Quotulatiousness

June 21, 2011

Would you pay $23,698,655.93 for a book about flies?

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

This link was sent to one of my various mailing lists. It’s an amusing little story about a very expensive book and how the price on eBay got so out of hand:

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly — a classic work in developmental biology that we — and most other Drosophila developmental biologists — consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

I sent a screen capture to the author — who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.

At first I thought it was a joke — a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over a million dollars. And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random — suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?

Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

June 20, 2011

L. Neil Smith on what defines a libertarian

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

From the most recent Libertarian Enterprise where L. Neil is discussing Ann Coulter’s dislike of Ron Paul:

In the column in question, she accuses Dr. Paul of hypocrisy, of being a libertarian who wants to get rid of government (both of which are untrue) while at the same time wanting people to elect him President.

There are two (and only two) fundamental tenets that an individual must accept wholeheartedly and without reservation in order to call him- or herself a libertarian. As decent and likable a fellow as Dr. Paul happens to be, I have never heard him specifically endorse either one.

If I am wrong, please correct me; it would be good news.

First of all, you have to regard yourself — as well as each and every individual around you — as the sole proprietor of his or her own life and, for better or worse, all of the products of that life, including the fruits of your labor and, equally, the smoke from your chimney. The concept is called “absolute self-ownership” — accept no substitutes.

Second — and this is the social and political manifestation of absolute self-ownership — you have to agree never to initiate physical force against another human being for any reason whatever, nor to advocate this initiation, or delegate it to someone else. This concept is called the “Zero Aggression Principle” and it is the absolutely indispensable bedrock on which political libertarianism rests.

If anyone argues with you about that, it’s because he (or she) wishes to reserve some right that he (or she) falsely imagines he (or she) has, to employ force against you whenever he (or she) feels it necessary or convenient. For the sake of national security. Or for the children.

Whatever you think of these ideas, they are unquestionably central to everything that is truly libertarian, and all proposed libertarian policies spring from them. Regrettably, the general freedom movement, as well as the Libertarian Party itself, are cluttered today with counterfeit libertarians — Nerfs and LINOs — who can’t make the moral cut. Coulter claims she has one libertarian friend who is “not crazy”, but if she regards him or her as “not crazy”, it’s certain that whoever she’s talking about is not a libertarian at all. This is among the best reasons I can think of for defining libertarianism properly.

June 18, 2011

Tawse celebrates their 10th anniversary

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:28

It’s rather late notice, but if you’re an Al Stewart fan, you might want to visit Tawse Winery today for their 10th anniversary celebration:

Canadian music icon and friend Jim Cuddy returns to Tawse Winery along with “Year of the Cat” singer/songwriter Al Stewart, to help celebrate our 10th anniversary. This very special ‘al fresco’ concert promises to be the event of the summer, and one not to be missed!

Unfortunately, I’m at the other end of Lake Ontario today, visiting CFB Kingston.

June 16, 2011

Apple’s lovely little pre-censorship patent

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:47

Oh, I know it’s supposedly intended to prevent iPhone users from filming at concerts and thereby depriving the promoters and performers of theoretical income, but I’m sure the technology will be used — in addition to, or instead — as a way of preventing certain kinds of citizen journalism.

The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.

A patent application filed by Apple revealed how the technology would work.

If an iPhone were held up and used to film during a concert infra-red sensors would detect it.

These sensors would then contact the iPhone and automatically disable its camera function.

I mentioned my concern to Jon, who sent me the initial link saying, “That sounds like a straight-from-Steve-Jobs kind of ‘how can we make money from censorship’ brain fart. Want to bet that the next thing it’ll allow is governments to automatically prevent iPhone users from filming police ‘doing their job’?

“Literally ‘nothing to see here’, if the technology works as they imply in the article.”

His response: “My bet is that the government application is the first we’ll see of this technology, not the next.”

Update: Oh, good, it’s not just me seeing the cloud instead of the silver lining — here’s Tim O’Reilly with the same concerns:

Doubtless in response to pleas from the entertainment industry, Apple has patented new technology to disable cellphone video based on external signals from public venues. Now imagine if that same technology were deployed by repressive regimes. Goodbye to one of the greatest tools we’ve yet seen for advancing democracy.

