Why Dont You Blog?

I dont have a huge amount of online time at the moment so I cant do these two news items justice. However, I still think people should read them (both from New Scientist)

• New Legal Threat to Teaching Evolution.
• Archaeologists refuse to help over possible Iran Strike.

The first link is a depressing indictment of a society that has allowed itself to be tricked into thinking there is an even argument betwen Evolution and Creationism. This is madness of the highest order. The concept that “teaching both sides” is a good thing only seems to apply against evolution, but still no one notices the weirdness. Shame on the nation that allows this sort of thing.

The second is worrying. Not so much that Archaeologists seem willing to allow world heritage sites to be hit during an attack but the implicit assumption there will be an attack.

Not a good day.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Popularity: 16% [?]

Well, we have talked about the evil madness policy that is the governments proposed 42 day detention without trial for people suspected of terrorism. It is wrong and no amount of fear-woo spreading will convince me otherwise, however there are those who are not so set in their views.

One of the major arguments “for” the 42 day detention is how we live in a “different world” than a few years ago when 28 days was enough. These people often opine how “we” don’t understand the threats the security apparatus face and how much “they” need this time to fight the evil terrorists. Wisely, the actual security organisations themselves have remained quiet on this and I have more than a little respect for that, although it makes it hard to counter the fear-woo.

Wonderfully, today the former head of the Security Service - the organisation charged with protecting the nation from terrorism - has made clear her (personal) opinion on the matter.

Lady Manningham-Buller, in her maiden speech to the House of Lords, said: “I don’t see, on a principled basis, as well as a practical one, that these proposals are in any way workable.”

Well, I couldn’t have put it better myself. Even better, this is not someone who has no idea about the threat. This is not someone who doesn’t understand the problems faced by the security apparatus. Baroness Manningham-Buller spent 33 years working for MI5 combating terrorism and espionage throughout the cold war, the IRA bombing campaign and headed up the organisation in the madness that followed the Jul 2005 bombings. This is not someone who can be dismissed as having “no idea,” she has lived it for almost all her adult life. If she thinks it is wrong, it may well be wrong…(*)

Sadly, I doubt the almost non-existent coverage of her statement will sway much of the UK population.

But it should. The more power we give to the state, the harder it becomes when things go wrong. And they do go wrong with a scary regularity. Also in today’s news was the armed response to a case of mistaken identity:

Three police forces are to be investigated after armed police ordered a man to lie face-down at a railway station in a case of mistaken identity.

Two Dorset Police officers arrested the 21-year-old at gunpoint after his train stopped at Bournemouth on Saturday. He was identified by British Transport Police after Hampshire police told them of an earlier incident in Basingstoke.

Now this is fairly harmless and the poor person in question was simply made to lie down. However the situation where an armed response was going in meant everything was very dangerous. Keep in mind, this is an innocent person. They have committed no crime. What if, for example, they were hard of hearing or simply confused by the instructions shouted by the armed officers? There was an example of what can happen when it goes wrong on the London Underground in 2005.

No one is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. These are so frequently used it is almost embarrassing to write it here, however it highlights a critical measure. We, as a society, should be aware that mistakes get made. Rather than holding continual, pointless, inquires after the act why not prepare for them by making sure that the damage caused by mistakes is minimal. I am not saying the measures taken by Dorset Police was wrong (although it does smell of the new offence of “being black on public transport”), as they do have a public safety issue to balance. However, the more we give them the ability to punish and detain innocent people, the greater the risk of a serious mistake - and the more power the state has, the harder it is to bring to account.

–

(*) Don’t think this means I agree with her on torture or the overall “war on terror” approach… It just means she isn’t always wrong… As soon as she reads this blog and realises I am always right the better…

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]

Time for a new topic. Why do so many women pluck or wax their eyebrows?

I find this really hard to understand. By definition, pulling hairs out by their roots has GOT to hurt. A lot.

So why is this a well-nigh universal female practice?

(Except for people like me, blessed with such a depth of vanity that we assume we are naturally close enough to perfect. And would, at least, need some damn good proof to the contrary before we underwent some painful beautifying process. )

Everybody wants to look acceptable, at least to the degree that strangers don’t stare and point at you in the street.

I’m not an eyebrow purist. If you have an embarrassing novelty eyebrow, I can’t see any problem with correcting it. It would seem perfectly reasonable to me to shave off the middle of a total unibrow. If your eyebrows were growing into eye moustaches and reaching your cheekbones, fair enough. Cut the buggers.

