There’s something that I just don’t understand about vegetarians. It’s something that I didn’t understand when I mercilessly teased them, and it’s something that I still don’t
understand now that I am one:
Quorn ‘Roast Chicken Style Slices’. No chickens were harmed in the making of this chicken.
You know the stuff I’m talking about: stuff made out of mycoprotein
or TVP or soya that’s specifically designed to emulate real meat in flavour (sometimes
effectively) and texture (rarely so). Browse the chilled and frozen aisles of your local supermarket for their “vegetarian” section and you’ll find meatfree (although rarely vegan)
alternatives to chicken, turkey, beef and pork, presented here in descending order of how convincing they are as a substitute.
Tesco ‘vegetarian’ hot dogs. There’s actually a distinct possibility that these contain MORE meat than their non-vegetarian counterparts.
Let’s be clear here: it’s not that I don’t see the point in faux meat. It has a few clear benefits: for a start, it makes vegetarianism more-approachable to omnivores who
are considering it for the first time. I’ve tried meat substitutes on a number of occasions over the last couple of decades, and they’ve really improved over that time: even a
meat-lover like me can be (partially) placated by the selection of substitutes available.
Man, this photo of a BLT looks more delicious every time I use it on my blog. Why do I torture myself this way?
And while I slightly buy-in to the argument
that the existence of these fake meats “glorifies” meat-eating, perhaps even to the extent as to under-sell vegetarianism as a poor substitute for the “real thing”, I don’t think
that this is in itself the biggest problem with the fake meat industry. There’s a far bigger issue in question:
Why are we stopping here?
A dodo. Apparently it tasted somewhat like turkey, only tougher: there are dozens of accounts of its preparation and consumption.
If we’re really trying here to make “fake meats”, then why are we setting our targets in-line with the commonly-eaten “real meats”? Why stop at chicken and turkey when we might as well
make dodo-flavoured nut roasts and Quorn slices? Sure, they’re extinct, so
we’ll probably never have real dodo meat: but there’s no reason that the manufacturers of artificial meats can’t have a go. There are dozens of accounts of the preparation and
consumption of dodos, so we’d surely be able to emulate their flavour at least as well as we do the meats that we already produce substitutes for.
A tin of unicorn meat: a good source of sparkles! Also cures poison, detects virgins, etc.
Why stop there? We might as well have tins of unicorn meat, too, a meal already familiar to those of us who’ve played more than our fair share of NetHack. How about dragons, or griffins, or the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary? If we’re going to make it up as we go along when we make artificial bacon, we
might as well make it up as we go along when we make basilisk-burgers and salamander-sausages, too.
There’s a reason, of course, that we don’t see these more-imaginative meat substitutes. Many of the most loyal fake-meat customers are the kinds of people who don’t like to
think about the connection between, for example, “chicken” (the foodstuff), and “chicken” (the clucking bird). To be fair, a lot of meat-eaters don’t like to think about this
either, but I get the impression that it’s more-common among vegetarians.
But seriously, though: I think they’re missing a trick, here. Who wouldn’t love to eat artificial pegasus-pâté?
On this day in 1999 I sent out the twelfth of my Cool Thing Of The Day To
Do In Aberystwyth e-mails. I wasn’t blogging at the time, although I did have a blog previously, but I felt that it would be nice to do something to help keep in touch with my
friends and family “back home”, so I came up with Cool Thing Of The Day To Do In Aberystwyth. I’ve written about it a little in a previous On This Day post.
On this particular day, I’d just finished downloading a copy of The Matrix, that fantastic
cyber/action movie that spawned a huge string of memes and won the love and praise of geeks and action-flick junkies everywhere. The movie remains a pinnacle of great filmmaking, with
its’ adventurous direction (remember when bullet time was still new and exciting?),
funky soundtrack, and cleverer-than-average twists… for a film full of guns.
I’d not been at the University long, and I was making the most of the huge amount of bandwidth that seemed to be available: for the first time ever, I was able to download music (of a
appreciable bitrate) faster than I could listen to it (the boundary at which “streaming” becomes feasible). Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet splashed out on new hardware, so downloading a
1.4GB film quickly became a drain on my hard drive, which will have probably been in the region of about 20GB total. But it didn’t matter, because it was cool. “Look at me, I’m
a l33t haxxor like Neo!” I never actually uttered those words, but I might as well have.
I soon went and bought a copy of The Matrix – one of the first DVDs I owned – if only to save on hard drive space. I also burned my second ever student loan cheque on a beefy new
computer of a specification so high that nobody I knew had even seen such a thing before: including a massive 500MHz processor (or as we’d call it nowadays, a “half-gigahertz”).
