Here's a scan of a Tupperware advert that appeared in a 1973 issue of the The Scarfolk Times Sunday magazine.

Back in the early 1970s, people weren't entirely convinced that death was final, irrespective of whether or not their loved ones had been cremated. The general opinion was: it can't hurt to keep things as fresh as possible. Just in case.

It was around this time that children throughout Scarfolk began seeing ghosts of seahorses drifting on the breeze. Adults could not see the apparitions, so the children were not believed at first, but 'Old Jamton Bones,' a recluse who lived in Scarfolk Woods, came out of his hermitage, proclaiming the seashorses to be an omen.

According to Bones, every forty years the appearance of the seahorses heralds a big change in Scarfolk. For legal reasons, what happened back in 1973 cannot be discussed here, but it is now forty years since their last appearance.

The mayor will keep you posted...

I’m wondering if somewhere in Nick Clegg’s office, there’s a giant Wheel Of Fortune-style spinner, with all the party’s principles, policies and promises written on it. Every so often – around once a month or so – when he gets bored, the wheel gets spun, and whatever comes up is determined as the next big liberal idea to be jettisoned overboard.

The wheel has spun again, and this time it’s libel reform that’s being gutted, because liberty demands that we stand up for the right of big business to silence those who criticise them. No, sorry, that’s not the reason being given for it, as that would involve someone pretending to have a principle, even if it was insane. The stated reason is:

“Unfortunately we are in a Coalition and this was one of those areas where we could not get our Conservative colleagues to agree with us”

In English, that translates as: ‘The Tories wouldn’t budge on this, so we had to’ an idea so crazily flawed, it’s hard to know where to start. As I pointed out last year (here and here) the party has a seriously weakened position in coalition negotiations because the leadership have bound themselves to the ‘we have to show coalitions work’ argument. With the Tories not operating under the same assumptions, the party leadership are continually giving way instead of standing their ground and saying no.

Of course there’s give and take within coalition, but both sides are meant to be doing it, not just one giving and the other taking. Supporting libel reform was featured in the party’s 2010 manifesto, and as there’s no mention of anything like the proposal the MPs are supposedly going to be voting for in the Coalition Agreement, there’s no reason the leadership can’t say ‘sorry, we’re not voting for this.’ It’s not a bill that affects any other part of the Government’s programme, and the party’s MPs should be being urged to support the Defamation Bill, not gut it before it reaches the statute book.

To borrow a metaphor from Geoffrey Howe, the current situation feels like the party leadership have broken their own bats before walking out to the crease, and are then congratulating the bowlers on what a splendid job they’ve done in getting them out.

Okay, so. We have a one-word hint from Matt Smith: 'Paintings.'

And in a photo of David Tennant, a letter from Queen Elizabeth I can be seen, with the text 'until such time a a National Gallery is established'. So, the paintings are a pretty big deal.

Now, one of the biggest problems with a multi-Doctor story is the aging of the actors. Moffat was able to wing it with Time Crash, but that can't be repeated. So how could former Doctors be included in a 50th Anniversary episode?

Maybe there is a sequence of dimensionally transcendental paintings out there, each one representing the Doctor in one of his incarnations. They would be rendered using CGI, and as the episode is going to be in 3D, the audience could look right into them. And they could, Hogwarts-style, be able to speak and act.

This would allow previous Doctors to VOICE their parts, while neatly sidestepping the problem of actor aging. It would also, crucially, allow the actors to record their parts from wherever they happened to be in the world. So, for example, the fact of three of the Doctors being in New Zealand right now wouldn't necessarily be a problem. Previous Doctors could, if necessary, miss the read-through and the live-action filming, and be brought in later on for the CGI portraits.

Furthermore, one might say that an actor who is only voicing a part isn't technically appearing in the 50th Anniversary. Which neatly allows the various actors to keep the fans guessing - and on the edge of our seats with worry about whether or not we'll see any of them.

I have no idea what the plot might be, but we do know that Zygons are involved. Zygons are masters of imitation, so maybe the Zygons are trying to get hold of the Doctors' portraits, in order to perfectly mimic the Doctors and cause havoc throughout the universe?

As ever, it's only a theory. But it's a theory I will be clinging to in stark, pitiful desperation.

So essentially says Jon Trickett in the Guardian today. His thesis is that we are close to another major political turning point in 2015 rather like the one that started with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. He also thinks that Labour (the party he has been a member of for 30+ years) is the only one that can bring about this change.

Here are a couple of snippets:

...when a country arrives at a turning point, as we clearly had, the direction that it takes is not pre-determined. 

Thatcher had understood all of this too. As we now know, it was she who ended the interregnum into which the country had fallen. 

She broke with the Attlee consensus and created a new settlement that has endured (albeit modified by New Labour) ever since. Thus it was possible for Tony Blair to say – in his comments immediately in the aftermath of Thatcher's death – that: "I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them."

And then further down:

Both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are hopelessly compromised by their period in office. The Tory modernisation project has been jettisoned partly due to the threat from Ukip, and the Lib Dems have irrevocably embraced divisive neoliberal economic and social reform (such as the NHS reforms). 

Therefore, if there is going to be a government that will usher in a fresh start for Britain it will be the Labour party.

I don't necessarily disagree with Jon's broad thesis. I think something does need to change quite radically in our body politic. I wouldn't be at at all surprised if in decades to come the next few years is seen as another historical pivot point.

But it takes a certain kind of willful blindness to look at the evidence of how all three main parties have bought into the post 1979 Thatcherite consensus including essentially Labour (with a bit of tinkering around the edges) for 13 of those years with massive majorities when they could have forced a change in direction and decide the only party that can effect change is Labour.

If they couldn't do it between 1997 and 2010 why is he so certain they can now?

If we are to see a new political consensus it is likely to require the backing of people across the political spectrum and also from outside. This sort of blinkered tribal thinking will not help us get there.

This popped up in my Twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/PublishersAssoc/status/323427947539218433/photo/1

It is a picture from DigiCon. The quote below is:

"Copyright is fundamental to creative industries, those who believe it's not relevant are mistaken"

I find that interesting on a few levels. And by "interesting" I mean "bullshit".

First, because it talks about "industries" and not "artists". I was unaware that industries own copyrights. I thought the creator of the work owns the work, and industries are made of companies that exist to exploit the work that artists create.

Second, because I don't believe copyright law, as it currently exists, is fundamental.

When I write something, I believe I should be the only one allowed to make money from that writing (unless I assign rights to that work). I believe I should have the sole ability to do this for a reasonable length of time.

But anyone who isn't making money from my work should be allowed to do whatever they like with it.

Trade it, copy it, share it, borrow it, create derivative works, etc. As long as you aren't doing it for cash, I'm okay with it.

If you use my work to do something that does make money, or you use a significant amount of my work in order to create a work of your own with the intent to make money, I ask you to get my permission

So many writers seem unduly concerned about copyright infringement. On one hand, if someone makes a film called AFRAID and uses my plot and characters without paying me, then releases that film nationwide, I'm going to sue.

But if someone makes a student film out of AFRAID to show on YouTube without monetizing it, go for it.

Want to write a song about a book I wrote? Knock yourself out.

Share my ebooks with your family? Go for it.

Quote a paragraph I wrote in your work? Be my guest.

Sample my voice and put it in a song? Cool.

Seed a Jack Kilborn torrent? Enjoy yourself.

Sell your used copy of WHISKEY SOUR, paper or ebook or audio, to somebody else? No problem. I'm for first-sale doctrine.

I define "fair use" as: You can do whatever you want with my intellectual property, as long as you're doing it without intending to make money. Once you want to make money from it, get in touch and we'll try to work something out.

Having monetary control over my work does not mean I get to control my readers.

My readers should be able to do anything they want to with my work, whether they bought it or obtained it freely. Once I create something, it takes on a life of its own. It exists independent of me. In fact, as I've said many times this past decade, the book does not exist as words on a page. It exists as a story in the reader's head. And I have no claims on that, monetary or otherwise.

If you do want to use my work to make money for yourself, I think it is fair to include me somehow, by negotiating for the rights to do so. But if you want to use my work for anything else, enjoy yourself.

The world is becoming digital. Human beings are born to share. Information wants to be free.

Copyright laws will have to change to encompass this point of view. Because this is what the majority of people want.