Think for a moment about the pro-democracy impact of cellphone video combined with online services like YouTube [. . .] I hope Apple has the guts and good sense never to deploy this technology, and instead uses the patent to prevent it being implemented by others. Yeah, right! If it were Google, that might be more than a vain hope.

Update, the second: Cory Doctorow chimes in:

An Apple patent describes a system for allowing venue owners to override compliant cameras. The patent describes using an infrared signal that compliant cameras would detect; in the presence of this signal, the device would not allow its owner to activate its record function. It is intended for use at live events and galleries and museums, and it will be a tremendous boon to policemen who shoot unarmed subway riders, despotic armies putting down revolutions as well as anyone else who is breaking the law or exercising coercive power.

June 15, 2011

The “Amina Arraf” hoax

Filed under: Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

Brendan O’Neill on how easily the hoaxer’s blog became “a go-to place for liberal hacks, bloggers and tweeters who wanted to know ‘the truth’ about life in Syria.”

The revelation that the Gay Girl in Damascus is actually a stubbly bloke in Edinburgh has sent shockwaves through the media. ‘How could he have done this?’, journalists are demanding of Tom MacMaster, the American self-confessed nerd based in Scotland who for six months pretended to be a dissident dyke in Syria. ‘Doesn’t he know the damage he has done to gay people in the Middle East and to the reputation of political blogging?’

These are the wrong questions. Because the most striking thing about this blogging hoax is not its potential impact over there, but what it reveals about culture, politics and journalism over here. The thing that ought to cause jaws to drop and eyebrows to rise is not Mr MacMaster’s deceitfulness — he isn’t the first mundane man to masquerade as something sexier on the world wide web — but rather the ease with which he planted himself in the cultural consciousness. It is the manipulability of the modern media, their wide-eyed openness to unchecked foreign stories that seem to confirm their prejudices, which should really be in the spotlight.

[. . .]

The media’s current focus on the clever nature of the gay-girl hoax (‘it is an elaborate hoax’, says a track-covering Guardian), overlooks what is easily the most important dynamic in this story: not MacMaster’s alleged powers of persuasion, but the media’s susceptibility to delusion. However well-written or seemingly authentic MacMaster’s blog was — and as it happens, some Syrians have said it was unconvincing — the fact is that it was just a blog; just a self-started website with various bits of personal writing and nothing to suggest that any of it was accurate or authoritative. Those complaining about being duped, Scooby Doo-style, by the apparent master of disguise that is Tom MacMaster need to have a word with themselves: it was their openness to being duped, their embrace of the seemingly made-in-heaven ‘gay girl in Damascus’ narrative with its achingly right-on contrast between a morally sensitive LGBT gal and a male-dominated regime, which really blew this blog out of all proportion.

Daily link roundup

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:16

More links that don’t quite make it as separate blog entries.

  • North Carolina shipwreck officially recognized as being Queen Ann’s Revenge, the flagship of the infamous pirate Blackbeard. “The Queen Anne’s Revenge, a captured French slave ship, was part of a four-vessel pirate flotilla when it ran aground in 1718 beside the inlet leading to Beaufort and was abandoned. The wreck was found a little more than a mile off the beach in 1996 by Intersal, a private salvage company. The location precisely matched historical accounts of the grounding, and the ship appeared to be the right vintage and size and was armed to an unusual degree. And from the first, the artifacts brought up fit the origins of the ship, the crew and the places it was known to have visited.”
  • If more reporters (and bloggers) followed John Rentoul’s list of forbidden words and phrases the internet would be only a few megabytes in size (really, those phrases seem to appear in every article and blog post lately). “The original Banned List was, of course, George Orwell’s in 1946: dying metaphors (“Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed”); verbal false limbs (“Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of”); pretentious diction (“Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilise, eliminate, liquidate”); and meaningless words (his examples included “class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality”).”
  • Significantly different approaches by Canadian and British militaries to dealing with “operational security” over Libyan operations. “It is interesting to contrast the amount of information the Canadian Forces releases on its missions in Libya. It talks about the war in general terms but CF spokesman Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette claims that detailing the type or numbers of bombs dropped on targets (or even naming specific targets) would violate operational security.” The British, in contrast, are eager to tell how many bombs (and of what type) were dropped from which aircraft and which Royal Navy vessels were involved in combat operations.
  • I was happy to see that Rogier van Bakel is now working with some co-bloggers at a new URL. Here’s the round-up of who, what, and where.

