a new type of search engine

Imagine everything you have ever been told about the internet in general and search engines in particular. Then reverse it.

This is a counter intuitive idea, yet when I explain it, people always say it must exist already. Perhaps it does, but I haven't come across it.

Information they say wants to be free and perhaps it does but advertisers want different values placed on different types of information: so free means different things at different places.

Let's put it this way, but it is only one of millions of potential examples, suppose you are looking for orange Egyptian cotton sheets in Ebay, you can find them but it is a very tedious process. These are standard high street products but you will have to wade through enormous quantities of stuff you are not interested in at all (pillow cases, polycotton sheets, which is probably not cotton at all and a lot of other stuff as well, almost none of it coming from Egypt).

Ebay probably tries its best to serve people who want to buy the goods offered via its service, but I believe internet traders attempt as hard as they can to compete on anything but price. In other words they hope that you may forget what you are looking for and instead click to buy their offerings on impulse. There seems to be no other conceivable reason for the fact that many of the entries are virtually identical, as if the search engine had been stuffed in order to crowd out low priced competition.

It's the same story with Google and other search engines. Googlewhacking is the name given to the process of entering search terms into google - often two words - with the aim of finding a search with just one result on Google. There is a word for this phenomenon because it is so rare. Many searches will give you millions of results. It is said that you can even get billions of results if you enter a term like if!

So far as most of these searches are concerned the results are of little value to anyone except the advertisers, reminding one of the old adage, he who pays the piper calls the tune!

So is the internet doomed to sink into a commercially driven miasma? Unfortunately, it probably is and, of course, this has driven the creation of selective search engines and web sites that catalogue related information. It's also possible to refine the way you search but fundamentally so long as the advertisers are paying it's never going to be a level playing field. If it was they wouldn't pay!

From a consumer's point of view this is all pretty depressing. Just as the internet really takes off as a commercial forum and high street stores start to feel the competition, consumers begin to find it almost impossible to discover what they really want.

So there is a huge unmet demand for an intelligent search engine and at the same time there is a vast amount of extremely cheap untapped intelligence: About three billion people (half the world's population), live on less than $2.5 a day. Source: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats

It's hard to avoid watching techy or third world development tv programmes without seeing stories of African towns, or sometimes whole African countries, aiming to be internet hot spots. But what exactly are they supposed to do with the internet (apart from attempting to obtain the bank account details of people who believe they are about to get $100million from some phoney source)?

Obviously, there are legitimate things people can do, like compete for jobs on services like peopleperhour, but they don't seem to do it a great deal. Perhaps it is too complex to get access to an internet enabled computer and perform quite sophisticated duties (like designing a Powerpoint presentation)?

But doing a search is quite a simple operation, if tedious. Pay internet enabled people living in these desperately poor areas $5 a day and I imagine it would seem like wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

Even if they had to spend 20 minutes wading through an Ebay search sometimes, they'd probably be able to do a dozen searches a day. Charge the consumers $2 a search word ($8 for Orange Egyptian Cotton Sheets) and it could be quite profitable.

Save the core information obtained on an intranet and it might be possible for second line searchers to do a hundred searches a day, so you could make a good profit even if you were charging 25c a word.

Of course, there would be considerable consumer resistance to a search engine like this. People expect to get information for free and even premium services usually offer limited use for free.

Then there's the problem of micro transactions. It might be difficult to charge 25c via Paypal (or similar) so there would be a need to register and pay a subscription. Many consumers might give up at this point and say they can't be arsed to pay for something they know little about, particularly if they have to go through the process of registration.

On the other hand, I don't think it would be worth doing unless some (preferably a handful) of charities like Computer Aid and Oxfam, bought into the process. These charities have enormous databases and a vast ability to publicise a scheme like this. Their involvement would also make consumers feel better about parting with their cash.

Then there's the problem that search results would be delayed. They would not be instant. Could this be presented as an advantage?

For one thing this search engine is really intelligent and does not simply appear to be intelligent. It passes the Turing test so you can engage in a genuine conversation with it. If you don't like the response you can ask for the engine to take another look (possibly for a small additional fee).

Then there's the cooling off period angle. I can imagine the advert: ever bought a blow up purple rhino on the internet and wondered why when it was delivered a few days later? Using this search engine if you want to buy something you get to look at what you want to see yet the transaction takes a while. It isn't instant.

