baby – Dan Q

Get Lost on the Web

Get lost

I got lost on the Web this week, but it was harder than I’d have liked.

The Ypsilanti Water Tower, at the intersection of Washtenaw Avenue and Cross Street, Ypsilanti, Michigan. The tower is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and is a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. An American flag and a Greek flag are flying, and a bust of the Greek general, Demetrios Ypsilantis (also commonly spelled "Demetrius Ypsilanti"), for whom the city is named, is in the foreground. Photo by Dwight Burdette, used under a Creative Commons license. — Now that’s a suggestive erection. Photo by Dwight Burdette.

There was a discussion this week in the Abnib WhatsApp group about whether a particular illustration of a farm was full of phallic imagery (it was). This left me wondering if anybody had ever tried to identify the most-priapic buildings in the world. Of course towers often look at least a little bit like their architects were compensating for something, but some – like the Ypsilanti Water Tower in Michigan pictured above – go further than others.

I quickly found the Wikipedia article for the Most Phallic Building Contest in 2003, so that was my jumping-off point. It’s easy enough to get lost on Wikipedia alone, but sometimes you feel the need for a primary source. I was delighted to discover that the web pages for the Most Phallic Building Contest are still online 18 years after the competition ended!

1969 shot tower at Tower Wharf, Bristol. Photo by Anthony O'Neil, used under a Creative Commons license. — The Cheese Lane Shot Tower in Bristol – politely described as a “Q-tip” shape – was built in 1969 to replace the world’s first shot tower elsewhere in the city. Photo by Anthony O’Neil.

Link rot is a serious problem on the Web, to such an extent that it’s pleasing when it isn’t present. The other year, for example, I revisited a post I wrote in 2004 and was pleased to find that a linked 2003 article by Nicholas ‘Aquarion’ Avenell is still alive at its original address! Contrast Jonathan Ames, the author/columnist/screenwriter who created the Most Phallic Building Contest until as late as 2011 before eventually letting his site and blog lapse and fall off the Internet. It takes effort to keep Web content alive, but it’s worth more effort than it’s sometimes given.

Anyway: a shot tower in Bristol – a part of the UK with a long history of leadworking – was among the latecomer entrants to the competition, and seeing this curious building reminded me about something I’d read, once, about the manufacture of lead shot. The idea (invented in Bristol by a plumber called William Watts) is that you pour molten lead through a sieve at the top of a tower, let surface tension pull it into spherical drops as it falls, and eventually catch it in a cold water bath to finish solidifying it. I’d seen an animation of the process, but I’d never seen a video of it, so I went about finding one.

Cross-section animation showing lead shot being poured into a sieve, separating into pellets, and falling into a water bath. — The animation I saw might have been this one, or perhaps one that wasn’t so obviously-made-in-MS-Paint.

British Pathé‘s YouTube Channel provided me with this 1950 film, and if you follow only one hyperlink from this article, let it be this one! It’s a well-shot (pun intended, but there’s a worse pun in the video!), and while I needed to translate all of the references to “hundredweights” and “Fahrenheit” to measurements that I can actually understand, it’s thoroughly informative.

But there’s a problem with that video: it’s been badly cut from whatever reel it was originally found on, and from about 1 minute and 38 seconds in it switches to what is clearly a very different film! A mother is seen shepherding her young daughter off to bed, and a voiceover says:

Bedtime has a habit of coming round regularly every night. But for all good parents responsibility doesn’t end there. It’s just the beginning of an evening vigil, ears attuned to cries and moans and things that go bump in the night. But there’s no reason why those ears shouldn’t be your neighbours ears, on occasion.

Now my interest’s piqued. What was this short film going to be about, and where could I find it? There’s no obvious link; YouTube doesn’t even make it easy to find the video uploaded “next” by a given channel. I manipulated some search filters on British Pathé’s site until I eventually hit upon the right combination of magic words and found a clip called Radio Baby Sitter. It starts off exactly where the misplaced prior clip cut out, and tells the story of “Mr. and Mrs. David Hurst, Green Lane, Coventry”, who put a microphone by their daughter’s bed and ran a wire through the wall to their neighbours’ radio’s speaker so they can babysit without coming over for the whole evening.

It’s a baby monitor, although not strictly a radio one as the title implies (it uses a signal wire!), nor is it groundbreakingly innovative: the first baby monitor predates it by over a decade, and it actually did use radiowaves! Still, it’s a fun watch, complete with its contemporary fashion, technology, and social structures. Here’s the full thing, re-merged for your convenience:

Wait, what was I trying to do when I started, again? What was I even talking about…

It’s harder than it used to be

It used to be easier than this to get lost on the Web, and sometimes I miss that.

