Looking Out To Sea

At work there’s a tentative conversation about a book group, to read and discuss (and presumably work through) books like SICP. I’m tempted to join in but I wonder if I’d actually get anything done. I haven’t been to the Science and Society Reading Group for several sessions because I just haven’t had time to read the books in question.

(This is why our other book group is better because reading books is optional and finishing books is not necessary.)

But the combination of SICP and discussion with some of the engaged programmers at work might be really useful. I will put my name down and see what happens. The starting book suggested was the aforementioned SICP but after that they’re going to look at something Agile/XP related which is generally an area I know nothing about except by hyped reputation. I’d also be interested in reading research papers so I might suggest that too.

When we moved into our flat on Leith Walk there was an arrangement with a man from Penicuik to get the stair cleaned. At each visit he’d post a bill through someone’s door, so each person only had to pay every eighth time. He’s stopped coming — in fact, he’s stopped business altogether — and he didn’t tell us. And because there was always a long gap between bills anyway it took a while to sink in that the stair was definitely getting dirtier.

At the weekend we sent round a note asking people to come in on Monday evening for a meeting to decide what we wanted to do. Helen had done some research and found prices for the council and for a local company to clean, and we were also willing to entertain a bucket-and-mop rota if that was the consensus.

Out of the 7 other flats we had one apology and two shows, which leaves four flats technically unaccounted for. Someone is apparently on holiday for 3 weeks, so that seems a reasonable excuse. Another were only just moving in that day so maybe they’re just snowed under. Overall I’m still annoyed by the lack of communication. As I guessed would happen, we settled on our preferred option. Of course now we have to get people to go along with this — to agree to paying regularly. If we can’t do that where are we? Whatever happens we lose if there are people who can’t be bothered — if the stair gets slowly more filthy that’s rubbish for everyone, but some care less than others; if some of us pay then we’re taking a bigger hit and others are free-loading; and if no-one wants to pay then people who care about the stairwell end up cleaning it themselves, when they can, while others look on. It may be worth noting that the people who bothered their arses this time round are the ones who own their flats.

(A similar issue can be found when you look at the garden. Who uses it? Who cares about it? Who weeds and tends it? Who has a lawnmower or can pay someone to trim the grass? This is made much harder because the dividing fence between our half of the garden and the half belonging to the adjacent tenement has been removed. It’s a bigger, nicer garden, but there are double the number of people to rope into any discussion.)

To help foster the impression that it’s not just me or Helen forcing the issue one of our neighbours is going to write up a wee note saying what we decided and who decided it. Once everyone knows what our decision was we have to work on getting the other tenants of the stair involved. Knocking on doors and such. It’s not the kind of thing I’m very good at or relish in particular but it has to be done and right now there is no real community here. I want to see if we can sort some of that out. Just starting with a core of two or three households that hold a common opinion, and working from there.

And that also leads onto the garden and the issue of the next tenement over. We need to make some friends there too — to even see some faces would be an incredible help. Last summer there were regular barbecues from the other tenement so maybe we’ll be able to build on that too.

I’m sure this is a recurrent problem. The renting tenants in the stair just seem to come and go, and we’ve recently lost two owners who had been for a long time, so we lost a lot of common understanding and knowledge in a short period of time. This happens all over the city, all over the country. But how, right now, do we deal with it?

I’m not long back from Greener Leith’s latest evening community talk. This is the second event I’ve been to, held in the Kirkgate Community Centre at the foot of Leith Walk. Last month was about hedgerow foraging which was quite interesting — I bought the book! — but I haven’t really followed up on any of the notions it inspired. It is much easier to just buy the book…

Today they were continuing the food theme with a talk from Donald from the local convivium of the Slow Food movement. Last month’s talk was very well attended so it was quite embarrassing to realise that I was the only person in the room that wasn’t (a) a presenter or (b) on the Greener Leith organising committee. I was “the public”.

I don’t really have much to say about Slow Food as an organisation — they are bound up by some vague notion of anti–fast food but don’t define themselves particularly. Most of their members internationally are local food producers and independent farmers of one type or another. There are a lot of them, and they have a big meeting once every two years to celebrate their strange unity, but they are not really important for Leith.

Leith has not much in the way of wheat fields or cattle so the focus locally is obviously on the more urban concerns — local producers and retailers, and hooking them up with each other and the general public. Getting people to investigate the bakers rather than Tesco, and getting the local farmed produce into the hands of people who live in Edinburgh.

Since there were so few of us in the room it was just a chat rather than a presentation, and the presenter brought some small examples of local produce — a loaf of sourdough from the Manna House and some bottles of Stewart Brewery beers. We talked (well, they talked; I mostly listened) about local food issues and small ideas to change the way food is seen.

