I bet they kill this par

Posted on February 8, 2008 by acb

But when you open tomorrow’s Guardian there ought to be an analysis on the news pages that starts like this:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, a man whose prose is as luxuriant as his beard, might not have anything in common with the heroes of American tough-guy novelist Elmore Leonard beyond a tendency to interrupt his sentences with “Jesus”. But it was an Elmore Leonard hero he called to mind in his latest speech: the one in Tishimongo Blues, who earns his living by diving from high platforms into tiny pools of water; except that when the Archbishop emerged from his latest feat of public intellectual gymnastics, he was dripping all over with shit.
How could one speech have united against him the liberals, the conservatives, most Muslims, most Christians, all secularists, all the political parties; everyone who only read the headlines, and almost everyone who read beyond the headlines the lecture that he gave? Could any common idiot have written it?

This is why I no longer write news stories.

Posted in God, Journalism | 3 Comments

Deer stalking

Posted on February 6, 2008 by acb

Some things are just too strange to be believed. I was walking yesterday in the fields near Strethall Church and saw what seemed like a cloud of smoke above the farm there. It was pigeons, rising from the field to roost in trees, and the low evening sun had caught the grey undersides of their wings as they eddied above the church. Another flock descended just as I reached the car, and their wings, close up, filled the air with a noise exactly like the server fans in the data warehouse at the Sanger Centre. I had spent maybe ten minutes trying to discover the right term for that sound: it’s not a whirr, nor a whoosh, nor a grumble but something mid-toned. Yet if I were to put in the piece I am writing, quite truthfully, that the fan rooms sounds as if an enormous flock of pigeons were descending on it, all the time, the subs would rip it out in seconds, wouldn’t you, Charles?

I have been trying for years to take a picture of the white hart I once saw in a field near Strethall Church, and this afternoon spotted the herd about a quarter of a mile away, grazing by a hedgerow.

I was able to use the hedge as cover to get reasonably close: this picture didn’t have to be blown up too much from a 200mm telephoto shot and the light, at around 4.30pm, was low and rich. It turned out there are two white or albino deer in the herd, but they didn’t pose for me as these two did.

Deer%20IMGP4333.jpg
There are more pictures, some showing the white deer, in a set on Flickr now.
Posted in Pictures | 1 Comment

Tony Judt interview, as requested

Posted on February 4, 2008 by acb

This was written for the Guardian, which for some reason never used it; the only other one of my profiles to suffer that fate was Benny Morris. I suspect that fear of endless I/P thrashes played a role in both decisions, though this also coincided with a redesign and a change of section editors. In any case, I like it.

Tony Judt was changing trains in Vienna when the Berlin Wall fell and he realised that his life up till then was history. It was, a moment of revelation for a professional historian: that past became fully visible only once the future that everyone expected had been wrenched away. It took him ten years more before he could start to write his 900 page history of Europe since 1945, and the work was interrupted for nine months by illness. But the result is one of those rare works which makes one understand that the past was just as undetermined as the future now seems.

Starting in the ruins of Europe with foreign armies everywhere, Postwar traces the outbreak of the Cold War, and the extraordinary amnesiac recovery into prosperity of Western Germany and France; the collapse of British power and the almost accidental emergence of the European Union. The half century of apparently natural peace, stability and progress between 1950 and 2001 emerges in sharp relief from the shadows around it.

Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism, War | 10 Comments

Scraps at the end of a long silly day

Posted on January 30, 2008 by acb
  • These quiz things seem popular on the internet, so here is a one question personality test, without any typing, to try: what is the word you see here?
  • Damian Thompson has now admitted his story was nonsense, but what I particularly enjoyed was the reaction to the story’s unravelling on the Jihadwatch site. In particular, the commentator who has won this year’s Dawkins prize for abject and sincere apology:

I am forced to conclude, as others here and elsewhere have concluded, that this story is a tissue of lies, a fabrication, a factual untruth, a malfiscient piece of propaganda advanced only to discredit us by playing upon our credulous (justified?) belief that Islamics would indeed behave in the way portrayed in this story.
Of course Islamics would and could behave in this way but this particular story appears to have no basis in fact – in actual events. It is, in all probability, a Muslim constructed story designed to show us in the worst possible light.”
“In all probability.” Couldn’t put it more judiciously myself.