This idea would change the world. It could make internet shopping work better. It could improve the lives of the poverty stricken. It could force companies to be more transparent when they list their wares on the internet.

Lots of people have talked about providing internet enabled $100 computers in some of the poorest parts of the world. This search engine could afford to pay for and distribute such machines in meaningful numbers and at the same time create a lot of value for the people who construct it.

Biutiful (2010)

Biutiful written and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu is probably the most depressing film I've ever seen. I would cheerfully break off watching it to see Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Ingmar Bergman is a comic film maker (and I'm not talking about Now About These Women) in comparison to Iñárritu.
Yet Biutiful is gorgeously made and has some of the best performances ever recorded on celluloid, particularly Hanaa Bouchaib, a teenager, though it was actually Javier Bardem who got nominated for the Oscar. In truth his performance is phenomenal but in this Spaniish film that is not unusual.
It is set in a Catlonian badland, so bleakly depressing that it seems as if it would be impossible for things to be worse: and yet almost immediately they get much worse and continue to spiral downwards at an ever increasing rate.
If you imagine something ghastly might happen, it almost immediately will. Yet this is not done for comic effect and it is hard to believe that Iñárritu thinks it will actually change anything. It probably won't.
The only redeeming factor is that you may emerge a better person having gone through an emotional wringer (a roller coaster with only downs and no ups). I sincerely hope so.
If you have to see the very best film making (which this is) go see it. But if you value your happiness, stay well away.

Brief Encounter of The Third Kind

This is a treatment for a film script I could write (or produce in collaboration with other writers).
The background is very steam train heavy. Lots of steam trains since there are many steam railways run by enthusiasts and it might be possible to get access to their system at a reasonable cost. The project would also need a disused railway station, a sand pit in a park (with a nearby path big enough for an ice cream van) and a hill with a railway line running up it (Snowdonia would be nice but might be expensive).
The kernel is boy meets alien (or dreams alien). Falls in love. Lips quiver. He obsessively starts to build train shaped sculptures (for example a train shaped sandcastle in a sandpit). Meanwhile everywhere he goes he hears a set of five to eight notes and sees people with bent arms moving them backwards and forwards in a co-ordinated way like children playing trains. The ice cream van, for example plays the five to eight note refrain while he is creating the train sandcastle.
The film starts with images of pipes being oiled, clearly overheating. The pipes thrash about in a frenetic way as old fashioned steam piping does but the camera is so close it is impossible to see any context. Eventually as the tension builds the viewpoint shifts to a billowing white cloud, through which a steam engine appears.
It concludes with a meeting as a railway station on top of a hill at which the two star crossed lovers decide that cultural differences are just too great and their love can never be consummated (apart from anything their plumbing works in such radically different ways making such an event quite impossible). It ends with the alien departing on the train.
Along the way there is a psychiatrist who says the leading character (let us call him Trevor Howard) is mad, police officers who chase him to a field where wide eyed locals have gathered to watch the ghost train pass by and a station tea room where Trevor imagines he entertains the alien (let us call it Celia Johnson) and she seems to take embodiment.

House building

In 1980 when Maggie Thatcher was rolling back the public sector and was about to begin selling off council housing at bargain basement prices, the private sector embarked on building 131,990 while the public sector notched up 110,010 housing starts. The balance was roughly 55% to 45%.
The UK housing stock is about 25 million so total starts of 242,000 meant the average new property had to last a shade more than 103 years. Build 242,000 houses every year for 103 years and you get 25 million.
But the design life of much new housing is only 30 years. This is not just a theoretical constraint. Much 1960s housing has already been demolished.
One of the motivations for cutting back public sector housing was to liberate the private sector: to let the free market provide the needs of the country.
In reality house building has been declining.
In 2008 there were only 182,820 housing starts. This is a quite remarkable reduction. A third more housing was built in 1980 than in 2008.
In general the private sector has built more houses than it did in 1980 (in 2008 private starts stood at 150,720) but the additional units were nothing like enough to make up for the decline in public sector building brought about by Thatcherism.
At the same time the population has been climbing quite rapidly, it hit 62,262,000 in mid 2010, compared to 56,330,000 in 1980, an increase of more than ten per cent.
In 2003 the Barker Review of Housing Supply calculated that 39,000 extra houses needed to be built each year just to accommodate population growth and changing patterns of household formation. (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/press_barker_03.htm).
A paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (UK Household Formation: Nuclear Fission?) pointed out: "There have been dramatic changes in patterns of marriage and childbearing behaviour in the United Kingdom in the past 15 years. Divorce rates have risen, the propensity of unmarried couples to 'cohabit' has increased, and the proportion of babies born outside marriage has risen, from 8% to 19%."
If the nuclear family really is melting down then there will be a need for extra housing units even if the population stays the same.
The press often talks about a population time bomb caused by baby boomers reaching pensionable age and putting unacceptable pressure on the social fabric of our society. In reality this does not seem to be happening (for various reasons). If the proportion of pensioners was too high you'd expect births to decline. The opposite is happening. In 2010 live births reached 797,000, the highest since 1991.
More births, of course, means more demand for housing both now and in future years.
Government statistics reveal that things are much worse in 2010/11 (April 2010-March 2011) with total housing starts running at 131,040 of which 99,050 are private sector. At a rate of 131,000 houses built each year, the average new property will have to last 190 years.
Well some may, but to return to that Barker report house prices have risen much faster in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, suggesting there is already considerable over demand (or to put it another way, scarcity).