Don't bet against the masses. And if you're an artist aching to worry about something, worry about the giant industries (publishing, film, TV, recording) treating you unfairly, not the fan who lends your audiobook to his Mom.

 

An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century

 

An Internal Report to the Holy See by The Pontifical Academy of Sciences in conjunction with the John Templeton Foundation, based upon investigations inaugurated July 23—Sep 16 2093

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Background

The past century has witnessed what Sujeit describes as “a joyful if weedy renaissance of Faith in the face of the secular … an inevitable reaction to science’s vendetta against the soul”. This has been a source of ongoing consternation to the secular community. Surely, they say, the more science explains, the less we need to invoke the supernatural. Surely the “God of the Gaps” diminishes with each new scientific breakthrough. How then to explain not just the persistence but an actual resurgence of faith in a world where every last vestige of humanity can be “explained” by the invocation of some brain structure or chemical process?

Ironically, it is thanks to the empiricists themselves that we can answer this question. It has been known for generations that Faith flourishes most strongly when people feel threatened and powerless. What could be more threatening — what could make a soul feel more powerless — than an endless litany of scientific “discoveries” hammering home our utter insignificance in a vast and indifferent cosmos, reducing every flicker of the Human soul to chemicals and electricity, telling us that the very notion of free will is logically absurd in a mechanistic universe?^[1] Science itself has provoked this return to God — and once again we see His Hand in that precisely-designed mechanism ensuring that our faith is strongest when it is most desperately needed.

While we may thank this divine feedback loop for reversing the last generation’s exodus from the Church of Rome^[2], it has also played a role in a recent proliferation of cults whose elements borrow from a variety of pagan and pantheistic sources, and whose tenets pose a fundamental obstacle to Salvation. Such cults have always been with us, springing to life on stony ground and withering just as quickly. The Abrahamic religions, rooted in richer soil, have outlasted them all and continue to thrive even under the tumultuous conditions of the late twenty-first century.

These are, however, times of uncertainty; and in the face of modern challenges we may find ourselves tempted to turn our backs on the wider world (as have certain Protestant denominations). Such retreat in the face of adversity would not only go against the Scriptural admonition to “go and make disciples of all nations”, but also risks dire consequence in its own right. The Redeemer Gyland offers a stark case in point. It has been almost a year since the alliance between the Southern and Central Baptists broke down, and three months since we have been able to establish contact with anyone from either side of that conflict. (It is no longer practical to board the gyland directly— any craft approaching within two kilometers is fired upon — but remote surveillance has yielded no evidence of human activity since March 28. The UN believes that the weapons fire is automated, and has declared Redeemer off-limits until those defenses exhaust their ammunition.)

In contrast to the failed retreat of the southern Baptists, other faiths have tried “broadening their appeal” to “keep up with changing times”.  While this has an undeniable short-term appeal, it too would be ultimately self-defeating. It is certainly easier to join a group which makes no real demands of its adherents — which tolerates sin in the name of “diversity” and “equal rights” — but it is also much easier to leave such a group. The existence of moral codes and constraints, arbitrary though they may appear to outsiders, serve to ensure that only the truly faithful enter the Church. It is no accident that strict religious communities have longer lifespans than secular (or even liberal theistic) ones.

Historically, therefore, the Holy See has never had cause to feel threatened by the transient appeal of the cults forever flowering around our ankles in the morning, only to blow away by nightfall. To date, we have also taken this attitude of benign tolerance regarding the so-called Bicameral Order.

It is the considered opinion of this committee, however, that continuing complacency would be a terrible mistake in this case. We believe the Order represents a threat not only to the Holy Church of Rome, but to all Abrahamic religions.

 

The Limits of Science

The purview of science is a narrow one: it deals with questions of how the multiverse works. The deeper issues of why the multiverse exists— and of our rightful place therein— are beyond its reach. The Church is not threatened by the procession of discoveries and insights hailing from the scientific method, because worldly matters are not within its domain. As St. Gould famously opined, Science and Faith occupy “non-overlapping magisteria”. It is no more the place of the Church to make testable hypotheses than it is the place of Science to pass judgment on matters of the spirit.

It is perhaps too-infrequently noted, however, that science can claim no better understanding than the Church even in the matter of how the universe works.

This is a surprisingly uncontroversial view even among scientists, most of whom admit not only that science cannot claim to accurately describe reality, but that it cannot even claim to approach greater accuracy as it progresses. Yes, Einstein’s physics produce more accurate predictions than Newton’s— but a model in which celestial bodies are affixed to a series of concentric crystal spheres produces more accurate predictions of planetary motion than one which posits only a single sphere. Is it more “realistic”?

So while Science may produce ever-more-accurate predictions about how reality behaves under known conditions, it can never claim to understand what lies within that black box (a century after its introduction, Smolin’s “Breeder Multiverse” remains untested and untestable even in principle— a mathematical construct to be taken on faith no less than the existence of God Himself).  Ultimately, all science is mere correlation. For that matter, there was a time before science even existed when people turned to religion to understand the physical universe; and while the thought of deities hurling lightning bolts may seem fanciful to modern minds, it was then (as science claims to be now) the best explanation available to limited human understanding.

The fundamental difference between Science and Scripture is not, therefore, that scientific insights are necessarily more realistic than those based upon Faith. The difference is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.

 

The Bicameral Threat

The Bicamerals represent a stark anomaly in this otherwise consistent landscape. We have exhaustively reviewed their publications and the predictions contained therein. Their methodologies appear to be explicitly faith-based, and they venture unapologetically into metaphysical realms which defy empirical analysis— yet they yield results with consistently more predictive power than conventional science. (How they do this is not known; our best evidence suggests some kind of rewiring of the temporal lobe in a way that amplifies their connection to the Divine.)

It would be dangerously naïve to regard this as a victory for traditional religion. It is not. It is a victory for a radical sect barely half a century old, and the cost of that victory has been to demolish the wall between science and faith. The Church’s concession of the physical realm informed the historic armistice which has allowed faith and reason to coexist in separate and inviolable domains to this day. One may find it heartening to see faith ascendant once again across the Human spectrum; but it is not our faith. Its hand still guides lost sheep away from the soulless empiricism of secular science, but the days in which it guided them into the loving arms of Our Savior are waning.

The Bicameral Order does not proselytize, preferring to stay out of the public eye (a suspicious sign in and of itself). Nonetheless, its ability to work miracles on demand cannot help but draw notice. While the ultimate consequences of their arrogance will be evident to anyone familiar with Genesis’s metaphor of the forbidden fruit, the inevitable near-term impact is to put more venerable institutions at a significant disadvantage.

Under current circumstances, therefore, we foresee the collapse of the Abrahamic religions — possibly even of the Dharmic and Taoist faiths to which the Bicamerals claim at least tenuous kinship — within as little as a single generation.

 

Recommendations

Having exhaustively considered and prayed upon the alternatives, we implore His Holiness to pursue a clandestine alliance of the Abrahamic religions, pursuant to meeting this common threat to our existence. The conflicts and internecine squabbles that have historically occurred between our respective faiths pale into insignificance next to the crisis currently brewing. The task before us will be daunting enough even in the company of powerful allies; standing alone, it would likely prove impossible.

God help us, we see no recourse but drastic action.

 

 

Like everyone else in this country (except, we can hope by now, a few official-type investigating officers), I don’t know who was responsible for yesterday’s ghastly bombing in Boston. And like less than half the people in this country, it seems, I know I don’t know. It’s distressing how many folks seem to have decided it absolutely, positively, proven-beyond-all-doubt has to be…well, whoever they’re most afraid of. How many acts of terrorism now have been initially blamed on certain foreign villains and then later it turned to be some home-grown psychopath?

A little while ago, a so-called Terrorism Expert was on CNN saying the kinds of things that self-proclaimed experts say when they don’t know anything and feel they have to say something. He’s sure it was a group like Al Qeada. Why? Because there were two bombs and a “lone nut” (his term) couldn’t have managed two bombs. Ergo, it had to be a whole group.

I’m not sure why one person couldn’t plant two bombs. Wasn’t the 1996 Olympic Park Bombing committed by one guy who’d been going around planting multiple explosive charges? Why is it so impossible for a guy who could make one and plant one bomb to make and plant two?

