Friday dustbin blogging

Another homage to Dr C's seminal Crabdance (progenitor of "Friday xxx blogging"). With thanks to [Paul] Fitz[gerald], who allowed his christmas present to be hijacked for the purpose.

Irritable hyperbole syndrome

Snow is, at the moment, causing problems in many places. Around me, traffic was hampered and an airport was closed. Elsewhere, things have been more severe. To the east, Basingstoke in southern England was taken by surprise and had a very bad day.

But it does irritate me to hear the tired old cliché trotted out again that Basingstoke "is like a war zone".

No; really, it isn't.

Sensible nonsense

A fixture of the interactive web, these days, is the distorted text image which you have to type into a box (proving that you are not a robot) before continuing with some action. I have no doubt that the spammers and other assorted barbarians at the gate will eventually crack this; but not yet.

I am regularly impressed by the words offered on Blogger sites where I need to enter the magic password before my comments are registered. Not only are the words more easily readable than in many other instances, but they consistently manage to be pronounceable as well.

Both characteristics make transcription errors less likely, minimising the risk that I will stomp off in a sulk and not bother to comment at all. Thought has clearly gone into the system.

I'm not a natural or enthusiastic programmer. Perhaps the making of pronounceable nonsense words is trivial to those who are; but to me it's a small wonder.

I have written a spreadsheet which generates passwords for sites to which I must restrict access. It throws up twenty five groups of random alphabetic characters at a time, and I hit recalc until one of these groups is pronounceable. Since I set a single password for a period of time, and a usable group comes up fairly quickly, it's not an onerous process ... but it's not efficient, either.

Whatever algorithm Blogger uses is not just a simple matter of alternating consonants and vowels (though come to think of it, I might modify my spreadsheet to do just that). Over at JSBlog, for instance, I've just been asked to type in "madmast"; previous visits have asked for "svalploen", "omchak" and so on. I have seen "valvsnagorm" but I never get consonant groups like that "lvsn" at the beginning of a word. Clearly there is a fairly sophisticated rule base which specifies which letters can be used together in which circumstances.

As I type this, and think through the logic, it becomes clearer ... I still have no intention of trying to program such a mechanism, but I do begin to see how it would be done. Nevertheless, to see a different pronounceable but meaningless word pop up every time still feels like magic.

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen...

To be honest, the expectations of Copenhagen were always impossibly inflated. But there has to be hope.

US President Barack Obama offered hope of several kinds, when elected, and many more which he did not offer were hung around him unasked.

The end of Copenhagen does for both sets of hopes. A target of limiting global temperature rise to 2° Celsius isn't sufficient, and we now know it isn't going to happen either: it has been left to founder in a vat of fudge. And the manner in which Obama announced limited agreement to this fudge had all the hallmarks of US rule by fiat which his election had brought hopes of ending.

The message from my generation for new arrivals like Quinn Wilder Perkins is that all pretence is off: today will bequeath to their tomorrow a world in which growing populations fight for decreasing land, food and water. We could make it different if we really wanted to; but we don't care enough.

Friday crumpet blogging

Genstat for Windows, 12th edition

The 12th edition of GenStat for Windows has been out for a few months, now, but I’ve been examining it in the wild (so to speak) rather than on a review bench. One reason for this has been an upcoming SCW feature, which has had me schlepping around a variety of life science teams, for which many of 12's features were useful and in which GenStat happens to feature prominently. [more...]

Global security after the war on terror

“the responses required to counter the potentially disastrous consequences of the wealth-poverty divide interacting with an ecologically constrained global system are truly radical. ... ... ... The war on terror has been a disaster, but recognising its failure might at least help us develop our understanding of global security in a manner appropriate to the 21st Century.”

---

• Paul Rogers, Global security after the war on terror, an ORG briefing paper. 2009, Oxford: Oxford Research Group.

If you buy a hard disk, and look carefully at the small print on the casing, you will find a number estimating the “Mean Time To Failure” (MTTF) or “Mean Time Between Failures” (MTBF) – to all practical intents and purposes, for the buyer, they are the same thing.

When I first bought a hard disk (to go in an Amstrad PC1512, since you ask; 40 Megabytes, of which the operating system could make use of only 32), MTBF figures were quite small on the scale of things. The mean time before I could expect to hear the heads crashing noisily into the platters and sending all my hard work to the great erasure in the sky was in the credibly near future. Worse still, it was only a mean figure, with no accompanying measure of dispersion; if that conveys nothing to you, don't worry about it ... in essence, the mean figure was useless, since actual failure could happen at any unquantifiable time either side of it¹.

Now, as it happens, I have only once had a hard disk die on me before I replaced it on other grounds – usually because I need a bigger one. But the thought of everything vanishing at an arbitrary moment gave me a paranoid devotion to backup régimes, so it seems that MTTF has its uses.