Obviously if you go back far enough this is true. Back when search engines were much weaker and Internet content was much less homogeneous and more distributed, we used to engage in this kind of meandering walk all the time: we called it “surfing” the Web. Second-generation Web browsers even had names, pretty often, evocative of this kind of experience: Mosaic, WebExplorer, Navigator, Internet Explorer, IBrowse. As people started to engage in the noble pursuit of creating content for the Web they cross-linked their sources, their friends, their affiliations (remember webrings? here’s a reminder; they’re not quite as dead as you think!), your favourite sites etc. You’d follow links to other pages, then follow their links to others still, and so on in that fashion. If you went round the circles enough times you’d start seeing all those invariably-blue hyperlinks turn purple and know you’d found your way home.

But even after that era, as search engines started to become a reliable and powerful way to navigate the wealth of content on the growing Web, links still dominated our exploration. Following a link from a resource that was linked to by somebody you know carried the weight of a “web of trust”, and you’d quickly come to learn whose links were consistently valuable and on what subjects. They also provided a sense of community and interconnectivity that paralleled the organic, chaotic networks of acquaintances people form out in the real world.

In recent times, that interpersonal connectivity has, for many, been filled by social networks (let’s ignore their failings in this regard for now). But linking to resources “outside” of the big social media silos is hard. These advertisement-funded services work hard to discourage or monetise activity that takes you off their platform, even at the expense of their users. Instagram limits the number of external links by profile; many social networks push for resharing of summaries of content or embedding content from other sources, discouraging engagement with the wider Web, Facebook and Twitter both run external links through a linkwrapper (which sometimes breaks); most large social networks make linking to the profiles of other users of the same social network much easier than to users anywhere else; and so on.

The net result is that Internet users use fewer different websites today than they did 20 years ago, and spend most of their “Web” time in app versions of websites (which often provide a better experience only because site owners strategically make it so to increase their lock-in and data harvesting potential). Truly exploring the Web now requires extra effort, like exercising an underused muscle. And if you begin and end your Web experience on just one to three services, that just feels kind of… sad, to me. Wasted potential.

A woman reading a map. Photo by Leah Kelly. — I suppose nowadays we don’t get lost as often outside of the Internet, either. Photo by Leah Kelly.

It sounds like I’m being nostalgic for a less-sophisticated time on the Web (that would certainly be in character!). A time before we’d fully-refined the technology that would come to connect us in an instant to the answers we wanted. But that’s not exactly what I’m pining for. Instead, what I miss is something we lost along the way, on that journey: a Web that was more fun-and-weird, more interpersonal, more diverse. More Geocities, less Facebook; there’s a surprising thing to find myself saying.

Somewhere along the way, we ended up with the Web we asked for, but it wasn’t the Web we wanted.

A Suitable Blog

At a little over 590 thousand words and spanning 1,349 pages, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is almost-certainly among the top ten longest single-volume English-language novels. It’s pretty fucking huge.

A Suitable Boy, seen from the edge — I’ll stick with the Kindle edition: I fear that merely *holding* the paperback would be exhausting.

I only discovered A Suitable Boy this week (and haven’t read it – although there are some good reviews that give me an inclination to) when, on a whim, I decided to try to get a scale of how much I’d ever written on this blog and then decided I needed something tangible to use as a comparison. Because – give or take – that’s how much I’ve written here, too:

Of course, there’s some caveats that might make you feel that the total count should be lower:

It might include a few pieces of non-content code, here and there. I tried to strip them out for the calculation, but I wasn’t entirely successful.
It included some things which might be considered metadata, like image alt-text (on the other hand, sometimes I like to hide fun messages in my image alt-text, so perhaps they should be considered content).

On the other hand, there are a few reasons that it perhaps ought to be higher:

It doesn’t include any of the content “lost” during the July 2004 server failure, some of which (like this post about Orange) were later recovered but many of which (like this post about Christmas plans and upcoming exams) remain damaged. It also doesn’t include any of the lost content from the original 1998/1999 version of this blog, only the weird angsty-teen out-of-context surviving bits.
Post titles (which sometimes contain part of the content) and pages outside of blog posts are not included in the word count.
I’ve removed all pictures for the purpose of the word count. Tempting though it was to make each worth a thousand words, that’d amount to about another one and a half million words, which seemed a little excessive.

Of course, my blog doesn’t really have a plot like A Suitable Boy (might compare well to the even wordier Atlas Shrugged, though…): it’s a mixture of mostly autobiographical wittering interspersed with musings on technology and geekery and board games and magic and VR and stuff. I’m pretty sure that if I knew where my life would be now, 18 years ago (which is approximately when I first started blogging), I’d have, y’know, tried to tie it all together with an overarching theme and some character development or something.