Later, friends and coursemates Rory, Huw, John, Dom would join me in producing a 15-minute spoof of The Matrix as
part of our entry for the University of Wales, Aberystwyth’s Student Skills
Competition. We won best presentation. This in gave me the opportunity to help out with the Student Skills Competition and networked me to the person who eventually introduced me to
the guy who would eventually become my boss at SmartData. It’s amazing how these little things link together, isn’t
it?
Looking Forward
Later still, no sequels were made to The Matrix, thankfully. You heard me: no sequels were made. Especially not Reloaded. Okay, okay: they made The Animatrix. But they certainly didn’t make any video games.
Nowadays, I keep a little over 2TB of storage space in my primary computer, but I still manage to fill it somehow – one of my drives ended up with only 5GB of free space just the other
month, and needed a big tidy-up. Or, as they’ll call it in another twelve years: 0.00005PB.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on
years gone by.
From an elevated position in the exhibition room, I run a few tests of the technical infrastructure whilst other staff set up, below.
In particular, something I’ve been working on are the QR codes. This
experiment – very progressive for a sometimes old-fashioned establishment like the Bodleian – involves small two-dimensional barcodes being placed with the exhibits. The barcodes are
embedded with web addresses for each exhibit’s page on the exhibition website. Visitors who scan them – using a tablet computer, smartphone, or whatever – are directed to a web page
where they can learn more about the item in front of them and can there discuss it with other visitors or can “vote” on it: another exciting new feature in this exhibition is that we’re
trying quite hard to engage academics and the public in debate about the nature of “treasures”: what is a treasure?
A QR code in place at the Treasures of the Bodleian exhibition.
In order to improve the perceived “connection” between the QR code and the objects, to try to encourage visitors to scan the codes despite perhaps having little or no instruction, we
opted to embed images in the QR codes relating to the objects they related to. By cranking up the error-correction level of a QR code, it’s possible to “damage” them quite significantly and still have them scan perfectly well.
One of my “damaged” QR codes. This one corresponds to The Laxton Map, a 17th Century map of common farming land near Newark on Trent.
We hope that the visual association between each artefact and its QR code will help to make it clear that the code is related to the item (and isn’t, for example, some kind of asset tag
for the display case or something). We’re going to be monitoring usage of the codes, so hopefully we’ll get some meaningful results that could be valuable for future exhibitions: or for
other libraries and museums.
Rolling Your Own
If you’re interested in making your own QR codes with artistic embellishment (and I’m sure a graphic designer could do a far better job than I did!), here’s my approach:
I used Google Infographics (part of Chart Tools) to produce my QR codes. It’s fast, free,
simple, and – crucially – allows control over the level of error correction used in the resulting code. Here’s a sample URL to generate the QR code above:
500×500 is the size of the QR code. I was ultimately producing 5cm codes because our experiments showed that this was about the right size
for our exhibition cabinets, the distance from which people would be scanning them, etc. For laziness, then, I produced codes 500 pixels square at a resolution of 100 pixels per
centimetre.
H specifies that we want to have an error-correction level of 30%, the maximum possible. In theory, at least, this allows us to do the maximum
amount of “damage” to our QR code, by manipulating it, and still have it work; you could try lower levels if you wanted, and possibly get less-complex-looking codes.
0 is the width of the border around the QR code. I didn’t want a border (as I was going to manipulate the code in Photoshop anyway), so I use
a width of 0.
The URL – HTTP://TREASURES.BODLEIAN.OX.AC.UK/T7 – is presented entirely in capitals. This is because capital letters use fewer bits
when encoded as QR codes. “http” and domain names are case-insensitive anyway, and we selected our QR code path names to be in capitals. We also shortened the URL as far as possible:
owing to some complicated technical and political limitations, we weren’t able to lean on URL-shortening services like bit.ly, so we had to roll our own. In
hindsight, it’d have been nice to have set up the subdomain “t.bodleian.ox.ac.uk”, but this wasn’t possible within the time available. Remember: the shorter the web address, the simpler
the code, and simpler codes are easier and faster to read.
Our short URLs redirect to the actual web pages of each exhibit, along with an identifying token that gets picked up by Google Analytics to track how widely the QR codes are being used (and which ones are most-popular amongst visitors).
By now, you’ll have a QR code that looks a little like this.
Load that code up in Photoshop, along with the image you’d like to superimpose into it. Many of the images I’ve had to work with are disturbingly “square”, so I’ve simply taken
them, given them a white or black border (depending on whether they’re dark or light-coloured). With others, though, I’ve been able to cut around some of the more-attractive parts of
the image in order to produce something with a nicer shape to it. In any case, put your image in as a layer on top of your QR code.
