• These quiz things seem popular on the internet, so here is a one question personality test, without any typing, to try: what is the word you see here?
• Damian Thompson has now admitted his story was nonsense, but what I particularly enjoyed was the reaction to the story’s unravelling on the Jihadwatch site. In particular, the commentator who has won this year’s Dawkins prize for abject and sincere apology:

I am forced to conclude, as others here and elsewhere have concluded, that this story is a tissue of lies, a fabrication, a factual untruth, a malfiscient piece of propaganda advanced only to discredit us by playing upon our credulous (justified?) belief that Islamics would indeed behave in the way portrayed in this story.
Of course Islamics would and could behave in this way but this particular story appears to have no basis in fact – in actual events. It is, in all probability, a Muslim constructed story designed to show us in the worst possible light.”
“In all probability.” Couldn’t put it more judiciously myself.

• Spot the razor blade in this potato: Richard Lewontin, reviewing the life and achievements of Steve Gould, comes to deal with other public intellectuals: “It is even possible to become a public intellectual in science with no institutional home in a technical discipline. Richard Dawkins, who was trained as a biologist and who obviously knows a great deal about genetics and evolution, is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford”
• From the same issue of the NYRB: Tony Judt’s fantastic speech on the holocaust and memory. I think I really should post here the profile of him that I wrote and the Guardian never used.

Looking around for links with which to embellish my last piece, I discovered that almost all of the references on the net to the great Cyril Kornbluth story The Marching Morons stressed its eugenicist—actually dysgenicist—character, something I had entirely forgotten. In my memory, the dysgenic character of the book was merely a boondoggle to drive separation of humanity into an elite and the rest. It is a period piece, rather like the contemporary belief of Alcoholics Anonymous that alcoholism was a genetic disease. The really interesting quality of the story is the idea —as Frederik Pohl puts it in his introduction—that this is about the corruption of the human spirit, not the human gene pool. The point about the marching morons is that they live in a world of the phony and the second rate, and are constantly told that this is the best that history has ever offered anyone. Their cars are elaborately chromed, wonderfully finned—and pedal powered. The superfast trains move at FORTY FIVE miles an hour. Their food—well, anyone who has eaten American fast food recently knows already what it is like.

The real difference between Kornbluth’s dystopia and more modern ones is that the morons in Kornbluth are content with their lot. They never suppose that could enjoy pleasures they cannot themselves imagine. Perhaps I am misremembering, here. But if I am right, that was Kornbluth’s great misreading of the future. No one could suppose that the present underclass is contented with its lot.

I was told the other day about an interesting feature of some of the most widely used blog comment software in the newspaper business, Pluck Site Life, which is used by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and others. Apparently it sorts commentators into three classes, and for those in the lowest class, there is an option for the moderators to put them in a padded cell of their own where they can see their own comments, and no one else can.

This seems to me one of the most cynical and unpleasant pieces of software design I have ever come across, because it destroys the whole idea of community. The purpose, of course, is to resolve the central problem that all newspaper comment sites face, which is that the overwhelming majority of their readers are tediously aggressive loonies. If they are all eliminated, then no one else bothers to show up and the advertisers lose interest. But if they are left to run free round the asylum they drive off any sane or well-informed readers.

The answer I favour is brutal and public moderation, that makes community norms entirely clear without entirely suppressing free speech. Disemvowelment does this very well, since it is possible to reconstruct the original comment, with some effort, if anyone cares enough. So does the YouTube method of hiding, rather than scribbling, obnoxious comments, while the Slashdot system sort of works, too. Perhaps, in practice, the Slashdot system approximates to the Pluck one, since who actually reads the zero-rated comments except for the people who write them?

But in all these cases, the public punishment of bad comments serves to encourage better behaviour, which is what we ought to be trying to do. People go online to show off, and they will respond to incentives about what sort of behaviour gets them admired.

The Pluck method removes all that. The loonies are robbed of their dignity and don’t even know it. It is entirely corporate. It comes from the world of the Marching Morons, which is, increasingly, the world in which we discover we were living all along.

There is a completely insane story up on his blog at the moment about a supposed riot in which “Muslims” shut down one of the public hospitals in Sydney rather than allow an autopsy to be performed on a young man who had died in a car crash.

He lifted it off “Dhimmi watch” which is, exactly as he described it to me on the phone, “One of America’s leading anti-Islamic websites”. As he also said, %(loony)”It is based on an anonymous report”% and he made no attempt to check it out. Indeed, he asked if any of his readers could %(loony)”stand it up”,% since they are obviously better placed to do so than a leader writer on a national newspaper who has been a professional journalist for 25 years.

