Why Dont You Blog?

“Captcha is the bane of the internet,” says Matt Mullenweg, who runs the massively popular blogging site Wordpress.com. “I can’t figure them out myself half the time!” (from the Guardian technology page today)

This is from a Guardian piece discussiing how captchas are welll and truly broken - by algorithms and by cheap human labour -thus increasing the volume of blog comment spam. The writer suggests Akismet or the type of non-machine readable questions that you find on ApathySketchpad as viable alternatives.

I’m comment-impaired at the best of times. I’ll try and comment on a blog and find that my comment just disappears. Granted, this suggests the universe has an innate capacity for mercy. But, just occasionally, the words that disappear into the net’s black hole were comments that I really wanted to make. So, I’ll try and rewrite it, in a half-hearted fashion. It will disappear again. I’ll have a final stab at writing. And sending. But by this time, it’s incoherent garbage, sent only to show the comment-eating demon who’s boss.

And then the captcha is there mocking you. Matt Mullenweg is so right, except, on his own proud boast, at least he gets them right half of the time. Falling foul of captcha is a daily occurrence here at WhyDontYou Towers. And a score of 50% correct is just a fond dream.

The idea is that only humans can read the things. A reverse Turing test. This whole concept falls down on the point that any shapes that are too unlike characters to be read by a souped up OCR-style algorithm are much too unlike letters or numbers for human beings to interpret them.

Even when you can distinguish those shapes that are meant to be characters from the deliberately inserted wavy lines, you face something like:

oo9I0g

There is no way to reliably distinguish between 9 and g, 0 and O, 1 and l and I.

So you type in zero zero nine one zero g, on the offchance. It rejects you. You don’t get another shot at the ambiguous letters.

Oh no. A fresh bleeding captcha. This time you find you have to choose between identifying a letter as either a very thin letter j or the letter i with a slight curve at the bottom. Failed again.

Next time it’s either an l with a slight curve at the top or an anorexic letter c. Ok, got the c right but then you thought that oddly shaped capital A was a 4, didn’t you? Robotic fool.

By this time, the human-detector software has often decided you are a bot cos you couldn’t even guess one out of 3. So your comment is bounced anyway.

If you’ve ever thought that you might as well go for the disabled option, don’t bother. That’s not worth it either. Captchas that claim to be for the disabled are actually even harder to use than their able-bodied comrades. Different experiences you can have with the accessibility captcha include:

• A long silence. So you think it’s not working and cancel a fraction of a second after it kicks in.
• so much feedback and background weird noises (to simulate the visual noise on the visual captcha) that you couldn’t even work out what it’s saying if you had a comic book aural discrimination superpower.
• Voices so bizarrely accented and echoey that you are stunned by the novelty that this is suposed to represent speech. So you don’t notice, let alone memorise, the content as it racespast you in a jumble of syllables.
• The disabled version sometimes matches the written one and sometimes doesn’t. Which one do you try? The wrong one, of course.

The whole concept of the disabled one seems stupid to me. You are assumed to be too blind to see the captcha image. So how do you see the captcha box and spot where the disabled button is? Are the blind fitted with memory enhancement chips that let them translate a string of meaningless letters and numbers from the native gibberese AND remember them long enough for their screen reader to kick in and tell them where to type?

Popularity: 7% [?]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Appealing science stuff in the news this week.

• The Guardian’s science podcast is about music. Some of the speakers have voices that could be marketed as aural Mogadon. However, if you can stay awake, the debate is interesting.
• Magpies can see themselves in the mirror.

  Apart from the interesting implications that magpies have some sense of self that’s not completely unlike ours, this is just a beautiful experiment. So elegant in terms of lateral thinking about testing a hypothesis.

  Imagine that you were wondering if magpies could see themselves in a mirror. How would you find out?
  The answer is to put coloured sticky tabs on parts of magpies that they can’t normally see. Then, place the magpies in front of mirrors. The magpies then start noticing the sticky tabs that they previously ignored and make the effort to remove them.

The elegant experiment prompts me to tell my own ludicrous magpie story. There’s no elegance in it. There’s no testable hypothesis. I haven’t even got any evidence that it happened. (I tried to aim my webcam out of the window but it’s useless enough even for its normal webcamming purpose. It just got glare off the glass and I couldn’t focus it properly.)

On a chimney behind my yard, there was a nest, with magpie chicks in it. This was really interesting. (It made a welcome change from watching rats sneak under the yard door, for a start.) I could watch the magpie-lings getting fed, growing bigger and noisier every time I saw them.

A feral tabby cat usually turns up and whines at my back door on Sunday afternoons. He mainly calls round to get warm and dry and to lie on a couch.

