Why Dont You Blog?

Another leaked secret wiki-leaks style memo in an occasional series. I bring you the top secret Powerpoint manual issued to the leaders of all educational institutions, companies and government agencies*

The 10 rules of giving a Powerpoint presentation:

• Don’t bother to check that the projector works before the room is full. Log in to the Windows desktop first then search for your presentation. This will build rapport with your audience.
• Use a preset background. These make text so readable and they are so attractive to the eye to a captive audience. A dark background is always a good choice with navy text. Yellow swirls can complete the viewer’s experience.
• Preset transitions are also always appreciated. Why not try a different fade-in for each slide. And bring in every paragraph separately. This was groundbreaking in 1996 and it’s just as great now.
• Some presentations fail to impress by being too short. Use at least 30 slides, if possible.
• Always schedule your presentations at convenient times.  If it’s not possible to span the standard lunch break, time your presentation for the half-hour just before lunch.  No one will mind at all if you overrun.
• Read every word on every screen. I cannot repeat this enough. Many people whom you employ may be unable to read. Others may be secretly blind, hiding that fact by expertly touch-typing their sales reports. Spare them the agony of endless bluffing. Read every word on the screen. Twice is even better.
• Pace the speed of your reading. Read at least twice as slowly as the time that it takes the least literate person in your audience to read the words twice.
• Keep to a huge font size when you are presenting in a small room. Tiny fonts go down well in larger venues
• Use acronyms wherever possible. Always use at least one acronym that you can’t remember what it stands for. This gives your audience something to ask about at question time.
• Everyone enjoys seeing banalities spelled out in a bullet point format.  In a meeting room.   If you are presenting unpleasant facts - such as redundancies - the experience of sitting through a well-planned Powerpoint presentation will soften the blow enormously.

***************************
Inspired by the devotion to Microsoft Powerpoint that I share with Andrew, XanderG, heather-the-other, who all mentioned Powerpoint’s unique blessings when they commented on the previous post.

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This is Whit Sunday. Saturday’s Face to Faith, in the Guardian, confusingly said that Easter lasts seven weeks and includes Whit/Pentecost. (I see I’m too much of a heathen to have realised that it’s still Easter. )

Whitsun is such an impressive name for a festival. It’s like “Walpurgisnacht.” I am impelled to Google it.

Pentecost is also known as “Whitsun” (or “Whit Sunday”) in the United Kingdom. The week beginning on Whit Sunday is called “Whitsuntide” (formerly also spelled “Whitsontide”) or “Whitsun Week”. The term is derived from Middle English whitsonday, from Old English hwīta sunnandæg, “White Sunday”, in reference to the white ceremonial robes formally worn on this day. An alternative derivation is from “Wit” or “Wisdom” Sunday, the day when the Apostles were filled with wisdom by the Holy Spirit (Wikipedia)

Bugger the “alternative derivation.” A festival that still bears an Anglo-Saxon name impresses the hell out of me.

The only two other Germanic languages to name this holiday ‘Whitsunday’ are Faroese and Icelandic, where it is called Hvítusunnudagur and Hvítasunnudagur (White-Sunday), respectively. (Wikipedia again)

So Whit seems to be a very Far-Northern-European holiday. Indeed, even within England, it’s very much a Northern thing. Whit Walks are still held in Lancashire on Whit Friday, a Day I had certainly never heard of before. ( It’s the Friday after Whitsunday. ) They involve parades, with brass bands and women  wearing white dresses.

As far as I can make out, Whit Walks are a folk custom from the years of early industrialisation. (Spinning the Web. ) They have been held in the mill areas around Manchester (and in Yorkshire) since about 1800. Showing off new spring clothes seems to be a crucial part of the ritual.

Oldham and Saddleworth Whit Friday website has a 1961 photo that looks as if it was taken in Fairyland,.

Ethereal Gothic novel style heroine; slightly spooky children and Les Dawson style matriarchs, wearing hats and gloves. Wow. I admit to being less enamoured of the Brass Band Competition stuff. I love the whole idea of it. I just don’t enjoy the sound of brass instruments, especially in a mass format.