The most concrete, and actually quite interesting, idea that was mentioned was a Slow Food Table at the Leith Gala. Try to get as many people to contribute something to a table of food which people are encouraged to sit at and take time to eat. Provide a contrast to fast food served elsewhere at the gala. Maybe there will be more of this?

Of course the real problem with food, locally and in many urban areas, is that so many people have been disconnected from food for so long that, even if given a plentiful and cheap supply of good food, they don’t know what to do with it. Trying to bring together local professional chefs and schoolchildren has not met with much success. I have no real solutions to offer, other than to note that the people who sell fruit, vegetables, meat and fish must have some passion for it, and should be consulted. (Obviously I’m ignoring the supermarkets in this, but there are a fair number of “high street” food shops in Leith which fit the butcher, greengrocer, fishmonger archetype.)

Well, I have volunteered what I can and hopefully come June we’ll have a plan to put into execution for the Leith Gala.

Some of you might remember a TV broadcast from a couple years ago called The Great Global Warming Swindle. The central thesis, that cosmic rays are the central cause of global warming, has been long disproved. (To make the film-makers’ case more appealing they, uh, “omitted” the last 30 years of data.) Two of the interviewees filed official complaints with Ofcom because their views were misrepresented and their scientific findings distorted in order to show the opposite effect. The producer has previous record on this point and it’s a wonder anyone wants to work with him at all.

I bring all this up to mention that I saw the Ofcom summary by accident the other day:

However, whilst Ofcom is required by the 2003 Act to set standards to ensure that news programmes are reported with “due accuracy” there is no such requirement for other types of programming, including factual programmes of this type.

You heard it here first — factual programmes do not have to be factual.

It seems documentaries, or programmes which look like documentaries, do not have to hew to anything we might call reality. Graphs, figures and statistics can be pulled out of the producer’s… hat and this wouldn’t matter.

The remainder of the ruling makes for some quite depressing reading. You can get away with whatever you want if you introduce your detractors as “the orthodoxy”, mention that they represent a “distortion of a whole area of science” and that they are conspiring to “invok[e] the threat of climatic disaster, to hinder vital industrial progress in the developing world”. Because despite all that you are letting the opposing view have a say. The excuses can stretch even further if your programme is viewed as being “polemical”, as if unsubstantiated nonsense is its own rightness.

Totally unrelated to the above, the same document also contains other rulings, the last of which quite amused me. It was regarding a complaint against subscription-only SportXXXGirls, in which the female presenters “perform[ed] explicit sexual acts” and “invited viewers to contact them for ‘adult chat’ via a premium rate text service”. The complaint was that the “live chat” was a repeat from the week before, which wasn’t obvious (unless you’d seen the previous screening, I guess…). I can only imagine how often they get complaints like this — I don’t know how many people consider complaining about subscription porn channels — but the result was that “Ofcom viewed the recordings supplied and noted that the material shown on the 10 February 2008 was a repeat of that shown on 3 February 2008”. What a strange job…

Tomorrow (that is, 30 January 2010) there are going to be a number of demonstrations/protests outside branches of Boots, under the general name of the 10:23 campaign. At 10:23, a bunch of not-very-brave people will be “overdosing” on homeopathic pills. I think the plan is that each person takes a bottle full. This will, of course, have no downsides whatsoever because there is nothing in it.

The point in this case is not to point out the stupidity of homeopathy to the people in the street, though it will no doubt do that. It’s to make the point that Boots sell these things — have whole aisles devoted to these little white pills — even though they admit there is no evidence for their effectiveness. There are even Boots-branded homeopathic pills on the shelves! And at the same time they sell you something useless, they want you to know that their pharmacists are trustworthy enough to dispense medicines with active ingredients, and give advice about these medicines.

I leave you with James “the Amazing!” Randi, to explain the absurd details of homeopathy in his wonderful way:

This is the second grocery-shopping post I have made in a row, which is slightly alarming. In future will all my blog posts have some theme of standing in the cheese aisle, fretting over which kind of cheddar to buy? I hope not.

Anyway, at some point in the last six months — and I can honestly say I refuse to hunt down the references because it simply does not matter — the supply of 100W incandescent light bulbs has dried up. By law. I refuse to act like it is my human right to buy bulbs that are hot enough to burn fingertips. No doubt there are professional Boring Farts out there doing that very thing, in between complaining about the weather forecast being in degrees Celsius and milk being sold in litres.

Instead I will say something that really matters:

• The aforesaid Co-op (the one that occasionally stock Our Kind of Tea™) has decided that No 100W Bulbs means No 100W-equivalent Bulbs. I’m only asking for something like a 20W bulb, but the most I can buy is a 65W-equivalent (=14W actual).
• Sooner or later there will be a generation that doesn’t know what a 100W light bulb means. Woah.

