Apathy Sketchpad

With the issue of Scottish independence looming again, the question of the flag has come up. I really like the Union Jack. I think it’s an ace flag. But The Sun have mocked-up a version of how it might look without Scotland. I’m not impressed. First of all the airbrushing is clumsy, and secondly the Irish cross should be centred in each quadrant without the white, Scottish one competing for the space.

But mostly, I think it lacks imagination. Let’s bring Wales into the fold. This would seem an obvious start:

I quite like that. But then I discovered that Wales has a back-up flag, so we could have this rather dangerous number:

Who’s going to mess with the United Kingdom with that flying from our castles? That’s a flag you do not fuck with.

Better still, Northern Ireland has more flags than a Republican fundraiser, so if the above is considered too intimidating, we could go with this:

While I can think of no more British act than our current practice of voluntarily not having a dragon on our flag when we’re plainly entitled to one, I can think of no legitimate reason why we shouldn’t have a dragon playing a titty-harp as our national standard.

I challenge anyone to design a better flag for anything.

I saw a story a couple of days ago about a new 50 pence piece designed for the 2012 Olympics, which attempts to explain the offside rule of football, that least popular of the Olympic sports.

There was some disagreement over the accuracy of its description, but I think that’s incidental, since probably most people understand it anyway. It’s like removing bras. We like to keep up a pretence that it’s difficult so it’s more impressive when invariably all of us can manage it almost every time, but basically it’s not. Personally I am no football fan and understand the offside rule completely, except for how someone in possession of the football can possibly fail to be “involved in active play” of the game of football. My point, though, is this: I really like the idea of using coins to educate, and fitting a meaningful concept into the small area of even a 50p is an interesting challenge. Here are my ideas. I welcome yours. Any topic, maths, science, language…

This happened to me earlier. Or yesterday. I forget.

I double-clicked a variable name in Visual Studio to select it, but instead it selected the line below. I pressed the ‘up’ key to move the cursor to the right place, then double-clicked again since Windows offers no other way to instantly select the word under the cursor.

Obviously it selected the word below again, because the mouse cursor hadn’t moved. The keyboard cursor had. My question is: why are there two cursors?

I can only focus on one point on the screen at the same time. I never do one thing with the mouse and another with the keyboard. When I’m using the keyboard, wouldn’t it make sense for the mouse cursor to vanish, and reappear wherever the keyboard cursor is when I touch the mouse again?

Grabbing the mouse is easy to handle. The converse situation I’m less sure about: automatically positioning the keyboard cursor wherever the mouse ends up seems like a bad plan to me. Maybe it’s because the current system is ingrained on my brain by now, but the toolbars at the top of text boxes would, I fear, become a nightmare. Instead, I would suggest that clicking on a text area sets the keyboard cursor and hides the mouse one, and simply typing while the mouse cursor is visible causes it to quickly move to the keyboard cursor and then vanish.

Selecting a block of text would have to leave the mouse cursor, in case you then want to drag the newly-selected text, or click “copy” or whatever. Again, typing would replace the selection and hide the mouse cursor as before.

I think I’d also like my mouse to have Wiimote-style tilt sensors in so I could pick it up and perform big gestures like “back” and “forward” but frankly I suspect that would be as annoying as voice control after as little as four minutes.

Hang on a minute,

Matt Baker: So Jeremy, … Do you the strikes are a good idea?

Jeremy Clarkson: It’s been fantastic.

…

Alex Jones: Do you know anybody who …

Matt Baker: [interrupts – inaduiable] – being on strike today?

Jeremy Clarkson: … No, absolutely. We have to balance it though, don’t we because this is the BBC.

Alex Jones and Matt Baker: Exactly.

Jeremy Clarkson: Frankly, I’d have them all shot!

…

Matt Baker: Well, … of course those are Jeremy’s views.

Jeremy Clarkson: I just … ! I was just giving two views for you!

Isn’t that perhaps the cleverest joke he’s ever made? I appreciate that’s damning it with faint praise. Frankly, the last line reads like the last panel of a Dinosaur Comic.

He’s mocking the BBC’s silly pretend “balance”, and the response is “SACK HIM!”