Years ago when I was immersed in Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy talk, I found this interesting. There was a theory that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had killed John F. Kennedy. There were elaborate theories that involved hundreds, even thousands of people who got together, killed J.F.K. and then managed to keep the secret within their very large circle. But I never saw anyone with a theory that two or three people had killed Kennedy. It was always one guy or a whole mob.

It seemed to me that most of those who held out for the whole mob had worked backwards to get there; that they’d started with the assumption that The Crime of the Century had to be about something way bigger than any motive a gnat like Oswald could have had. So then the narratives diverged: Was it a Big Conspiracy in which Oswald was a patsy? Or a Big Conspiracy in which Oswald was utterly uninvolved? There were dozens if not hundreds of theories within those two categories. But there were no theories involving Small Conspiracies.

I have no real point to make here…just my observation that folks are too quick to make the leap from Lone Nut to Big Conspiracy. Right now, we shouldn’t be jumping to either because we don’t know. And some of us even know that.

Just a brief reminder that news is bad for you. No, seriously: publicly available news media in the 21st century exist solely to get eyeballs on advertisements. That is its only real purpose. The real news consists of dull but informative reports circulated by consultancies giving in-depth insight into what's going on. The sort of stuff you find digested in the inside pages of The Economist. All else is comics. As there's an arms race going on between advertising sales departments, the major news outlets are constantly trying to make their product more addictive. And like most other addictive substance, news is a depressant, one fine-tuned to make you keep coming back for more.

When a particular incident like today's bombing of the Boston marathon kicks off a news cycle, a common pattern asserts itself. First, there's photographic evidence and rumour. Then there's some initial information—immediate numbers of dead and injured, scary photographs. But the amount of new information coming out tapers off rapidly after the first hour or two, and gives way to rumour and speculation. There probably won't be any meaningful updates for a couple of days: but the TV channels and newpapers have to fill the dead air somehow, to keep the eyeballs they've attracted on the advertisements, so they cobble together anything they can grab—usually talking heads speculating without benefit of actual information. Such speculation in turn increases anxiety levels and causes depression, bringing the onlookers back for more.

Which is why I am about to back away from the keyboard, stop looking for more updated news from Boston, and go swimming. Terrible though the bombings may be, we won't learn anything significant about the responsible parties for some time: and in the meantime I see no reason to allow my emotional state to be manipulated for the benefit of advertisers. (And neither should you, unless you're a Bostonian or a relative or friend of someone directly affected, in which case, you have my deepest sympathy. This goes for you, Dan.)

Update: And here's Bruce Schneier with some words of sense.

Additional update: The comments on this blog entry are not intended for wild speculation about the identity and motivation of the bombers; comments on those lines may be deleted, especially if I think they amount to hate speech directed against minorities.

In today’s Guardian, John Harris wonders what happened to that extinct species, the One Nation Tory. He finds a revealing statement by Margaret Thatcher (quoted in a book by Ian Gilmour, one of her cabinet ‘wets’):

“Do not say it is time for something else! Thatcherism is not for a decade. It is for centuries!”

Thatcher said this in 1990, towards the end of her premiership when she was already going round the bend. Nevertheless, the idea that Thatcherism is permanent or inevitable is widely held, even among her opponents.

The apologias by juvenile right-wingers among the comments on Liberal Democrat Voice are only to be expected, but others who ought to know better have been equally fatalistic. Here for example is Paddy Ashdown, speaking in last week’s debate in the House of Lords:

At the time when she did those things, they needed to be done.

Historical inevitability? I never knew Paddy was a Marxist.

More often, inevitability is cloaked in a false notion of pragmatism, where the Thatcher settlement is viewed as so permanent as to be beyond ideology. This has led to the current fad for managerialism, which suggests that most mainstream politicians have given up on offering real political choice.

There is a difference between agreeing with Thatcher and being mesmerised by her. It is time for people to snap out of it.

In politics, nothing is inevitable or permanent. If that were the case, there would be no need for politics. We always have a choice and, the sooner that is recognised, the healthier our politics will be.

Nick Clegg on libel reform in January 2010:

"Libel tourism is making a mockery of British justice," Mr Clegg will say. In one case, a US academic was successfully sued for £130,000 by a Saudi businessman in an English court, even though the defamatory book sold just 23 copies in Britain over the internet. 

"I am deeply concerned about the stifling effect English libel laws are having on scientific debate," Mr Clegg will say. "Scientists must be allowed to question claims fearlessly – especially those that relate to medical care, environmental damage and public safety – if we are to protect ourselves against poor research, phoney treatments and vested corporate interests."

From the Independent website this evening:

The Government is to block plans to reform Britain’s “chilling” libel laws and to prevent large companies from silencing their critics with the threat of being sued.

The attempt by ministers to water down the Defamation Bill when it returns to the House of Commons tomorrow was condemned by academics, scientists and libel reformers. They warned it would allow big companies to continue to “hound” their critics with the threat of crippling libel fees and cement Britain’s reputation as the defamation capital of the world... 

A Liberal Democrat spokesman said the party would be instructing their MPs to vote with the Government. “Unfortunately we are in a Coalition and this was one of those areas where we could not get our Conservative colleagues to agree with us,” he said.

This pattern seems all too well established. Nick courts an interest group with almost exaggerated language - think students or civil libertarians who oppose secret courts - only to let them down when he gets the chance to do something about it in government.

I do not think people would mind being let down quite so much if Nick had not originally been so good at convincing them of his support for their cause.

In the news not long ago: at John Hopkins University, students in one professor’s computer-programming classes received grades of 100 on their final exams after refusing to take the exams. The professor was grading on a curve, with the highest exam grade in each class becoming a 100 and other grades bumped up accordingly. So with a highest grade of zero — you know the rest. The Johns Hopkins students have been praised for initiative and teamwork: whether they were working as a cheerful community or a dastardly cabal, I cannot say. But I can say that they should not have received 100s.

Not because they have cheated: academic misconduct is not in any obvious way the problem here. The Johns Hopkins students collaborated, but collaboration is not necessarily forbidden, as when students study together for an exam. These students showed no intention to deceive: they didn’t share answers or use unacknowledged sources or purchase work from a term-paper mill. Indeed, the students were transparent in their intentions, standing in the hallways to check whether anyone went in to take an exam (and prepared to take the exam if necessary). There is, in any event, something odd about a charge of academic misconduct in the absence of academic work.

One can argue, as many observers have, that all these students did was to exploit a loophole in a grading policy. But such observers have overlooked important points about the workings of a curve. A curve assumes that students are making a genuine effort to do well in a course by doing its work. If that condition doesn’t hold, a curve becomes a joke, as students can decide as a group to answer, say, just one question each for an exam or assignment. More important: a curve applies only to students who have done the work. A student who doesn’t take an exam when other students do receives a zero, not a grade based on the others’ performance (a grade in the single digits perhaps, instead of a zero).

We can assume that the professor’s syllabi said nothing about these points. They are rightly left as tacit understandings shared by the members of an academic community, understandings that fall under the handy, all-encompassing alligator rule. You don’t write essays in Morse code. You don’t read novels in an English class in Spanish translation. You don’t show up for a 2:00 exam in the wee small hours of the morning, even if the professor left out p.m. You don’t get any grade other than a zero if you don’t take an exam. And guess what: the Johns Hopkins students knew that. As one of them explained in an e-mail, “Handing out 0’s to your classmates will not improve your performance in this course.” In other words, if just one student were to take the exam, those who didn’t would receive zeroes, because a curve does not apply to an exam not taken. And if no one takes an exam, there are no grades to curve.

And if it doesn’t go without saying, you don’t bring an alligator to class, or a typewriter.

When I first posted about this incident, my response was indignation. I said that the organizers and those who went along with them should be ashamed. For getting 100s, yes. But only now do I realize that even in my indignation, I didn’t recommend zeroes. I think that the best response to the zero-to-100 trick would have been neither a reward nor a punishment but an acknowledgement of the students’ cleverness — touché — and rescheduled examinations. Such a response would have permitted the students to maintain their intellectual integrity, if not their perfect grades.