June 14, 2011

The SlutWalk double standard

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

Abigail Ross-Jackson wonders why SlutWalkers would want to “live in a world where women can wear what they want but men are never allowed to woo or whistle?”

Why should men be demonised for wolf-whistling or for attempting to chat up a woman whom they think is attractive? The Slutwalkers’ demand of the right not to be judged is profoundly backward and anti-social. Several of the banners on Saturday’s protest seemed to suggest that men are more like animals than rational human beings. One said: ‘Why am I dressed like a slut? Why are you thinking like a rapist?’ This is worrying, because it points to another serious problem with the Slutwalk phenomenon: its embrace of the widening definition of ‘harassment’. While most people would agree that stalking, groping and so on is unacceptable, amounting to harassment, the idea that looking, thinking, flirting and chatting someone up is also no longer acceptable, and that it amounts to ‘thinking like a rapist’, shows that everyday human interaction is now increasingly being labelled ‘harassment’. What next: no eye contact without written permission?

One woman who took part in the London Slutwalk later tweeted: ‘Thirty-seven people have taken my photo so far on #slutwalk. Just one sought consent first. (Of those I challenged, it’d not occurred to them to ask.)’ This just about sums up the preciousness, and the social aloofness, of Slutwalkers: they seem to imagine that even on a public demonstration at which they have dressed in the most attention-grabbing way, it is somehow a violation of their person for someone to take a photo. Feminists are warping the word ‘consent’, taking it from the realm of rape and applying it to such everyday actions as chatting and taking photos in public. But if we had to seek consent for every form of human interplay, nothing would ever happen; it would be a boring world indeed.

[. . .]

Many millions of us negotiate our relationships, sexual or otherwise, on a day-to-day basis; we don’t need contracts or written consent or any clearly established boundaries. In trying to formalise human relationships, the Slutwalkers’ attitude is actually quite arrogant: they seem to want to reshape the public sphere, and even parts of the private sphere, according to their own tastes and desires, with no regard for the rest of us. One Slutwalker said: ‘I wear what I want. Because I dress this way it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. I get upset if a girl gets dressed up for male attention.’ This really gets to the heart of the double-standard in the Slutwalk phenomenon: they can wear what they like because they are apparently empowered and strong women, but if other women chose to dress in order to attract attention then they should be pitied and looked down upon. Meanwhile men can’t look, pass judgement or flirt for fear of being branded sexist and vile, while women apparently exist in a bubble where they are elevated and protected from the prying eyes and judgements of society.

Yet another call for the government to “do something”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

Sean Gabb dissects what is really going on with the current push for the British government to “do something” about the sexualization of children:

The argument I have been putting is fairly simple, and I have not deviated from it in my various appearances. I argue as follows:

1. It is reasonable to assume that anyone who uses the “protecting the kiddies” argument is really interested in controlling adults. Indeed, one of the organisations most active in pushing for controls is Media Watch UK, which used to be called the National Viewers and Listeners Association, and which, led by Mary Whitehouse, spent most of the 1960s, 70, and 80s arguing for censorship of the media.

2. Ratings on music videos will have no effect, as many of these things are now downloaded from the Internet. As for controls on clothing, children will wear what they want to wear, and it will be hard in practice to do anything about it.

3. How children dress and behave is a matter for their parents to control, not the authorities. Doubtless, there are some rotten parents about. But any law of the kind proposed will not be used against a small minority, but against parents in general. It will be one more weapon in the armoury of social control that has already reduced parents to the status of regulated childminders.