Where do these traditions come from? Internet sources tend to stress the “clothes” wearing thing, either as an opportunity for mill-owners to show off their products or as part of the survival strategies of the poor.

One of the traditions of the Whit Walks is for those taking part to wear new clothes for the occasion. In harder times this was something to look forward to as children would rarely get new clothes, more often receiving handed-down clothes from older siblings or relations. …..
Another custom, still in practice, is for people watching the walk from the pavement to look out for people they know taking part in the walk and to run forward and give them money (From Ashton-under- Lyne.com)

I must say, I’m not convinced by the “advertising” explanation. The Lancashire mills produced cotton for much of the world, rather than for a few Lancashire villagers. Industrialisation was invented there, ffs. I can’t imagine any branding benefit that cotton-mill owners would gain from passing out free clothing to people who couldn’t afford to buy more and who would only be parading their wares in front of equally poor people.

In any case, I am still baffled about the origin of the Whit walks. Were they rural customs brought to the city by the peasants who had turned machine-minders? Nowhere else in England seems to have such a tradition. The medieval Whitsun tradition that is most often mentioned on the Internet involves ale. (Like most medieval traditions, basically. Oh, and that would be most modern festivals, too. )

A site called homely divinity does mention walking in the context of Whitsun tradition.

“… the custom of walking barefoot through the dewy grass on Whitsunday morning.”.

(That magic May dew strikes again.)

The site talks about other notable medieval aspects of Whitsun - decorating churches with greenery and using purpose-built deus ex machina devices to release doves in church. Morris dancing. Wow. Morris dancing. Keep your brass bands, give me Morris dancing.

And the “Green Man”:

Carvings of the Green Man appear in British churches beginning in the 12th century. His prototype, of course, is much older. His origins are to be found in the ancient god of the woodlands who was known as Sylvanus by the Romans and Cernunnos by the Celts and was related to Dionysos, the Greek god of the vine and its fruit. ……

So, granting this site an unearned unspuriousness (because it suits me at the moment…) Whit is just another old non-Christian festival with a Christian overlay. (Well, duh. ) It’s a bit sad that all that exuberant May celebration stuff, like Maypoles and Morris dancing dwindled to a sedate walk in a white dress, but still, it’s something. Respect, Oldham & Saddleworth, Bolton, Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, et al.

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It’s the 15th birthday of the release of the source code for the World Wide Web, according to the BBC.

Just 15 years. And it’s already almost impossible to remember how we lived before tinterweb.

The first ever web site was http://info.cern.ch. It’s still there (the site not the same web page…) It is pretty rubbish, which is oddly comforting. (No reasonable menu, you can only find the other pages by going to the sitemap, elements don’t fit exactly, in IE6, and they use style attributes in tags instead of the class definition ) There’s some screenshots of Tim Berners-Lee’s first browsers, which could give present-day browsers some serious competition.

It links to CERN’s proper site which is brilliant, although most of it is so far over my head that i might as well be reading an umbrella.

The web itself has become indispensable. Especially for finding out anything you want to know - instantly. It’s true that much of what you get is spurious, but the more of us that develop a built-in bullshit detector the better.

And mostly, it’s great that the web has grown so fast precisely because it was designed to be free and open and collaborative The BBC reported Robert Cailliau:

“We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favour of that.” ………
“If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.

(Maybe someone should tell the DRM fanatics.)

Popularity: 32% [?]

Rabbi Jonathon Romain wrote a piece in the Guardian against faith schools. This is an unusual view for a minister of a major religion to present. So, a big cheer from this blog.

His argument refers to the danger of isolating children from others of different backgrounds, which he sees as socially divisive:

There is a real danger that the growth in faith schools today will be blamed in 30 years’ time for the social disharmony then. It is not too late to reverse that trend, if we want a society that has diversity within unity, not at the expense of it.”

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Sometimes I have to (albeit briefly) question the value of having a free press. It seems that the freedoms enjoyed by the press are far from beneficial for the public good. (However, I am aware of the alternatives so I suppose we have to live with it.)