[Thanks to Curtis Corlew, who wrote about the alligator rule in this comment. Unlike the John Hopkins e-mailer, I follow Garner’s Modern American Usage in pluralizing numbers: -s with no apostrophe.]
You’re reading a post from Michael Leddy’s blog Orange Crate Art. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

As an SF/F author, this makes me so incredibly happy…

“Happily for everyone, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory in Chile recently discovered a planet with a mass similar to that of the earth orbiting the sun-like Alpha Centauri B. Indeed, Alpha Centauri Bb is the first planet with an earth-like mass ever found orbiting a sun-like star.”

(Via An Earth-Sized Planet is Orbiting the Nearest Star.)

There’s some moral backbone for you (not) from the governor of Georgia refusing to condemn a segregated prom and called condemnation of it a ‘leftist’ ‘publicity stunt.’

“Gov. Nathan Deal won’t take sides in the controversy over some Wilcox County teens’ efforts to integrate their prom.

By email, his spokesman, Brian Robinson, said Deal would have no response to a liberal group’s call for state officials, including the governor to speak out.

He wrote, ‘This is a leftist front group for the state Democratic party and we’re not going to lend a hand to their silly publicity stunt.’”

(Via Spokesman: Gov. Deal Won’t Comment on Wilcox Prom | 13wmaz.com.)

It amazes me that the Dept. of Culture are discussing state regulation of blogging this week, and British bloggers are so quiet about it.
— Martin Robbins (@mjrobbins) April 12, 2013

I agree with Martin Robbins.

On Tuesday, so Sunny Hundal, Stephen Tall and William Perrin tell us, a number of bloggers met representatives of the  Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to discuss how the legislation following the Leveson Report will affect bloggers.

We don't know who else wast there and we don't know what they said when they got there. As Martin suggests in one of his many tweets on the subject, if a blogger finds himself or herself tangling with the law in future, the argument "a group of people you had no part in choosing and whose identity you may not know raised no objection to this" will not be an impressive one.

Thanks to their relative openness on the subject, we know that Sunny, Stephen and William were there. And in a tweet Sunny said those present were "mostly bloggers who run top blogs. But one or two lone bloggers." But beyond that we don't know and when Martin Robbins asked the DCMS it declined to tell him.

What Sunny, Stephen and William say is useful, but if blogging were really the edgy, collegiate activity we used to think it then more would have leaked out or people would have declined to co-operate with this exercise in the first place. Perhaps the silent participants felt flattered to be asked?

Still, it does make you wonder why the government thinks blogging is worth regulating if bloggers are won over so easily.

Elsewhere, Hacked Off have elected themselves as our representative. But we didn't choose them either, did we?

Saturday reprise


Before we get on to reviewing last night’s terrific episode, another thought:

“An ancient clade of wizards whose eternal, endless chanting keeps the dreaded devourer from awakening and ending us all… until a Time Lord interferes, and silence falls.”

“The Rings of Akhaten” or “Logopolis”?

The difference being, “Logopolis” doesn’t pull its punches and people die. Sure, the eponymous planet is destroyed in both stories, [oops, spoilers] but the difference could not be more stark between the hideous visceral dissolution of Logopolis, visibly aging to dust along with its population, and the planet-god disappearing up its own swansong.

People criticise Christopher H Bidmead for his approach to the series, yet for me the “science fairy-tale” of “Logopolis” is far more successful than anything Moffat has produced, because – like a proper fairy-tale – it is about something.

Entropy is inevitable, and arguably essential for a Universe with free will, and the Doctor does not defeat the “big bad” in the end. At best he lights a candle against the oncoming dark – the CVE in Cassiopeia that will give the Universe just a little more life. His real victory is when he dies… and regenerates and becomes younger, turning the processes of entropy on their heads in defiance of the rule that “change and decay” are synonymous and represent a further step away from Godliness. The Doctor’s Fall brings us freedom from tyranny under the Master. He brings us hope.

Put it this way: all those limitless potentials of Clara’s magic leaf… they are meaningless in a Universe imploding under the weight of total entropy… they only happen because of what the Doctor did here.

"Do you use Boy Words or Girl Words? Or the other words, but I can't 'amember them."

The story of Noah in the book of Genesis does not invite a “literal” reading. It cannot even be made to tolerate such a reading.

This is not a historical story. It is not told to say, “Here is a thing that really happened and I am telling it to you, first of all, so that you will know that this was a thing that really happened.”

It is not that kind of story. The story itself tells us it is not that kind of story. And thus to read it that way is to fail to listen to what the story itself is telling us. To read the story of Noah as a historical account is to contradict the book of Genesis.

When we treat a story of one kind as if it were a story of another kind, we ruin the telling of it. We become exactly like That Guy who won’t let you finish a joke. (“Wait — you can’t bring a duck into a bar. The health code …”)

That Guy only comes in two varieties. He’s either so dim that he doesn’t understand how stories work and thus has completely failed to notice all the clear signals as to what kind of story is being told. Or else he’s just a jerk who’s trying to ruin the story on purpose so that we never get to the punchline.

“So this Southern Baptist minister, a Catholic priest, and an imam walk into a bar. Bartender looks up and says …”

“No way. A Catholic priest maybe, but a Southern Baptist minister and an imam would never go to a bar.”

“…”

“They’re teetotalers. They think drinking alcohol is a sin.”

“OK. Fine. Make it a Presbyterian minister, a Catholic priest, and a rabbi.* They walk into a bar. Bartender looks up and …”

“So which is it? A rabbi or an imam? I doubt this ever really happened at all! Just where is this bar supposed to be, anyway?”

That Guy is technically correct. But he’s also an idiot who doesn’t grasp the kind of story being told.

Entrance to the Museum of the Good Samaritan (photo by Josh Envin).

But there’s one thing more annoying than trying to tell a story over the clueless interruptions of a That Guy who misunderstands the kind of story being told — trying to hear a story told by a That Guy who misunderstands the kind of story he’s telling.

In both cases, the story will be ruined. Try to turn the one about the guy with the duck under his arm into a journalistic report and you’ll wreck the punchline. You’ll never convey the moral of the story about hard work and discipline if you wind up focusing, instead, on defending the notion that ants and grasshoppers are capable of speech.

So whether you’re reading, hearing or telling the story of Noah, you’re bound to make a mess of it if you don’t respect the story enough to treat it as the kind of story it presents itself to be. Treat it otherwise — treat it as a historical account — and you will inevitably miss what the story itself is saying.

Rep. Joe Barton of Texas provided a neat illustration of this yesterday when he attempted to invoke the story of Noah as a historical account:

Republican Texas Rep. Joe Barton on Wednesday dismissed concerns that the Keystone XL pipeline could contribute to climate change, citing the biblical flood myth described in the book of Genesis as evidence that climate change was not man made.

… In contrast to Barton’s past insistence that global warming science is “pretty weak stuff,” the Texas Republican took a different tack in Wednesday’s hearing.

“I don’t deny that the climate is changing,” he said. “I think you can have an honest difference of opinion on what’s causing that change without automatically being either all-in that it’s all because of mankind or it’s all just natural. I think there’s a divergence of evidence.”

“I would point out if you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change. And that certainly wasn’t because mankind overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

(What is it with Texans and the complete inability to understand the story of Noah’s Ark?)

Poor Barton reminds me of the American church group I met at the “Good Samaritan’s Inn” — a museum/gift shop for tourists and pilgrims along the Wadi Qelt in the West Bank. They were very excited to be at the “actual location” where the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ story took the man who had fallen among thieves. For them, it was a confirmation that the story “really happened.”

Except that the story did not “really happen.” The story never claims to have really happened. It was a parable. Parables are not fables, and we shouldn’t try to reduce them down to some “moral of the story” slogan, or to say “this and only this is the point of the story.” The story of the Good Samaritan is told to teach us several things, I think, but none of those things is that “this really happened.” It’s not that kind of story. And if the main thing you take away from the parable of the Good Samaritan is “this really happened,” then not only have you learned a false lesson, you’ve failed to learn any true ones.

You wind up, in other words, in the same illiterate, ignorant bind as Rep. Joe Barton.

Barton appeals to the story of Noah to argue that: 1) climate-change has nothing to do with human behavior; and 2) since humans are not responsible for causing climate change, we are not responsible for responding to it or mitigating its effects.