4. Authoritarian conservatives deceive themselves when they think the authorities are fundamentally on their side. The moment you ask for a control to be imposed, you put your trust in people you have never seen, who are not accountable to you, who probably do not share your own values, and who will, sooner or later, use the control you have demanded in ways that you find surprising or shocking. The attempted control of clothing, for example, will certainly be made an excuse for the police to drag little girls out of family picnics to photograph the clothes they are wearing, or to measure their heels to see if they are a quarter of an inch too long. Anyone who dismisses this as an absurd claim has not been reading the newspapers. That is how the authorities behave. Even when it is not an abuse in itself, any law will be abused by them.

June 13, 2011

QotD: Canadian foreign policy

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Further proof of the Americanization of our politics: the journalistic elevation of the drunkard’s walk known as Stephen Harper’s foreign policy to the level of a “doctrine.” We spent the post-Gulf War nineties hearing about “the Powell doctrine”, and in 2001, Charles Krauthammer gave George W. Bush a doctrine of his own as a post 9/11 present. Today, the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson gifts our prime minister with his very own “Harper Doctrine,” spelled out as follows:

     “We know where our interests lie and who our friends are,” he declared, “and we take strong, principled positions in our dealings with other nations, whether popular or not.”

I’m no foreign policy guy, and John Ibbitson has taught me more about how Canada works over the years than I like to admit. But apart from supporting Israel “four-square, without reservation” — which Harper does seem keen on — I don’t see the evidence for the rest of it. “No foreign aid funding for abortion” doesn’t seem like much of a doctrine to me. As for “aggressively asserting our sovereignty in the North” … how so?

Andrew Potter, “Canada’s foreign policy, in black and white and orange”, Maclean’s, 2011-06-13

June 12, 2011

Second excerpt from Rule 34 by Charles Stross

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:48

Charles is posting a few excerpts from his soon-to-be-released new book Rule 34. This is the second in the series.

The first part included a definition of that obscure phrase “a two-wetsuit job”:

A two-wetsuit job means kinky beyond the call of duty. [. . .] Back in the naughty noughties a fifty-one-year-old Baptist minister was found dead in his Alabama home wearing not one but two wet suits and sundry bits of exotic rubber underwear, with a dildo up his arse. (The cover-up of the doubly-covered-up deceased finally fell before a Freedom of Information Act request.)

It’s not as if it’s like isnae well-known in Edinburgh, city of grey stone propriety and ministers stern and saturnine (with the most surprising personal habits). But propriety — and the exigencies of service under the mob of puritanical arseholes currently in the ascendant in Holyrood — dictates discretion. If Jase is calling it openly, it’s got to be pretty blatant. Excessively blatant. Tabloid grade, even.

June 11, 2011

PTerry plans his own end, in his own time

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Short of a miracle cure for Alzheimer’s, Terry Pratchett outlines how he plans to commit suicide:

Terry Pratchett, a 62-year-old British writer of comic fantasy novels who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007, says he intends to commit suicide, sitting in a lawn chair outside his country home, listening to the classical church music of Thomas Tallis on his iPod, with a glass of brandy in one hand and a potion of life-ending pills in the other.

“Perhaps, a second brandy, if there is time,” the euthanasia and assisted-suicide advocate quips.

“And since this is England, I had better add, ‘If wet, in the library.’ ”

On Monday, Mr. Pratchett will play host to a real-life suicide when BBC2 television airs a controversial documentary in which he helps a 71-year-old man with motor neurone disease kill himself in Switzerland.

June 9, 2011

Arizona’s First Police Armoured Division goes into action

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Earlier this year, facing a looming threat, with ordinary police procedures considered too ineffective, Arizona teamed up with Hollywood for a solution. Rather than sending a squad car to serve the warrant, Maricopa County unleashes the awesome armoured power of the 1st SS Panzer division police plus actor Steven Seagal:

We have previously followed the feudal system created by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona. Arpaio’s insatiable desire for media attention has led him to turn over areas of his office to Hollywood producers. Last week, Arpaio’s unhinged administration gave the public another bizarre scene as Steven Seagal was seen attacking a home with a tank, armored cars, bomb robot, and dozens of SWAT team members. The crime? Suspected involvement in cockfighting.