I’ve been carrying out an unscientific survey of men’s eyebrows. (This involves looking at brow ridges quite a bit more than would be considered polite if they were other body parts.) Even in this groomed-within-an-inch-of-its-life world, men’s eyebrows are still allowed to grow as they choose. And I haven’t seen more than - oh, I don’t know - one in a hundred men of any age who have eyebrows far enough on the outlying edges of a conceptual normal eyebrow-size-and-distribution curve to warrant a second look. Let alone a shriek or an instant gagging response.

So, do a disproportionate percentage of women suffer from gross eyebrow deformities? Perhaps there’s a bizarre tendency for women to grow comedy eyebrows, that can only be kept in check by pulling hair out at the roots.

All the same, I shudder to imagine a natural eyebrow growth of such a luxuriant excessiveness that it would be weirder than the eyebrows that I see on women every day. (Some of which actually do make me want to point and giggle. At the least, my eyes are inexorably drawn to the novelty eye furniture, to the point of being unable to take in anything the wearer says.)

My favourites include the one where the browridge has been depilated to the bone and the eyebrow replaced with an approximation of a eyebrow. Drawn on. Using a jet black pencil. Even when the wearer’s head hair has been bleached to a brilliant yellow. What do I mean “even when…” . The correct phrase is “especially when…”

This artwork is based on the “incredibly surprised” model from “Drawing cartoon faces 101″.

More sedate eyebrow models include simply plucking the hairs until the eyebrow is about 2 mm thick and starts to sprout just above the pupil. This also tends to make the wearer look constantly surprised, if slightly more mammalian.

(When I was at school, there was a brief fashion for girls to shave their eyebrows completely and then draw an unskilled approximation of a curve onto their newly-blank forehead canvases. This was initially quite impressive to a 14-year-old me, until the impressionist sketches were seen to be nesting in a visible lawn of brow prickles a week later.)

It’s hard to see what possible advantage this brings anyone, in terms of attractiveness. Do men really think “Well, I quite fancy her but she doesn’t look surprised enough?”

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]

Over on the excellent Grumpy Lion blog, there is a regular commenter who, I think it is fair to say, often gets the wrong end of the stick. However, Steph is so inordinately self-opinionated that nothing will ever come close to swaying her on any issue. It doesn’t matter if she is wrong. It doesn’t matter if you point out her mistakes. She appears to refuse to listen. If you correct her twice she will swear at you and call you a stalker. This is all good internet-kook behaviour, generally confined to the more religious zealot. Feel free to pop over and read her comments - she comments a lot, and often on topics about which I know nothing, however when it is a topic I have some understanding off, she is invariably wrong. I would be interested to know how this extrapolates to her other comments.

Anyway, the most recent “encounter” was on a recent post that degenerated into an argument about UK gun control laws. Quite wisely, Ric has now ended comments as it was, sadly, repetitive. However, in the best internet traditions, I now feel left out as I haven’t had the chance to get the lastword™®© in . However, here the magic of the interblog steps in…!

For those who don’t know (or don’t want to read her screed), Steph has made numerous claims, all of which would normally need something to back them up. Take this from her very first comment on the thread:

But States with tight gun control laws have higher gun crime rates than the States with lax gun laws. And most gun crime is perpetrated against those who don’t have guns.

Fair enough. The first bit is regulary bandied around but I have yet to see where the figures come from. The second sentence is pretty meaningless. It is an attempt to imply that carrying a gun reduces the chance you will become a victim to gun crime. This is akin to saying if you are a mugger you will be less likely to be mugged. It is hollow and provides nothing of substance, so I will not dwell on it further.

Steph trots out the old bit about how she has her gun and will kill to defend herself, and knows how, etc. This is regularly used by people with very little experience of violent encounters - especially ones involving weapons. In a nutshell, if it was this easy, why do armed forces the world over train their soldiers? Owning a gun is no use unless it is in your hands and pointing at the person who may do you harm. As you don’t know who this will be you would have to travel everywhere with your weapon drawn and keeping a bead on everyone you encounter. Realistic, maybe, in some post apocalypse nightmare film but certainly not on the streets of an even moderately populated village.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Popularity: 22% [?]