Today, one of the headlines on the radio news was about impending strike action which may close down a fairly crucial power plant. Basically, workers at the Grangemouth refinery are planning a 2-day strike, the closure of the refinery has the knock on effect of cutting power to one of the main Scottish pipelines reducing the flow of oil into the UK by about 1/3. Yes. That is it. Flow will be reduced by 1/3 for two days.

There have been loads of statements from the Scottish executive and various government bodies explaining that there is at least 10 days worth of stock (10 days of no oil coming in) and as long as nobody panics, everything will be fine.

Did you spot the important bit. As long as nobody panics. Sadly, not panicking does not make good news.

Cut to the afternoon news bulletin on the radio. First off, this is not presented in a calm, matter of fact manner. It is read out by an excitable and breathless woman with a lot of emphasis on how prices are going to rise and people may face shortages (less emphasis on the may, than the shortages). One of the radio stations had people call in to “share their experiences of panic on the forecourts.” Nothing like a bit of pre-empting there…

Anyway, there were four callers talking about how it had “gone crazy” today and people were buying fuel much more than normal. Weirdly, one of the callers claimed to be at the same petrol station (gas station for colonials) as I was at, getting fuel for my car. The caller claimed the place was full and had been all day. I sat and listened to her, while I looked around and was the only car there. Hmm.

As I drive about a lot in my job, I have passed a lot of petrol stations today and for most of the day none have been busy. Cut to about 1900hrs onwards and things changed. Lots of people getting lots of fuel. Now the radio stations are exuberantly talking about how the “stay calm” advice has been ignored and “everyone is panic buying fuel” and how “stocks cant be expected to last long at this rate.”

Call me a cynic, but from my take on today the whole un-necessary panic (if it actually exists) is something generated by media reporting. Like all herd problems, once a few people start to run every one else does. In this case, when a few people start to “panic buy” fuel, everyone has to join in and it becomes a bit of an arms race because now stocks will really begin to struggle (especially on a local level). The oil companies must love this - the strikers are actually doing the wrong thing! - because now, as you would imagine crude oil prices are going up even more. The news stations love this because it gives them all the things they like to report on and it hits home to everyone. However, the general public have been somewhat shepherded into buying loads of fuel as the prices rise.

Is this all the fault of the media - no, not at all. That is most certainly not the point I am seeking to make. However, I do think that public “panics” (not just in this case, about everything from MMR to crime) are largely the result of irresponsible and sensationalist reporting.

The media has a unique power to influence the public to a greater extent than any other facet of our society. Is it using this power responsibly?

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Relatively new (to me) general laws named after people that I’ve recently come across:

Godwin’s Law, mentioned in Black Sun Journal “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

Hanlon’s Razor, mentioned in Barefoot Bum: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Brook’s Law: mentioned in someone’s course book “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

There was even a superb post on NewsBiscuit “Archbishop claims introduction of Sod’s Law is inevitable“, very funny if you get the reference (Archbishop of Canterbury and Shari’a Law), probably even funny, if you don’t.

Here’s a quote:

Sod’s Law has already been introduced in some parts of the UK. New Welsh secretary, Paul Murphy, introduced his own version of the law in Wales this month. From 1 February ‘Murphy’s Law’ dictates that anyone who applies for a public sector post will be interviewed by panel that includes the driver you crashed into on the way to the interview or an ex-girlfriend who found you in bed with her sister.

Wikipedia beat me to the punch in my plan of listing all the laws that are named after someone. It has a whole page titled List of eponymous laws. Most of them are standard Boyles’ Law-style Laws but they also have the new ones.

Linus Torvalds is the only person whose Law was named for his first name.

Linus’s law — named for Linus Torvalds, states “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.

I can’t find a single female. That’s not to say that there are no females in the list. I don’t know. I not only never heard of most of these people, I’ve never heard of most of the Laws. Nor can I think of when they might apply.