Move the image around until you have something that’s aesthetically-appealing. With most of my square images, I’ve just plonked them in the middle and resized them to cover a whole
number of “squares” of the QR code. With the unusually-shaped ones, I’ve positioned them such that they fit in with the pattern of the QR code, somewhat, then I’ve inserted another
layer in-between the two and used it to “white out” the QR codes squares that intersect with my image, giving a jagged, “cut out” feel.
Test! Scan the QR code from your screen, and again later from paper, to make sure that it’s intact and functional. If it’s not, adjust your overlay so that it covers less of the QR
code. Test in a variety of devices. In theory, it should be possible to calculate how much damage you can cause to a QR code before it stops working (and where it’s safe to cause the
damage), but in practice it’s faster to use trial-and-error. After a while, you get a knack for it, and you almost feel as though you can see where you need to put the images so that
they just-barely don’t break the codes. Good luck!
Another of my “damaged” QR codes. I’m reasonably pleased with this one.
Give it a go! Make some QR codes that represent your content (web addresses, text, vCards, or whatever) and embed your own images into them to make them stand out with a style of their
own.
Just a quick thought: what does it say on the inside front cover of the
Queen‘s passport?
A British passport, with its famous inside text.
Presumably it ought to say:
My Secretary of State requests and requires in my name all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or
hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.
Nonetheless, I’ll bet that she doesn’t get as much trouble at passport control as I do, despite the fact that she doesn’t have a surname at all (to be completely accurate, Windsor is the name of
her royal house, and is not a surname in the conventional sense). It makes the Passport Office look a little silly to complain about my unusually short name.
Interesting fact about passports: in their current form, they’re a comparatively new invention, but have achieved a rather quick ubiquity in international travel. Historically, the term “port” in their name doesn’t refer,
as you’d expect, to sea ports, but instead to the “portes” (gates) of walled cities: most early passports granted the bearer the permission of their lord or monarch to travel between
cities in their own country – sea ports and international boundaries were considered fair game for anybody to cross.
It was only really with the outbreak of the First World War that it became a widespread mandate that travellers had passports to cross international borders, as the nations of Europe
fought to prevent spies. The Schengen Area – only around 25 years old and
hailed as welcome liberalisation of European international transit laws – could actually be likened to a step backwards to a simpler time when citizens movements were not so closely
monitored.
Recently, I’ve been diagnosed with cluster headaches. I
could tell you more about them, but I’d rather just point you at the Wikipedia article and say “that’s pretty much spot on.”
This picture, from Wikipedia, covers it pretty nicely, actually.
So that’s pretty shit.
It’s been several months now – long enough that, to begin with, I suspected that these new, severe headaches were something to do with the concussion I suffered while moving
house. I’m still not convinced that they’re not: it just seems a little too much like a coincidence that that’d happen just weeks before they started.
Since then, they’ve come and gone. Attacks will come on every couple of days – usually at about 3am, but sometimes in the afternoon – for about two weeks, and then will be gone for
several weeks. And then they come back again.
The pain is… incredible. I can’t even begin to describe it nor compare it to anything else. Painkillers don’t seem to touch it at all. The only success I’ve had with painkillers has
been when I’ve taken so much codeine that I’ve had an “opium high”. The pain doesn’t go away, but at least then I don’t care so much. Then within a couple of (long, long) hours, it’s
gone, leaving me drained and exhausted. Sometimes it leaves me with a headache – just a “normal” one, the kind that you can wince and ignore, or treat with asprin – for about a day
afterwards, but usually it just disappears as quickly as it came on.
Those things on the left that are shaped like space rockets? They go up my fucking nose, would you believe it. They're supposed to be for migraines, and they seem to work for me - at
best - about one time in three.
I’ve been working my way through a variety of medications, with limited success. Basically, the doctors are guessing. In sheer desperation, I’ve even been caught using
mild-to-moderately ridiculous alternative treatment, like chiropractic. It didn’t work – it just left me with a new variety of back pain: temporary, I hope – but I think
it goes some way to expressing how crippling it is when I of all people will go to a “spine wizard”. Needless to say, I’m still a long way from desparate enough to try the
reallystupidalternativemedicines: it’s still got to at least sound like it might work before you’ll get me to try it – after all,
it’s not like any of these therapies are without risks.
There’s next to no build-up, and no warning, and no relief: they just start and go away their own accord. That’s a terrifying feeling of powerlessness. It’s genuinely scary, going to
bed during one of their episodic periods, and not knowing if you’re going to wake up in agony a few hours later.