I think that might be a bit mad.

It seems to me that if you spend two decades paying someone to be offensive and obnoxious, it’s a bit fucking rich to get all offended when they say something offensive and obnoxious.

Jeremy Clarkson says offensive and obnoxious things on Top Gear and in his columns — whether or not he writes either — and people like him for it. Some of them take it as a silly side-show, while others fail to see the comedy pastiche beneath his brash façade and actually believe his absurd rantings. Nobody could believe them if they’d thought about it at all, but luckily many people have been conditioned not to. Which group Clarkson himself falls into is a matter for philosophers — certainly nowhere in his contract does it say he has to think about the offensive and obnoxious things he says provided he continues to say them.

A third group are offended by the whole thing and don’t watch Top Gear or read his columns, but sometimes one of them stumbles across one of his silly, pretend opinions in a misguided channel hop, or maybe when someone leaves whichever paper carries  his column on a train. Then they get all cross and rant about it in the pub or the Daily Mail.

This week, he was accidentally allowed onto the One Show, where he did what his performing-monkey training had long since programmed him to do and said something offensive and obnoxious. I would suggest that the problem here is not Clarkson, who was only obeying the ingrained instructions carved on his brainstem years ago by his employers and fans, but whichever idiot producer at the One Show thought it would be a good idea to show the unsuspecting third group their automatic person-offending machine.

For pity’s sake. If you’ve built a robot that shouts “they’re all cunts!” every time you ask it a question, don’t put it on television and ask it about sympathetic or minority groups. Who could possibly think that would end well?

I say, instead of sacking Clarkson, we cancel the One Show and replace it with recordings of Richard Feynman until everyone learns to think again.

I am normally the first to defend Facebook’s various redesigns, although only because most of the vitriol directed at them is from people who know where everything used to be but not how to look for them. But this one… this one is a bit of a disaster, isn’t it?

It’s just… everything. Everywhere. All at once. I mean, obviously I put the blur on myself, but still… Google’s been systematically taking out UI elements and spacing things out, and as a result all their websites look gorgeous. The new-look Gmail has been out for about a day and already people can’t believe how cramped the “compact” option is — even though that was the only size available on Tuesday morning. I have genuinely stopped visiting Facebook unless it emails me.

So here’s what I’d do. I’ve tried to keep all this within Facebook’s general ethos: profitable, brand-friendly, oriented towards real-life connections, wants to be your home page, and big on news feeds. I really like the idea of Facebook and I wouldn’t want to turn it into Twitter or Google+. I just don’t like the direction it’s going or the handcart it is riding there.

1. Scrap the stupid fucking chat/news sidebar thing

Nobody likes it, four columns is too many, and it does nothing the main site can’t do. The one potentially useful part of it — the old-style chat panel — is by default scrolled off the screen with an invisible scrollbar, while the scrollbar next to the sidebar scrolls the page on the other side of it. Use the space freed up by eliminating the sidebar to increase the font size to something halfway readable.

2. Get rid of all the irrelevant crap

The right navigation bar should only have information relevant to the page you’re looking at. No status updates from a year ago, bad suggestions for people it thinks I might know, random photos, or anything like that. If you’re on the main landing page then it should have notifications, event invitations and so forth. And if you click “10 invitations”, it should take you to the events page rather than creating a pop-out with another link in it. If you really must put an advert in there then go ahead, but stop accepting adverts from obvious scams, because it’s unethical and makes you look dodgy. If the adverts could not take the form of polls, that’d be nice too.

Get rid of all the bullshit in the news feed, too. I don’t care if my friends change their pictures. I don’t care if Sarah is now friends with some guy I’ve never heard of. I don’t care if someone’s got a high score in a game. I don’t care if a friend “likes” a status posted by someone I don’t know. Basically, if my friends didn’t explicitly tell me about something, please assume I won’t care about it and don’t show it to me. Oh, and ditch “questions”. The overlap between “people who post questions” and “people whose friends like to see questions” must be essentially nil.

Basically, show me things I want to see, not things you want me to see. I won’t click on the latter anyway, and it will only deter me from visiting the site at all.