He’s the most pampered “feral” cat imaginable. He must have at least seven houses on his round. (Lots of people feed feral cats around here, mainly on account of the rats mentioned above.) If he doesn’t like the flavour of the cat food he’s given, he licks off the gravy/jelly then goes back to rooting through garbage. If he likes it, he demands more, plus a few hours’ sleep on the couch. He’s a very vocal cat, and very affectionate. (Neither attribute would seem like much of a survival strategy for a feral cat, but they certainly work for a cat who’s learned that meowing at humans, purring and rubbing against human legs, is the fastest way to get food and warmth.)

This situation suits me. It combines the occasional pleasure of having a pet with a complete absence of the need to be responsible for it.

A few weeks ago, I noticed him standing in the yard with a furious magpie. I kid you not. The magpie was facing him off - standing about 2 feet away from him - and cawing at him, deafeningly. The cat was neither attacking the magpie nor makng for an exit. He was just cowering, in a defeated stance looking down at the floor.

I watched this for a few minutes and nothing changed. I looked back a few minutes later and the two animals were both on top of the yard wall, doing the same things - shouting in magpie language and cringing in cat body language. (Anthropomorphising, that cat looked damn guilty.)

I looked up at the nest and there were no chicks there. I formed the untestable hypothesis that the magpie was kicking off because the cat had eaten its chicks and that the cat was accepting the magpie’s complaints, on the grounds that it might indeed have done something to get it in trouble.

I lost interest that day. There’s only so long you can wonder what’s going on between a cat and a magpie.

The next weekend, the feral cat turned up as usual. But - in the company of the bloody magpie. The two came into the yard together. The magpie waited in a corner while I opened a pouch of cat food. When the cat had finished eating, they left together.

Disappointingly, this must have been just an early summer friendship. Since then, the cat’s only called round on its own, (Maybe, the cat had incurred some sort of blood debt to the bird and was paying him off in shared plunder. Maybe, the cat finally ate it….)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

The Guardian seems to have started a Wire discussion group. It would be churlish to suggest that the Guardian, as an entity, never took as much interest in the Wire before it centred round a newspaper office.

(Charlie Brooker and a couple of other Guardian tv reviewers were the honourable exceptions to this.)

I’m going to steal its intro warning to explain why I haven’t been indulging in my customary gushing over the genius of the Wire:

SPOILER ALERT: Usual rules: No giving the game away if you’ve gone further; don’t spoil it for yourself if you are further behind.

Basically, it’s too difficult to remember which Wire events are OK to write about and which aren’t, in case I spoil someone’s enjoyment. Sadly, I’ve already spoilt it for myself by seeing it already. I know what’s going to happen in the wind-up part of the 5-series set, so I don’t want to watch it until I’ve forgotten enough detail to make it watchable again.

There’s an Iraq war short series from “the team who brought you the Wire.” I would be grateful if someone who’s seen it in the US will tell me if it’s good. I’ve decided to wait till it’s on television here, so as not to spoil it, in case it is good.

However, I’m so squeamish that I won’t want to watch it if it’s too distressing. Which, given that it’s about the Iraq war, is probably a certainty. So I’m in two minds about the whole thing and would welcome any guidance.

Otherwise completely unconnected to the above rambling, except for being also interesting in today’s Guardian, there’s an article by Hicham Yezza, the academic who’s waiting to be deported after downloading the al-qaeda manual for a colleague.

The UN’s committee on human rights has just published a report criticising Britain’s anti-terror laws and the resulting curbs on civil liberties. For many commentators the issues raised are mostly a matter of academic abstractions and speculative meanderings. For me, it is anything but. These laws have destroyed my life. (from Hicham Yezza in the Guardian.)

I had lazily assumed that this nonsense was all sorted out months ago. It appears not. Just because the media have lost interest doesn’t mean that this absurdity has been undone. In fact, some inexorable process - that Yezza characterises as Kafkaesque - seems have been set going.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

In an Olympic event for the dumbest so-called experts, food experts would probably get a gold.

According to this story, in the Guardian and elsewhere, they can’t tell their stir-fried arses from their lightly fricasseed elbows.

How bad for you is coleslaw?
In the light of a Food Commission report showing that a large pot of KFC coleslaw contains 22.4g of fat - more than its fillet burger (15.6g) or large fries (19.4g) - it is perhaps reasonable to wonder that if a mix of shredded cabbage, carrot and mayonnaise isn’t a healthy option, what on earth is?
…..
A survey of leading nutrition and obesity experts bears this out, with none of the 66 specialists capable of telling from a menu description which item was the least healthy option.