  • Spot the razor blade in this potato: Richard Lewontin, reviewing the life and achievements of Steve Gould, comes to deal with other public intellectuals: “It is even possible to become a public intellectual in science with no institutional home in a technical discipline. Richard Dawkins, who was trained as a biologist and who obviously knows a great deal about genetics and evolution, is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford”
  • From the same issue of the NYRB: Tony Judt’s fantastic speech on the holocaust and memory. I think I really should post here the profile of him that I wrote and the Guardian never used.
Posted in Blather | 7 Comments

Kornbluth and Eugenics

Posted on January 30, 2008 by acb

Looking around for links with which to embellish my last piece, I discovered that almost all of the references on the net to the great Cyril Kornbluth story The Marching Morons stressed its eugenicist — actually dysgenicist — character, something I had entirely forgotten. In my memory, the dysgenic character of the book was merely a boondoggle to drive separation of humanity into an elite and the rest. It is a period piece, rather like the contemporary belief of Alcoholics Anonymous that alcoholism was a genetic disease. The really interesting quality of the story is the idea — as Frederik Pohl puts it in his introduction — that this is about the corruption of the human spirit, not the human gene pool. The point about the marching morons is that they live in a world of the phony and the second rate, and are constantly told that this is the best that history has ever offered anyone. Their cars are elaborately chromed, wonderfully finned — and pedal powered. The superfast trains move at FORTY FIVE miles an hour. Their food — well, anyone who has eaten American fast food recently knows already what it is like.

The real difference between Kornbluth’s dystopia and more modern ones is that the morons in Kornbluth are content with their lot. They never suppose that could enjoy pleasures they cannot themselves imagine. Perhaps I am misremembering, here. But if I am right, that was Kornbluth’s great misreading of the future. No one could suppose that the present underclass is contented with its lot.

Posted in Literature | Comments Off on Kornbluth and Eugenics

Another approach to sanity on the net

Posted on January 30, 2008 by acb

I was told the other day about an interesting feature of some of the most widely used blog comment software in the newspaper business, Pluck Site Life, which is used by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and others. Apparently it sorts commentators into three classes, and for those in the lowest class, there is an option for the moderators to put them in a padded cell of their own where they can see their own comments, and no one else can.

This seems to me one of the most cynical and unpleasant pieces of software design I have ever come across, because it destroys the whole idea of community. The purpose, of course, is to resolve the central problem that all newspaper comment sites face, which is that the overwhelming majority of their readers are tediously aggressive loonies. If they are all eliminated, then no one else bothers to show up and the advertisers lose interest. But if they are left to run free round the asylum they drive off any sane or well-informed readers.

The answer I favour is brutal and public moderation, that makes community norms entirely clear without entirely suppressing free speech. Disemvowelment does this very well, since it is possible to reconstruct the original comment, with some effort, if anyone cares enough. So does the YouTube method of hiding, rather than scribbling, obnoxious comments, while the Slashdot system sort of works, too. Perhaps, in practice, the Slashdot system approximates to the Pluck one, since who actually reads the zero-rated comments except for the people who write them?

But in all these cases, the public punishment of bad comments serves to encourage better behaviour, which is what we ought to be trying to do. People go online to show off, and they will respond to incentives about what sort of behaviour gets them admired.

The Pluck method removes all that. The loonies are robbed of their dignity and don’t even know it. It is entirely corporate. It comes from the world of the Marching Morons, which is, increasingly, the world in which we discover we were living all along.

Posted in nördig | 6 Comments

Damian Thompson: wtf f?

Posted on January 29, 2008 by acb

There is a completely insane story up on his blog at the moment about a supposed riot in which “Muslims” shut down one of the public hospitals in Sydney rather than allow an autopsy to be performed on a young man who had died in a car crash.

He lifted it off “Dhimmi watch” which is, exactly as he described it to me on the phone, “One of America’s leading anti-Islamic websites”. As he also said, “It is based on an anonymous report” and he made no attempt to check it out. Indeed, he asked if any of his readers could “stand it up”, since they are obviously better placed to do so than a leader writer on a national newspaper who has been a professional journalist for 25 years.

A few minutes with the Sydney Morning Herald site showed no record at all of anything like the reported events. But a few minutes on Google showed the same story verbatim on a blogger site. This is presumably the source for the “Dhimmi Watch” story. Who else does it have links to? Let’s see … Three British blogs, all of them run by members of the BNP … two Serbian nationalist blogs, both of them campaigning against the extradition of a suspected war criminal from Australia to Croatia … the Brussels Journal, The Gates of Vienna … obviously the sort of people from whom you would trust an otherwise completely unsourced story.