3. Never guess what might be important to me

Suggested friends should have at least 10 connections to me rather than having a passing acquaintance with one of the 200 people I’ve vaguely met since I joined the site. Similarly, “top stories” are a bit of a disaster area. The other day, some guy I barely know commented on a photo I’d never seen, in Russian, and Facebook considered this a “top story”. I moaned about that on Facebook and the first comment was (essentially) “Dammit, Facebook considers this status a top story”. Hopefully, “top stories” won’t be needed once the newsfeed is free of all the crap I just mentioned. I wouldn’t mind this too much if Facebook hadn’t insisted I tell it who my “close friends” are — so now their updates come through as notifications and the news feed has its own, independent and much less accurate stab at what it reckons I might care about.

Similarly with the left navigation bar: it has basically random shit in it. It should have the main navigation links — newsfeed, events, messages and so on — and then a list of your favourite pages — like the “quick links” lab experiment in GMail, this would let you bookmark any page within Facebook, be it a fan-page, profile, group, event, status, photo, album, message thread, whatever — and then a list of non-favourited online people so you could chat to them. The little icons for each section/group would remain, except that profiles’ icons would be a green or blue circle depending on whether the person was online. The gist here is that I decide what I want to see, rather than Facebook’s servers guessing. Even a casual glance at the chat sidebar shows they’re shit at that.

On the subject of the left navigation bar, the ‘friends on chat’ thing needs to have names, and online indicator spots big enough that I can discern their colour. I really thought this stuff was obvious.

4. Scrap “smart lists” and implement “circles” in a sane way that makes sense for Facebook

“Smart Lists” are rubbish. Nobody’s interested. Google+ beat you hands down and you slavishly copied it, except hopelessly missing the point. Thanks to circles, people use the same Google+ account for professional and personal networking — and with Facebook’s market dominance, getting circles right could help it be LinkedIn and FetLife at the same time, to the same people. (Another thing Facebook does hopelessly at the moment is adult content. It’s insistence everything should default to public means it has to have a blanket ban on nudity, and that really restricts how it can be used.)

I think a better way to integrate circle-like functionality into Facebook would be to add what I call “contexts”. Each of your friends, groups, pages and subscriptions exists in one or more contexts — Manchester, skepticism, television, university, whatever — so let us build them. The ‘context’ page would then show all the posts from those groups, people, pages and so on. The “friends” context, and perhaps the “family” one, would be special — these would have to be mutual and would act as the friend list does now — these are the people you can invite to events and message freely and so on.

I get that nobody wants to sort through 200 ‘friends’ and put them in lists, but still, “Smart Lists” isn’t the answer. There’s no point trawling my friend list looking for anyone who’s listed “Manchester University” under “education” because that’s almost certainly not how I know them and it’ll miss loads of people who haven’t bothered filling that out. On the other hand, pretty well everyone at Skeptics has joined the Facebook group for it, so I could click “make context from this group”, it would create a new context named after the group and add the members and the group itself, and I’d be 90% of the way there. Add a couple of feeds and a page or two, and I’m sorted. I could probably import a couple of other skeptic groups and have a really useful resource.

Then I can add interests and other profile information to contexts, so my skeptic friends can see I’m on the acupuncture discussion boards without my family thinking I endorse it, and a Mistress could be open with all her subs about what fetishes she’s into without her boss being able to see it too. Friends and colleagues would see different email addresses. I would imagine maybe that members of a context could see that you were connected with other members of the same context, as distinct from Google+’ system where you can simply see a list of people in my circles without knowing which ones they’re in — so your professional and personal circles wouldn’t see each other.

5. Allow me to pull in information from outside Facebook

Facebook is keen to be my homepage, and it’s equally keen to know what I like, so it’s absurd that they force content creators to support them before I can read it there. Google Reader doesn’t work that way and nor should this. It will only encourage people to create fan pages if they discover they already have an army of Facebook subscribers.

Twitter has a good API, too. Let me add Twitter users to my contexts too. And perhaps tweet comments as replies if I’ve linked my Twitter account. Heck, maybe even invent a Twitter account for me if I haven’t. Turn Facebook into a viable Twitter client. Don’t compete with Twitter — eat it.