As believers are sometimes noted saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The moral of this story should have been noted by the more than slightly foolish Harriet Harman. Today, the news has been full of her frankly crazy ideas about changing the law. The BBC leads with:

Equality minister Harriet Harman has set out plans to allow firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minority job candidates.

The spectre of positive discrimination raises its ugly head again… Confusingly, this is followed with:

She said firms should be able to choose a woman over a man of equal ability if they wanted to - or vice versa.

I am forced to admit the “vice versa” has me confused a touch, but I will try to come back to that.

The basic principle, as reported on the TV and Radio news, is that Ms Harman is keen to allow employers to discriminate against certain groups of our society. No matter how it is dressed up, discrimination is wrong. It is very wrong that some sectors of the UK workforce are dominated by one gender, one racial group, one religion (or whatever). No one (sane) would disagree with this. However, forcing discrimination in the other direction is not the solution. Nothing is better at creating a divisive society. Nothing undermines the “equal” in equal opportunities more. It is not a good idea.

To make matters worse, like the BBC allude, this is a pretty incoherent policy idea (The BBC have a Q&A that doesn’t really say anything it is that confusing). The comment by the diversity advisor for the CIPD pretty much sums it all up:

Not everyone thinks it will create a fairer workplace.
Some business groups say it could create a box-ticking culture.
“This [proposal] is pretty incoherent. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for this,” said Dianah Worman, diversity adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

It will (and is) provide a massive PR victory for the rightwing pundits who cry that [insert ethnic group/gender of choice] are taking all “our” jobs (and I have never worked out who “us” are..). It will do nothing real to protect vulnerable groups. It is, basically, a perfect example of our current governments legislative policies.

Employers need to be free to chose the most suitable candidate. Most suitable for the job, not the one who is most suited to ensure their workforce is an accurate representation of the wider society. Either the law allows this or it forces an employer to favour one candidate over another based on something other than their ability to do the job.

That is discrimination. That is wrong.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Popularity: 18% [?]

Don’t you just love “Have Your Say“? What a wonderful place for those without any education, or any concept of the society they live in, to get burning issues off their chest without any fear of being punched in the face.

One of today’s topics is “Should witnesses have the right to anonymity” (link may be dead by the time you read this but it lives in the BBC archives). In a nutshell, the Law Lords upheld a long standing British legal tradition that says you have the right to face your accuser, and now the moaning-right want to abolish it. Ostensibly this is to allow people to give evidence without fear of criminal retribution (which, incidentally already happens and has happened for many, many years).

I think removing this right would be insane. It wouldn’t really help the police as they can already protect a witness under threat, but would allow people to lie without having to suffer the consequences. This is, IMHO, a very bad thing.

Anyway, on HYS there is a healthy mix of reactions. This is good as it means there are sane people out there. Ironically, the pro-anonymity argument seems to wrap itself up in contradictions…

Take this tirade against the law lords for their ruling:

The government is supposed to make the laws in this country, not a bunch of sad, senile old freaks. It’s patently obvious to anyone with an IQ greater than that of a prune that witnesses should be allowed anonymity, otherwise no one in their right mind would ever give evidence against criminal gangs. These idiots should not be allowed to make any more decisions of this kind.

Wow. The elected government (so often the brunt of right-wingers ire) is better a the law than the Law lords? Hmm. I disagree but that is not the issue. From this madness we get on to how the quality of the witness will be determined if the accussed can not challenge them:

The quality of the evidence will be taken into consideration by the judge during the trial. This will determine the validity and the Jury will be directed accordingly.

Wow. Ironic, isn’t it?

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]

Yet another “downside” of the thawing tensions between East and West was announced on the BBC today. Sir Edmund Burton was investigating the MOD’s woeful inability to prevent laptops going missing, and one of his conclusions was reported as:

Armed forces recruits from the “Facebook generation” do not take data security seriously enough, a Ministry of Defence security probe has found. (…)
In a highly critical report, he says the MoD had lost its Cold War discipline for data security and there was “little awareness” of its importance among staff. As a result a major security incident had been “inevitable”.

I sort of agree in that such a loss was (and still is) inevitable. However, I am not convinced it is as clear cut as the “facebook” generation or the end of the cold war.

First off, most of these breaches are not made by inexperienced recruits - they are not the sort of person who carries a laptop around with huge amounts of classified material. The people who do this are senior members of staff (even MPs…), I doubt Hazel Blears is part of the “facebook” generation - she simply had material on her machine that shouldn’t have been there and it got stolen. The MOD losses are similar.