Firstly, what is “healthy” in the context of food. Surely, short of actually putting poison in your mouth, all food is only “healthy” in terms of what it contributes to your overall diet. Cabbage and carrot have obviously got less protein and more vitamins and anti-oxidants than a burger, no matter how much fat they are sitting in. What’s “healthier” - protein or vitamins? You can’t live on either, by itself.

Secondly, why is it assumed that fat is automatically unhealthy? There are several kinds of fat - saturated, unsaturated, monosaturates (or something like that. I’ve forgotten the other kinds but, then, it’s not me who’s supposed to be the nutrition expert, ffs.) Whether any given one is essential or dangerous seems to be a matter of fashion.

The type of fat in the coleslaw isn’t likely to be the same as the types of fat in the burger or on the fries. The body of a person who wasn’t getting enough to eat would probably be well served by any of them. Fat can surely only be considered unhealthy for those of us who are already overweight and got that way by taking in too much fat, over a long time. But the experts are just taking it that any fat is “bad” and, by definition, unhealthy for everyone.

But my main quarrel with this is its bloody stupidity. Let’s temporarily assume for the sake of argument that all fat is by definition bad.

Do I have to take it that 66 “leading nutrition and obesity” experts really don’t know that coleslaw is made with mayonnaise. And don’t know that mayonnaise is made from oil and vinegar and egg yolks. Please note, that’s oil. (Don’t make me post a mayo recipe here.)

A bit more from the Guardian, making me wonder how people can really be this stupid about something so important to survival as food.

Confusion often stems from nutritional truth running contrary to accepted food wisdom. After all, surely vegetarian options are healthier? Not if you choose the Subway Veggie Patty Sub, which has more calories than either the steak and cheese sub, or the turkey, ham, bacon and cheese sub. Salads healthier than burgers? Not if you pick the McDonald’s crispy chicken and bacon salad, which has 15g of fat per portion, almost twice as much fat as a simple hamburger (8g)

I’m a vegetarian but I don’t assume vegetarian food was “healthier” and certainly not in this novel sense of “healthier” as meaning only “having less fat and/or fewer calories.” I have been on the planet long enough to know that food is “vegetarian” in the sense of “not being made from meat.” (Any other use of the word is usually a marketing tool.)

Which is a “healthier” lunch - a pile of candy or a steak? Here’s a clue. The candy is vegetarian.

Which has less fat - a cupful of olive oil or a plate of fried chicken and chips? (That’s french fries to you, Americans.) No matter how much we have been brainwashed into assuming that fried chicken and chips are “bad” for us, because they contain fat, I think you’ll find that olive oil wins this competition.

What about “Salads healthier than burgers? Not if you pick the McDonald’s crispy chicken and bacon salad.” This is confusing the definition of a salad - raw vegetables - with a labelled dish that has the name salad in its title but contains “chicken” and “bacon”, not normally considered raw vegetables the last time I checked.

The Guardian writer’s argument here is in support of the Food Commission’s aim to have nutritional information available for all foods at the point of sale, just as it is on supermarket foods.

This would be a rather more convincing argument if the “nutrition experts” knew enough about food to be aware that mayonnaise is made from oil, hence would recognise that any product swimming in mayo will have a high fat content.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Popularity: 7% [?]

It’s pretty insulting to tell a musician that their music is an instrument of torture. Not that many musicians seem to care. Metallica (crappy band, of old-Napster-destroying memory) are quite unconcerned that their music was a Gitmo standby.

Unfortunately, some artists are not offended by their work being used to torture. “If the Iraqis aren’t used to freedom, then I’m glad to be part of their exposure,” James Hetfield, co-founder of Metallica, has said. As for his music being torture, he laughed: “We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?”(from Clive Clifford Smith in the Guardian 19th June 2008)

So respect is due to David Gray for speaking out about the use of his “Babylon” track. He, at least, doesn’t find what the US call “torture lite” particularly amusing:

“That is torture,” the singer-songwriter told Radio Four’s World Tonight programme……
..”No-one wants to even think about it or discuss the fact that we’ve gone above and beyond all legal process and we’re torturing people,” he added.

The Guardian piece had a few words from someone on the receiving end of torture-lite. (Is that almost the most chilling phrase you’ve ever heard)

Despite this, to date, the Pentagon’s semanticists have achieved their purpose, and many people think that torture by music is little more than a rather irritating enforced encounter with someone else’s iPod. Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who is still held in Guantánamo Bay, knows a bit about such torture. The CIA rendered him to Morocco, where his torturers repeatedly took a razor blade to his penis throughout an 18-month ordeal.
When I later sat across from him in the cell, he described how psyops methods were worse than this. He could anticipate physical pain, he said, and know that it would eventually end. But the experience of slipping into madness as a result of torture by music was something quite different.
“Imagine you are given a choice,” he said. “Lose your sight or lose your mind.”