If “you’re a believer in the Bible,” or if you’ve ever read or heard the story of Noah, then you know that Barton is getting the story backwards and upside-down. The great flood in the story of Noah is a direct consequence of human behavior. Noah’s flood is, in that story, anthropogenic climate change. Genesis 6 does not say:

The Lord saw that the wickedness of ostriches was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made ostriches, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the ostriches I have created …”

Not ostriches. Humankind. (“Adam” is the actual word there.) The story is very clear that humans are to blame.

And because humans are to blame for bringing this destructive wrath down on the whole world, humans are also given the responsibility to rescue the rest of the creation.

This is not a minor point in the story. It is impossible to read this story or to hear this story or to tell this story without very clearly understanding that this story is saying that: 1) humans are uniquely capable of destroying all of creation; and 2) humans are uniquely responsible to care for all of creation.

Or, rather, it is almost impossible to read, hear or tell this story without understanding that. It’s possible to miss that point if you’re completely confused as to what kind of story you’re reading, hearing or telling. If you ignore or reject everything the story signals about what kind of story it is, then you can also ignore or reject everything the story has to say, focusing instead on what the story doesn’t say — that it is a historical account, the testimony of actual events from witnesses the story itself says cannot exist.

Focus on that and the story becomes something else — a tale of cubits, blueprints and cryptogeology. Read or told that way, the story no longer has anything to say about responsibility. That’s convenient for folks like Joe Barton, for whom avoiding responsibility is the whole point in quoting the Bible.

So which kind of That Guy is Rep. Barton? Is he the clueless idiot who doesn’t understand how stories work? Or is he the jerk who deliberately tries to ruin the punchline? I think probably it’s a little of both.

The good news for Joe Barton is that he’s from Texas. That means even after embarrassing himself with clueless statements like the one above, he still doesn’t ever have to worry about being the most embarrassing member of his congressional delegation. Heck, he doesn’t even have to worry about being the most embarrassing Barton from Texas.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* The punchline is “Bacon,” so really it works either way.

Harry Hayfield ahead of today’s BBC coverage

Throughout Saturday BBC Parliament will be replaying the 1979 general election programme, as a build up to the funeral of Baroness Thatcher on Wednesday. The 1979 election is, to date, the only general election in modern electoral history (since 1950) to have been triggered by a vote of no confidence in the government and the polling (done by Gallup) makes for interesting reading for the Liberal Democrats.

March 1977 saw the Labour government in a terrible state of affairs. It’s majority of three won at the October 1974 general election was now a mere memory and so James Callaghan (now Prime Minister after the resignation of Harold Wilson) along with Jeremy Thorpe David Steel (the leader of the Liberal Party) agreed the so called “Lib – Lab pact” to ensure that the government would survive. At this time, the polls were saying a Conservative lead of 16% (a 9.5% swing and an almost certain Conservative landslide) with the Liberals on 14% (down 5% on their election score). Almost immediately, the Liberals went into freefall in the polls (dipping into single digits a mere three months later) with Labour starting to rally.

A situation remarkably similar to what has been happening to the Liberal Democrats since joining the coalition

By October 1977, the Conservative lead had been wiped out and by the autumn of 1978, Labour were in the lead with a swing of 1% in their favour (suggesting a Labour majority of at least 35) and prompted discussions of a general election there and then. These were scotched however by Callaghan’s famous “There was I…” speech at conference that year. That speech killed the pact, the Liberals broke off their agreement but were still languishing in the polls by the time that the no confidence vote was lost (and yet despite that still managed to win the small matter of the Liverpool, Edge Hill by-election from Labour) with the last Gallup poll before the election suggesting a 7% swing from Lab to Con, coupled with a 12% swing from Lib to Con (promising virtual Liberal wipeout).

So as you watch the election from 0900 BST, ponder this. Are the Liberal Democrats heading for a 1979 election result (holding on to the majority of their seats due to local campaigns) or a 1997 election result (picking up seats from an unpopular Conservative party)?

Harry Hayfield

Bitcoins are a kind of money, but with no physical substance. They were invented by an unknown group of computer programmers early in the last decade. The designers imagined them as an alternative money, free from control by government. They’re “made” by software which is highly protected, so you can’t simply just make more yourself. They are generated or “mined” at a pre-estasblished rate, but in 2140 all production of bitcoins is supposed to stop.

Originally Bitcoins were for peer to peer trading, exchanges within specific communities only. They had the classic attribute sf money, in that the supply was limited–you could not simply make your own. They were untraceable and outside government authority, but only other people who had already bought into the idea would accept them. But very quickly a speculative market in bitcoins developed, in which people found ways to exchange dollars (or Euros, or other currency). The price of bitcoins went up spectacularly, then yesterday it fell just as spectacularly. In that way, the market was like the tulip market in Holland or the collector market in Beanie babies or pokemon cards: a good valued by a very specific community of like minded people suddenly becomes the object of frenzied general speculation

The history of money is partly a history of attempts to monopolize its production. Conquering armies typically imposed a new money form and demanded payments in that form. Rulers of all kinds sought a monopoly over the definition of money so they could manipulate it to suit their aims. If I could declare that from henceforth only the “gold aporeto” could be money I could make a very plausible claim about who was under my authority (e.g. those who used my money), and I could control the gold content of the aporeto to suit my constant needs, for example if I needed money to invade a neighboring blog. The US has a long history of alternate forms of money.

The New England settlers arrived with high expectations and many Bibles, but little money. “Money” then meant mostly “gold or silver” and there wasn’t any to be found in the local rock. The Puritans noticed the Indians using “wampum,” which were small beads made from the shells of a particular clam. The supply of these shells was limited by nature–only so many washed up on the beaches. It was further limited by the fact that making beads with stone age tools is really difficult, requiring a lot of skill and time.

The coastal Indians used wampum as art, stringing it in patterns that told stories. They used it as a store of wealth, and they used it as a trade good with inland tribes. The  Puritans declared “wampum” to be currency–so many beads equaled so many shillings–and they set the rate into law. They would use it in trade amongst themselves, and in trade with indians, but that was as far as it would go, because no one in London was taking wampum. Very quickly after that wampum production exploded. Metal tools made it much easier to make wampum, and when nature failed to produce more clams people just started making counterfeit wampum out of wood or bone. By 1661 wampum had been abandoned as money

Bitcoins are like wampum in many ways–the supply is limited by “nature,” that is, by the terms set by their original programmer. There are only so many clams being “born.” And it’s also limited by the fact that the skills required to produce them are in short supply. Partly that’s because relatively few people are computer programmers, and because the code to generate them is highly protected by encryption. Like wampum, they were originally imagined as something exchanged in a limited community.

But wampum was declared currency by the Puritan government, and its value was set by law. Bitcoins were imagined as an extra-legal form of money, outside of governmental authority.

Bitcoins have a lot in common with another form of money, “shinplasters.” Alexander Hamilton formally defined “a dollar” as either 371.25 grains of pure silver or 24.75 grains of pure gold in 1791 But in practice Americans found this definition restrictive, and simply printed their own money. There were at least 800 different kinds of bank note curculating by 1850, but ordinary merchants could simply print their own small denomination notes and use them as change, or to buy supplies. If you went into the aporetic store to buy a supply of analogies, you would get change back in small value “aporetos.” You could spend these among other people likely to shop at the aporetic store, but spending them outside of the realm of readers of theaporetic was highly unlikely. It’s not at all clear how much of this kind of money circulated, because it’s wasn’t a currency controlled by a central government or bank. Lots of different entities printed their own money before the Civil War–insurance companies, constructions companies, private persons. See for example “George Smith’s Money.”

Like these semi-licit currencies, bitcoins only work in a  community of people willing to accept them–they have no force of law. And like shinplasters, but unlike wampum, bitcoins have no connection to government, and thereby evade government monopoly over the money supply. But bitcoins do not physically exist, except as bits on computer storage media.

Bitcoins issue from a community skeptical of government. Communities like that have a long history. The inventors of bitcoin rejected the usual cranky libertarian dodge of the gold standard in favor of an invented money of limited supply.  Sooner or later bitcoins will be counterfeited, if they haven’t been already. But for now, the idea that they are limited, and can’t be faked, is what drives the speculation in their value.

Writing in Slate, Farhad Majoo described the experience of buying $100o worth of bitcoins (note the picture–it is not real–there ar eno physical bitcoins.) It was a dodgy transaction, and his bitcoins had a value, but that value only existed among other speculators in bitcoins and those who did business –mostly secret business in controlled substances–in bitcoins.  He boasted of his much his investment had increased in value, but hours later most it had evaporated. It will probably come back.