While we’re here, though, scrap the dumb “fan pages” generated automatically from Wikipedia, because they’re just hopeless.

6. Let me put non-Facebook content on my profile

Once the above is done, I should be able to add RSS and Twitter feeds to my profile so people can choose whether to subscribe in Facebook or not — and if I notice lots of people read my RSS or Twitter through Facebook, I should be able to link them so I can interact with them directly. Right now, I have to choose to show all my tweets to everyone or none to anyone, and I’ve no idea what my friends would prefer. Facebook are sort of fixing it, since I can now just about hide certain kinds of updates from certain people only, but really, who’s going to use that in any but the most annoying cases? And why should I have to have to import my blogposts as “notes”? (Answer to rhetorical question: so my friends don’t suspect the content is available elsewhere.)

I should be able to use Facebook as a landing page in the mould of Minicard. They want to be my permanent email address, why not my permanent homepage too? If it’s easy to set up then people will go for it, much like all bands have a mySpace just because it’s easy to set up and you can put songs on there. And then your users are pretty well locked in.

7. Fix the email alerts

I’ve mentioned this before, and they’d nearly got this right — implementing nearly all my ideas — and then they decided everyone was getting too many emails so they unilaterally changed all my settings and now I only get an email if I get a message and don’t visit the site for a bit. By the time it deigns to email me about it, there might be several replies. Not good enough, especially when they’re trying to set themselves up as a viable primary email address. A secondary messaging service that doesn’t proactively alert me when I have new mail is worse than useless — it’s like prayer or homœopathy: it gives people the illusion of having contacted me so they won’t bother actually doing so.

Secondly, the “other messages” folder is a liability. Events send me important updates and I never see them because they’re ferreted away without even a badge update on the home screen, much less an email. I have to explicitly check for these ‘bacn’ messages. It’s absurd — why would I not want updates about events I’m attending?

8. Duplex API

Right now, it’s very easy for developers to piss information all up someone’s Facebook wall but almost impossible to take information from Facebook to use elsewhere. This is why Twitter apps are varied and fascinating while Facebook apps are X-to-Facebook syndicators, quizzes and vampyric ‘games’ designed to make you spam adverts to your mates. Facebook is built on newsfeeds, and every single one of them should be available as RSS. If my tweets go to Facebook but my Facebook updates don’t go to Twitter, then Twitter, not Facebook, will become my social hub.

9. Add a calendar

Facebook is a great events handler, and not bad for messaging if you use it as your primary provider, so why not add a calendar? Isn’t that just common sense? Isn’t that a great way to get me to visit every day? Isn’t it a great way to convince office networks to unblock you? I use Google Calendar for work and I’m sure people would use Facebook for it if it supported that and didn’t mean sharing all your drunken photos with everyone on your friends list. As an added bonus, it could show you your schedule around the time of events you’ve been invited to so you’d know if you were available.

It’d be nice to have the calendar available when you were planning an event too, and for preference some system to create a dateless event and let people tell you when they were and weren’t available.

If the calendar and messages could be available via Microsoft Exchange or similar so I could use the native apps on my phone, that would be even better, although I imagine Facebook would rather I use their app.

10. It should always be obvious what is going on

If adding someone to a list will email them, tell me before I do it. If you add “following” as well as “friending”, make it clear that that is what is happening. We don’t trust you, so be more open with us until we do, and then keep doing it — for a start you can make the Friend Finder use Gmail’s API rather than requiring my password like a scam website would. And if you’re advertising a dating app, don’t add “Brian Jones uses this!” underneath, because that will only discourage me from going anywhere near it — people generally aren’t keen to broadcast their resorting to internet dating to all their friends. Quite apart from anything else, stuff I don’t want my friends to know is usually stuff that will bore them and I feel sure we covered this in point 2.

In short, I think Facebook has the potential to be far more useful than it already is. It could easily be more widely applicable while at the same time appearing far more focussed than it is. It’s decreasingly obvious what Facebook is for, and that needs addressing, especially if they’re going to go for a TweetDeck-style intimidating-wall-of-text-based interface.