Or perhaps throw in the odd plot twist or surprise: something with some drama to keep the reader occupied, rather than just using the web as a stream-of-conciousness diary of whatever it is I’m thinking about that week. I could mention, for example, that there’ll be another addition to our house later this year. You heard it here first (unless you already heard it from somewhere else first, in which case you heard it there first.)

Annabel sitting on her daddy's knee and looking at sonograph pictures of her future baby brother. — Brought up in a world of tiny, bright, UHD colour touchscreens, Annabel seemed slightly underwhelmed by the magic of a sonograph picture of her future baby brother.

Still: by the end of this post I’ll have hit a nice, easy-to-remember 594,000 words.

Teaching Kids to Code – Why It Matters

The BBC ran a story this week about changes to the National Curriculum that’ll introduce the concepts of computing programming to children at Key Stage 1: that is, between the ages of five and seven. I for one think that this is a very important change, long overdue in our schools. But I don’t feel that way because I think there’ll be a huge market for computer programmers in 13+ years, when these children leave school: rather, I think that learning these programming skills provide – as a secondary benefit – an understanding of technology that kids today lack.

Computer program that asks if you're a boy or a girl and then says it likes that gender. Photograph copyright Steven Luscher, used under Creative Commons license. — Ignoring the implied gender binary (fair enough) and the resulting inefficiency (why do you need to ask two questions), this is a great example of a simple algorithm.

Last year, teacher and geek Marc Scott wrote an excellent blog post entitled Kids Can’t Use Computers… And This Is Why It Should Worry You. In it, he spoke of an argument with a colleague who subscribed to the popular belief that children who use computers are more technically-literate than computer-literate adults. Marc refutes this, retorting that while children today make use of computers more than most adults (and far more than was typical during the childhood of today’s adults), they typically know far less about what Marc calls “how to use a computer”. His article is well worth reading: if you don’t have the time you should make the time, and if you can’t do that then here’s the bottom line: competency with Facebook, YouTube, Minecraft, and even Microsoft Office does not in itself demonstrate an understanding of “how to use a computer”. (Marc has since written a follow-up post which is also worth reading.)

Children programming on laptops. Photograph copyright Steven Luscher, used under Creative Commons license. — If the can of Mountain Dew wasn’t clue enough, these children are coding.

An oft-used analogy is that of the automobile. A hundred years ago, very few people owned cars, but those people that did knew a lot about the maintenance and inner workings of their cars, but today you can get by knowing very little (I’ve had car-owning friends who wouldn’t know how to change to their spare tyre after a puncture, for example). In future, the requirements will be even less: little Annabel might be allowed to ‘drive’ without ever taking a driving test, albeit in a ‘driverless’ computerised car. A similar thing happened with computers: when I was young, few homes had a computer, but in those that did one or more members of the family invariably knew a lot about setting up, configuring, maintaining, and often programming it. Nowadays, most of the everyday tasks that most people do with a computer (Facebook, YouTube, Minecraft, Microsoft Office etc.) don’t need that level of knowledge. But I still think it’s important.

A 2-year-old using a MacBook. Photograph copyright Donnie Ray Jones, used under Creative Commons license. — A future computer-literate, or just another computer “user”?

Why? Because understanding computers remains fundamental to getting the most out of them. Many of us now carry powerful general-purpose computers in our pockets (disguised as single-purpose devices like phones) and most of us have access to extremely powerful general-purpose computers in the form of laptops and desktops (but only a handful of us use them in a ‘general purpose’ way; for many people, they’re nothing more than a web browser and a word processor). However, we expect people to be able to understand the issues when we ask them – via their elected officials – to make sweeping decisions that affect all of us: decisions about the censorship of the ‘net (should we do it, and to what extent, and can we expect it to work?) or about the automation of our jobs (is it possible, is it desirable, and what role will that mean for humans?). We expect people to know how to protect themselves from threats like malicious hackers and viruses and online scams, but we give them only a modicum of support (“be careful, and install anti-virus software”), knowing full well that most people don’t have the foundation of understanding to follow that instruction. And increasingly, we expect people to trust that software will work in the way that it’s instructed to without being able to observe any feedback. Unlike your car, where you may know that it’s not working when it doesn’t go (or, alarmingly, doesn’t stop) – how is the average person to know whether their firewall is working? You can find out how fast your car can go by pressing the pedals, but how are you to know what your computer is capable of without a deeper understanding than is commonplace?