We’re getting somewhere, though, hopefully. I’ve been assigned to a specialist (to whom I’m sure I’ll be as much a research subject as a patient: I suppose it’s pretty ideal – if you
have a rare, barely-understood disease and you’re at the point of being willing to try anything, you probably make a great research subject), and in the meantime there are
plenty more medications left to “try”. And I’ve been reading some of the thoughts of other sufferers via an online support group, some of whom have shared some of their relief/coping
strategies (some of which I’ve tried already; others of which I’ll try in the future). So there’s still plenty of opportunity for a “fix”.
I didn’t blog about this before now because I was hoping to get to a point where I’d be looking back on it and laughing, first. I quite liked the idea of putting up a blog post –
perhaps with some photos of my MRI scans, or something – and saying “Hey; look what happened to me! It’s medication-controlled, now, and the only side-effect is that I
can shoot frickin’ laser beams out of my eyes! Muhahahaha!” But I guess that point might still be a way away, and I didn’t want to keep you all in the dark.
Anyway: there’s that, then. If you were hoping for a clean, concise blog post with some closure at the end, you’ll be left hanging. But hey: if I have to suffer, I might as well spread
a little bit of suffering to you, too.
Another successful murder mystery party! This one was a prefabricated “kit” one, unlike many of our recent ones, in the Inspector McClue range.
As usual, Murder Mystery Night starts a day or two earlier, with Ruth preparing a monumental quantity of food.
I was slightly worried that – with only six people (we four Earthlings and Ruth‘s brothers) in attendance, that the evening might be a little too “quiet”, but Robin and Owen did a pretty good job of ensuring that
this wasn’t the case by any stretch of the imagination.
Maurice de Cheval (Robin) and Wallis Simper (Owen)
My character was Marlene Deepditch, a German wine merchant. Not wanting to take things by halves, I put a perhaps-excessive amount of effort into my last-minute costume, even going so
far as to shave off my beard… as well as my sideburns… chest… armpits…
My dress wasn't quite as long on me as I'd expected, and I'd neglected to shave my legs, unfortunately.
Hilarity ensues as the combination of wine and outrageous accents kicks in.
All in all, a fantastic night, full of exactly the kind of delicious chaos that’s usually reserved for larger murder mystery parties – watch this YouTube video (may contain spoilers) to see what I mean.
Never before have I come across a wine so obviously created for me as this one.
Bottles of white and red 'pro-mis-Q-ous' wine.
I haven’t tasted it, and I’ve never seen it for sale. But just look at the label: it’s called pro-mis-Q-ous, a deliberate mis-spelling of
“promiscuous” that substitutes in and emphasises the letter Q (which, of course, is my surname). The label goes
on to define promiscuity, and it – and their website, makes significant mention on nonmonogamy, which few will by surprised to hear is pretty close to my heart too.
Back in 2009, I wrote about Open-Source Shaving, and the journey I’ve taken over the years to arrive at my current preferred
shaving solution: the double-edged traditional safety razor pictured. It’s great: reasonably heavy, just aggressive enough, and far more… manly than anything made of plastic.
It’s so manly, in fact, that merely using it results in a surge of testosterone sufficient to make you grow a bad-ass beard, which somewhat undermines the entire exercise.
That blog post attracted a lot of comments, both on and off the web, and since I wrote it I’ve tried a few other different approaches to shaving, too. Like this:
The Rolls Razor
A Rolls Razor with a chrome case, in its original box.
After reading my first Open-Source Shaving post, a friend delivered to me a Rolls Razor that they’d found in a charity shop. I’ll admit that it took me far longer than it ought to have just to
open the case, but when I did, I was thoroughly impressed.
The Rolls is a self-contained, self-sharpening, safety razor, in a sleek portable case. That’s right: it’s a safety razor… that you can reuse like a straight razor! The last
one was made in the 1950s, and I’m pretty sure that mine was made in the mid-1940s, but these things were built to last and the one I was given is still in perfect working order despite
being older than my parents (who aren’t).
The open case of a Rolls Razor, with the "sharpening" side removed and the "stropping" side ready to use.
The case can be opened from either side, and under each “lid” is a different surface: a sharpening stone under one and a leather stop under the other. A lever arm mechanism folds
down and attaches to the blade, such that moving the lever backwards and forwards sharpens or strops the blade, depending on whichever side you didn’t remove. It’s tucked
into the most remarkably small space, and yet still manages a wonderful feat of trickery: as is correct, the blade grinds forwards when it’s against the stone, and
draws backwards when it’s against the strop – a remarkable feat of engineering.
A rolls razor, assembled and ready to use.