source:e Office for National Statistics (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13975481)
source: http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/pdfs/research/2010/50_Years_of_Housing_UK.pdf (Communities and Local Government *Based on Experian forecast for Great Britain)
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_pop-people-population&date=1980

Passwordphobia

I hate passwords and so should you. I just signed up to pay my electricity bills online and EDF, the French nuclear power company that runs the old London electricity board, required a password from me. Why?
I can understand that some people might not want their electricity bills widely known but can't those who have a fetish about these things simply get the option of password protecting their account? The rest (the sane people) could simply have an account area that is not available from any kind of search (you can only go to it if you have a link).
Now it may be objected that EDF is storing confidential information about me and doesn't want to divulge this to anyone. Well again why?
Not why should they keep confidential information confidential. Why should they have confidential information online at all!
I probably have dozens of passwords. Sometimes the organisation sends you a password and you have no choice about it. Sometimes I can enter whatever password I want. But usually I get to enter a password but there are strange rules (it has to include a capital as well as lower case letters, there must be at least one number or some such thing). As a result it is quite impossible to have the same password for everything and so you have to be a memory specialist to be able to recall every password.
OK, it's usually (though not invariably) possible to get them to email you a link to a place where you can create a new password. But this is often a very tedious process so by the time it arrives I may have completely forgotten why I wanted it.
No I am not losing my marbles. I have quite a good memory, but I'm also very busy and it's easy for me to get preoccupied with something more important than a bloody password.
OK it's not a mater of life and death but it is just another one of those things that makes the internet slower and less useful than it could be.

Interiors

Woody Allen's Interiors (1978) is a strange film compelling in its way, but not perhaps his best work. Dark and brooding it is clearly going to be compared to Ingmar Bergman's work but reminded me more of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), radio on film for the most part with a few shockingly beautiful shots.
Of course, Allen makes no secret of his admiration for the Swedish director. Was I mistaken or did I see some references to All These Women (or Now about These Women) Bergman's 1964 colour film? But Bergman usually (though not invariably) illuminates his scenes with a crisp, clear light. Just think of his Seventh Seal with its studio quality lighting and iconic images.
In my view Allen is as much influenced by Bob Hope as he is by the Swedish director so it is strange to see a Bob Hope look alike, E G Marshall, playing the father figure in this production.
The story itself is for me quite annoying. It concerns a group of people (revolving around three sisters) suffering profound angst and trauma, yet they seem to have all the money and opportunity in the world. They are rich, powerful and (for the most part anyway) either handsome or beautiful. I kept wanting to say to them, for heaven's sake buck your ideas up! Live a little.
It is almost as if they have to invent problems for themselves because their lives are simply too perfect.
There are few laughs in the film, none perhaps, except possibly the last scene, when the sisters position themselves beside a window in a way that clearly references Woody Allen's comedy about Russian angst, Love and Death.
Yes life is difficult, even if you have money and opportunity, but why make things worse by dwelling in neurosis and claustrophobic passions?

Autumn leaves

When I was a kid one of the greatest pleasures of autumn was kicking the leaves along the road. The sound of those crisp leaves and the feel of them against your shoes, socks and legs (in those days I wore short trousers more often) was quite unique.

But today we try our best to deny the children this pleasure. The council hires an extremely expensive contractor to collect the leaves (I think they use a mechanical blower) and bag them. They are then expensively collected and taken for disposal, presumably in landfill.

