Looking Out To Sea

A few minutes ago I started thinking how to write this review, and about the ideas presented in the book. I swiftly went off on a strange tangent related to continuations and website interaction and their intimate relation with human memory and criminal responsibility. Yes, really! I’m not kidding around here. So this will be two separate reviews in one — the straight-up “what I thought of the book” review, and secondly my thoughts on the issues the book raises, which may include spoilers.

Part 1. In Which we Look at the Book in Question

The last Richard K Morgan book I read, Black Man, was technically good but rubbed me up the wrong way. It took the silly way and the stupid explanation where the obvious one would have got the author into less trouble. That is to say, call the protagonist a genetically-engineered super-soldier and I would have no complaints; but call him a genetically resurrected pre-agricultural super-soldier and then I know you’re taking the piss.

But anyway, Altered Carbon had none of the silliness of that book. There was some slight super-soldiering but most of it seemed to fit in with the environment and the technology at hand. Humanity has spread to stars, developed True AI and has the ability to capture consciousness on file. Human bodies can have their minds added and removed at will, and their consciousness can be transmitted between distant planets and slotted into a waiting body.

The central plot is a detective story — the protagonist is a ronin hired to solve a mystery for a wealthy benefactor. It’s a really interesting mystery, though to my mind the “real” solution is not as good as the red herring that also appears. It doesn’t feel much like a murder mystery because the reader has very little sense for the norms of the society it’s set in. With Agatha Christie there are certain conventions one can rely on — long lost illegitimate children, the butler, unrevealed gambling debts and so on. With Altered Carbon you just have to take a back seat and see where the story leads.

It’s still a damn good read and I stayed up late in to the night on several occasions.

(From this point on there may be spoilers, though I won’t mention any explicit plot points. But reading further will give you more clues to see through the plot than I had.)

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Hey folks, sorry for the radio silence. We’ve been busy laying on the adipose tissue for winter and haven’t had much spare blogging time. We’ve been doing at least one Nigella recipe every day this past week. In proper Hobbit style we had two breakfasts this morning. Put that Longbottom leaf in your pipe and smoke it!

We have still more to come this weekend. Tomorrow we will be cooking an outlandish lunch for 6 or 7 people. I hope it all goes well. I have to put together some flatbreads this time. They seem to be a bit like focaccia but without the height — you know, flatter. The problem of course is that I don’t have a big enough oven or enough baking trays to handle even the quantities mentioned in the recipe.

The weather outside now — as I look up the street from my sofa, along Leith Walk to Calton Hill — is dreich. The column at the top of Calton Hill is just disappearing in the haar. I’m sitting in here listening to Debussy and thinking about another cup of tea. I learned the other day that we have no drinking chocolate left. This seems like an oversight. I’m pretty sure it will become very appropriate as the weather veers towards the permanently wintry.

I’ve had a cracking evening so I thought I’d take a few minutes to show you what I’ve been up to. It’s been a mixture of learning and supplementing the Diagrams package as before.

I’ve started a new repository at to store the test material I’m using. That way I can make it public without cluttering up the package with unnecessary files and commits.

First, I would like to introduce my brother. He will be helping us this evening, in the manner of Debbie McGee. (He will survive, in one piece. It’s just magic folks…) One of the additions I have made to the package is the ability to save on top of another image. Instead of a plain white background, you can load something from disk and put your diagram onto that.

We’ll see it all in action here, with the help of my brother (as mentioned). Excuse me if the code is a bit sloppy. As mentioned this is my scratch pad for developing features, so it’s quite a crufty place to work!

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Recently there was a fluff science story on the BBC website about the happiest place in Britain. You know the type. What was unusual about this particular article was the disclaimer buried in the middle:

However, the researchers stress that the variations between different places in Britain are not statistically significant.

That’s right. After breathlessly telling us how much sadder the inhabitants of Edinburgh are than the people of Powys in Wales, they “let slip” that it’s all cobblers.

I mentioned this on the Bad Science forum but took it no further. Happily, others did. You can see Gimpy’s letter to the BBC and their response elsewhere, but I’ll quote the relevant bit from the BBC’s response here:

We felt that as the story was of a light-hearted nature, and that as the conclusions were not of great importance, or significance, it made for a light and entertaining read.

I agree that the story was both unimportant and insignificant. But it’s the fact they pretended it did have importance and significance that is so disturbing. They reported exactly the opposite of the research. They even dispatched a reporter with camera crew to Hay-on-Wye in Powys to really drive home the “insignificance” of the story.

BBC Most Read
© Betsy

I wonder what the criteria are for a “light and entertaining” story, as determined by the BBC? Off the top of my head I would guess it would include comic stories involving pets and record-breaking attempts to snog for 48 hours straight. I didn’t think it would include using a researcher’s name to assert the opposite of what they claim.

The BBC would like to claim that because there is no real importance to the story that they are not under any obligation to report accurately. Somehow they’ve decided that stories which are not Serious News™ can be treated with a freeform approach to reality. And that this slapdash journalism is okay if you admit somewhere in the article, “oh by the way, we made all this up”.