I’m taking it that they are general principles. Otherwise the temptation to break ones like

Reilly’s law — of Retail Gravitation, people generally patronize the largest mall in the area.

would be well nigh overwhelming. It’s a bit wishy-washy anyway… “generally.” Much I would like to flout it by going to the smallest mall I could find, it seems a bit too unprescriptive for a full-scale law, so hardly worth the effort of breaking it.

# Rothbard’s law — everyone specializes in his own area of weakness.
# Sarnoff’s law — the value of a broadcast network is proportional to the number of viewers.

I am not at all convinced by Rothbard’s law. Otherwise I’d be running a housekeeping service. And Sarnoff? What. Any business’s value depends on the number of its customers. What sort of a meaningful Law is that? How did he get his name stuck on a Law on the basis of so banal an observation?

I’m leading up to a point…..

It’s about time there was a Law coined by a female, so I am volunteering. Following Linus, I’m going to use my first name. (Well, my first name as in nom de blog.) I thought of plundering Oscar Wilde’s work for all those pithy sayings, presented in an arch Law-like way. Too cowardly, and it would be breaking a plagiarism Law. Here’s my first humble effort.

Heather’s Law: “Any general observation is more likely to be be presented as a Law the more closely it approaches a truism”

Popularity: 19% [?]

Black Russian squirrels attacked and killed a dog.

This story turns out to be a couple of years old, so its appearance in today’s Most read sectiion of the BBC website might be an overrun April Fools Day joke. But this more recent one about Scottish squirrels definitely isn’t a spoof:

Red squirrels get their own tsar

I hope for their sakes that they also get their own kremlin and politburo so they are properly organised to defend themselves against any Black Russian squirrels who try to claim him back.

Popularity: 9% [?]

What is the best survival strategy for wild animals? The evidence suggests that it’s being hated by humans. There is nothing like a programme to bring any species’ numbers down to boost the population. This seems to bode ill for pandas and polar bears, but it’s working out fine for for magpies, rats, mice, pigeons, flies and fleas.

On the Guardian website, Graham Holliday says that there’s a war on wild boar in France.

In the UK guidance by Defra on how to cull the growing wild boar population was published in February. The British government has decided against a state-led cull saying that the damage currently caused by wild boar is too minimal to be of concern, but some people in France are seriously worried.

There are 1,000 feral boar in the UK, apparently. DEFRA have given advice on how to kill them, which doesn’t seem too hands-off to me, but, then, I haven’t read the guidance.

The French are apparently taking the threat of wild boar rampaging through their celtic villages, snuffling their magic potion and overturning their roundhouses seriously. Oh sorry, that was in Asterisk.

And if you read the Observer article about the French, it seems their imaginary wild boar rampages caused

…. an estimated 20,000 car accidents a year involving the animals and hundreds of millions of pounds of damage to crops and property

To reference another meat animal - Bull. Those figures are so blatantly spurious, they are hardly worth challenging.

The surprising thing is how many people see wild creatures as threats to people, rather than welcoming them as signs that we still haven’t managed to destroy the ecosystems that support us..

One commenter (Trxr) says

where you get the munters (including certain celebs who should concentrate on paying their divorce settlements to their temporary trophy-wives) screaming about a roo cull here in Australia. There’s a lot more than a thousand of the things roaming about here.

Another commenter (the aptly monikered “Ishouldapologise”) on the Guardian article says, in what I assume to be a sarcastic way:

Bring back the Weald, I say. Bring back the bears and the wolves and the wildcats. Bring back the eagles and the adders and packs of wild dogs. Bring back a little magic into this overfarmed country. Who cares if the occasional tourist or country inhabitant gets killed or eaten. That’s what the same people want for Africa and the Amazon, don’t they.

Well, yes, actually, that sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

It is really lucky - in terms of survival of some species, if not biodiversity - that all the creatures we hate and fear seem to thrive on our opposition if they don’t get made extinct. Any creatures that we like seem to be going extinct in direct proportion to how much we value them. Except for pets, but I doubt that the pet species could survive for long without Pedigree Chum and Whiskas.

One BBC writer on hating magpies on the grounds of an almost universal UK superstition:

The sight of another lone magpie still stops me short. Far from wanting the numbers to halve, I instantly want them to double.