David Gray pointed out that there might be legal implications in using music tracks without permission:

The singer wonders whether governments who use music as a torture technique without asking permission from the artists involved could face legal action. “In order to play something publicly, you have to have legal permission and you have to apply for that.(Guardian)

Just saying… VirginMedia have responded to pressure from the BPI by sending out threatening letters to customers suspected of sharing music illegally. Shouldn’t these copyright protection agencies be suing the US government, instead, if it turns out that they haven’t applied for permission, or paid for the rights, to broadcast music in their Gitmo free concerts?

Also on the endlessly enraging topic of torture, immense respect is also due to Christopher Hitchens for undergoing the euphemistically named “waterboarding” and reporting on how bad it was, even for a volunteer who knew he wouldn’t die and could go home at the end of the experience. (Hat tip to Quintessential Rambling for the link to this story.)

“Waterboarding” sounds so much like a fun new extreme sport, whereas those old-fashioned words like torture sound so cold and depressing. “Torture-lite” sounds so ironic and post modern, as if it’s not really torture at all. Something like being stuck in traffic on a really hot day. It seems that Newspeak can change anything from “morally abhorrent” to “familiar and acceptable.”

(There’s a good thought-provoking video of Stephen Pinker’s talk at the RSA, about how we use language - including the uses of euphemism.)

Popularity: 16% [?]

Popularity: 16% [?]

Two good (even entertaining, on a serious subject) articles in the Guardian: Jan Morris’s Davis fight is not just for liberty: It is for Britain’s soul. (This was published a couple of days ago but it’s well worth reading just to remind yourself that the whole world is not mad.)

She says that Britain is becoming divided into two camps - those who care about freedom and those who are happy to give it up:

of the contemporary two nations, it seems to me, by far the greater is giving up on liberty. Anyone can see that in Britain, 2008, individuality is being suppressed, so that year by year, generation by generation, the people are being bullied or brainwashed into docile conformity. What is more ominous is that so many want to be docile. They want to be supervised, cosseted, homogenised, obedient.

She suspects that even those of us who don’t want to be brainwashed are dreaming of autocratic powers to put paid to the current nonsense.

Already every free soul, I suspect, has sometimes wished that we had a benevolent dictator to sweep all the nonsense aside, the flabbiness and the conformity, the brainwash and all.

There is something in the point she is making - so many people are becoming so passive and fearful, it’s quite a temptation to think they don’t deserve any freedom.

Today, the intermittently-brilliant Marina Hyde also takes a strong stance against our incorporation into an authoritarian Truman Show world: This surveillance onslaught is draconian and creepy. She says that the level of surveillance for petty offences makes her ashamed to be British.

The past few years have thrown up dozens of instances which made one wince to be a citizen of this septic isle, but a personal low came with the discovery that 500,000 bins had been fitted with electronic tracking devices. Transponders in bins … Could any morning news item be more designed to force one back against the pillows, too embarrassed about one’s country to start the day? Yes, as it turned out…

(referring to the Poole Council’s surveillance of parents suspected of trying to get their kids in a specific school.)

She suggests that wearing a hood or hijab might become a necessity for anyone who wants any degree of privacy in public space.

Yet there does seem a vaguely depressing irony in governments insisting that constant surveillance is essential to prevent our being overrun by repressive regimes who’d make us all cover our heads and the like. It’s these initiatives that drive even the most pliant members of society to dream of taking just that precaution themselves, if only for a bit of privacy.

Of course these articles got a fair number of comments from people who could be replaced by the Twat-a-tron with no loss to the planet and a valuable net saving of air.

I’d repeat some of the more comedic ones here, if only I could see them again on the Guardian website… and if Firefox didn’t die every time I pay attention to its “unencrypted- information- being-sent” warning about the Guardian website and refuse to send whatever is harvested every time I open a page. I’ve looked at the Guardian’s privacy policy and it doesn’t say its cookies will dial home every time you look at a page.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Popularity: 16% [?]

Take the cameras that follow us everywhere. Increase their intrusiveness level by a factor of ten and you get an idea of how much staff surveillance a German-based supermarket chain thinks it needs. Lidl has been spying on its German and Czech workers in ways that might shock the most avid defenders of surveillance, according to the Guardian story.

The store employed detectives and used video cameras to gather an alarming amount of personal information about its workers. Information about their finances, their tattoos, their love lives, their friends, how many times they went to the toilet….