Portable IT equipment is a high value target for theives, by its very nature it lends itself to being carted away easily. Of course people will try to steal things like this so any security plan must take that as an assumption and build from there (such as not putting unnecessary data there in the first place…). It is not the cold war’s fault for having the barefaced cheek to end.

The larger “issue” of all this, is despite the poor record, our government is continually trying to record and store more and more data on its citizens. Imagine the security compromise possible when a laptop containing 25,000,000 (not a made up number) people’s ID card details goes missing…

Remind me again why ID cards are good?

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Following my posting yesterday (although I doubt the two are linked), I received a message on flickr today, inviting me to join a group (No Photographs Day / 15.DEC.2008) that read:

All,
We, the photographers of the world, are at risk. More and more we are viewed with suspicion, more and more we are subject to illegal interpretations of new anti-terrorism laws, more and more are we stopped and our cameras, our film, our digital media are either confiscated or wiped by officials unaware of the real laws. More and more are we bullied, more and more are we treated with disrespect and fear.
This needs to stop.
This group is to organize a protest.
This protest will involve attempting to get *every* member of flickr to refrain from uploading *any photographs* on a specific day.
This day will be Monday, December 15th 2008.
Join the group, put it in your diaries, tell your friends, discuss in the group, tell people you know in the media, come together.
Come together before it’s illegal to use a camera in a public place.

Now, I am not yet convinced of the value this action will take, but I rarely see the point in “awareness raising” activities so that is not unusual. However, the group does address something I have begun to become interested in (which is why I have “raised awareness” of it through the medium of blog).

Added to this, it (worryingly) seems there are many groups of people who have had problems in one way or another because of their interest in photography:

• Photography is not a crime
• The Harassed Photographer
• You can’t take pictures here!

Representative or not, it is a sorry state of affairs if people in the “free” civilized societies in the west can not carry out a harmless pastime that has been enjoyed for a hundred years. Wont life be better when we carry our papers round, are stopped at random by non-Police Security / Border Guards, are monitored 24/7, have all our emails sifted through by civil servants, be imprisoned for drawings …

Welcome to the New World Order.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

If you hadn’t already noticed, I am a keen hobbyist photographer. I love going out with my family and taking pictures of everything around me. This is pretty harmless and it gives us nice pictures to hang on the walls or foist off on relatives in place of Christmas and Birthday presents. As a pastime, there could be much worse.

Being interested in photography, I always considered myself lucky that I was born in a democracy where people are basically free to indulge in their hobbies and predominantly interested in landscape photography where you dont have to ask someone to smile.

It seems, however, I was actually quite wrong and it is only my tendency for landscape shots that keeps me on the right side of the law. Despite our “evil freedoms” being abhorrent to the nutcases like Usama Bin Laden, we actually have a lot less than you would think. Actually, that isn’t true (yet) but I will come back to this.

Two news items from this weeks Amateur Photographer magazine give pause for thought about our “rights” and freedoms. The first is a worrying incident in the land of the free:

A TV crew filming a story about photographers being harassed at a US railway station were stopped by security and told to switch off their cameras. (…) Tom Fitzgerald, a reporter for Fox 5 television, was interviewing the chief spokesman for rail operator Amtrak when a security guard ordered the crew to stop filming. Ironically, the spokesman had apparently just confirmed to the reporter that photography was, in fact, allowed.

It continues to mention that this is not an isolated incident (flickr discussion) and the madness that “moves are afoot to introduce draft legislation designed to protect the rights of photographers to take pictures.”

It is doubly ironic that they tried to put paid to the film crew filming the company spokesman saying filming was allowed. What better example of corporate non-communication could there be?

The Amtrak Goons are insane, but are not alone. We have a similar problem in the UK:

Olympics 2012 bosses have apologised to photographers who complained about heavy-handed treatment by security guards at the East London construction site. The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) came under fire after two amateur photographers complained following a confrontation outside the site on 3 May. Louis Berk and Steve Kessel say they were left feeling intimidated after guards demanded to see their identification. ODA spokeswoman Laura Voyle said the guards approached the photographers ‘to investigate a report that they had been seen within the Olympic Park boundary’. However, the pair insisted they had been on a ‘public pavement’ and had not ventured onto the Olympic site itself. (…) And [Olympics Security Manager] promised to conduct a ‘review of instructions on how they will deal with issues relating to photography’.  (…) However, [Louis Berk] does not feel reassured, telling us: ‘What concerns me is that I still don’t know if the ODA realises that suspicion of taking photographs of their property from a ‘public place’ is not a cause for intervention by the guard force.’