When you’re ready to use it, a clip-on handle (which also fits neatly inside the case) is attached to the blade. The fit is snug, and it’s not always easy to push the blade into
position, but that’s far better I suppose than a loose and wobbly blade.
The shave is raw and basic. Despite the fact that it looks no more-sophisticated than a straight edge, it’s almost as easy to shave with as a disposable-blade safety razor. The
blade feels a little bit narrow, and it takes more strokes than would be ideal, but it’s perfectly usable. On the scale of things, it’s certainly preferable to an electric shaver or a
plastic disposable razor, but it’s not quite as good as a cartridge razor or – still my personal favourite – a double-edged safety razor with disposable blades.
Nonetheless, it’s a wonderful piece of engineering and I’m proud to own one. There’s a great guru-page about the Rolls Razor, if you’re interested to learn more.
The Shavette
Here’s where things get scary.
A shavette (or 'injector razor'), armed with half a razorblade and ready to go. Vicious-looking, isn't it?
I’ve always wanted to try a straight edge – you know, a proper razor blade: a strip of metal sharpened on one side. I’ve been told that it’s an incredibly close shave, a
wonderfully tactile experience, and a challenge to dexterity to challenge even the handiest of men. But there’s an overhead: you need a strop, and a sharpening stone, and there’s a
whole suite of skills that you need to learn about care and maintenance before you even get close to putting a blade near a face.
A shavette – or “injector razor” – is a simpler alternative. It’s functionally a straight razor, but instead of having a blade it has a pair of closely aligned grips and a clip to hold
them in place. You take a traditional double-edged razor blade (which I have about a million of anyway), snap it – carefully! – in half, and insert one half into the grips,
then clip it into place. Ta-da: you have a piece of metal shaped like a straight razor, but holding a disposable sharp edge.
The challenge is learning how to use it. It turns out
that there’s a reason that you have a barber do this for you: it’s actually really quite hard!
Finding a suitable angle of attack isn’t hard so long as you’re used to using a safety razor already: that same 30° or so angle that words for a safety works when you don’t have a
guard in place too. You’ve got to remember to maintain the angle, of course, because the tactile feedback is subtler and more gentle, and it’s easy to slip up. It’s also challenging
because – unlike a real straight edge – razor blades have corners, and those corners can catch if you’re not taking care in more-rugged terrain such as around the jawline.
How to hold a straight razor.
The grip used for a straight razor looks unwieldy, but it’s actually quite comfortable and gives a great deal of control over the motion of the blade. It’s possible to perform strokes
that just aren’t feasible with any other kind of shaving equipment, like scything, where a rotation is applied such that the tip of the blade moves further than the end closest
to your fingers. It’s challenging, but effective.
But the biggest difficulty with shaving yourself with a straight razor or shavette, for me, has to be that you have to be ambidextrous! I’d read this fact online even
before I got my razor, but I’d somehow glossed over it: somehow in my mind I thought that I’d have no problem with just using my right hand. But the first time I tried to shave with a
shavette, I realised my mistake: if you try to shave the left-hand side of your face with your right hand… your arm is in front of your eyes! The angle is just about achievable, but
without being able to see the mirror you’re quickly going to find yourself in pain.
I got the hang of working left-handed, eventually, but it was a struggle. And while the shave isn’t much cleaner than a safety razor, it is possible to get a great deal of control. I
still use my shavette from time to time, particularly if I want to get a very sharp, tidy finish around the edges of my beard or to straighten my mustache, but from a standpoint of
speed and convenience alone, my safety razor is still the first thing I reach for.
The Glass Hone
A glass hone, which can allegedly keep razor blades sharp for hundreds of shaves.
I was recently given a glass hone: a small piece of slightly curved glass that can be used to hone (align) plain old razor blades. The theory is sound – it’s well known that blades
require honing far sooner than they actually require sharpening. It’s not possible to strop a double-edged razor blade, but if this mechanism works then it would provide a means to
dramatically extend the lifespan of each blade.
I’ve not used it yet: I’m naturally skeptical of claims of such a magnitude, and I’d like to put together a good double-blind test to see if it actually works as well as it
should. I’m thinking I’ll run down a pair of blades, store them, label them, and have somebody else hone one (of their choice) without telling me which. I’ll then try to re-shave with
both, try to identify the honed one, and then re-run the whole experiment a few more times before asking my assistant to identify which blades were the honed ones.
Maybe I take these things too seriously.