Recording how a German employee identified as Frau M spent her break, one report read: “Frau M wanted to make a call with her mobile phone at 14.05 … She received the recorded message that she only had 85 cents left on her prepaid mobile. She managed to reach a friend with whom she would like to cook this evening, but on condition that her wage had been paid into her bank, because she would otherwise not have enough money to go shopping.” (from The Guardian)

The Guardian writer saw this incident in a Czech Republic store as the most shocking:

.. a female worker was forbidden to go to the toilet during working hours. An internal memorandum, which is now the centre of a court case in the republic, allegedly advised staff that “female workers who have their periods may go to the toilet now and again, but to enjoy this privilege they should wear a visible headband.

The story was taken from the German magazine Stern. It appears in the Telegraph and other UK newspapers. There’s more on Lidl on AsdaWatch. Lidl’s Wikipedia page that refers to the Guardian article.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]

The science shows that culling badgers would spread, not limit the spread of cattle TB, according to Roy Hattersley, writing in the Guardian today

.. the assumption that culling will reduce the incidence of the disease is wrong. Indeed, unless we brush aside the work of Britain’s most distinguished conservation scientists, we have to conclude that the sort of cull proposed by Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser, will do more harm than good.

Well said, Roy. He points out that killing badgers will only placate the influential National Farmers’ Union leaders who have either no rational idea what to do or who see more effective responses as too costly.

The argument is that limited killing of badgers would be counter-productive. David McDonald of Oxford University calculated that a cull in Cornwall - the central focus - would cut the TB incidence there by 20% but increase the level outside the cull area by 27%.

An unlimited culling of badgers would surely be an environmental crime of immense proprtions. No government needs to placate farmers that badly. Can’t we just pay them to leave the badgers alone or to vaccinate their cattle?

Roy Hattersley, points out that, even if the government doesn’t follow the simple moral path and refuse the cull, there would be a serious political fallout.

there is no doubt that, should ministers decide to follow his (the chief scientist’s) advice, they would unleash a countrywide campaign that would make the pro-hunting protesters seem half-hearted.

Well, I’m not holding my breath on the government’s taking an ethical stance on this. However, as a distinguished old-Labour politician, Hattersley is probably pretty shrewd when it comes to judging what might have influence on the Department of the Environment. Let’s hope that a government keen to paint itself as green doesn’t miss his message.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]

The Guardian website announced this afternoon that Craig Ventner is about to announce the creation of a chromosome. The article headings are:-

I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer
· Scientist has made synthetic chromosome
· Breakthrough could combat global warming

I have less than zero capacity to judge the legitimacy of this news item. It’s obviously ‘pop science’ journalism. That normally means that I apply my one-tenth-understanding to some science journalist’s half-understanding.

Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before”.

That said, taking the news at face value, this does seem to be a potentially huge ethical issue. It could be really good or really bad, depending on the social and political context that such research is sued in.

I can’t help having a bit of a doom and gloom response. I don’t think our track record as a non-creator species is good enough to justify us getting even greater power over the nature of life. (I’ve read Mary Shelley, ffs.)

The Guardian’s mention of a solution to global warming just reminds me that global climate change is the perfect example of an issue where we humans have created a problem and refuse to solve it. (Maybe we haven’t solved it because we couldn’t create artificial life? Sorry, I can’t follow that argument even in sarcasm)

The people in power won’t even admit to the reality of climate change because it might cut their profits and the voting public might object to anything except untrammelled consumer growth so cut off their access to power if they even tried. These are two very short-term concerns that affect a small number of people but they are what determine the world’s response to global warming.

Is our species about to change? Are our leaders all about to become wise and beneficent masters of the universe? In that case, the power to create test tube life is safe in their hands……

Popularity: 23% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]

It’s 10 years since the first blog, according to the Guardian. In that time, as you all know, the blog has become a major force for mass communication. More and people are setting up blogs.

“We’re seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day,” said Dave Sifry, the chief executive of the blog monitoring site Technorati. “That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second.”

Ironically, the article finishes by quoting some supposed expert who says that most blogs are boring vehicles for narcissistic individuals.

“The real issue is whether it adds any more to our culture. Most of it is just so transient and ephemeral …. Why do I want to know what some guy sitting on the west coast of America thinks about Iraq? Would you pay to listen to this person?”

This self-proclaimed dotcome millionaire is about to publish a book saying that blogging is killing off the internet. Have to paraphrase here:

“Why do I want to know what some guy who a guardian journalist happens to have the phone number of thinks about blogging? Would you pay to read this person’s book?”

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]