In that sense, bitcoins are like a classic example of a collector mania. Back in the 1990s, there was a huge collector market in beanie babies. Originally marketed as toys for kids, people started buyiing them up as “investments.” For a while, rare beanie babies sold for astonishing amounts of money. Then the bubble collapsed. Beanie baby mania created an odd cognitive disjunction, where the best policy was to buy one, and then put it safely away and never touch it. This made them intensely fascinating to children and thus increased the sense that they were going to go up, up, up in value. The less evidence of wear and use it had, the more valuable, so the goal was to render it invisible to your kids, or anybody’s kids.

Bitcoins have some of that same tension between use and non-use. As Manjoo describes, their relative inaccessibility is a big part of their value. So too perhaps, is the fact that they are part of the digital playground of young people. Beanie babies called to mind soccer moms n minivans: bitcoins call to mind bearded hipsters in cafes.

As always in asset bubbles, lack of a sense of history contributes to the frenzy. This is new! It’s innovative!  Except that it’s not new, and their are interesting analogues throughout our past.

 

 

A couple of weeks ago, there was a bunch of news about a major DOS attack on Spamhaus. Spamhaus is an online service that maintains a blacklist of mail servers that are known for propagating spam. I've been getting questions about what a DoS attack is, and more specifically what a "DNS amplification attack" (the specific attack at the heart of last week's news) is. This all became a bit more relevant to me last week, because some asshole who was offended by my post about the Adria Richards affair launched a smallish DoS attack against scientopia. (This is why we were interrmitently very slow last week, between tuesday and thursday. Also, to be clear, the DNS amplification attack was used on Spamhaus. Scientopia was hit by a good old fashioned DDoS attack.)

So what is a DoS attack? And what specifically is a DNS amplification attack?

Suppose that you're a nastly person who wants to take down a website like scientopia. How could you do it? You could hack in to the server, and delete everything. That would kill it pretty effectively, right?

It certainly would. But from the viewpoint of an attacker, that's not a particularly easy thing to do. You'd need to get access to a privileged account on our server. Even if we're completely up to date on patches and security fixes, it's probably possible to do that, but it's still probably going to be a lot of work. Even for a dinky site like scientopia, getting that kind of access probably isn't trivial. For a big security-focused site like spamhaus, that's likely to be close to impossible: there are layers of security that you'd need to get through, and there are people constantly watching for attacks. Even if you got through, if the site has reliable backups, it won't be down for long, and once they get back up, they'll patch whatever hole you used to get in, so you'd be back to square one. It's a lot of work, and there are much easier ways to take down a site.

What you, as an attacker, want is a way to take the site down without having any kind of access to the system. You want a way that keeps the site down for as long as you want it down. And you want a way that doesn't leave easily traced connections to you.

That's where the DoS attack comes in. DoS stands for "denial of service". The idea of a DoS attack is to take a site down without really taking it down. You don't actually kill the server; you just make it impossible for legitimate users to access it. If the sites users can't access the site even though the server is technically still up and running, you've still effectively killed it.

How do you do that? You overwhelm the server. You target some finite resource on the server, and force it to use up that resource just dealing with requests or traffic that you sent to the server, leaving it with nothing for its legitimate users.

In terms of the internet, the two resources that people typically target are CPU and network bandwidth.

Every time that you send a request to a webserver, the server has to do some computation to process that request. The server has a finite amount of computational capability. If you can hit it with enough requests that it spends all of its time processing your requests, then the site becomes unusable, and it effectively goes down. This is the simplest kind of DoS attack. It's generally done in a form called a DDoS - distributed denial of server attack, where the attacker users thousands or millions of virus-infected computers to send requests. The server gets hit by a vast storm of requests, and it can't distinguish the legitimate requests from the ones generated by the attacker. This is the kind of attack that hit Scientopia last week. We were getting streams of a couple of thousands malformed requests per second.

This kind of attack can be very effective. It's hard - not impossible, but hard - to fight. You need to identify the common traits of the attackers, and set up some kind of filter to discard those requests. From the attacker's point of view, it's got one problem: price. Most people don't have a personal collection of virus-infected machines that they can use to mount an attack. What they actually do is rent machines! Virus authors run services where they'll use the machines that they've to run an attack for you, for a fee. They typically charge per machine-hour. So to keep a good attack going for a long time is expensive! Another problem with this kind of attack is that the amount of traffic that you can inflict on the server per attacker is also used by the client. The client needs to establish a connection to the server. That consumes CPU, network connections, and bandwidth on the client.

The other main DoS vector is network bandwidth. Every server running a website is connected to the network by a connection with a fixed capacity, called it's bandwidth. A network connection can only carry a certain quantity of information. People love to make fun of the congressman who said that the internet is like a series of tubes, but that's not really a bad analogy. Any given connection is a lot like a pipe. You can only cram so much information through that pipe in a given period of time. If you can send enough traffic to completely fill that pipe, then the computer on the other end is, effectively, off the network. It can't receive any requests.

For a big site like spamhaus, it's very hard to get enough machines attacking to effectively kill the site. The amount of bandwidth, and the number of different network paths connecting spamhaus to the internet is huge! The number of infected machines available for an attack is limited, and the cost of using all of them is prohibitive.

What an attacker would like for killing something like Spamhaus is an attack where the amount of work/cpu/traffic used to generate the attack is much smaller than the amount of work/cpu/traffic used by the server to combat the attack. That's where amplification comes in. You want to find some way of using a small amount of work/traffic on your attacker machines to cause your target to lost a large amount of work/traffic.

In this recent attack on Spamhaus, they used an amplification attack, that was based on a basic internet infrastructure service called the Domain Name Service (DNS). DNS is the service which is used to convert between the name of a server (like scientopia.org), and its numeric internet address (184.106.221.182). DNS has some technical properties that make it idea for this kind of attack:

1. It's not a connection-based service. In most internet services, you establish a connection to a server, and send a request on that connection. The server responds on the same connection. In a connection-based service, that means two things. First, you need to use just as much bandwidth as the target, because if you drop the connection, the server sees the disconnect and stops processing your request. Second, the server knows who it's connected to, and it always sends the results of a request to the client that requested it. But DNS doesn't work that way. In DNS, you send a request without a connection, and in the request, you provide an address that the response should be sent to. So you can fake a DNS request, by putting someone else's address as the "respond-to" address in the request.
2. It's possible to set up DNS to create very large responses to very small requests. There are lots of ways to do this. The important thing is that it's really easy to use DNS in a way that allows you to amplify the amount of data being sent to a server by a factor of 100. In one common form of DNS amplification, you send 60 byte requests, which generate responses larger than 6,000 bytes.

Put these two properties together, and you get a great attack vector: you can send tiny, cheap requests to a server, which don't cause any incoming traffic on your attacker machine, and which send large quantities of data to your target. Doing this is called a DNS amplification attack: it's an amplification attack which uses properties of DNS to generate large quantities of data send to your server, using small quantities of data sent by your attackers.

That's exactly what happened to Spamhaus last week. The attackers used a very common DNS extension, which allowed them to amplify 60 byte requests into 4,000 byte responses, and to send the responses to the spamhaus servers.

There are, of course, more details. (For example, when direct attacks didn't work, they tried an indirect attack that didn't target the spamhaus servers, but instead tried to attack other servers that spamhaus relied on.) But this is the gist.

• Tom
• Baker

One thing almost completely buried (ho ho) by the passing of Margaret Hilda Thatcher (and credit where credit's due to both David Winnick and Glenda Jackson for refusing to go along with the consensus in today's tribute debate) has been the remarkable treatment meted out to Paris Brown, the unfortunately named 17-year-old appointed to be yoof crime tsar by Kent's police and crime commissioner.  Try to put aside the fact that Brown's mission was supposedly meant to be to bring the police and young people closer together, as "they used to be", or that almost no one wanted the PCCs in the first place, and instead marvel at the sheer laziness, cynicism and callousness involved in the Mail on Sunday's attack on someone still not old enough to cast a ballot herself.