Nowadays, MTTF figures are up in the million hours range ... which means, of course, since a million hours is a little over 114 years, that the disk expects to last longer than I do. It also means that somebody has extrapolated some sophisticated guesswork and we don't really know. And there is still no measure of dispersion, so it's not much use anyway. So, I fall back on empirical experience: I have had hard disks between 100 and 320 Gigabytes in use for some years, and they have never let me down even though some of them have been dropped onto hard surfaces while running. I still run those paranoid backup routines, though: I'm not taking any chances.

This has all come back to mind in a different context.

When Pentax brought out their first digital SLR, the IstD, I shifted my majority photographic practice to it from the LX and K2 film bodies which I had used until then. I have set of *istD bodies, and have stuck to them. New models came and went, ignored.

I would be quite happy to stick with the IstD's forever. Newer bodies have useful new features, and because of what I do I don't have to actually pay for them. But consistency, knowing that every body I pick up is exactly the same, that my hands can operate them unconsciously without distracted my eyes or brain from higher tasks, is more important to me than a new trick or a better bell and whistle.²

Alas, in a world which moves on, it's not always possible to freeze one's own part of it.

Two of my IstD's having bitten the dust³, I automatically looked to the second hand market for replacements. Because most buyers of digital SLRs take a different approach from me, upgrading to new models as they become available, a second hand IstD body now only costs about \100. But the number of available bodies is reducing, and will probably dry up in time. And then again, there is the new spectre of “expected shutter life”.

Expected shutter life is quoted in terms of a number of “actuations”: the number of times the button is pressed. As a crude approximation, this is the number of photographs which the use can expect to take before the shutter assembly fails. So far as I know, this was not given for the IstD; but for its newer models Pentax is quoting an expected shutter life of one hundred thousand actuations; other manufacturers are around the same.

This is very similar in many ways to the MTTF of a hard disk. In particular, it comes with no dispersion measure and so is meaningless as a planning assumption. It may be more realistic than MTTF, in so far as there is no practical barrier to Pentax firing off a test batch of production shutters one hundred thousand times over, let's say, a couple of weeks.

These newer models store within their picture files the number of shutter actuations to date. The IstD did not, so I don't have details for each of my existing bodies. On average, however, I can say with certainty that I passed the one hundred thousand mark for each body about three years ago and have more than doubled it by now. On the basis of normal usage patterns, it's a fair guess that each one of them has passed the dreaded 100K barrier and one or more may well have quadrupled it. So, am I on borrowed time?

The first Pentax body I owned (thanks to the generosity of my parents, who could ill afford it) was a Spotmatic bought in 1968. I still have it, and the shutter still works perfectly in all respects except that the top speed has slipped from the marked 1000^th second to a 750th. That slip of the top setting started in 1995, so the camera was 27 years old at the time. I have no way to precisely say how many actuations that represents but, from knowledge of throughput and negative records it must have been somewhere approximately in the region of three hundred thousand. Later bodies have seen similar usage volumes and none of them, where they survive, show any shutter deterioration.

What I want to do is replace both of the lost IstD bodies ... but nagging intimations of mortality urge me to go for a complete newer replacement set. What I've finally settled for is one IstD replacement and one new: a K7 which bears the closest physical similarity to the IstD. I suspect that I have caved into insecurity driven by marketing hype.

---

1. If you are interested: the measure of dispersion around the mean is “standard deviation” (SD). If, for example, the MTTF of a disk was given as 100000 hours with SD of 500 hours, it would mean that there was a roughly 70% confidence that failure would occur between 99500 hours and 100500 hours, or about 99% confidence that it would be between and 98500 and 101500 hours.
2. I have only changed camera bodies three times since 1968. The first time was when Pentax switched lens mount from screw thread to bayonet; to get new lenses which I needed, I had to also get new bodies which would accommodate them – but chose the KX which was very similar to the Spotmatic. The second was addition of LXs; the KXs continued in use, as a set, for work where battery dependency was an issue, but the LX set took over many other types. Finally, the digital IstD replaced the LX while the KX continued (and continues) for film based work.
3. Curious, the number of euphemisms we have for death and (by anthropomorphic extension) destruction or cessation of function. “Bit the dust”. “Kicked the bucket”. “Popped his clogs”. “Gone west”. “Gone for a Burton”. “Gone to the great [insert own jocular noun here – I used erasure above] in the sky”. “Passed on”. “Shuffled off this mortal coil”. Presumably it reflects superstitious fear of ... well, “The last great adventure”.

Phraseology

Exactly six months ago today, Watoosa at The Conscience Pudding asked for the catch phrases which have become part of our lives.

I had trouble thinking of them on demand but they surface in day to day life, and each time one of them does so I briefly think of going back and posting it as a comment ... but it seems a bit daft to do so after all this time ... I don't want to appear as a virtual stalker, after all ... so I put the thought aside.

