.

How did I miss this?

“This month, NO2ID and a growing number of other organisations* ask that you renew your passport… Did you know that, from October of this year, as preparation for the ID scheme, ALL first-time passport applicants will have background checks and be interviewed by officials at one of the government’s 69 new ‘enrolment centres’? This will include your children as they reach 16“ (http://www.no2id.net/ 7 May 2006) At the moment, existing passport holders are not included in this but they will be.

Granted this means coming up with £51 now, but the ID style one will cost at least £93, according to no2ID. And will get you stuck in the sytem for life.

Anti-ID rants have been a bit lacking here for a few weeks, so I thought I’d better do some web searching about the current state of the inexorable march of ID. I found this excellent quote on http://www.no2id.net/ :

“I’ve read Orwell’s ‘1984’ – I don’t want my kids to live in it.” Andy..

There is an interesting article on the excellent no2id.net site that refers to the plan to merge the Office of National Statistics’ Citizen Information Project with the iD database, at even greater expense but allegedly saving millions after 2021. (Hmm. If anyone knows of a database that has stayed in the same format on the same hardware for more than 5 years, please tell me. Not to mention, if anyone has the capacity to calculate costs in a decade and a half’s time)

The same article links to an article in the Times that refers to a plan to add medical information to the ID database, allegedly to save lives in emergency situations while at the same time helping to prevent people without valid cards from accessing NHS resources. It brings up a quite disturbing image of doctors turning away sick and injured people who haven’t got the right ID.

And, I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of plague carriers remaining untreated personally threatening. In “The Gift Relationship,” Richard Titmuss argued years ago that Britishtransfusion service blood was far safer than US blood because it was donated out of altruism rather than a need for money. i.e Altruism in health care is more profitable for public health than selfishness.

I think this principle can be extended to the illegal immigrants gaining access to the NHS. I would much rather pay my NHS contribution and accept that the occasional person who hasn’t paid gets treated than rigorously exclude everyone who hasn’t paid their stamp and risk dying of TB or AIDS.

I am totally distressed to see that David Cameron said on May 3 that he would stop the ID fiasco. http://www.no2id.net/news/newsblog/index.php Distressed because it’s dispiriting to see that I am agreeing with a Tory leader on an issue of public security for the first time in my life. Old age is creeping up on me it appears.

By the way, http://www.no2id.net/ sells good-looking t-shirts that say NO ID. I have to get some.

The wonderful David Attenborough is 80. When most octogenarians are lucky if they aren’t in a grim care home, Attenborough is still actively promoting his concerns for the environment. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4976552.stm) He must be the best-ever presenter/creator of science and nature programmes. Every year, he brings amazing new content to remind us of the fragile diversity of life on Earth.

Attenborough has had a wonderful life, having seen so many of the fragile marvels of the world. He personifies all the positive qualities of an ideal of aristocratic Englishness – adventurousness, intelligence, wit,  moral worth, charm, willingness to endure hardships and joys with equal stoicism – that were rarely found in reality rather than ideology. 

Digital channels have been showing his programmes from throughout the past decades.  These are almost always brilliant. In his BBC radio interview, he is careful to credit the cameramen as the real creators of the stunning footage that we associate with Attenborough.  However, it is his majestic and much parodied  delivery that makes so many of these programmes unforgettable.

The BBC site says that he got his first presentation job by chance, despite the misgivings of an administrator over the size of his teeth. This suggests that a modern Attenborough would be unlikely to get near the screen. Present day tv presenters tend to be either comedy “mad scientist” stereotypes or perfectly groomed forgettable clones. Attenborough is certainly distinctive without ever being a hysterical mad scientist. His delivery is  perfectly judged. His voice is unmistakable, with its odd tendency to whisper for greater effect.  He approaches the viewer as someone like himself, with all the aristocratic virtues.

If ever there was a 50s “Boys Own” hero in the real world, David Attenborough comes close.

