Looking Out To Sea

Arnold Zwicky over at Language Log gets to complaining about, well, things in general. Including the amount of email he gets and how long it takes to write a good post. He lets slip that

…I have a more-or-less constant queue of 250 postings in preparation, that is, partly written.

Would this be what they call slightly excessive? I have never had more than twenty unpublished posts and have long since come to the conclusion that any post that hangs around unedited and unpublished for more than a few weeks will probably never see the light of day. At least, not without a complete rewrite and probably a shift in focus and tone.

Two hundred and fifty posts!

As Mark Hoofnagle ably points out, the kind of spiritual new-age mock-science that Deepak Chopra issues forth gets really tiresome really quickly:

The mind controls the body, the mind is powerful, blah blah blah, who cares right? Well, today Chopra pulled back the curtain and we see the crank within. It’s a reminder that behind the façade of all the touchy-feely nonsense of the alties is a campaign against science and legitimate medical practice. We start with the standard quack appeal to the individual, which sounds nice, but in practice basically means they have no consistent method to apply their nonsense.

The “unique and beautiful snowflake” argument is so deeply entrenched in altie medicine that even practises that ignore everything but the symptoms (I’m looking at you, homeopathy) claim it for their own. And yet, the only practise that actually has this whole-person approach is the one that everybody rags on for not having it: standard, visit-your-GP, we-have-your-medical-history, we-have-books-about-which-drugs-affect-each-other, evidence-based, medicine.

Strange that I’ve never seen any woo treatments which claim to treat the unique and beautiful snowflake that is your infection. One could argue that the infection is far more important than the person: I may get several colds a year but I don’t really change. It’s the virus that mutates as it moves around the population before coming back to visit me again.

But no-one’s going to be flattered by the notion that, even though they are a unique snowflake, this doesn’t matter. Every single unique snowflake starts to drip when they’re infected by the common cold.

Like it says, it’s a book about mosquitoes, and it’s got a massive picture of one on the front, looking all creepy-buzzy otherworldly. It’s written by a mosquito-borne infection expert and a journalist (Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio respectively), which makes it both readable but also strangely artificial. There are scientific bits interspersed with bits that seem forced and too-friendly, as if to compensate for actually talking about the facts briefly.

There’s a lot of detail about the life-cycle of mosquitoes and the different places they breed, which ones bite and why, their post-prandial behaviour and so on. Then there’s loads on all the horrible diseases they spread, how they move from person to person, which animals act as reservoirs but don’t develop symptoms, etc. But through all that, the disease I know least about is malaria. I actually had to ask Helen what it was (it’s some sort of parasite, apparently) because the book doesn’t explain at any point. That’s just downright weird.

It’s a pretty enjoyable read, with some very interesting background to the story on DDT. There are an awful lot of conspiracy theorists about who believe Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring) is the Great Satan and responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Ming the Merciless combined. In reality, it was well known at the time that DDT was losing its edge because of over-use. The heavily sprayed areas were seeing resurgence in malaria from newly-resistant mosquitoes. The environmentalist movement was only one nail in the coffin.

1. Get home.
2. Settle on sofa.
3. Open boxed set.
4. Find the first five DVDs are missing.
5. Blog about it.

It seems we will be watching 24 season 2 on another occasion.

You can tell a lot about what information is used for by how it is stored. Or at least, you should be able to tell, because it should be organised in such a way that it’s really easy to access. Dictionaries are in alphabetical order by keyword. The Icelandic telephone book is alphabetised by given name, since the Icelandic culture has no family names. Each person’s second name is modelled on the first name of one of their parents.

Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowchart; it’ll be obvious. — Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

Organising information badly can be a powerful impediment to efficiency. It’s amazing how much easier some tasks become when the information you require is organised in the right way. A thesaurus isn’t ordered alphabetically, but grouped by theme. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to find a word in a thesaurus if it didn’t also have the alphabetical list at the back?

I’m interested in data structures from a computer science perspective. It’s amazing what a difference good data structures can have on the efficiency and comprehensibility of a program. But you don’t have to delve into the world of programming to work this out.