The police acknowledge that there was no evidence to suggest that the man was dangerous or that he was armed. He was indeed arrested without a struggle and no guns were found in the house. Well, without a struggle on his part. The armored Seagal attack blew its windows out and caused the neighborhood to think that an invasion was afoot. The huge operations (and its attendant costs) was basically a stage set up to give Seagal good footage for his reality program, “Lawman.” Seagal is shown riding in the tank in the assault on the suspected cockfighter.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

June 7, 2011

Charles Stross previews Rule 34

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:17

It’s due in the stores soon, but if you want a quick preview, Charles Stross has posted the first chapter of his new novel Rule 34 on his personal website:

“Rule 34” should be showing up in shops in 33-35 days (depending where you live). By kind consent of the publishers, I’m able to give you a sneak preview of the first few chapters. So I’m going to roll them out on consecutive Fridays. Here’s the opening. (Note that this is carved out of the final manuscript; there will be some minor differences from the published text — typos fixed in the proof stage, mainly.)

June 6, 2011

SlutWalk arrives in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

Brendan O’Neill is not impressed with the SlutWalkers, calling them “the most anti-social sluts on earth”:

The most annoying thing about the SlutWalk phenomenon, which arrived in Britain at the weekend, is not its knowingly provocative name or even its attempt to make a serious political project of the frazzled Nineties pop trend of Girl Power (“I wear sexy stuff, therefore I am powerful!”). No, it is its inherently anti-social nature. These are the most anti-social sluts on earth. Where I grew up, the catty phrase “she enjoys the company of men” was often used as a euphemism for “slut”, but you could never say that of those taking part in SlutWalk. On the contrary, many of the SlutWalkers seem to see interaction with men — especially cocky, swaggering men — as a dangerous and risky thing, best avoided.

Of course, no one — except maybe Peter Sutcliffe — disagrees with SlutWalk’s spectacularly uncontroversial message that women should be free to dress as they please without getting raped. But it is quite different to expect to be able to dress as you please without attracting *any* attention from blokes. Yet that is what some SlutWalkers seem to be demanding: effectively the right to dress provocatively without ever being looked at, commented on, whistled at or spoken to by a member of the opposite sex. Unless such interaction is clearly solicited, of course.

[. . .]

The high-minded feminists who make up SlutWalk’s supporters and cheerleaders seem to want to opt out of this everyday social interaction, to dress as sluttishly as they like while also being surrounded by some magic forcefield, legally enforced perhaps, which protects them from any unwanted male gaze or whistle. They are prudes disguised as sluts, self-styled victims pretending to be vixens, astonishingly anti-social creatures who imagine it is possible to parade through society dressed outrageously without any member of that society ever making a comment about or to them. This is the highly individuated politics of fear — fear of men, fear of unplanned-for banter, fear of sexual licence — dressed up as radical feminism. But to update an old saying: no slut is an island.

June 3, 2011

The right software tool for the job: Excel is not a database

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

You know how some people, having mastered a particular software tool, keep trying to fit every task into the one tool they know even when it’s awkward to do? I’ve seen people using Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word or another word processor to produce letters — and people using Word to do spreadsheet-like tasks. The old adage seems to still apply in the software world: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It’s apparently not just small companies that suffer from this sort of problem:

The London 2012 Olympics is set be a humanoid spectacle of the like never witnessed by the world’s population before. Or something. But disturbing information has reached us at Vulture Central that reveals the organisation’s entire cultural events database is stored in *gasp* Excel.

A job vacancy currently advertised on the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) website is offering a competitive salary to someone who can maintain and report on data held in Microsoft’s spreadsheet software.

Now, a small biz with few customer accounts might consider Excel to be fit for purpose. But surely housing an Olympic stadium-sized database on a standalone spreadsheet is bonkers, isn’t it?

That’s a mighty big nail for such a small hammer.

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