You might recall that back in 2009 the Scottish Sunday Express ran what was quite possibly the most ill-judged and despicable newspaper piece in many years.  Written by Paula Murray, the article "exposed" what it described as the "shame" of the survivors of the Dunblane massacre, who now having reached 18 were daring to live their lives the way almost every other 18-year-old would. Murray had scoured their social networking profiles for the slightest evidence of "bad" behaviour, whether it be drinking, swearing, sex, getting tattoos or even into the odd fight, and instead of being told by her colleagues or indeed even her editor that this was just about the most appalling breach of privacy imaginable, Derek Lambie went ahead and splashed it on the front page.  Deserved opprobrium duly landed on the heads of all involved.

Four years later, and we have the first major evidence that the politicians and public figures of the future are likely to be damned for what they put on their Twitter or Facebook pages potentially decades previous.  The hatchet job performed on Brown is still astonishing though, both for the vehemence of the attack and the sheer breadth of what the MoS decided to focus on.  Understandably, most attention was focused on Brown's comments on "pikeys" and her description of everyone on Made in Chelsea as "fucking fags", but the paper also saw fit to draw attention to the fact that Brown talked of how the "worst thing about being single" was "coming home ... horny and having to sleep alone".  A young woman daring to express sexual desire in a public forum? How dare she!

Regardless of when she made some of the tweets, and as Brown swiftly deleted the account we can't check whether she did make some when she was 14 or 15 and not recently, there really isn't much here to get even slightly outraged about.  No, it isn't clever to say you're glad your little brother hit someone who gave his friend a black eye, nor should it be acceptable to call people fags or faggots regardless of the changing meaning of the word, although it should be remembered programmes like Made in Chelsea are produced with the intention of winding people up.  As for her attack on "pikeys", it's fairly apparent she was using the word not as an attack on gypsies directly, but in the sense it's came to be used in as shorthand for thieves in general.  Still not anywhere approaching OK, but are there many who can say that at Brown's age they didn't also make such sweeping condemnations of people, or even use racist language?  I know I can't.

Quite apart from the hysterical hypocrisy of the Mail stable of newspapers condemning someone's non-PC comments on race relations and gay rights, what really rankles is that they chose to draw attention to some of her more introspective, vulnerable tweets, including one where she's obviously criticising herself for how she has sometimes behaved when drunk.  17-year-old has on occasion had a drink! Hold the front page!

It was hardly surprising then when, presumably pressurised into doing so, Brown sat across from the PCC Anne Barnes apologising for the messages while crying her eyes out, all in front of the TV cameras.  I don't think I've seen a more pitiful sight in quite some time; a young person thought she was doing something to help those her own age, and was duly rewarded for it with the kind of attack usually reserved for those who have in some way or another attracted the Mail's ire.

Brown shouldn't have had to resign, but almost certainly had no option. Joe Jones says she have been fully vetted, with her social networking profiles looked at, yet is this really the kind of territory we're now getting into?  When teenagers can't even be allowed to make mistakes or say stupid things for fear they might later have them picked up on, we're in clear danger of creating a generation of politicians who are so desperately dull and have such indistinct opinions that the public becomes even less enthused with the system than they currently are.  Whatever you thought about Thatcher, she believed in what she was doing.  Plenty of those now growing up have the potential to be outstanding future leaders with similar qualities, and are presumably exactly the sort the Mail on Sunday would approve of.  If we're going to attempt to kill them off before they even get started because of daft things they've done on the internet, our democracy is going to be a very dry place indeed.

[Official results, from a very small election. Click for a larger, more detailed view.]

Sometimes a bar graph isn’t needed. The decimals suggest to me that the maker may have been indulging a sense of humor, but I can’t be sure.
You’re reading a post from Michael Leddy’s blog Orange Crate Art. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

[*] Cats are to kittens as calves are to cows. "But that's ridiculous, Andrew: have you ever tried milking a cat?" 

[**] What is the British equivalent of Motherhood and Apple Pie? "The Church of England and Steak and Kidney Pie, perhaps?

The only appropriate response yesterday seemed to be to mock.  Thatcher had become and will remain a myth, for both right and left.  For her most devoted followers on the right, and for an example of the loopiness she has on even those usually most staid of academics, historians, one only need read the Graun's interviews with Michael Burleigh and Andrew Roberts, she was a giant who will never be equalled.  It doesn't matter to them how many communities her policies ripped the heart out of, how many lost their jobs as an effect of her repudiation of the attempts to maintain full employment of the post-war years and were thereafter bought off with incapacity benefit, or how the ultimate effect of the castration of the unions was the soaring inequality we have today (or if it does, they rationalise it as unavoidable collateral damage).  They really, genuinely, believe that she saved the country as David Cameron said yesterday.

Equally, for some on the left, Thatcher became the ultimate depiction of the nasty, heartless, even evil Tory.  There is no such thing as society, she said, and that quote came to symbolise how they felt she cared nothing for the working man who wanted little more than a secure job and a roof over his head.  If he wanted to buy that house, then that was different, he became "one of us".  All the rest could be disregarded, or if they were actively hostile, they could be characterised as the "enemy within".  The previous solidarity of local communities and workplaces was broken down through such rhetoric, while the police were used, whether against the miners or the strikers at Wapping as her effective line of enforcement.

As you might expect, my own view on Thatcher is closer to that of the latter rather than the former.  It's difficult to draw such a broad conclusion though when she resigned as prime minister 5 days shy of my 6th birthday.  Indeed, one of the many absurdities of yesterday was that so many of my generation and younger were either celebrating or certainly not feeling the slightest bit sad about the death of someone they could either barely remember as being in power or had resigned years before they were even born.  I don't have very solid memories of much before I was about 7, although I can extremely vaguely recall the news of the poll tax riots.  As for her political passing, there's just a blank.  I might be a child of Thatcher, but actually remember her time? I certainly don't.

Britain in 2013 is nonetheless still her country.  It's undoubtedly a more socially liberal and multiracial place than it was in the dying days of 1990, but economically it resembles it more closely than it has in years previous.  Enterprise zones, straight out of the Thatcherite handbook are back, as is the language of there being no alternative. George Osborne even lifted directly from her for his budget slogan, that it was one for those who want to "work hard and get on", as tactless a message as we've come to expect from the sledgehammer chancellor.

It's here where a certain section of the left's demonisation of Thatcher begins to fall apart.  To understand what she achieved, you don't just have to be aware that not a single one of her privatisations, financial reforms or trade union laws was unpicked by Labour between 97 and 2010, but also that support for her was so total from the vast majority of the media that it forced everyone that has come since into trying to ride the press tiger.  All have tried, and all have failed, although John Major refused to play the game to anywhere near the extent that Blair, Brown and Cameron did.  It's been said repeatedly that New Labour was Thatcher's greatest achievement (including by herself), and it's one of those rare cases when such a widely shared view is probably right.  In fact, New Labour didn't just keep to her settlement, it expanded on it: one of Gordon Brown's very first acts as chancellor was to give away the only remaining power that the Treasury had kept, that of raising and lowering interest rates.  The free market was triumphant.  That Labour would have almost certainly won in 97 regardless of Tony Blair's transformation of the party is now just another of those what if scenarios.

Although I disagree with plenty of the Heresiarch's analysis, he's right to note that the most fundamental difference between the New Labour machine and that of Thatcher was language.  New Labour (initially at least) spoke compassionately and continued to denounce the evils of Conservatism while going far further than she had dared in many areas.  Whereas she may not have cared two hoots for the NHS, she didn't introduce privatisation, as New Labour did; nor were the unemployed or others on benefits denounced in anywhere near the terms that became familiar in the final years under Labour (Tebbit's "on yer bike" anecdote about his father aside, although the denunciation of single mothers wasn't many moons away).  The use of the private finance initiative boomed, while the City was allowed to do whatever it liked, and duly did.  Thatcher undoubtedly wanted as many as possible to get rich, but she never said anything amounting to the immortal line uttered by Peter Mandelson.  She also might have loathed anything that wasn't bourgeois while having no interest in wider culture whatsoever, but she didn't expand the prison estate in the way her successor and then Labour did, or impose the restrictions on civil liberties Labour did in the aftermath of 9/11, despite almost being murdered by the IRA.