Strangely when it comes to dealing with more offensive substances (like the stuff dogs leave) the council is less assiduous, though my old friend Denise Liunberg did devise a poop scoop scheme for dog owners in Waltham Forest that still works, up to a point.

You'd have thought with the huge cuts in local government expenditure (the council where I live, the London borough of Waltham Forest, has to save more than £50m) the collection of autumn leaves could be abandoned this year, or at least delayed until there is some rain and the leaves become unpleasantly saturated.

A shame but that appears to be the world we live in today.

Politely ask the Germans to leave

It has been said that it takes two to Tango, but in truth it's possible to dance alone even if the result would be a fairly pale imitation of the real thing. What you can't do is have a currency crisis on your own. For this it does take at least two: you could call them a buyer and a seller, or a lender and a borrower. In truth they are probably all these things.
So it makes absolutely no sense to talk about the Greek economic crisis. Not only that: all the current so called solutions do not address the real difficulties. Bankrupt Greece, or throw it out of the Euro, and you haven't solved the problem at all. If Greece is out of the frame the spotlight is thrown on Spain, Portugal and Italy. And there is a long line of pins waiting to fall down after them.
The real problem is that the Euro is over valued so Greek business can not compete on the world market. As a result the Greek government can not raise enough taxes and the country can not pay its debts.
But why is the currency over valued? In a word: Germany. The German economy is so productive, so efficient that the country on its own is one of the great trading forces of the world economy.
German exporters benefit from the valuation of the Euro since it enables them to sell more goods abroad. Of course, Germany as a whole loses out since if the country was outside the Euro and went back to the Mark imports would become cheaper and the average German could have a slightly more comfortable lifestyle. But there is iron in the collective soul of Germany and past austerity has given them a taste for frugality in exchange for currency stability. When it comes to the Euro, the German view is:

And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
(Hilaire Belloc)

But what happens if a country is unable to compete in the world market and can not depreciate its currency? The answer is clear, we already know, for we have seen it in the north of England, Ireland, the south of Italy and many other places. Productive, industrial jobs wither. International companies attracted by soft loans or favourable tax regimes are increasingly footloose and fancy free so even if they do build a plant or two there are not as many jobs as there used to be and they stay for a shorter period of time. Low paid service industries (like tourism) become the mainstay of the economy. The Germans get to put their towels on the deckchairs first because local youths have mostly gone thanks to a permanent economic diaspora.

The solution favoured by the politicians (often described as kicking the can down the road) is to let the rich countries subsidise the poor ones, or perhaps more accurately to let the Euro inflate a little so long as Greece, Italy and the others promise to put their houses in order. This may work for a while if only because China may want to invest in the Euro in order to hedge its American portfolio (or to put it another way play Peter off against Paul).

But the Greeks and the others will eventually have to pay if only because in the medium term financial support will result in political interference. In effect the Germans will be telling them what to do. As Homer might have observed: Beware of Germans bearing gifts.

If you look at the problem like this the solution is obvious. Instead of relying on the Germans for hand outs, simply throw them out of the Euro. If this happened there would instantly be a dramatic reduction in the value of the currency (just to publicly suggest the possibility would probably drive the Euro down 5%) and Greek exporters would be back in business. The Euro without Germany would still be a large trading bloc, quite capable of looking after itself.

It might be argued that the Greeks would be in an even worse state since interest rates would rise and servicing their debts would become impossible. But this is hardly likely. If the Greek economy was in a position to pay back its debts at some point in the future, lenders would probably be prepared to accept a lower interest rate.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

The first trade journal I ever worked on was called Building Trades Journal. It was primarily sold through newsagents and had a fairly large circulation (about 25,000). At the time we were extremely reluctant even to print press releases and copy clearance, when you show what you are about to print to the company concerned, was virtually unknown. It did happen but it always led to much hand wringing and mental anguish.

BTJ employed a lot of journalists and was a relatively serious magazine. Readers really wanted to read it, or at least look at the technical features and the adverts. They would hardly have paid for it in such large numbers if it had just been candyfloss, pages filled with vanity journalism.

All that changed when controlled circulation swept the land. Instead of the journalists being the main (or at least a significant) earner of revenue, they became simply a cost. With controlled circulation people get sent copies of what was now being called business to business, or b2b, magazines whether they read them or not. Advertising was now king. Magazines printed the press releases, sometimes even embarrassing public relations firms by printing rubbish they'd assured their clients would never be used. They had to print them since they simply had no time to source proper editorial with the smaller journalistic staff that became the norm. In the era of controlled circulation, magazines didn't need large editorial departments.