Maybe the point is relevant in a wider context. Our desire to wipe out certain wild species might just serve to double their numbers, following some obscure law of nature….

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Newsbiscuit has a couple of posts to interest atheists:

• Referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Shari’a law soundbite faux-pas:
  Archbishop claims introduction of Sod’s Law is inevitable
• Atheism renounced to avoid working bank holiday weekend

Popularity: 18% [?]

Ben Goldacre (BadScience columnist from the Guardian) presented a programme about nutrition fads, on BBC Radio 4 today. It’s the first of a two-part series, The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists. You can hear a podcast on the Radio 4 site. (Pick Monday’s choice.) It’s quite entertaining. In this part, Goldacre talks about the history of some classic quackery.

In contrast, today’s Guardian prints a piece by Madeleine Bunting in favour of unscientific medicine. Referring to several anti-alternative medicine books, as well as Dawkins’ 2007 TV series The Enemies of Reason. Bunting says:

It seems the aim of some of these authors is to finish off a burgeoning health industry that they believe is based on charlatans and quacks preying on the gullible and desperate.

This is one of the most common charges made against complementary medicine - that most of it is no better than placebo. But there is a way of turning that accusation around: perhaps complementary medicine is an effective way to harness placebo as one of the most powerful - and cheapest - of healing processes.

Mind and body can’t be conceptually separated. We know relatively little about how they interact. There’s plenty of room for research into how we can use the mind to fight illness. But I still can’t see how this can justifies encouraging the sick to believe in lies.

Why bother with scientific medicine at all, if you can just carry out a ritual or hand out a sugar pill?

Reason number 1 comes down to a similar point to that expressed in the question “Why won’t god heal amputees?” Can you cure cholera by reflexology? That is, alternative medicine “works” where symptoms are ill-defined and at least partly emotional in nature. Or as Bunting says, putting a positive spin on it:

Complementary medicine is most popular where conventional medicine fails, such as with musculoskeletal conditions and mental health - stress, depression, anxiety

Well, if some people’s mental conditions can be cured by ritual, surely these are revealed to be states of mind rather than organic disease. I bet the rituals don’t work so well with brain damage, dementia or full blown psychosis. So isn’t that like saying, lies aren’t powerful enough to cure real diseases.

Reason number 2. There are plenty of things that can make you feel happier/more relaxed/more cared for. These can be your own ritual practices or substances. (In the Asterisk books, the Brits’ magic potion is a cup of tea.)

You don’t necessarily have to pay for them. You do have to pay for alternative medicine.

In its raw form, a placebo may indeed be one of the cheapest healing process (as Bunting says). However, once you pay for the time of the “understanding” practitioner who prescribes you a 30 ml bottle of water, you enter into a commercial transaction that compares very badly with the cost of visiting a doctor, if you live anywhere with a public health service.

Reason 3: Alternative therapies are “alternative” because they haven’t been proved to work. End of story. Yes, medical research is pretty flawed in many ways. But, the very fact that new drugs are immensely profitable for drug companies and expensive for healthcare funders indicates why promising new treatments are unlikely to be ignored. If an alternative medicine or treatment worked, there would be an unseemly scramble to patent it or to use it to replace expensive drugs.

There must be hundreds of traditional medicines and bizarre treatments that would be effective against various illnesses. The only way to find this out is to test them. Why would the discoverer or inventor of an unusual cure not want to test it? Fear it doesn’t work. Fear of loss of profit.

Reason 4: Alternative medicine is generally the exact reverse of “empowering” despite the claims of its supporters. When you give up your power to evaluate solutions to your physical and mental illnesses, you must take the practitioner’s rituals as authoritative, with no basis for doing so except their claims.

Most of us would feel ripped off if we went to buy a toaster, paid for a toaster and were told - in a caring way - that we had got a toaster, when all we took home was an empty box. So, why is it OK to sell people treatments that don’t work? Indeed, not just morally acceptable but apparently desirable, according to Bunting?

Popularity: 31% [?]