In any case, I can’t report back to you on how useful such a tool is until I actually get the chance to do so, and as I don’t bother to shave every day, it’d take me a while to get any
results. Perhaps others would like to volunteer to participate in my experiment, too? Is there anybody out there who shaves with a double-edged safety razor who’s willing to buy one of
these things and provide feedback? We could even have our assistants liaise with one another behind our backs and agree not to hone either blade for one or the other of
us, to act as a control group…
While lying in bed, unwell and off work, last month, I found myself surfing (on my new
phone) to the Wikipedia page on torsion springs. And that’s when I found myself wondering – how did I get here?
Thankfully, there’s always the back button: famously the second most-used bit of your web browser’s user interface. So… how did I come to be reading about torsion springs?
An anniversary clock, using a torsion pendulum, so-named because it only needs winding once a year.
I got there from reading about torsion
pendulum clocks. My grandmother used to have one of these (an “anniversary clock”, like the one above, and I remember that I used to always enjoy watching the balls spin when I was
a child).
I’d followed a link from the article about the Atmos clock,
a type of torsion pendulum clock that uses minute variations in atmospheric temperature and pressure to power the winder and which, in ideal circumstances, will never need
winding.
Before that, I’d been reading about the Beverly Clock,
a classic timepiece that’s another example of an atmospheric-pressure-clock. It’s been running for almost 150 years despite having never been wound.
This was an example of another long-running experiment given on the page about the Oxford Electric Bell, which is perhaps the world’s longest-running scientific experiment. Built in 1840, it
uses a pair of electrostatic batteries to continuously ring a bell.
The Oxford Electric Bell experiment. It’s batteries have lasted for over 160 years, but I have to charge my mobile most nights: what gives, science?
I got to the Oxford Electric Bell from another long-running experiment – the one acknowledged as the world’s longest-running by the Guinness Book of Records – the University of Queensland Pitch Drop Experiment.
Running since 1927, this experiment demonstrates that pitch is not solid but a high-viscosity fluid. A sample of room-temperature pitch in a funnel forms a droplet about once a decade.
Earlier, I was learning about the difference between the different substances we call tar. Traditionally, tar is derived by baking pine wood and roots into charcoal, and collecting the runoff, but we also use the
word “tar” to describe coal tar (a byproduct of coke production) and bitumen (viscous, sticky crude oil).
I took the initiative to learn about those differences after reading about the name “Jack Tar“, an Empire-era slang term for a sailor in the Merchant Navy or Royal Navy…
…which in turn was linked from the similar article about “Tommy
Atkins“, a term for a British infantryman (particularly in the First World War), which has an interesting history…
…to which I got from the “Doughboy” article. The Doughboys were
members of the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War.
R.U.R. – “Private Robot” – loads an artillery piece.
Finally, I got to that first Wikipedia article while, when reading an article on The Paleofuture Blog, I wondered about the etymology of the
term “doughboy”, and began this whole link-clicking adventure.
It’s fascinating to work out “how you got here” after an extended exploration of a site like Wikipedia (or TV Tropes, or Changing Minds, or Uncyclopedia – and there goes your weekend…).
Thank you, Back Button.
I just wish I had a Back Button in my head so that I could “wind back” my wandering thought processes. How did I end up thinking about the salt content of airline food,
exactly?
[disclaimer: this post appears just days after some friends of mine announce their pregnancy;
this is a complete coincidence (this post was written and scheduled some time ago) and of course I’m delighted for the new parents-to-be]
In October, the world population is expected to reach seven billion. Seven fucking billion. I remember
being a child and the media reports around the time that we hit five billion: that was in the late 1980s. When my parents were growing up, we hadn’t even hit three billion. For the
first nine or ten thousand years of human civilisation between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, the world population was consistently below a billion. Let’s
visualise that for a moment:
World population for the last 12,000 years.
How big is our island?
Am I the only one who gets really bothered by graphs that look like this? Does it not cause alarm?
We have runaway population growth and finite natural resources. Those two things can’t coexist together forever. Let’s have a look at another graph:
Reindeer population on St. Matthew Island, from the comic of the same name.
This one is taken from a wonderful comic called St. Matthew
Island, about the real island. It charts the
population explosion of a herd of reindeer introduced to the island in the 1940s and then left to their own devices in a safe and predator-free environment. Their population ballooned
until they were consuming all of their available resources. As it continued to expand, a tipping point was reached, and catastrophe struck: without sufficient food, mass starvation set
in and the population crashed down from about 6,000 to only 43. By the 1980s, even these few had died out.
There are now no reindeer on St. Matthew Island. And it looks like this 40-year story could serve as a model for the larger, multi-century, world-wide population explosion that humans
are having.
Game Theory
Humans are – in theory at least – smart enough to see what’s coming. If we continue to expand in this way, we risk enormous hardship (likely) and possible extinction (perhaps). Yet
still the vast majority of us choose to breed, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that this is Not A Good Thing.