As a result readers stopped bothering very much about editorial (they knew it was just disguised advertising). Copy clearance and paying for editorial space (guaranteed editorial to match advertising, for example) became quite common. The next red line (only facts could be corrected, the style had to be left alone) soon disappeared.

In a way all this happened because readers stopped buying b2b (trade) magazines. Perhaps, more accurately, the market expanded and presented with a bewildering choice it began to be almost impossible to guarantee sufficient numbers of eyeballs to make advertising worthwhile. People simply had too many other competing interests for their time. Television, radio, cinema, company brochures etc. etc. All came along after trade magazines.

A similar dilemma faces the film industry right now. In the internet age it is said information wants to be, perhaps must be, free. Whatever information is, it is bound to include films in the long run. Anyone who has used the BBC web site must realise that the old ways of watching films are threatened by the availability of high quality films streamed over the internet.

Faced with a possible collapse of both cinema and DVD receipts, the film industry is having to look at alternative income streams. Morgan Spurlock's film The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, catches it in transition moving from one distribution system to another and, equally frighteningly, changing from a viewer focused income system to a company focused one.

This film, which is being featured in the Guinness World Records as the movie with the largest number of product placements in history, made a profit before it even reached its first festival.

It is, of course, a criticism of product placement and the panoply of associated techniques designed to commercialise film in a way we have never seen before. It unveils the system, etching out the naked truth on the screen for all to see. But this is not an ashamed nudity.

The marketing gurus who appear on camera attempting to corrupt the film they are appearing in, are perfectly well aware of what's going on. They've not been fooled for a moment. They are taking part because they know it works. The mantra is: all publicity is good publicity.

But on a deeper level, business has given up worrying about what you or I think. You may be disgusted with the corruption but there's nothing you can do about it except move to São Paulo (the city that the film reveals has abolished advertising).

Morgan Spurlock has done an enormous amount of work on this film and covered virtually every conceivable angle. It should be compulsory viewing for every film student. It is also quite funny in parts. That said it is not a great work, more a horror movie than a documentary.

The concept behind the film is a development of Vít Klusák & Filip Remunda's 2004 film "Czech Dream" in which an all too real advertising campaign is run to launch a phoney department store, along the way revealing the unpleasant face of marketing.

If the film industry follows the path charted by the b2b magazine business, expect product placement marketeers to have the dominant voice in a decade or two. The creatives (now known as the film makers) will be relegated to making the film equivalents of press releases and advertising copywriting. After a showing at the NFT in September 2011, Morgan Spurlock hinted that this was already the case when it came to films with a budget of more than $50m.

A thoroughly depressing film. But watch it (in more senses than one) if you care about film.

Real leather

When I was 17 I got a small 4 stroke Japanese motorcycle. It went surprisingly fast and I think my mother was worried that I was going to hurt myself. As a result I believe she bullied one of our neighbours (a guy called Peter Allen, I think) into parting with an old leather motorcycle jacket he had. I don't think he was very happy about losing it.

I knew Peter because he kept ferrets and sometimes we went ferreting together, a rather ghastly and strangely pointless business (you don't catch many rabbits). But there's something to be said for country walks and the ferrets themselves, with their almost overpowering woody smell, were both fascinating and friendly.

Not long after I got the jacket (I recall paying Peter £7, though it may have been less) I tore it when I fell off the motorbike going round a corner in the rain. Evidently my mother was right. But 40 years later I could still wear it. The difference is in my teenage years I could put a full size cooked chicken (a perk of my job as a kitchen assistant in a fish and chip shop) beneath the zip, whereas the zip can only contain me now.

It's one of the few things I still have from my teenage years, even though by nature I'm a hoarder. But truth be told the jacket has seen better days. The label (pictured above) got removed when I had it repaired a few years ago. The neckline is cut open showing the lining. It certainly doesn't look as stylish as it did, but neither do I.

Sometimes I wonder if I should give it a decent burial (it is leather after all). Perhaps a Viking funeral? Pushing it out on a burning boat at the Hollow Ponds (Whipps Cross) might be nice, but I'm not sure the authorities would allow it.

I can't afford to get it fixed properly and don't want someone to do a hamfisted repair. So what do I do with it? It seems cruel to let it rot on a coat hook.