From Charlie Brooker’s latest column:

God/no God? No God. We’re all freelancers. Some of us may choose to sit in imaginary offices from time to time, pretending to receive memos from our made-up boss, or enjoying watercooler conversations about the loving/vengeful/forgiving nature of our fictional chief with our colleagues, but no matter how many hours we clock up, it doesn’t alter the fact that no one’s actually running things on the top floor. This is good news. We own the company!

So, what’s up? Em, it was my birthday two weeks ago. Went to ESI (a Leith restaurant owned by an Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman) and had a good time there with Helen. The service was quite slow but the food was good and there was no faulting the company.

I also organised a sort of test-the-waters meeting of Edinburgh Haskell users. Four of us met in the pub on a Sunday afternoon, and I received two more emails from other people who would have come if I had given more notice. The time didn’t go particularly easily — one of our number was horrendously awkward to talk to — but it was a start. No plans to do anything more with it at the moment.

But out of that (and the advertisements I sent to the Haskell Cafe mailing list) I got a message from Eric Kow, asking if I wanted to help organise a Haskell Hackathon this August to coincide with the ICFP and Haskell Symposium in Edinburgh. So I’ve been thinking about that and coming to realise just how impossible it is to get anything organised while the Festival is on…

Meanwhile I feel that things are going quite well at work, which coincides with the contracting budget being cut to almost-nothing. A good handful of my colleagues are now on redundancy notice. I managed to get the one job for which there was funding, but that only lasts six months. In January or thereabouts I will be looking for something new. I’m not sure what. Helen’s horror stories from work make me think I could at least be a force for good if I tried programming with the NHS. But another part of me thinks the problem is likely to be systemic and no amount of enthusiasm or skill can make up for some problems.

It feels weird to now be looking for jobs — paying attention to the job market, at least — and realising that I have those “two years’ experience” that employers seem so keen on. I had to revise my CV when applying for this position with the extended funding (though strictly speaking it’s exactly what I was doing before) and it’s staggering to think how little experience was expanded to fill those two pages. But now I feel more confident — not only in my own abilities but also in knowing what’s important when applying/interviewing for a new position. I actually have points which are important to me as a developer. They always say you should have something to ask a potential employer in an interview, but knowing what to ask only really comes with that experience.

All this doesn’t get around the fact that applying for jobs is a horrible thing to have to do and I’m not at all looking forward to it.

This is an announcement:

• The Science Behind It

  Ever get really annoyed by the BBC not providing adequate citations for their science and medicine stories? At most we get a researcher’s name and maybe the name of an institution. Doesn’t that really bug you?

  This website is the answer to all your problems. It scans whatever BBC or Reuters article you give it and then tries to extract whichever meagre details the journalist included. This information is used to search MedLine and give you a list of articles which may have been the source.

  This is a really fantastic resource. I highly recommend using the “bookmarklet” as well. Whenever you’re reading an interesting or dubious article, just press the “bookmarklet” button and The Science Behind It will magically read your current URL and try to find the real data. Many congratulations to Andy, the author of this great service.

• Just Fucking Cite It

  This is admittedly more juvenile and less immediately informative, but in my opinion still necessary. My little contribution.

  The internet is full of people who can, and should, make more references. Bloggers don’t have any word limit. Inline URLs don’t even add to the word count, since they are seamlessly integrated with the text. But still people don’t cite their sources. And it makes me mad. It’s lazy and sloppy and reduces transparency. It also engenders distrust, especially for bloggers who are trying to push a social or political agenda. Anyone can lie about anything when they don’t give their readers the chance to check the facts themselves.

  So next time you see someone make a claim about some new science story on a blog or forum, use this link — and challenge them to justify their claim.

The fledgling JFCI was created after reading this post on Language Log. The first reference to TSBI that I saw also appeared in the comments to that post.

From Boing Boing:

If one dislikes Monday because of school or work then why does one continue to go back to work or school? I believe that folks like this are probably in the wrong job or studying the wrong course and probably should look for something that enables them to enjoy Mondays — and every other day for that matter. Those who genuinely enjoy work or school probably won’t give “Work or School” as the reasons they dislike Monday.

Interesting, but I don’t agree with the conclusions. I think it’s specifically change that people object to. They don’t like to return to work because they’ve just had two days sitting around at home, relaxing over lunch with family — living in a holiday lifestyle. Then it all has to change.

The same happens to me every single day. In the morning I don’t want to get out of bed, and the evening I don’t want to go to bed. What I’m doing now is always far more interesting than something I might be doing later. And truth be told, last Friday I was late leaving work because I couldn’t bear to leave what I was doing.

So it’s not really about not enjoying the work. For me, at least, it’s about not enjoying the change and resenting that context switch.