A few minutes with the Sydney Morning Herald site showed no record at all of anything like the reported events. But a few minutes on Google showed the same story verbatim on a blogger site. This is presumably the source for the “Dhimmi Watch” story. Who else does it have links to? Let’s see … Three British blogs, all of them run by members of the BNP … two Serbian nationalist blogs, both of them campaigning against the extradition of a suspected war criminal from Australia to Croatia … the Brussels Journal, The Gates of Vienna … obviously the sort of people from whom you would trust an otherwise completely unsourced story.

I would report the whole story to the author of a recent book subtitled %(loony)”How we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history”% if I had not suddenly blanked on its, or his, name.

The Telegraph reports today that there are more than a thousand phone-tapping applications made (and granted) every day in Britain. The paper is particularly worked up because it is not just the intelligence services and the police but local councils which have the power to do this. That seems to me all of a piece with the general dysfunction of the post-imperial state: it’s hard to be good at anything when you don’t know what you’re for. And I have taken for granted that everyone will tape everything ever since the fights over RIPA. What did make my mind reel, though, were the last sentences of the piece.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: “It beggars belief that in a nine-month period, based on these figures, the entire City of Westminster could have had their phones tapped – yet Britain remains one of the few Western countries that won’t allow this evidence to be used in court … to prosecute criminals and terrorists.”
But Sir Paul [Kennedy, the information commissioner] confirmed that MI5 and other intelligence agencies remain opposed to any change in the law.

What possible creditable reason can there be for collecting all this informaiton without ever using it in court?

I had to help a friend buy a macbook the other day. My well-informed advice was pretty simple: “You don’t need that or that or even that. Buy the cheapest one in the shop, and, by the way, have you thought of a mac mini instead?” but this got me poking around my own mac mini to see what she was getting into, and that, in turn reminded me of why I had advised her to buy one, and not a PC. It’s not just security or reliability. A properly maintained Windows system has those things, too.

I don’t find macs particularly intuitive, either. If you don’t want to do anything particularly obvious, they hide their unix-ish bits much too well. I needed to set up a small web server on mine, and so wanted to replace Apache with the much more lightweight and easy to configure Abyss Web Server. It took ages to work out how to switch bloody Apache off and then, since the firewall rule is helpfully linked into the services menu, how to open the firewall for a non-Apache web server. I suppose that the sort of user who wants to do that will be able to work out how to in the end, but documentation doesn’t actually harm things.

What Macs do have and Windows doesn’t is a real market in software Almost everything on Windows is either free or compulsory. Because Mac software is seldom free, people make their livings at it, and are able to build things that are impressive and individual. If I were ever to switch, it would be because of programs like Mellel, Yojimbo, Tinderbox, and Textwrangler: stuff made for people who actually work and aren’t given outlook for free.

About fourteen months after I realised there was a problem, I have finally reached a system which allows the faithful reproduction of colours when printing digital photographs on windows. I’m not saying this is the only one. But it works, and it’s cheaper than Photoshop.

The key is colour profiles; your camera and screen will already have them. Really obsessive people will calibrate their monitors, too; but I don’t bother because I use a profile and a reference card. My aim is to get the prints looking right, since they are what other people see.

So the first thing to do is to get a custom colour profile for the printer, inks, and paper that you use—note: you will need a different profile for every paper you use. Fortunately, Permajet do free ones in this country.

Since I print using QImage which is much the best program for getting detail into prints, as well as arranging prints on paper, the custom profiles work perfectly to print exactly what is on screen. I have had that working for a year now; but how to ensure that what’s on screen has the same colours as the original? This is really a problem of white balance, rather than colour profiles, and last month I stumbled across the answer: there is a plugin for Bibble Light which works with colour reference cards to solve it.

I sent off to Mölndal[1] to get a couple of glossy colour matching cards; put them beside the embroidery I was photographing; and when I later looked at the raw file in Bibble at full size and rotated it until it matched the plugin mask, it fixed the colours at once, and this fix could then be pasted into everything else from that session.

Since the resulting prints are going out to galleries, it really matters that they should look as much as possible like what they represent. I suppose the total outlay for this system is around £120—perhaps a bit more. Some of these programs—Bibble, certainly—are cross platform, though Macs presumably have their own tricks. But the point is that this is now rock solid and almost idiot proof, so it’s worth knowing for anyone who needs to produce accurate digital colour in ways that were impossible for amateurs even five years ago, and until recently prohibitively expensive, too.

fn1. There are American firms that make similar things. Sweden is closest to me.