But even people smart enough to know better seem to continue to be procreating. And perhaps they’re right to: for most people, there is – for obvious evolutionary reasons – a biological
urge to pass on one’s genes to the next generation. During a period of population explosion, the risk that your genetic material will be “drowned out” by the material of those
practically unrelated to you. Sure: there might be a complete ecological collapse in 10, 100 or 1000 years… but the best way to ensure that your genes survive it is to put them into as
many individuals as possible: surely some of them will make it, right? Just like buying several lottery tickets improves your chances of hitting the jackpot.
A stack of lottery tickets. If I buy enough, I’m sure to win, right?
On a political level, too, a similar application of game theory applies: if the other countries are going to have more people, then our country needs more people
too! Very few countries penalise families for having multiple children (in fact, to the contrary), and those that do don’t do so very effectively. This leads to a “population arms
race”, and no nation can afford to fall behind its rivals: it needs a young workforce ready to pay taxes, produce goods, pay for the upkeep of the retired… and conceive yet more
children.
The same tired arguments
Mostly, though, I hear the same tired arguments for breeding [PDF]: cultural conditioning
and social expectations, a desire to “pass on” a name (needless to say, I have a different idea about names
than many people), a xenophobic belief that the world needs “more people like us” but “less like them”, and worry that you might regret it later (curious how few people seem to consider
the reverse of this argument).
For me, the genetic problem is easy enough to fix: if your children’s genes are valuable to you because of their direct relationship (50%) to your genes, then presumably your brother’s
(50%) and your niece’s (25%) are valuable to you to: more so than that of somebody on the other side of the world? I just draw the boundary in a different place – all of us humans share
well over 99% of our DNA with one another anyway: we’re all one big family! We only share a lower percentage with other primates, a lower percentage still with other mammals, and
so on (although we still share quite a lot even with plants).
The similarity between you and your children is only marginally more – almost insignificantly so – than the similarity between you and every other human that has ever
lived.
If you’re looking for a “family” that carries your genetic material: you’re living in one… with almost seven billion brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts! If you can expand your
thinking to include the non-human animals, too, well: good for you (I can’t quite stretch that far!). But if you’re looking to help your family survive… can you expand that thinking
into a loyalty to your species, instead, and make the effort to reduce population growth for the benefit of all of us?
My family tree. Have you met my great aunt baboon? Oh; sorry – that’s my sister before she brushes her hair on a morning…
The other argument I frequently see is the “replacement” argument: that it’s ethically okay for a breeding pair of humans to have exactly two children to “replace” them. This argument
has (at least) three flaws:
The replacement is not instantaneous. If a couple, aged 30, have 2 children, and live to age 80, then there are 50 years during which there are four humans taking up space,
food, water and energy. The problem is compounded even further when we factor in the fact that life spans continue to increase. If you live longer than your parents, and your children
live longer than you, then “replacement” breeding actually results in a continuous increase in total population.
Even ignoring the above, “replacement” breeding strategies only actually works if they’re universal. Given that many humans will probably continue to engage super-replacement level
reproduction, we’re likely to need a huge number of humans to engage in sub-replacement level or no reproduction in order to balance it out.
It makes the assumption that current population levels represent a sustainable situation. That might or might not be true – various studies peg the maximum capacity
for the planet at anywhere between one and a hundred billion individuals, with the majority concluding a value somewhere between four and ten billion. Given the gravity of the
situation, I’d rather err on the side of caution.
Child sandwiches
“Do you not like children, then?” I’m sometimes asked, as if this were the only explanation for my notion. And recently, I’ve found a new analogy to help explain
myself: children are like bacon sandwiches.
I’m sure I’m overusing this picture of a BLT.
Children are like bacon sandwiches for five major reasons:
Like most (but not all) people, I like them.
I’d love to have them some day.
But I choose not to, principally because it would be ethically wrong.
I don’t want to prevent others from having them (although I don’t encourage it either), because their freedom is more important than that they agree with me. However, I’d like
everybody to carefully consider their actions.
They taste best when they’re grilled until they’re just barely-crispy. Mmm.
The reasons are similar, though: I care about other humans (and, to a much lesser degree, about other living things, especially those which are “closer” family), and I’d rather not be
responsible, even a little, for the kind of widespread starvation that was doubtless experienced by the reindeer of St. Matthew Island. Given the way that humans will go to war over
limited resources and our capacity to cause destruction and suffering, we might even envy the reindeer – who “only” had to starve to death – before we’re done.