I would report the whole story to the author of a recent book subtitled “How we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history” if I had not suddenly blanked on its, or his, name.

Posted in Journalism | 3 Comments

Surveillance: wtf?

Posted on January 29, 2008 by acb

The Telegraph reports today that there are more than a thousand phone-tapping applications made (and granted) every day in Britain. The paper is particularly worked up because it is not just the intelligence services and the police but local councils which have the power to do this. That seems to me all of a piece with the general dysfunction of the post-imperial state: it’s hard to be good at anything when you don’t know what you’re for. And I have taken for granted that everyone will tape everything ever since the fights over RIPA. What did make my mind reel, though, were the last sentences of the piece.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: “It beggars belief that in a nine-month period, based on these figures, the entire City of Westminster could have had their phones tapped – yet Britain remains one of the few Western countries that won’t allow this evidence to be used in court … to prosecute criminals and terrorists.”
But Sir Paul [Kennedy, the information commissioner] confirmed that MI5 and other intelligence agencies remain opposed to any change in the law.

What possible creditable reason can there be for collecting all this informaiton without ever using it in court?

Posted in British politics | 3 Comments

Nice Mac things

Posted on January 28, 2008 by acb

I had to help a friend buy a macbook the other day. My well-informed advice was pretty simple: “You don’t need that or that or even that. Buy the cheapest one in the shop, and, by the way, have you thought of a mac mini instead?” but this got me poking around my own mac mini to see what she was getting into, and that, in turn reminded me of why I had advised her to buy one, and not a PC. It’s not just security or reliability. A properly maintained Windows system has those things, too.

I don’t find macs particularly intuitive, either. If you don’t want to do anything particularly obvious, they hide their unix-ish bits much too well. I needed to set up a small web server on mine, and so wanted to replace Apache with the much more lightweight and easy to configure Abyss Web Server. It took ages to work out how to switch bloody Apache off and then, since the firewall rule is helpfully linked into the services menu, how to open the firewall for a non-Apache web server. I suppose that the sort of user who wants to do that will be able to work out how to in the end, but documentation doesn’t actually harm things.

What Macs do have and Windows doesn’t is a real market in software Almost everything on Windows is either free or compulsory. Because Mac software is seldom free, people make their livings at it, and are able to build things that are impressive and individual. If I were ever to switch, it would be because of programs like Mellel, Yojimbo, Tinderbox, and Textwrangler: stuff made for people who actually work and aren’t given outlook for free.

Posted in nördig | 7 Comments

Colour management on Windows

Posted on January 28, 2008 by acb

About fourteen months after I realised there was a problem, I have finally reached a system which allows the faithful reproduction of colours when printing digital photographs on windows. I’m not saying this is the only one. But it works, and it’s cheaper than Photoshop.

The key is colour profiles; your camera and screen will already have them. Really obsessive people will calibrate their monitors, too; but I don’t bother because I use a profile and a reference card. My aim is to get the prints looking right, since they are what other people see.

So the first thing to do is to get a custom colour profile for the printer, inks, and paper that you use — note: you will need a different profile for every paper you use. Fortunately, Permajet do free ones in this country.

Since I print using QImage which is much the best program for getting detail into prints, as well as arranging prints on paper, the custom profiles work perfectly to print exactly what is on screen. I have had that working for a year now; but how to ensure that what’s on screen has the same colours as the original? This is really a problem of white balance, rather than colour profiles, and last month I stumbled across the answer: there is a plugin for Bibble Light which works with colour reference cards to solve it.

I sent off to Mölndal1 to get a couple of glossy colour matching cards; put them beside the embroidery I was photographing; and when I later looked at the raw file in Bibble at full size and rotated it until it matched the plugin mask, it fixed the colours at once, and this fix could then be pasted into everything else from that session.

Since the resulting prints are going out to galleries, it really matters that they should look as much as possible like what they represent. I suppose the total outlay for this system is around £120 — perhaps a bit more. Some of these programs — Bibble, certainly — are cross platform, though Macs presumably have their own tricks. But the point is that this is now rock solid and almost idiot proof, so it’s worth knowing for anyone who needs to produce accurate digital colour in ways that were impossible for amateurs even five years ago, and until recently prohibitively expensive, too.

1 There are American firms that make similar things. Sweden is closest to me.

Posted in Pictures | Comments Off on Colour management on Windows