While then it was at least nice to hear one alternative voice yesterday, and it's difficult to disagree with Ken Livingstone that Thatcher's reforms set the political failures on housing and the City we're living with today into motion, his opponents were also right when they stated back that his party did nothing to change them and in some cases have ended up exacerbating the problems.  Just then as Thatcher lay the foundations for New Labour, so too did New Labour set the foundations for David Cameron's Tories and the coalition.  David Cameron's attempt to rebrand the Tories has undoubtedly been more spin and less substance than the remaking of Labour was, yet it just about worked.  That in power almost all of the fluffiness has fallen away and been replaced by some incredibly harsh rhetoric isn't just a mirror on the 80s, it's also how Blair and Brown operated when they thought they had to.

You can't imagine though that when either Blair or Brown go there will be impromptu street parties to mark the occasion.  Thatcher wasn't just divisive, as has been admitted even by Cameron, she polarised the country.  Apparently capable of great charm and kindness in private as well as rudeness, her public demeanour inspired hatred.  You were either with her or against her, a position only Tony Blair has since invoked.  For all the claims of how she was an inspiration for people in the Soviet bloc and had a passion for freedom, this only went so far.  If you were unlucky enough to be under the yoke of a dictatorship of a British ally, whether in Chile, Indonesia or Saudi Arabia to name but three, then hard luck.  The same went for the ANC in South Africa; she may well have opposed apartheid, but she continued to refer to Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and refused to impose sanctions on the regime.

All the more reason why yesterday we should have heard more widely from those who opposed her at the time.  The closest the mainstream came to acknowledging the depth of feeling of some, not to mention what was happening online were the one or two interviews with miners, with Red Ken and Shirley Williams turning up on Newsnight, alongside the odd reference to George Galloway's tweeting.  The 80s were hardly a sanitised era, and Thatcher herself was ruthless in her attacks on the media when they refused to follow the Conservative line, particularly the BBC, although perhaps most notoriously when Thames broadcast Death on the Rock.  Nor was there much, if any comment on the continuing censorship during her decade in power: the video nasty panic and the influence of Mary Whitehouse on Thatcher went unremarked upon.

Nor should it have been decided so swiftly that she would receive a ceremonial, if not state funeral, although the difference is frankly semantic.  Regardless of what you think of Churchill as a politician both before and after the war, his leadership during the conflict demanded that he receive full state honours when he died.  He worked to unite the nation and give it the belief to fight on.  Thatcher did the opposite of the former, while indirectly promoting a class conflict that continues to this day.  If the family wanted a public event, then by all means they could have either paid for it themselves (as they are doing in part) or had it privately funded.  Those pushing for a full state funeral should note that if Thatcher deserves one, then when Blair goes he will also surely merit such recognition.  It will also inevitably attract much protest, which raises the question of how it's going to be policed.

The ultimate conclusion to draw is that as always, it's the victors that end up writing the history.  Where the left has arguably succeeded socially (although there is much still to do) the right has most definitely triumphed economically.  What Thatcher and Reagan instituted in the 80s ought to have been exposed by the crash of 07/08 and the depression that has followed.  Instead, after a initial bout of Keynesianism, neoliberalism has re-emerged if anything stronger than ever.  There is, we are told, no alternative.  They're right, as the left has completely failed to set out that alternative.  Thatcher won then, and her successors are doing so now.

You’ve probably heard about the rat-brain network by now — it showed up in the popsci threads back at the end of February, provoking breathless comparisons with Vulcan mind melds and The Matrix. And I gotta say, the coverage certainly sucked me in: an actual (albeit rudimentary) network of brains, linked together to solve problems? Hive-Mind stuff; Mind-Hive stuff. Something very much like it shows up in Echopraxia. It makes a cameo in “Giants”. The talk I gave at last year’s SpecFic Colloquium got into it big-time. Right up my alley.

Then you read the actual research paper and, well… not so much.

This is how they sell it; this, technically, is how it was. The brains of two rats, each connected to the other by an array of microelectrodes implanted in the motor cortex. One of them is presented with a stimulus; the other, with the means to act on that stimulus¹. If the second rat reacts correctly to the stimulus the first one perceives, both get a reward. Rat #2 — gifted with no clues or insights save those piped directly from the brain of Rat #1 — reacts correctly 70% of the time, far more often than the 50% hit rate that random chance would serve up.

Ergo, the rats’ brains are in direct communication via an electronic network. Technologicaly-mediated telepathy. Technepathy.

There are the rudiments of a B2B interface here, certainly. Motor cortices and embedded electrode microarrays. A computer that mediates signal transmission from one to the other. Options presented, choices made, a reward for pressing the right lever. The way the Results are worded you really get a sense of linked minds, that the signals received by decoder-rat were pretty much the signals generated by the motor cortex of the encoder (“The primary factor that influenced the decoder rat’s performance was the quality of spatial information extracted from the encoder rat’s M1,” Pais-Vieira et al tell us. “The performance was high if the chosen neuronal ensemble accurately encoded left versus right presses”.) You imagine the array reading the motor commands off the very cortex, sending them through the internet, inserting them into the recipient’s motor control system where — possessed by an alien command planted in her brain — the little rodent feels an irresistible urge to move her paw just so.

Only when you move on to the Methods (Yes, “Methods” come after the “Results” in this paper for some reason), do you discover: oh, wait. The recipient was trained beforehand to push one lever or the other, depending on the incoming stimulus. And the stimulus wasn’t a motor command copied-and-pasted from one brain to the other, it was an arbitrary signal sent by the computer after the computer had decoded the sender-rat’s neural activity. It’s the difference between experiencing an orgasm and watching a tiny figure on a faraway hill spell out oh-god-oh-god-oh-god-yes using signal flags.

In other words, this is a brain dyad only in the most trivial sense. There’s no real meeting of the minds here, no sensory input or motor commands flitting between cortices in native neuro-ratspeak. Sure, the recipient must be feeling something; but whatever that is, it’s not the vicarious feel of walls against whiskers or the urge to move a muscle. It’s more itch than insight; the little guy was just trained beforehand to push one lever in response to Itch X, and another in response to Itch Y. For all the telepathy involved, he might as well have reacted to a blinking LED.

I admit I’m curious as to what that itch actually felt like, mind you. After all, the electrodes were embedded in motor wiring, not sensory; I’m a bit surprised that Pais-Vieira’s decoders felt anything at all (I’d have expected some kind of uncontrollable muscle tremor). And this is the standard approach used by all those wired-up primates who’ve been making news by controlling robot and/or virtual limbs with their minds. You don’t move that thing on the screen by actually sending a motor command down your arm; you just kinda concentrate, and the computer takes those arbitrary brainwaves and interprets them as left or right. Somewhere out there, someone might have trained an on-screen avatar to jump whenever she thinks the first six notes of “Aqualung”. It’s all pretty cool.

But a mind-meld? A “brain-net“? Not even close, not unless I become part of the Borg Collective every time I have a two-sentence conversation with someone.

Which is not to say that I find the idea of brain-to-brain networks ludicrous in principle. I’m actually a bit scared by them. Everybody knows what happens when you split a brain down the middle, force the hemispheres to resort to the dial-up speeds of the hypothalamus instead of the broadband pipe of the corpus callosum: two distinct personalities emerge in the space where one had been before. Fewer people, I suspect, know that it works the other way around; when isolated hemispheres are reconnected (when an anesthetized hemisphere wakes back up, for example), the persona manifested by the lone hemisphere gets swallowed into the greater whole. I see no reason why that wouldn’t scale up. If you could build a fat enough pipe between two intact brains — an electronic corpus callosum, as it were — and if you could keep latency down to below the few-hundred milliseconds that seems necessary for coherent self-identity — would the result be two linked minds, or a single distributed one? Would the parts retain their identity, or would consciousness expand to fill the space available? If you joined such a network, would you retain any more autonomy, any more sense of self, than your parietal lobe enjoys now?

I feel a story coming on: a few decades from now, a glitch in the iMind servers inadvertently surpasses that magic bandency threshold and a few million streaming subscribers meld for a few minutes. But the subsequent class-action lawsuit fails when Apple argues that none of the affected individuals have standing to bring the case, since none of them actually existed as individuals during the alleged events. Maybe it even countersues on behalf of that vast and ephemeral mind who took their place, only to be torn apart and murdered after a measly ten minutes of life.

I bet I could keep it short enough to fit onto the back page of Nature. Still need a punchline, though.