This morning, as pre-dawn darkness lifts to reveal the white-out of freezing fog, one of those phrases has surfaced. It's from Kate Atkinson's Emotionally weird, or more accurately from one of the several fragmentary and nascent stories that bubble up through Kate Atkinson's Emotionally weird – a novel in which every character is writing a novel. (I highly recommend it as possibly the most hilariously laugh out loud funny books I have ever read.)

But I digress... That phrase, which has surfaced in the early morning fog and has transplanted permanently from novel to the private codebook of my partner and I, is from a fantasy novel series entitled (by its imagined author character) The chronicles of Edrakonia:

“And the murk covered the land, and the dragons did flee.”

OK; perhaps you have to have been there...

---

Addendum:

For some unknown reason, a comment left on the 12th by Ray Girvan vanished into the BitVortex. On the 13th, 24 hours late (is that a clue?), it rematerialised in its proper place. Google moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform...

Ray's contribution, for no obvious reason, reminds me of one which lingers from my childhood. Mr Wizard tells Tudor (or Tooter, Toodor, Tutor) Turtle "Always, always, I tell you, Tudor: be what you is, and not what you is not!"

---

• Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird. London, 2000, Black Swan. 055299734X

Pilate asked: What is truth?

Yesterday my brother sent me, without comment, a Discovery Channel News link referencing the speculatively constructed and partially animated version of Tiger Woods' automotive mishap. This morning, I found that Thinking through my fingers takes this same video as the starting point for a consideration of where our opportunities for accessing “true” news are heading. (Looking back, I see that TTMF referenced the same video a week earlier; but I didn't pick up on it.)

On the face of it, a very obviously constructed fiction (and one in which Woods, and his wife, and even the physics of real life movement, are scarcely recognisable) should be of little concern to anyone except the Woods family and their lawyers. It exists in the same intellectual space as Ice age 3: the dawn of the dinosaurs about which I grumbled recently. But that is disingenuous; the reality is that very few news consumers give much critical consideration to their sources, and very many make only blurred distinctions between fiction and nonfiction.

On the other hand, to start crying that the dividing line is being eroded between imaginative interpretation and objective reportage is equally disingenuous. I doubt that there has ever been such a distinction; certainly I cannot remember a time when it existed outside the platonic ideal in the minds of its champions (of which I, for the record, am one – if not a very active or heroic one). "Briefing against" is at east as old as China's "warring states period (476-221 BCE); eighteenth and nineteenth century press in Europe and the Americas offered political commentary skewed and invented to a degree unrivalled today; and Ray Girvan recently offered, over at JSBlog, an example of a 19th century "tabloid smear" against ordinary people. Truth has always been an elusive, provisional, partial thing, and finding even a worthwhile approximation to it has always been a process of determined exploration and detective work.

That last sentence is where TTMF starts: that "truth" (of even the blurred and provisional variety) can only be found (even by those actively seeking it) if somebody is somewhere telling it. Or, more accurately, if enough sources genuinely trying to tell it can be found and compared.

What concerns me even more is that as the volume of information sources multiplies, the fragmentarily "true" is ever harder to find. Whether or not disinformation is proliferating faster than information is a moot point about which we can all argue forever on the head of a pin, but is irrelevant. As the haystack grows exponentially, the pins will become harder to find even if they proportionally keep pace.

I don't suggest that anything be done about this, even if that were possible (which it is not): I would deplore central censorship of dis/information flow even more. But I do dispute the widespread idea that ever greater flow of information form every greater numbers of sources is synonymous with "more truth". The vital importance of critical thinking by consumers about sources and their content increases as a direct function of information volume.

I realise, belatedly, that this is little more than a rehash of my Whither democracy post, almost two years ago ... ah, well; “I grow old ... I grow old”* ... at least I stopped short of requoting Lem!

---

• T S Eliot, "The love song of J Alfred Prufrock", line 120, in Prufrock and other observations. 1917, London: The Egoist Ltd.

Friday monster blogging

For anyone who liked Dr C's crab (last week), or my frog (earlier today), you mustn't miss the latest instalment in the saga (from Ray G) HERE.

Pay no attention to his protestations of innocence...

Friday frog blogging

Inspired by Dr C's Doctor necrophagia video, I have created one of my own. It shows Rana salaria, observed in its natural habitat.

Note that frog blogging is not to be confused with the thoroughly reprehensible practice of brog flogging.

Quo vadis?

In his October briefing, when Obama's decision on extra troops was still uncertain, Paul Rogers said if it went in favour of a McChrystal surge:

“It is therefore possible that US policy will move in the direction of bypassing Karzai and working more consistently with local and provincial administrations. If this were to be emulated by other ISAF contingents, and if foreign development assistance was to be substantially increased, along with a greater willingness to engage with some insurgent actors, then the beginnings of a new approach might start to emerge. If not, then a war of many years duration remains likely.”

Well; now we have the surge.

---

• Paul Rogers, "The Afghanistan decision" in International Security Monthly Briefing 2009. 08(6). Available from: http://oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/monthly_briefings/afghanistan_decision.