There is more madness around the 2012 London Olympics but this highlights the current problem.

In a nutshell, both instances were the result of private Security Guards not being aware of the rules regarding their location. This is down to poor education by their employer. In the UK you can photograph almost anything (some locations are exempt under the 1911 Official Secrets Act) from a public place. If you can see it, you can photograph it. Kind of makes sense really. It is different if you are on private property, but 90% of the time the property owner will give permission. Again, it makes sense. I can only assume the law is similar in America.

What is worrying is that both instances show people have a default setting of STOPPING photography. I will be charitable and say neither organisation put out instructions to annoy members of the public (including tax payers who paid for the bloody Olympic-farce) so the security guards must have assumed the camera was a security threat. Over the last few months there have been lots of occasions where over zealous guardians have taken offence at people trying to take photographs, even in (weirdly) popular tourist destinations like Trafalgar Square. I have read claims that people were questioned because they could be “terrorists doing reconnaissance” (with an overt camera and tripod - good job Johnny Foreigner isn’t clever enough to use a mobile phone camera…) or other equally spurious risks (there were children present etc..).

The problem is, these fears (and certainly this one in particular) are nonsense. Bruce Schneier, BT’s chief security technology officer, recently wrote an excellent article for the Guardian where he dismisses most of these fears. The article is really, really worth reading even if you aren’t a photographer - there are many more “freedoms” at risk from our apathetic approach to them and “terrorism.” Schneier has an interesting theory that this madness where we fear long-lens cameras is because it is a “Movie Plot Threat.” Also worth reading.

Sadly, it may well be too little, too late for our society. We fear that the evil Islamic terrorists will destroy our culture, so to “beat” them we destroy it ourselves. Well done us.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Salman Rushdie spoke about religion and atheism, in an interview on the Canadian CBC news site

Q: ……. Is this a comment on the current vogue for atheism?

A: Maybe it’s making a slight comeback. In the ’60s and ’70s, religion was in extreme retreat. It really felt as if that subject was over. The idea that we would have to reckon with religion as a major force in public life would have seemed absurd, if you had suggested it to me when I was in my 20s.

For someone of my generation, what’s been shocking is the way that religion has rushed back and returned to public life. And it’s only happened since the 1980s. In the Eastern hemisphere, it’s the rise of radical Islam and here it has to do with the Christian right.

Absolutely right. Ideas that seemed twenty years ago to have only historical value are now powerful mass motivators.

Rushdie says that he differs slightly from Hitchens or Dawkins in that:

… I have no problem with religion, as long as it’s private. If people find it consoling or uplifting or nourishing – not my business. Why should I dictate to people what they should enjoy? I may think they’re dumb, but it’s not my business. Where it becomes my business is when it comes into the public arena and is a social and political force that seeks to impose certain norms on society. Then, I think it becomes a malicious force.

Well, yes. I tend to agree with him here. We all have an infinite number of false beliefs and they are noone else’s concern, no matter how dumb, unless we act upon them in ways that have an impact on other people.

But, playing Devil’s Advocate, religion can never really be a wholly private matter. It’s socially transmitted. A patchwork of individually derived superstitions is one thing. A (more-or-less) internally coherent belief system is another. It requires central authority to propagate its ideas. mechanisms for transmitting its message and, apparently, having been organised, it needs to strengthen its internal cohesion by defining non-believers as other. (*)

Can you have a personal god belief that’s not produced through society? It doesn’t seem likely. Believing in a concept of “gods” isn’t an automatic response to the wonders of the universe. Otherwise, people wouldn’t bother to indoctrinate their young into their belief systems. We would all be born fully formed christians or muslims or hindus or whatever. Or, at least, all religions would be singing from the same hymnsheet.

I’m not convinced that a personal god can be so easily separated from socially organised belief. However, if anyone knows what can happen when you challenge organised religion, it’s Salman Rushdie. So, I take his point that individual folly hardly matters when mass folly is so dangerous.

(*) Sorry, sociological and philosophical pedants, I know I am reifying religion here. It’s just a rough description, OK?

Popularity: 14% [?]

Popularity: 14% [?]