In my review of my new HTC Sensation earlier this month, I tried to explain how
my new phone – with it’s swish and simple interface – didn’t feel quite… geeky enough for me. I picked up on the way that it’s process management works, but I’ve since
realised that this is only symptomatic of a deeper problem. This is entirely to do with the difference between traditional computers (of which my old N900 was one) and modern consumer-centric devices (which, inspired by the iPod/iPhone/iPad/etc.) try
to simplify things for the end-user and provide strong support for centralised repositories of pre-packaged “apps” for every conceivable purpose.
To take an example of the difference: my N900 ran Linux, and felt like it ran Linux. As a reasonably-sensible operating system, this meant that all of the applications on it
used pretty much the same low-level interfaces to do things. If I wanted, I could have installed (okay, okay – compiled) sshfs, and be reasonably confident that every application on my phone, whether it’s a media player or a geocaching application
or whatever, would use that new filesystem. I could store my geocaching .gpx files on an SSH-accessible server somewhere, and my phone could access them, and my geocaching
app wouldn’t know the difference because I’d have that level of control over the filesystem abstraction layer.
Similarly, if I installed a game which made use of Ogg Vorbis to store
its sound files, which therefore installed the Vorbis codecs, then I can expect that my media player software will also be able to make use of those codecs, because
they’ll be installed in the standard codec store. This kind of thing “just works”. Okay, okay: you know as well as I do that computers don’t always “just work”, but the principle is
there such that it can “just work”, even if it doesn’t always.
On these contemporary smartphones, like the iPhone, Android devices, and (I assume) modern BlackBerrys, the model is different: individual applications are sandboxed and packaged up
into neat little bundles with no dependencies outside of that provided by the platform. If you have two applications installed that both use sshfs, then they both have to
include (or implement) the relevant bundle! And having them installed doesn’t automatically give sshfs-like functionality to your other filesystem-accessing tools.
It’s not all bad, of course: this “new model” is great for helping non-technical users keep their devices secure, for example, and it means that there’s almost no risk of dependency hell. It’s very… easy. But I’m still not
sure it quite works: I’ll bet that 90% of users would install an application that demands dubious levels of permissions (and could, for example, be stealing their address book data for
sale to scammers) without even thinking about the risks, so the security benefits are somewhat nullified.
In summary:
Pros
Cons
Traditional-computing device (e.g. N900)
User actually “owns” device
Applications to be combined (e.g. pipes, automation, new middleware)
More secure (in theory) as platform exposes little
Centralised “app store”/”marketplace”
Potentially limiting for technical users
Only as secure as the user is savvy.
Centralised “app store” store can act as a “lock in”
Needless to say, the new model devices are winning, and already tablet computers powered by the very same platforms as the mobile phones are beginning to be seen as a simpler, easier
alternative to conventional laptops. It’s to be expected: most of today’s users don’t want a learning curve before they can use their smartphone: they just want to make some calls, play
Angry Birds a bit, keep up with their Facebook friends, and so on.
But I hope that there’ll always be room for a few folks like me: folks who want to tinker, want to play, want to hack code for no really benefit but their own pleasure… and without
having to shell out for a developer license in order to do so!
Since last year, I’ve been volunteering at a helpline called Oxford Friend, providing emotional support
and information to the LGBT community in Oxfordshire (those who are aware of my volunteering background are unlikely
to find this surprising). More-recently, though, I became a trustee of that charity, and that’s what I thought I’d tell you about.
Every helpline and similar service I’ve volunteered with has had it’s… quirks. They’ve all got their own unique personality and identity, their own
strange policies and practices, and Oxford Friend is no exception. One thing that I always found unusual about them – and still do – is the peculiar way they differentiate between
trainee and “full” members: once they’re done as a trainee and become a full member, volunteers become trustees of the charity.
At first, this seemed like a lot of paperwork with little benefit, but the idea has grown on me a little. By becoming a trustee, you’re becoming responsible for (and liable for!) the
actions of the charity, which should encourage one to have it’s best interests at heart (as if that were ever a concern!). It fosters a sense of ongoing shared responsibility, making a
charity that’s less like a corporation and more like a co-operative.
It’s only feasible, I think, because the charity is so small: a few dozen volunteers collectively running a helpline, email service, and providing external outreach and training on LGBT
issues. It’s a very communal approach to the management of the operation of the charity, and it seems to work perfectly well: they’ve been running for 30 years now! But I
don’t think it would work for a larger charity like either of the Samaritans branches I’ve worked with.
I’ll be interested to see if the addition of my unusual name to the record at the Charity Commission goes to plan (Companies House always seem to have difficulty with it!). But
regardless: for now, I’m proud to be able to support Oxford Friend and the remarkably valuable work that they do.
Back in 2009, I wrote about 