A really excellent piece by Andrew Leonard in his Salon blog. Key quote:

The root of Wall Street’s woes leads back directly to their own strategic missteps, greed, speculation-run-amok, and lack of appropriate supervision. The brightest minds in finance had exactly what they wanted, a playground where the monitors were looking the other way, and they blew it. When the China Investment Corp. pumps in $5 billion to Morgan Stanley, we are not witnessing the triumph of state capitalism, but rather, the embarrassing, humiliating failure of Reagan-Thatcher style unregulated capitalism. So now the U.S. buys Chinese toys at Wal-Mart, and China uses the resulting cash to buy American banks. Hey, anything’s fair in love and war and free markets.
The magnitude of the disaster, from a free market apologist point of view, can hardly be overestimated. By abjectly failing to compensate or cushion the “losers” from globalization—whether by boosting safety nets, improving healthcare, or investing significant resources in education and training—the Bush administration guaranteed a growing groundswell of political opposition to global trade. And by failing to properly oversee financial markets, it provided an opportunity for foreign governments that may not share “American” values to become significant players in the heart of the global financial system. Talk about your legacies! The Bush administration not only may have crippled the Republican Party for a generation, but it also might have broken the free market! Whoops!

Yes, folks: it’s back to Mao and Macchiavelli. Power really does grow out of the barrel of a gun, something which is obscured when the richest country on earth also has the army that everyone else is afraid of. But the Republicans have solved that problem, too.

• Over at the Guardian there is a vigorous discussion of the new Apple Airmac, on which someone mentions that the IBM competitor, the Thinkpad X61, is on sale in the states for $1349 right now. Well, I love the X series thinkpads, and have used nothing else for years. My present one would not be harmed by updating, if I can put it like that. So what does the equivalent model cost from the website here? £1350, near as dammit.
• The Guardian has also published some unusual but clearly labelled pictures of the well-known blogger Daniel Davies. Unfortunately they have vanished from the web version, but anyone with access to yesterday’s paper paper will be rewarded by a trip to G2. Especially if their tastes are perverted.
• A horrible sadness from the Risks List: just before the New Year it reported a small riot in the parking lot of a supermarket (K-Mart) in Wisconsin, after the computer decided to give $4000 in credit to anyone who applied for a card. One witness said: %(sane)”It was a nice brawl. It came from inside to outside. If you go up there, you’ll see hair, earrings, all pulled out on the ground”.% Future historians should remember this moment at the beginning of the slump, when women were tearing out each other’s hair for the chance to borrow money at an interest rate of 30% or so.
• Has anyone else noticed that the 101st fighting Keyboard Kommandos have [a beachhead in Luton]?
• Could anyone who has read the Harry Potter books to the end explain to me why Martyn Minns and his chums are now known, apparently, as the Deathly Hallows?

So to a party to celebrate Granta’s 100th issue. I arrive late, having started at the wrong tube station and walked from Queensway to the Portobello Road in pouring rain. On the stairs up to the auditorium is Martin Amis, deep in conversation with someone I don’t recognise; inside the Twentieth Century Theatre everyone is facing away towards the stage, where there are speeches in progress. At the back of the crowd, straight in front of me, listening, Ian MacEwan, Annalena, Ian Jack; and then I look to my right and see Richard Williams, who worked on the magazine for a while. He whispers to me “I think I was here in 1968, for a concert by Quintessence; or was it the Third Ear Band?”.

The room is extremely noisy after the speeches, and I work my way to the other end, where I am talking to a woman who is writing a history of twentieth century art when we are approached by a distinguished looking gent: widow’s peak of silvery curls, quite tall, substantial; air of quizzical command. I have him down for a writer of military histories.

“Are you”, he says to my companion, “Suzy Israel?” No, she says.

Suzy Israel is the name on the RSVP, a figure of shadowy power who is Sigrid Rausing’s PA.

Would you recognise her? asks the distinguished gent. No.

Ah, he says. You see, I don’t quite know who invited me to this party.

Well, says she: there are Sigrid and Eric, meaning the couple who own the magazine, pointing them out where they talk a few yards from us.

He pulls from his pocket the invitation, an imposing rectangle of white card. On the back of it he has written two names. The top one is Martin Amis. Could we point him out?

“Can’t see him from here”, I say, “but then he is very short.”

The second name, he can’t make out. It is Ian somebody.

“MacEwan?” I suggest.

“Yes: that’s it. Is he famous?”

“Well, yes,” I say. “But I can’t point him out in the crowd: he, also, is very short.”

The art woman and I are now both studying the distinguished gent unashamedly, so as not to catch each other’s eye. He maintains an admirable sang-froid.

“I’m here”, he says, “because I am a a member of parliament. I chair the committee on human trafficking, and this, along with human rights, is a subject that interests Sigrid Rausing. The trouble is that it is very hard to meet trafficked women. They do exist, I know. But it is very hard to find them.”

We urge him to go and talk to his hostess, which he does, and I am left to reflect that this earnest and slightly ridiculous figure does more good for the world than almost all of the people in the room whom I normally think of as upholding civilisation. It’s not that I disparage culture. But I do think that working to end the slave trade is more admirable and much less absurd than producing second-rate literature, which some at least of the participants at this celebration must be guilty of from time to time.