A new generation of children tought to think in terms of how computers and their programs actually work – even if they don’t go on to write programs as an adult – has the potential to usher in innovating new ways to use our technology. Just as learning a foreign language, even if you don’t go on to regularly use it, helps make you better at your native language, as well as smarter in other ways (and personally, I think we should be teaching elementary Esperanto – or better yet, Ido – to primary school children in order to improve their linguistic skills generally), learning the fundamentals of programming will give children a far greater awareness about computers in general. They’ll be better-able to understand how they work, and thus why they sometimes don’t do what you expect, and better-equipped to solve problems when they see them. They’ll have the comprehension to explain what they want their computer to be able to do, and to come up with new ideas for ways in which general-purpose computers can be used. And, I’ve no doubt, they’ll be better at expressing logical concepts in mutually-intelligble ways, which improves human communication on the whole.

Let’s teach our kids to be able to understand computers, not just “use” them.

“Uncle Dan”

A week ago, Ruth pushed a baby out of her body, completely upstaging my birthday and, incidentally, throwing all of our lives pretty much into chaos. Having gotten to the point at which she’d resigned herself to “being pregnant forever“, Ruth would have certainly been glad to have that stage over and done with, were it not for a long and painful labour followed by a torturous and exhausting birth.

Dan, Ruth, JTA and 'Tiny' in the delivery suite of the hospital. — If Ruth looks like she’s about to die of exhaustion in this photo, that’s because that’s how she’s feeling.

There’s a lot that can be said about the labour: a 38-hour crescendo of Ruth gradually and repeatedly finding levels of pain and tiredness that each seemed impossible, until she reached them. But Ruth has suggested that she might like to write a little about it herself, so I shan’t steal her limelight. What I can say is that I didn’t – and I don’t think that JTA, either – appreciate quite how emotionally draining the experience would be for the two of us, as well. There was a strange sensation for me about twelve hours in: a sensation perhaps most-comprehensible by our friends who’ve done emotional support work. That was: after watching somebody I love so much suffer so greatly for so long, I felt as if I’d somehow begun to exhaust whatever part of my brain feels empathy. As if the experience of supporting Ruth had served to drain me in a way I’d never fully experienced before, like when you discover a muscle you didn’t know you had when it aches after an unusual new exercise.

Forcep-marks still visible, the newborn takes an extended nap in a crib alongside Ruth's recovery-bed. — Forcep-marks still visible, the newborn takes an extended nap in a crib alongside Ruth’s recovery-bed.

Of course, after the ordeal we got to take home a little bundle of joy, who continues – despite now having a perfectly fabulous name of her own – to be referred to as “tiny”, even though her birth weight of 8lbs 12oz (that’s about 4kg, for those who – like me – prefer to think in metric) doesn’t really make that a very fitting nickname! Nor the amount of damage she did to Ruth on the way out, which also might be ill-described as “tiny”! She’s also often referred to as “the poopmachine”, for reasons that ought not need spelling out.

Dan, sitting in the sunlight, rocking the baby. — I’m smiling, because I don’t yet know that, within seconds of this photo being taken, she’s about to fill her nappy.

My employer was kind enough to give me paternity leave, even though I’m not the biological father (JTA is; and he’s very-much still in the picture!). I’d looked at my contract and discovered that the wording seemed to imply that I was eligible, stating that I’d be permitted to take paternity leave if I was about to become a father, or if my partner was about to give birth, the latter of which seemed perfectly clear. To be certain, I’d wandered along to Personnel and explained our living arrangement, and they just had looks on their faces that said “we’re not touching that with a barge pole; let’s just err on the side of giving him leave!” As a result, we’ve had all hands on deck to help out with the multitudinous tasks that have suddenly been added to our lives, which has been incredibly useful, especially given that Ruth has been spending several days mostly lying-down, as she’s been recovering from injuries sustained during the delivery.

Tiny in front of the new beta version of Three Rings. — If only we had some kind of way to set up a web-based rota of feeding, changing and comforting the little one…

Despite everything, we and the rest of the Three Rings team still managed to push the latest version into testing on schedule, though fitting in time for bug-fixing is even harder than it would be were we at our “day jobs” during the daytimes! It’s not that our little poopmachine takes up all of our time, though she does seem to take a lot of it, it’s simply that we’re all so tired! For the last few nights she’s been fussy about sleeping, and we’ve all lost a lot of rest time over keeping her fed, clean, and feeling loved.

Ruth snuggles with her baby. — Who loves boob? Baby does! Also, everybody else in the house.

For all my complaining, though, what we’ve got here is an adorable and mostly well-behaved little bundle of joy. And when she’s not covered in poop, shouting for attention, or spitting milk all over you, she’s a little angel. And I’m sure you’ll all be sick of hearing about her very soon.