The “entertainment” excuse begins to wear very thin after a while. What kind of an impression does this reporting actually have on people? Are there less naive readers up and down the country who look at this story and think, “oh, those kidders at the BBC! what a lark they are!”. I doubt it. Instead, they’re more likely to do as Terry Wogan apparently did after reading out a letter from a listener:

“…apparently the second happiest place in the UK is Manchester, which is confusing because this very week began with more research which concluded that Manchester was number one when it came to self harm.”

I think possibly academics could keep things to themselves for a bit. We’re getting contradictory messages.

It seems even Terry Wogan (isn’t he employed by the BBC?) wasn’t aware that it was all just a joke guys! Get with the programme, Wogan! (Thanks to Bad Science forum user Allo V Psycho for the Wogan transcription and iPlayer link.)

I personally think that “entertainment” is a pretty pathetic excuse in this case. Which particular part of the story was entertaining, exactly? Francis Wheen mentions similar excuses in Mumbo Jumbo, given by newspapers for continuing to print horoscopes. “Entertainment” appears to be the last, nebulous excuse available when there is no good reason to do something.

Another Bad Science blogger recently suggested that The Media Think You Are Morons, or more accurately:

What I’ve found is that not only do the media not bother to give references to the academic work they are writing about, but they don’t bother to respond promptly to enquiries about their policy of keeping this information from us. The most likely conclusion is, I think, that they consider the general public to be morons incapable of understanding references — and they don’t think they need to explain themselves to their readers either.

The lack of references in news stories really annoys me. I’ve probably even written about it before. It can be pretty difficult to track down the source of a statement when all we have to go on is “scientists said” or “experts have found”. If these same news stories can now be relied upon to state the opposite conclusions to the source, what use is science reporting at all? It fails both to inform and to direct you to further data if needed. What service do the relevant media think they are offering here — “entertainment”?

Update: I am pleased as punch to note that Ben Goldacre wrote about this very topic in the weekend Guardian. I like to think it was because of the thread I started on the Bad Science forum. A boy can dream…

I use an excellent collaborative spam filter on this blog. It harnesses the power of naive Bayesian classification to identify spam, and aggregates everyone’s spam to get lots of useful data. In short, it’s really good at identifying spam, for the same reason Gmail is really good — they have a large data set.

SPAM!
© Laura A.

But once or twice a comment by a genuine person (as identified by my patented Genuine Person Detector™) has been dropped straight into the spam bin. So I check through the spam fairly regularly, unspamming the occasional good comment and deleting everything else. It takes just a few minutes, but it’s really beginning to get to me.

It’s not difficult to spot the spam. And I’m really glad the spam-blocker does such a good job. But it just depresses me terribly that I get all this stuff in the first place. Since starting this blog I have had 310 genuine comments and 4627 spam. The vast majority of that spam has been tediously obvious “hot girls! viagra! stock tips! buy buy buy!” links, hundreds of them in a single comment and no content whatsoever. Just ugly link dumps. I just get so fed up scrolling through these things, even though I know they’re already binned by the time I see them.

I wish there was a Neighbourhood Watch badge I could stick on my blog, to say “don’t spam here, we’ll catch you”. It’s selfish and silly, but I just get so beaten down by the endless stream of automated, transparent, stupid crap that flows through this blog.

I guess there is an interface issue as well. It would be easier to sort through the crap if the spam folder were augmented a bit:

• Showing username, email address and website is enough to identify most spam. If there’s nothing obvious spammy in the comment itself then the submitted website will be a link to some dubious-sounding pharmaceuticals supplier.

  In this case, an abbreviated spam page that just showed the meta-data (and maybe the first line of comment, like Gmail) would be quicker to skim through. I would get more spam on a single page too, so I wouldn’t have to click “Next page” if there’s a lot there.

• Sorting by “spamminess” would be good too. I’m sure the spam blocker assigns a “probability of spamminess” to each comment. It would be nice if the “least spammy” comments were floated to the top of the page, so I could deal with them first and then kill the tedious stuff without looking.

I’ve submitted these suggestions to the developers. I would guess the first one is more likely to be followed through than the second. I get the impression that the Wordpress interface doesn’t actually know the probabilities, it only receives a thumbs up/down for each comment.

We’re jumping feet first into the world of audio-visual entertainment. We looked at televisions on Sunday afternoon in John Lewis, and found a quite nice one. They didn’t have any in stock after we got home and checked reviews online.

Then today, one of my colleagues was selling a Humax PVR. His father had bought it before deciding he was too old for this new-fangled technology. (This was how my parents ended up with a microwave too, after my grandmother had been keen to get one.) It seems to be basically the same model as the one owned by Helen’s parents, with a few minor upgrades, so we should be quite familiar with it.

So at the end of Tuesday we have a DVD player (cost thirty quid about 4 years ago) and a PVR. But not television! Now they’re back in stock online but delivery takes at least a week. We’re going to pop in to the shop on Thursday evening and see if we can buy it there and then. We’ll just carry it home on the bus if necessary. We did it with a massive microwave so we can do it with a television. Twenty kilos is nothing.