Red tape learns how to keep secrets from Google

Years ago when the dominant search engine was probably Yahoo, a young upstart company emerged offering a better search engine. Its name was Google. Bloody silly name, but there you go.

The main added value it offered was the ability to include data stored in PDFs so that searching the internet became a much more rewarding experience.

In subsequent years government has felt it imperative to store much of its data online, or at least to make it appear that such data is accessible to the general public. But appearances in the case of government rarely align with reality.

Secretive and defensive authorities (the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority or LVRPA is the one I know best) learnt the Google lesson. Instead of uploading conventional PDFs that can be scanned by anyone they started converting ordinary (ASCII) text into pictures and then turning it into a document.

This does not save online space. The resulting file is very rarely significantly smaller and may be larger. What it does do, and the only conceivable motive for doing this, is turn the apparently accessible into the inaccessible.

If you get a 30 page document and there's a few words on page eight about something significant, it takes considerable effort to find it. If, and this is the usual case, there are literally dozens of similar documents, it may be more or less impossible to find the relevant item.

Search engines can not help since they can not search pictures.

Some authorities go even further. The appalling London Borough of Waltham Forest (LBWF), my local authority, sometimes forces you to view 100 page PDF document one page at a time. Trying to download it becomes a nightmare.

Whilst this might seem like sharp practice by a sassy authority that knows how to restrict information because information is power, in reality it is nothing of the sort. Authorities need people sifting through the corporate vaults, finding and exposing nonsense. Exposure of these blunders simply makes for better, cheaper, more effective government.

In my view there are far too many laws and most new laws are an abuse of power because they are not properly resourced and new laws that can not be enforced simply bring the system into disrepute, even if the laws promote apple pie, fluffiness and motherhood. But one new law I would bring in would be an amendment to the Data Protection Act to prevent any government department or local authority from posting text as pictures on the internet.

Riot uniform

The police say they are sorting through CCTV images locating the perpetrators of looting and rioting on our streets last week. So CCTV saves the day? Well, perhaps not.

In reality the authorities are anxious to get past these incidents. There will be a few show trials (such as the two people who got four years a piece for trying to arrange looting on Facebook), but the prisons are too full to accommodate the vast numbers of people who were involved in the rioting.

It may be that any time there is unemployment of more than two million in the UK (it went up to 2.49 million in June) there is a high risk of summer riots. And it may be that Blackberry looting where people pre-arrange attacks on target businesses, is a 21st century phenomenon we just have to live with.

Of course the police should be attacking Blackberry not Facebook but in yet another demonstration of the weakness of the British state (and perhaps the state in general) Blackberry (based in Canada) is above the law and its traffic can not be viewed by the forces of law and order. Or at least, that's what they tell us.

And it may be that CCTV is a big part of the problem rather than the solution. Hoodies wear their hoods in order to avoid detection by CCTV. If it were not for CCTV the fashion would have died out years ago.

By defining themselves as hoodies the young join an under class that is not exactly criminal but not exactly part of mainstream society either. ASBOs (anti social behaviour orders) so often worn as badges of pride, and exclusion zones that attempt to control perfectly legal activities people find to be a nuisance, complete the ostracism.

It is a small step from being harried by CCTV, exclusion zones and ASBOs, to crossing the legal line and looting when you get a message about an event on your Blackberry. Since there were thousands involved there is little chance that a large proportion of them will be thrown into jail, there simply isn't the room in the prisons.

There is a great deal to be said for the law. Blurring the borders between what is allowed and what is punished, never does any good in the long term as any parent will tell you. CCTV, or the monitoring and cataloging of perfectly innocent people, may seem inoffensive or perhaps benign. But if it causes much of a generation to adopt a uniform of disguise and disapproval it may be a much more powerful tool than we realise. And a tool that is not being deployed for our benefit.

Of course the rioting and looting might not have happened if there had been full employment and a widespread expectation that things were getting better. People who feel they have a stake in society are less likely to rock the boat, even when that boat is captained by an eccentric who issues strange rules.

Computers don't they make you sick...

OK I'm a geek. I've taken computers to pieces and put them back together again. I know about protocols, lots of software, operating systems, you name it. I've got the tee shirt.

But truth be told it wasn't always this way. For many years I was positively hostile to computers. When I was working for International Thomson Magazines I played a vital role in making it difficult for the management to pay us extra to use computers instead of typewriters. Not one of my better moves, perhaps.

