Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

Lazy science reporting

Oxford goat

People may have noticed that the news today is saturated with stories about scientists ‘discovering Kryptonite:’ the fictional substance that causes Superman to lose his powers. The claim is based on how the chemical formula for the new mineral – discovered in Siberia – is the same as the one invented for Kryptonite in the film Superman Returns. Obviously, this is just a fluke that arose because of some words a scriptwriter or prop designer happened to string together. No insight arises from referring to the new mineral with reference to the film. To me, this seems like the same kind of cheap, low-brow science reporting as when all the coverage about ‘hobbits’ being discovered emerged in response to the discovery of H. floresiensis.

I can understand why a journalist might want to put out a fluff piece like these and then take the weekend off, but it really isn’t ‘science’ reporting in any meaningful sense. It is especially depressing when quality newspapers decide to print such rubbish, perhaps hoping to attract a few more readers. It is astonishing to me that they lack allure on their own, when discussing serious science. After all, the pace of ongoing discovery and technological development is staggering, and it has never been more important for ordinary citizens to understand the natural and man-made phenomena that influence the ways in which we live.

PS. Claire, Hilary, and I saw many goats today. Here are some goats eating plants.

and in the darkness bind them

My printing graph clearly applies to a great many circumstances. Having finished my thesis last night, I could not print it in Wadham because their printer was broken. I couldn’t print it in St. Antony’s because every scrap of paper had been used by other people scrambling to finish their own theses.

No problem, I thought, Temple Bookbinders says on their website that “photocopying service from disk or proof is also available.” As it turns out, the website is inaccurate in this regard. The nearest place that could print it was “around the corner,” by about a mile and a half. There, my thesis was printed at the rate of one page every 23 seconds (I timed it). For the 222 pages of black and white printing, they charged me £16 ($36 Canadian). The thesis will be bound and ready to be picked up at 11:00am tomorrow.

On the plus side, I did manage to see the Headington shark house.

[Update: 5:00pm] I have returned my thesis books to their various libraries of origin, re-filed the books I own into my normal non-fiction classification system, and put my box of thesis related articles out of sight.

When only the high-carbon option works

After an agonizing two hours of trying1 to book Eurostar tickets, I gave up and got a flight to Paris from EasyJet. I am not sure if the bookings problems were Eurostar’s or NatWest’s fault. If my bank is to blame, they have sunk even deeper in my estimation. If it was the train company, they lost two customers because their web interface is unreliable. It failed at every possible stage: listing train times, entering payment information, and processing my credit card.

I am leaving on the afternoon of April 26th (three days after my thesis submission) and returning on April 30th (a few weeks before exams). It would be nice to go for longer, but the middle of an Oxford term is not the time for an extended foreign jaunt.

[1] Over and over and over again, without success.

Bad prioritization

Wadham just replaced most of the computers in our lab with brand new HP 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo machines, complete with new keyboards and monitors. This strikes me as pretty wasteful, given that the previous machines were completely adequate for web browsing and word processing – the only tasks for which the computers in the lab are ever used.

The new machines probably cost about £500 each: money that could have been much better spent on scholarships or some other purpose that serves student needs. Having three or four fast computers with Photoshop or similarly resource-intensive software makes sense; buying a dozen high power machines for mundane tasks does not. When running Word and Firefox, the performance difference on the new machines cannot even be noticed.

At least they didn’t upgrade to Vista.

Bad software rage

Be warned, EndNote 9.0 for Macintosh is not a well-coded piece of software. There is nothing quite like being in the middle of adding some complex footnotes to your thesis draft when EndNote crashes: causing Word, Firefox, Entourage, the Dock, and the Finder to crash along with it. Then, all the various error reporting windows crop up and waste even more time and sanity. That I haven’t lost any important data because of this so far is largely the product of extremely frequent backups.

Who watch him lest himself should rob / The prison of its prey

In case anyone doubts that the War on Terror creates situations straight out of Kafka, reading this article from The Guardian is in order. Sabbir Ahmed, a British citizen, was held in a detention centre for nearly two months because officials thought he was Pakistani and wanted to deport him there. He couldn’t prove that he was British because his passport was in his London flat and they offered him no other means by which to prove that he was, in fact, born in Blackburn as the son of two other British citizens.

He ought to be receiving some pretty heavy compensation, and high level apologies and/or sackings, for this kind of massive incompetence. Of course, this also speaks of institutional racism. Frances Pilling, chairwoman of the charity Bail for Immigration Detainees, said: “They chose not to pursue any avenue of investigation at all.” If he had been white and named John Brown, they might have accepted that he was from Blackburn after calling the Passport Office, or even some people there who would vouch for him.

It goes to show, yet again, that we have more to fear from government than from terrorists.

A disappointing presentation

If it had been an intellectual argument, Professor Timothy Luke‘s presentation on climate change tonight might have been subject to some strong criticism. As it was, it was essentially a smug collection of sniping ad hominem arguments directed at Al Gore, Nicholas Stern, and the concept of liberal environmentalism generally. He made clear that he holds these people in contempt – using a mocking tone of voice while quoting their work – but never really explained why, beyond some vague suggestions that ‘ecopopulism’ would be superior, and how the powerful and the plutocratic are aligned to remain in control. The idea that grassroots organizations will somehow directly access environmental science, then manifest their new preferences through the popular alteration of the political dialog seems rather unlikely. While you can certainly engage in argument with knowledge brokers like Nicholas Stern and Al Gore (starting that argument is much of the point of their work), simply attacking them for being part of existing governmental and economic systems carries little water.

One can hardly expect leaders of politics and industry to abandon their power and the standard economic system. That is especially true when you don’t seem to have any well-formed idea about what the alternative might be. By nor following up his scorn with substance, Professor Luke left us with little value for our time.

Separate not a man from his techie tools

I have a request for intelligent people around the world. Can we please agree that tiny little multi-tools like my SOG Crusscut are in no way dangerous weapons? Certainly, they are no more so than all manner of items (from pens to umbrellas) that are legitimately carried into all manner of places.

As one of the items that I carry around virtually everywhere, I am quite reliant upon it: particularly the scissors, screwdriver, bottle opener, and ruler. When I am forced to not carry it, usually because of travel, I frequently find myself frustrated and annoyed. The same should go for the Leatherman Micra and similar tools. Gram for gram, these little things are up there with LED headlamps, in terms of usefulness in varied circumstances.

PS. This minor tirade was prompted by this lengthy article on survival equipment, written by Neil Andrews. Judging by his ‘modules,’ he is the fellow to know in the event of a massive natural disaster or zombie attack.

Infernal machines

Proving the adage that technology is actually driven by evil spirits who let it fail just when it is most inconvenient: the MySQL database that serves as the back-end to my wiki has chosen this morning – an hour before I need to give a presentation stored in the wiki – to go kaput. SQL failures have been an irksome occasional occurrence with GoDaddy hosting. Good thing I printed off a PDF version of the presentation before going to sleep.

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