And maybe I’ve totally missed a key point, and all this wouldn’t work and Facebook’s way really is the best for all sorts of reasons I don’t understand — but if so then Facebook need to discuss it on their blog rather than filling it full of propaganda about people finding long-lost relatives or whatever on their website. But right now it seems like they’re adding features haphazardly and quietly deleting them again a year later if they’ve hopelessly failed. If they have a vision, they’ve not communicated it to me effectively.

People are not good at learning lessons from death.

When Jade Goody died of cancer, the tribute that the world decided on was to promote advanced screening. Advanced screening would not have saved Jade, though, and we know this because she had it and ignored it. She had four separate diagnostic tests come back positive, and three times she had an operation to remove the cancer. The fourth time, she couldn’t face it. I can’t say I entirely blame her. There must come a point like that for anyone.

But hey, boosting cancer screening numbers, even in the short term, is a pretty damn good legacy. How many of you have saved a life?

When Steve Jobs died of cancer, the tribute that the world decided on was to demand money for the fight against that type of cancer. Research would not have saved Steve, though, and we know this because he had it and ignored it. The cancer Jobs had was entirely operable, and he might be alive today (I’ve not done the research on this claim but it’s not exactly bold given the timing) had he agreed to have the operation in the first place instead of indulging in quackery — or in terms that owners of his products will relate to, he stopped working and nobody could open him up to fix anything.

And hey, boosting cancer research funding is a damn good legacy too, but it fairly obviously isn’t one Jobs wanted. If he gave money to charity, he did so secretly, and certainly the image is that he didn’t.

None of which is to say don’t give money to cancer research — by all means do. It’s just to say that if you admire someone, learn from their successes. Learn from their mistakes. Learn from their teachings. Don’t go with your first knee-jerk reaction to the thing that killed them — because then you risk it eclipsing them, and anyone worth admiring is better than it.

Hello!

I just saw this news story on singingbanana’s Tumblr:

The footwear expert made what the judge believed were poor calculations about the likelihood of the match, compounded by a bad explanation of how he reached his opinion. The conviction was quashed. But more importantly, as far as mathematicians are concerned, the judge also ruled against using [Bayes' theorem] in the courts in future.

What?

In case you don’t know, Bayes’ Theorem is a formula from the days when mathematicians could get away with just naming bits of common sense after themselves, and states:

P(A|B) = P(B|A) × P(A) ÷ P(B)

That is,

(probability A is true given evidence B) = (probability of finding B if A is true) × (probability of A being true) ÷ (probability of finding B)

Obviously that’s pretty useful in court, and it’s also pretty easy to understand: clearly, (probability of finding B) = (probability of finding B if A is true) × (probability of A being true) + (probability of finding B if A is false) × (probability of A being false). That’s all the options: A must be true or false. All Bayes’ theorem does is work out in what the proportion of the cases in which B is found, A is true. It’s almost obvious, in an informal kind of way, if you have the right kind of brain.

Point is, you’re now not allowed to use that reasoning in court, which means if your defence depends on any evidence more subtle than “fifteen people saw me across town” then you’d better find another way of phrasing it than this. It’s basically maths, so you ought to be able to work round it and find a more circuitous way of showing the same thing.

Strictly, the ruling was that you can’t use Bayes’ theroem “unless the underlying statistics are firm” but that doesn’t help a lot. In qualitative terms, all the theory says is that something is more likely if you have evidence for it — so I think we can safely assume it’s the use of maths that the judge objected to. It’s the same reasoning behind the Drake equation: people are bad at guessing big, complicated things like “how many aliens might there be” or “how likely is this guy to be guilty given we found this footprint”, but pretty good at estimating simple things like “how long might an alien race beam signals into space” or “how likely is it there’d be a footprint like this just here”. You can do the same thing if you get to the tie-break in a pub quiz: come up with a way to work out the answer from easier to estimate quantities and crunch the numbers. You’ll almost certainly do better than the team that guesses the final answer directly.

And that is why this ruling is worrying: because not only has a judge fallen foul of the natural but wrong tendency for humans to overestimate their own judgement and distrust logic and reason, but they’ve ruled that all other judges and lawyers have to make the same error. It’s a shame, because while any large group tends to be a bit rubbish at thinking, judges are usually pretty good — as, I think, is anyone impartial with the time and inclination to look into things.

