a-cubed.info

A lovely way to bring home to smokers the destructive nature of their habit: flickr picture link.

The Now Show included a wonderful piece this week about Net Authority, a group which attempts to claim the right to specify the acceptable use policy for the entire internet. With the age-old cry of censors “Think of the children!” they decry the inclusion of, amongst other things, “materials concerning bestiality, including interracial relationships.”
Among the websites they claim violate their acceptable use policy is that of the UK’s Labour Party .
I wonder if there’s another net censorship site which attempts to get racist material removed from the net. Maybe I can get these groups so interested in each other that they’ll stop bothering the rest of us.

Autopope wrote a post that attracted over a hundred replies, trying to explain to believers what it’s like to be an unbeliever. I was one of the repliers, with something I’ve been meaning to post something about for a while.
My favourite book is “Lord of Light” by Roger Zelazny. This is for a number of reasons. One is his absolutely wonderful writing. Anyone who can write a line as simple as ” Yama poured more tea. Ratri ate another sweetmeat.” and have it perfectly convey an immensely complicated mood, was an utter genius.
Another of the reasons I love this book is that Zelazny encapsulated my feelings on religion so well:
“I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not…”
“Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool, and I have no use for either.”

A BBC news website education report included the following quote from Anne Kiem of the IFS School of Finance:

She said: “We’re not talking about high finance – it’s things like how do you open a bank account, how do you pay a cheque”.

This may be a journalist’s mistake or it may be her mistake, but you don’t “pay a cheque”. You can “pay by cheque”, you can “pay in a cheque” or “pay a cheque in”, but you can’t “pay a cheque”. This, in a report about the lack of basic skills needed for employment, such as being able to speak/write in clear, accurate and understandable English, is pretty ironic.
Then again, the BBC news website is often littered with spelling mistakes (including ones which should be picked up by a basic spell-checker) and poor grammar, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

One of the Nippon 2007 committee just posted a brief English email to the staff mailing list. A message to an large list in Japanese would have started with “???” (that’s a made up name, not the name of the person who posted), giving the name of the originator. I’m not sure why this etiquette exists on Japanese lists. Possibly it dates back to when email systems couldn’t hold kanji/kana characters in headers. Anyway, when writing in English, this staff member translated “???” as “I’m Akira”, which in isolation is a perfectly reasonable translation of the Japanese. Unfortunately, in context, it’s very odd English. I had to manfully resist the temptation to reply with one or all of::

“I’m Spartacus”

“I’m Sparkey Tickets”

“I’m Brian, and so’s my wife.”

Bonus points (scored by the lovely Samantha) to anyone who can name all three references.

This brings me to the point of this post. One of the downsides of living in Japan, for an Englishman like me, is the lack of opportunity to make puns and other word play jokes. On the odd occasion when I can’t resist doing so, I’ve always got to explain it. If you have to explain it, it’s not funny. My Japanese isn’t nearly good enough to make Japanese puns, either. <Sigh>

I’ve not been posting as much on here lately as I’d have liked, because I’ve been having trouble with the blog. I’m hoping it’s now sorted out. One of the admin pages still looks awful, but it’s not one I actually need to go to and if I need to I can work with it. I was having trouble posting some entries and editing a lot of them. After hunting and hunting and hunting for the solution, I finally found something on the WordPress troubleshooting site about turning off Apache’s “security filtering module” in the .htaccess by adding this:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterScanPOST off
</IfModule>
As ifby magic, suddenly I can post and edit again. The original thread discussed certain words triggering this module. Dangerous words like “biopsy” and “autopsy”. I’m not sure what words in my Museums review post it didn’t like, but this shows how bad security can be in getting in the way of the purpose of software. The biggest problem is that I wasn’t getting an error. No, I was just getting booted back out to my home page.

In the 2004 US elections, the US catholic church warned that they would not give communion to politicians who voted in favour of abortion legislation. Last week, a Scottish Bishop said that UK MPs should not take communion if they vote for abortion legislation (a difference but still a problem) and yesterday the Catholic Bishop of Cardiff supported the Scottish Bishop’s statement.

This shows the big problem with Catholics standing for political office. They are elected to represent their constituents and while their own conscience should come into their decisions on how to vote on legislation (after all, their conscience is one of the things their constituents should be trying to gauge when voting for them) they should not be blackmailed by a religious group to vote in one way or another on the basis of the “orders” of the church, or blackmail about excluding them from religious worship. Catholics should think twice about standing for elected office while maintaining their membership of the Catholic church in this way. It’s one thing for the church to put forth their point of view, and even to lobby MPs and ministers in the same way that any other group does. But singling out individual MPs who happen to be members of their church and placing individual pressure on them to follow church doctrine rather than their assessment of the views and needs of their constituents makes membership of the Catholic church incompatible with the freedom of conscience necessary to be a representative of the people.

Suggestions that the UK government is to introduce a new police power, that of questioning without concrete suspicion has been called a move towards a police state by some, and likened to the US’ illegitimate permanent detention centre at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba. While I think the latter is hyperbole, the former is a more reasonable statement. What, after all, is a Police State? It is a state in which the police have arbitrary power, which they may exercise without reason, without explanation and without significant oversight. The over-use of anti-terrorist stop-and-search powers by some forces shows that unrestrained powers supposedly aimed at anti-terrorist operations can easily be overused (abused?) by officers.

Police already have the power to stop and question individuals, where they can show a reason to do so. So this is not about giving the police a new power of questioning, it is about removing the requirement for reasonable explanation of their actions. It is the requirement that police be able to explain their activity that prevents this being an arbitrary power.

Even worse is the suggesstion that refusing to answer the questions posed by a policeman would be classed as interfering with police business and in itself constituting an offence. The current government has already reduced the right not to incriminate oneself. This would be a further blow to that. Either you answer the police’s questions, or you are guilty of an offence by that refusal. This is a further erosion of human rights. All the rhetoric by government officials here, suggesting that anyone opposing these powers is “more concerned with the rights of terrorists than those of their potential victims” ignores the fact that the subjects of these powers will, in the vast majority of cases, be ordinary citizens, not terrorists.

Finally, imagine the world if Labour is re-elected in 2009 or 2010. In 2013 ID cards are planned to become compulsory. It is no surprise that these proposed new powers include the idea of “questioning as to identity”. It will likely become, effectively, an arrestable offence not to be able to prove one’s identity, i.e. to have an ID card with one at all times. “Ihre Papiren, bitte!” indeed.

A new OSS application for video editing I downloaded the other day had a couple of nicely fun icons for video operations. The “sharpen” operation for the image uses a picture of Albert Einstein. That’s nice enough but the unsharpen one is even better: a picture of George W Bush!

As mentioned, MPs at Westminster debated a bill to exempt themselves from much of the Freedom of Information Act. Having been provided with extra debating time by the government (which nevertheless claimed no collusion in this) MPs passed this shameful measure. We now depend on the Lords to defeat this retrograde step in public accountability.