Do you remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? I read a few, but they were always really disappointing. I spent half the time backtracking from abrupt deaths and very little time enjoying the reading. Games which require lots of decisions are really not suited to book format, unless you enjoy spending most of your time hunting for the next page in the story.

There is a natural symmetry between the linear format of a book, and the linear format of a plot. A branching tree of decisions, such as a game, doesn’t fit into this system. And the result is an extremely disappointing game/book hybrid. Organising data for efficient retrieval is, in some cases, a full-time job. You can even get degrees in librarianship, or get paid lots of money as a database analyst.

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. — Eric S Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

By way of contrast, the best data retrieval system I have ever come across is due to Mike, one of Helen’s old flatmates. The problem is typical: how to organise a CD collection for quick retrieval of good tunes. On reflection, all standard methods of organisation are sub-optimal. Alphabetising doesn’t work, because no-one thinks, “I’d like to listen to some L music today”. Organisation by style doesn’t work unless you can cut tracks out of CDs and move them to other discs.

My problem, especially when faced with a large collection, is two-fold. Indecision coupled with the secretary problem. I don’t know what to listen to, and if I make a decision I’m very sure there’s a better album buried in there, somewhere. What I do have is a good idea of what I don’t want to listen to. So, all you need to do is reorganise all the CDs so they’re in the wrong boxes. If you think “I don’t know what I want, but it’s definitely not Bach” you can happily put on whatever you find in the box labelled JS Bach: Cello Suites.

Alas, as with all other data structures, you must offset advantages in one place with disadvantages elsewhere. Finding good music is O(1). Finding a particular album is O(n). (I suppose it would be n-1, since it’s never in the box which it’s supposed to be in, but this is the same thing.) Oh well!

If I may characterise Ben Goldacre’s excellent article in the Guardian as Homeopathy doesn’t work because of A, B and C, then we can safely say that Denis MacEoin’s response consists of Yeah but what about B or C, you didn’t think about that, did you?

It really is the saddest thing, to see grown and (you would hope) intelligent people willing to skip merrily from premise to conclusion without a thought for everything they have to accept on the way:

• Like cures like. Why would something that causes fevers be effective at curing the flu? This doesn’t just require magical thinking — we need to throw out all of our understanding of human biology and how we fight infection before we can even entertain the idea. In fact, it also requires we throw out the entire notion of infection. This stuff does not jive with germ theory. Even creationists don’t deny the existence of disease-causing bacteria, but these people will happily sell you water to banish malaria or HIV.
• Dilution is amplification. This is the one that everyone laughs at, because it’s just so fundamentally silly. And they really do take it to extremes. Only a homeopathist would consider that dilution past the point of Avogadro’s limit is no obstacle to the principle. Just keep diluting, it’ll get more potent! (Did you know that it helps if you slap a leather-bound book against your homeopathic treatment? True story.)
• Holistic treatment only treats symptoms. The weird thing is that, while homeopathy is no more effective than reiki or chiropractic, it pretends to be “holistic” while blatantly ignoring the real causes of many diseases. The treatments, after all, are allocated depending on your symptoms, not their causes. Dizziness? Well, it could be last night on the G&Ts, or it could be West Nile virus, or that nasty bump you received when you walked into the kitchen cupboard. The treatments are all based on the symptom, so all these will seem alike.

Even if you swallow the “water has memory” stuff, there’s still have a massive load of nonsense to internalise. None of this can be explained by, or explains, what we know about biology or medicine or physics or… anything, really. There’s no evidence for any of it. It ignores hundreds of years of scientific discovery.

But even if we assume that it is all possible, we will never discover these purported benefits if we do as Denis MacEoin asks. We cannot have an unimpeachable priesthood, whose qualifications we have to match in order to say “no, that’s just water”. (At which point, I don’t doubt, you would be accused of heresy.) I don’t need qualifications of any kind to look at evidence, and yet at the moment all I can see is holes where that evidence should be. Homeopathy is a religion and those gaps must be filled with faith. For the rest of us, who live in the “reality-based community”, we might prefer those gaps filled with more than wishful thinking.