I often watch my network traffic in an idly interested way, networks being more or less incomprehensible to me. (I can watch the network actiivity and identify various bits of it, even enjoying picking my own passwords out of the ether.  I can reproduce the 7-layer model perfectly adequately. I don’t have a mental model of how they connect together. I sometimes almost grasp it but, half a minute later, it’s like knitting fog.)

I have recently noticed lots of packets with “bogus IP headers” or “malformed” or zero length packets, according to Ethereal. From my limited knowledge this tends to indicate a Trojan attack – no novelty to me, who appears to be Helen with regard to Trojans.

In the past few days, I’ve also noticed loads of packets that say “packet cable lawful intercept.”  It turns out that this is due to Ethereal confusing VOIP traffic with “lawful intercept” traffic. 

The concept interested me so I did some research. In case you don’t know what “lawful intercept” is, it seems that it means that your traffic has to be open to surveillance. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to understand. In fact it’s not even within loudhailer shouting distance of the easiest thing in the world to understand. That’s my excuse for not explaining it here.

Try googling http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=packet+cable+lawful+intercept&meta= if you think you’ll be able to make head or tale of it. It disturbs me, but then I’m  probably just clinging to an outdated view that personal privacy was supposed to be one of the benefits of not living in a totalitarian state…..

This is by way of being a response to the Web 2.0 blog. I have to agree with the view that people don’t usually want all-singing, all-dancing websites. They particularly don’t want to return to them.

I accept that this isn’t strictly true for novelty websites. There is always room for sites that you visit to go “Wow, what a fantastic effect!” and recommend to your friends. However, this is a very limited market. It’s hard to see where money can be made from these sites. They only have value to business when they are promoting a band or a movie. So, there is no one to pay for the development time. This means that these sites tend to exist only as student exercises.

Otherwise extreme use of the newer capacities of the web usually only exist to promote web design companies. Even more, they mainly exist to promote web design companies to other web design companies, which seems a bit pointless.

If there are problems with the Web from the end-user’s perspective, these are not usually along the lines of “If only there was more pointless moving around of icons and text and a few more flashing lights” Most problems are more like – This doesnt work as I expect. I have to log in to do anything. Do I really have to enable Active X to buy a mouse online and so on? Why does it take as long to buy a train ticket online as to go to the trainstation and buy one?

My main whine about the web is that sites are all starting to look the same. And this is not notably pretty. There used to be a much wider range of web aesthetics, from much more beautiful to much uglier. Now most of the web is just boring. The web has settled down to a common dull aesthetic. Maybe if some of the genius needed to pick up on a dozen new technologies went into a more experimental approach to the look of web pages, we’d all start to get excited about it again.

A new form of Trojan holds your files to ransom (according to http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6066636.html). Not having files of value >= 10p, this doesn’t exactly put me in a flap. But, as I am fair game for getting almost any malware, I could still find myself horribly inconvenienced.

According to zdnet, this is the third such attack in about a year. There are lots of details about the new Trojan attack on Sophos. (http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2006/04/ransom.html) Its characteristics include a seemingly modest $10.99 ransom demand, together with a pretty unreasonable demand to pay within 30 minutes, which must be unmeetable unless you live in a Western Union office. Oddly the messages don’t inpire much trust in the promise that paying up will halt the trojan, as the message provides a Yahoo email address for you to contact if the removal code doesn’t work.

The basic design flaw in all this from the criminal’s viewpoint must be the same problem faced by all extortionists – picking up the cash. Western Union may be international, but it is not anonymous. There can’t be a Western Union office in the developed world that isn’t covered by the currently ubiquitous cameras. A huge influx of $10.99 Western Union orders to one office would be its own trail anyway, unless, there is a computer wizard isomewhere so bored that they would bother to write and propagate a Trojan for $10.99. In which case, they could probaly get away with it but might be better advised to get a more profitable line of work.