I didn’t know they could do that. (I actually suspect they can’t and the story is overblown, but I wouldn’t know enough to decide.) What’s next — a judge commits the prosecutor’s fallacy and then rules that everyone else has to do it as well? Idunno, seems a bit dangerous to me.

It just seems like it’d be fairly easy to set someone up if there’s a big list of thought processes their defence lawyer isn’t allowed to invoke. Or design a crime that could be easily proven but not with the limited methods of thinking allowed in the courtroom.

There are some interesting mental exercises there — coming up with crimes or frames for differently handicapped justice systems — but not ones actual lawyers should have to bother with.

Late last year, I read a post on another skeptic’s blog which annoyed me. It had nothing to do with skepticism. It was about how pleased he was that his preferred footballing troupe had beaten what he called “the scum”. It was this term that annoyed me.

(I’m not going to link to the specific post because I don’t think it’s relevant. It’s an example of a wider trend and I don’t want to pick on anyone. Arguably I’m cutting out the opposing arguments by doing so but then he can link it himself if he reads this and wants to.)

Obviously I’m well aware that “scum” is a pretty common term for your footballing rivals. And in this case he was insulting the opposing players, not their fans, although this is why that doesn’t make it OK:

I just can’t see how calling Ipswich Town and/or their fans “scum” is any different from using a racial or religious slur, except that it’s less imaginative. In principle there’s nothing to stop you choosing what football team you support, but that’s true of religion and we all know that in practice you can’t really choose either. You get invested in one in childhood, and that’s generally it for life. There are people who will pick whichever is most popular or successful, but they’re widely agreed to be missing the point.

I would hope that any sport worth following would be interesting enough on its own merits without having to pretend that everyone in Ipswich is a massive cunt so you can convince yourself that anything of any genuine meaning or importance has happened on a football pitch since 1914.

When Ron Atkinson called Marcel Desailly as a “lazy, fucking thick nigger”, Jimmy Hill said

In that context, you wouldn’t think that words like nigger were particularly insulting: it would be funny. Without meaning to insult any black men, it’s us having fun.

What about jokes about my long chin? I mean, nigger is black – so we have jokes where we call them niggers because they’re black. Why should that be any more of an offence than someone calling me chinny?

While I agree that calling him “Chinny” is no cleverer than calling Desailly a nigger, neither qualifies as a “joke” to anybody who understands how to construct a joke. It’ll serve the same purpose as a joke, in certain circumstances, but that doesn’t make it one any more than it makes my lap a banqueting table. Quite rightly, nobody bought it and Atkinson resigned. I don’t see how this is different, except that ’scum’ is as common now as ‘nigger’ was in the fifties. ‘Scum’ is perhaps the worst thing I can think of you can call someone without actually knowing anything about them, and here it is being applied to people just based on where they’re from. I think that’s a very ugly aspect of football culture that is very probably putting people off getting into it, and I think it’s a downright vindictive thing to say while celebrating a win.

I think that just because it’s accepted doesn’t mean it’s OK, I think that fans of a skeptical bent should be more self-critical about these things, and I think that “banter” implies a level of wit well beyond chanting “we all hate Ipswich scum” for an hour and a half.

I recently moved, and with me came a big stack of paper books, most of which I’ll never read again — not properly — but still most of which I’d be unhappy to lose. And sure, the shelf looks suitably impressive with my array of literature, but the shelf would be far better used storing almost any other objects.

So I think it would be really cool if there was a system where could give the physical copies to my local library, who would contact the publishers, who in turn would send me a free copy of the ePub version of the same books.

The library gets free stuff. I get a shelf back. The publishers get royalties as libraries pay a small fee per rental. Maybe publishers lose out as libraries and their patrons read my copy instead of buying their own; maybe they make more money as libraries replace my worn copy with new, or patrons get hooked on series I haven’t finished yet. Maybe the ebooks could be tax-subsidised to encourage donations; maybe the PR benefits would sway publishers without subsidy.

Would this work? Does it already exist? How can it be set up? I don’t know any of these things. Do you? I don’t know that either.