But not wanky French cinema. Just a little romantic comedy which goes by the appalling long-form title of How to Get Married and Stay Single. Or just I Do. Premise was quite simple: middle-aged man doesn’t want to get married, but his matriarchal family take the decision for him and start setting him up lots of dates with women desperate to marry. He decides the only way to put the issue to rest will be to get jilted — so he arranges for someone to act as his girlfriend and charm his family, then fail to show up at the ceremony.

Obviously it doesn’t all go to plan: neither his family nor the “couple” react in the way his scheme had intended. The two-dimensionality of the plot and the character types isn’t a hindrance because the two leads are so thoroughly in control. It’s almost like the flatness of the background brings out the humour of the situation, like the endless variations on the “template” jokes:

“How many members of a certain demographic group does it take to perform a specified task?” “A finite number: one to perform the task and the remainder to act in a manner stereotypical of the group in question.”

Sorry, that was unnecessary. But the film, that was good.

The Lord of the Rings owes an awful lot to the epic poem Beowulf. Strange, then, that this retelling should opt for something closer to 300: warrior action over saga and heroism. It didn’t feel very epic, you know?

I appreciated the Neil Gaiman touch. It helps if you’ve read the novella at the end of his book Fragile Things, to see his own use of the characters of Grendel and his mother. They were different characters here than in the novella, but cut from the same cloth.

I also appreciated the attempt to join the stories together. If there was one point that the poem lacks (and this is where The Silmarillion really breaks down too) is that it’s a collection of heroic tales and histories, with no purpose or connecting, overarching plot. So this may not be pure Beowulf, it’s at least consistent.

Seeing it in 3D was a good laugh, though little more than a gimmick. Yeah, okay, so the spears don’t just point at the camera, they point at your nose. But once you’ve seen that, what then? I was less impressed with Bob Zemeckis’ darling motion capture. It’s just not ready yet. They weren’t quite as stiff and funny-looking as The Polar Express though, so it is getting there.

Probably worth seeing in 3D at the cinema to get an idea of the state of commercial CGI. And you might enjoy the story. But I wouldn’t hold out for being enveloped in the story.

I’ve not long finished a call to my brother in China. He’s just got Skype set up so could call long-distance for ε pennies. He obviously knew exactly where I was calling from, so I made it my task to find out exactly (or as near as I could manage) where he was.

He’s in China, at a university, teaching English. This also means he’s stuck behind the Great Firewall and so his access to the wider internet is a bit restricted. Anonymous proxies are only for the extremely patient. So he might not even be able to access this blog entry while he’s away!

Continue Reading »

There’s something greatly satisfying about spy books. There’s intrigue of course, the cloak and dagger stuff, but there’s also thinking yourself into the character’s position and whether you could cope as well as they would. Could you walk out of your home with a wallet full of money and a warm coat, never to return? Forget about forging friends and confidants in favour of the safety of Queen and country? Could you kill a man?

Restless by William Boyd, has two interwoven timelines in the life of a woman who worked as a British spy during the Second World War. The first is about her life in the war. The second is what affect it had on her and her child in the 1970s. It’s pretty enjoyable: you get a real sense of how permanently it alters the spy character to live without trust all the time. She doesn’t have the ability to let her guard down. It even mentions Scotland at the beginning, when she goes to Edinburgh to do training missions.

Strip Tease is a bit more, uh, low brow. It’s by Carl Hiaasen after all. But it’s no less fabulous: as the quote on the front from PJ O’Rourke says, “better than literature!”. This one’s about a single mother working at a strip club to get enough money to divorce her criminal husband. Then she gets tied up in politics because a horny old Congressman beats someone senseless with a bottle of fizz during her dance act. And then there’s the Florida sugar industry and headless drug dealers and men who ‘boost’ wheelchairs, etc. This is Carl Hiaasen.