I came to computers quite late. When I first got one (a second hand original IBM PC made at the silicon Glen in Scotland) the machines had no hard drives (just floppies) and Bill Gates was going round telling anyone who would listen that no-one would ever want more than 640kb of RAM. Yes, that's less than a megabyte!

My first hard drive (I added it myself) cost me about £150 (a lot in those days) and it was 32mb! But it was cavernous compared to those floppies.

When I got my first 1gb drive I thought I'm never going to need a bigger one than this. My Bill Gates moment, perhaps. The last drive I installed was 2TB (2,000 times bigger than that 1gb drive) and I'm still juggling between drives because of lack of space.

With RAM and processor power the stories are broadly the same, not worth the telling.

So I guess I'm a signed up technophile. But as Alan Greenspan once said, there's a flaw. The flaw is compatibility and the fly in the ointment is nearly always Microsoft and Mr Gates.

One of the most important things about computing is the ability to transfer stuff from one machine to another. The whole idea of the Cloud and 21st century computing is based on the principle.

But just try converting a full scale video (a Quicktime .mov file) into Microsoft format (wmv). It's a nightmare. My guess is Windows wants commercial control of wmv and so stops anyone from offering a converter.

But as a user you don't know this. When my video editor (a so called professional system) refused to produce anything longer than a 30 second wmv file, I went scurrying round the internet looking for a converter. It was easy to find software that would convert wmv files into sensible formats. They still looked bloody awful but you could convert them, if you had a mind to (though I don't have any problems playing wmv files on my Mac).

What you couldn't do (despite the fact that quite a lot of purveyors of the software suggested that you could) was convert from a decent format to the bloody awful wmv.

So it's possible to create quite a nice video and then you have to tear your hair out as the user at the other end tells you your video doesn't work because the Windows PC the video has to be played on will only handle wmv files!

This is monstrously stupid. Mr Gates could do a lot more good for the world by closing down his charitable foundation and using the money to buy out the various compatibility traps Microsoft uses for commercial purposes. The video problem is only the tip of the iceberg and similar traps for the unwary exist almost everywhere Microsoft has domination, or near domination, in software (like Word for example).

This lack of compatibility makes it more difficult for people to work together. It is like a sclerosis of the main arteries of the internet. It slows down development making people poorer and costing lives.

Will the shades ever fall from the eyes of the Windows users so that they install software to allow them to run sensible compressed video formats like DIVX? Perhaps, but probably not in my lifetime.

Guffaw? Well perhaps not...

Went to Guffaw at the Rose & Crown last night. It was unquestionably my worst ever night at a comedy club, and I've been to some stinkers over the years.

Yet you could say it was Walthamstow's finest and Susan Murray, probably the best compere I've seen and a local resident, was on sparkling form. So what went wrong?

Well firstly there was Paul McCaffrey, E17 resident and described as a fantastic rising star! He was dull but not all that bad. He had one or two flashes of adequacy (largely when he got off script and responded to noises from the road or whatever). His major concern seemed to be swans and truth be told swans do not figure in a big way in the dark regions of my soul. I do not need a comedian to salve the swan wounds or explore the swan issues for me, because, I don't have any swan issues.

Another guy followed. I can't remember his name.

Then there was Michael Kossew. Now MK could genuinely be a fantastic rising star. He has stage presence, an attractive manner and chutzpah. There are few comedians (successful or otherwise) of whom you could say these things. But his material, if material it could be called! People are often described as misogynist simply because they are disrespectful or chauvinist. Not this guy (or his persona). He really does appear to hate women and did not spare us the gynaecological details. Two women in the audience were moved to protest. One asked "why is this funny?" MK didn't seem to be able to explain. Lenny Bruce, you might say. But Lenny Bruce had an agenda. He was foul mouthed, rude and offensive but he was campaigning for freedom. If Michael Kossew is campaigning for freedom I'm not sure it's a freedom I really want. Maybe I'm getting old.

Topping the bill was Ian Cognito. I've heard about him before but never seen him. Of course, he's professional, but his cheerful cockney routine seemed odd in the Walthamstow Theatre Pub, the Rose & Crown. Is this what the punters who are prepared to pay £3.50 a pint really want? IC came out as Walthamstow born and bred. The climax of his act, for me anyway, was when he bled over my shirt. Don't think I can wear it again. Maybe I can sell it on Ebay?

