Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

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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Executive pay

This week’s Economist features a survey on executive pay that basically argues that, while there have been excesses, executive pay is generally awarded in a fair and legal way. The crux of the matter, as presented, is that executives earn less in pay than they add to the value of the company. More specifically, they add more than the most qualified person willing to work for less could.

At one point, the article holds up Robert Nardelli from Home Depot as an example. When he left the company, he got a severance package of $200 million. Even if his performance did earn more than that from the company, I think a case can be made that it is fundamentally unjust for one human being to have that much money. It enormously outstrips the needs a person could possibly have, and it is awarded in a world where millions domestically and billions around the world live in poverty. While emotionally satisfying, that argument may be fallacious: poverty alleviation is not the alternative usage for this money, and there isn’t a fixed amount of the money in the world to be distributed to one thing or another. It is at least logically possible that the economic contributions of chief executives do generate societal benefits.

Is the marginal value versus marginal cost perspective really the right way to evaluate executive pay? The degree to which the public tends to view such people as little better than venomous snakes suggests that the idea clashes with general moral intuitions. (Personally, I don’t think that venomous snakes belong in the category of things to which moral judgments can be applied; they are like large falling stones.) Of course, that doesn’t advance argument very far on the matter of what could or should be done about it. As discussed before, the problem is not that inequality is inherently morally problematic, but rather that it seems impossible that the differences between one human being and another could justify such excessive differences in payment. Furthermore, the reasons for which any such differences might exist are largely the product of chance.

Document incompatibilities

The members of the M.Phil in International Relations programs have collectively embraced Macintosh computers. The only machines you ever see during our seminars are MacBooks, Powerbooks, and my lonely iBook. At the same time, Microsoft Word has generally been embraced by the academic community. I get about half a dozen Microsoft Word attachments from fellow students, instructors, and mailing lists every day. Every academic journal with which I have had experience (both editing and submitting) has used MS Word as their normal document type.

As such, the following error is especially infuriating. If you add images to a Microsoft Word document being produced on a Mac (in this case, a Venn diagram for my failed states paper), it will may load in Word for Windows with the following error:

QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture.

First off, shame on Microsoft for not making documents from two pieces of their own software properly interchangeable. Secondly, shame on Apple. They say that Macs are machines for use in serious professional environments, and yet problems like this exist in the single most essential piece of professional software. This, and some other weird incompatibilities relating to fonts and formatting, make me a bit nervous about writing my thesis on a Mac, to be taken to a print shop that will almost certainly be using Windows machines.

People will say to switch to OpenOffice, but that is like replacing your car with a buggy because you don’t like the controls on the stereo. OpenOffice, like Linux, simply isn’t worth the bother in a world where everyone is using a near-ubiquitous alternative.

On a semi-related note, I am strongly considering using a non-standard font for the thesis (either Bembo or Perpetua, perhaps). Is it possible to have a document printed in a font that isn’t particularly standard, or will I get back something switched over to something generic but similar? If you turn a document using a non-standard font into a PDF, can people who do not have that font view and print it properly?

Cursing Nicotiana species’

During the last couple of days, I have started reacting very badly to tobacco smoke. It makes my nose run, my eyes water and turn bloodshot, and my face burn and itch. It is just like the allergic reaction I sometimes get in the presence of lots of dust. This is especially bad because everything here – from the ferries to cafes to bars to palace courtyards – is saturated with smokers and toxic fumes.

That humanity has embraced such a disgusting and anti-social practice so broadly is a fairly strong indictment of our good sense and compassion. The smoking of tobacco surely ranks among the worst of all human discoveries, along with biological warfare and ethnic nationalism.