A dreadful night and the Guffaw Comedy Club at the Rose & Crown, Hoe Street,Walthamstow, will be thanking its lucky stars that few people bothered to turn up to make up the audience.

Decimation

There is something terribly wrong with the decimal system. Suppose you've swum 29 lengths (you get time to mediate about things like this in a pool) how many more lengths do you need to swim to get to 35? Five! No six!

Thirty five, it turns out, is the sixth unit in the fourth group of ten (yes the thirties are the fourth set of ten numbers: teens second; twenties, third and thirties, fourth! I told you there was something wrong with the decimal system).

In any logical system of numbers 31 would be the first of the thirties and the set would end with 39 then 30. Of course, 30 should be 39 plus one and 30 should be followed by 41.

To fix the system, nought should be assigned a value (ten) and should follow nine rather than hanging about uselessly at the beginning of the number set. The system could then be called the Noughties rather than Decimal or Denary.

There'd still be the problem of the groups of ten being out of sync. One solution might be to abolish the numbers nought to nine and start with eleven. But the difficulty with this idea is that 100 would consist of only 90!

The obvious answer is to put nought to nine after 90. So the system would go 98, 99, 90, 1, 2 etc. Of course the problem then is that nought (now representing 99 units) would go immediately before 100.

But there's got to be an argument for putting 100 after 199. Then the progression would be 8, 9, 0, 101. Much clearer think!

Like the concept of replacing the decimal system with my noughties system, or not, you have to admit that there are severe problems with decimals.

Bad theatre

I live in Lea Bridge Road, one of the most dangerous roads in London. One year we had five murders or sudden deaths, in the road. In 2008/9 there were about 650 homicides in the whole country.
At one this morning I was awoken by a young woman screaming. When I went to the window to look out I saw a woman, or young girl being held down on the pavement by two police officers. She was screaming, over and over again, "I ain't done nothing" in best Dickensian form. If it had been a performance, I'd have said she was a ham and needed to go on an acting course. After a while she screamed "I'll call the police" to which the officer (a woman) who was holding her thighs responded "we are police officers".
While all this was going on a woman was sitting almost motionless close to the scene pointing a mobile phone at them. I took it that she was videoing the proceedings.
The woman on the ground continued to struggle and evidently caused the male officer who was holding her shoulders, some difficulty, because he started to kick her. She then yelled repeatedly "why are you kicking me". The woman continued to video and the police officers did not ask her to stop, so I twigged that she too must be a police officer.
This went on for several minutes and then police cars started to whizz along Lea Bridge Road with sirens blaring. I thought "my goodness, there must be a major incident, perhaps these officers will release this young woman and go to the incident'. Several police cars sped past. But then they came back. Evidently the police don't know how to use their sat navs.
Eventually there were ten police vehicles of various kinds parked outside my house, including one which was the supervision vehicle, suggesting that an officer of some rank was in attendance.
They took the young woman away. No doubt she was charged with assaulting the police or some such offence. Perhaps she will be sent to prison. But Lea Bridge Road is a pretty tough road and it is difficult to see how much damage a young woman can do at 1 a.m. Perhaps she was taking drugs, perhaps she was touting for prostitution. I don't know.
Next time I see a police car speeding down a road, siren blaring, I will not imagine they are headed towards an emergency tea break. I'll think of them converging ten vehicles to gang up on a young woman held prostrate on the pavement.

24 miles Fukushima

24 miles Fukushima

(Music by Burt Bacharach, sung by Gene Pitney as 24 hours from Tulsa)


Dearest Darling you had a right to say that the earth had moved, was it war?
Cause something happened to you while you were staying home
And you're not the same anymore

The sign said only 24 miles Fukushima
Oh only a short way away from the core

I saw a hideous light, an eerie glow in the night
And that is where I saw you
A tidal wave had dropped a small hotel and there you were
And so I walked up to you
Asked where I could get something to eat and you said nowhere

The sign said only 24 miles Fukushima
Oh only a short way away from the core

The geiger went beserk it clicked madly all day
I said 'no way'

The sign said only 24 miles Fukushima
Oh only a short way away from the core

The sirens started to play and daytime turned into night
Atoms were dancing, wildly
All of a sudden they lost control, the core melted down
The gas escaped, exploded
We thought we'd die before we got out of that evil town


The sign said only 24 miles Fukushima
Oh only a short way away from the core

Reactors do this to you
Fall out kills more than a few
What can they do?
And you can never, never, never go home again

Cogito Ergo Sim

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