yuck!

Posted on April 3, 2004 by acb

A sudden burst of comment spams, my very first. Fortunately, it is extremely easy to wipe them out from mySQL, and they can’t have been up for more than ten minutes. I can’t figure out how to do the fancy business of shutting off comments on older entries, so I suppose I will just stay here for the moment. Bastards.

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The cataracts of Stalinism

Posted on April 2, 2004 by acb

So, I went to see Eric Hobsbawm, and he was fascinating, learned, charming — but with a blind spot made of boot leather when it comes to communist regimes. I asked him, amongst other things, whether we can hope to reverse ethnic cleansing, once it has got under way …

You say it shouldn’t be accepted, but can we hope to roll it back? To take a practical example — when you look at Kosovo, is there any way in which a fractured, formerly multi-ethnic society can be put back together?

EH: Well it was done. It was done in Yugoslavia under Tito, so the fact is it can be done. If you start splitting them, if you start splitting societies, that is the safest recipe for ethnic cleansing — whether it’s multi-national societies or multi-national empires, that’s what happens — so my answer would be avoid splitting societies.

AB: Because I don’t see that the United Nations could ever use Tito’s methods. Or should, actually.

EH: What was Tito’s method in this respect?

AB: Well I mean he ran … he ran a full on Stalinist dictatorship which did indeed suppress an awful lot of … an awful lot of inter-ethnic bad feeling, but at a price which I don’t think that the United Nations could possibly pay.

EH: I think you make a mistake there. You see I mean he believed … Tito believed in fact in Yugoslavia as a mixture or a federation of equal nations. The only really bad feeling he created was against the Serbs, who had been used to being rather predominant. And when Tito fell, in fact it was very largely the Serbs and the Croats who broke the thing up, and that’s what did it. But otherwise there’s much you can say against Tito indeed, but not that he oppressed nations or that …

AB: No, I said that he oppressed impartiali — impartially without regard to nationality, but I think he oppressed on a scale which the United Nations could not do.

EH: [suddenly fierce] The United Nations can’t do anything anyway because United Nations depends on the force which is given to it by the Security Council. So the United Nations isn’t ? isn’t in the business.

Now, I spent part of my childhood in Belgrade, so the horrors of the Second World War there, and the brutality of the subsequent settlement, are part of my mental furniture. In the early Sixties there were still bullet-pitted buildings to be seen when we drove down through Bosnia to the coast.

Tito’s slave labour camps and secret police were quite as ghastly as anyone else’s, though it is true he was better than what came after. He wa a great dictator, and good for his country, but his methods were Roman in their brutality.

The day before this interview, we had been talking to Cathie Carmichael, a Balkan specialist at UEA, who brought up one horror I didn’t know about. Before the war, there were about half a million ethnic Germans in Jugoslavia, as part of the centuries-old settlements of Easter Europe. By 1946 there were none, as there were virtually none anywhere in Eastern Europe. What I hadn’t realised was that Tito only expelled half of them. The rest — a quarter of a million people — were simply shot, she says.

No, I don’t think the UN could use those methods of nation-building. Not even Paddy Ashdown …

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a timely purchase

Posted on April 1, 2004 by acb

It’s a shame that this won’t be available tomorrow (nor any other day this year), because I want one.

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another Douglas Adams anecdote

Posted on March 31, 2004 by acb

Though it seems to me that the joke was on Mac snobs here. At the end of the conversation I last blogged, I found another paragraph. DNA speaks:

“I was talking to Nathan Myhrvold the other day, and I said to him – you know, if you just went through Silicon Valley hiring all the people whom Apple has hired in the last few years, you could put together a pretty good technology company. That’s just about what we’re doing, he said.”

So now I remember why I keep dead people in the contacts book.

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the voice of Douglas Adams

Posted on March 31, 2004 by acb

There is an unnerving number of dead people in my contacts file. One of them is Douglas Adams, who I knew to get quotes from; attached to the phone number at his software company is a note of what he said when plugging some game on 23rd January 1998:


Working on it with a writer named Neil Richardson and w Michael Bywater. We have about 6 movie scripts’ worth of dialogue now: say 16 hours’ worth of speech. But we could go on till there were 32. There is an iterative process: we write a rudimentary script based on what people might put in, and miss 99 out of 100 reactions. So we record them playing it and start again. This iterative process starts to work. There are still times when you thing, oh God, STUPID machine, why didn’t you think of that? But there are other moments when it seems spooky. The machine puts together stuff that we had forgotten about, from far distant parts of the game. Of course, we don’t have real intelligence cracked – it’s a bit like Zeno’s paradox: we get closer and closer to the actual business of language, without ever reaching it. Like sawing someone in half: considered as a medical problem, it is very very difficult indeed. But if you just want to convince a large audience that you have sawn a lady in half in a cabinet – that’s easy.
I say that we really want to be fooled, and that is the secret of persuading people that we have found artificial intelligence. Even very stupid bots can appear intelligent if they are acting in accord with our preconceptions.
Yes: you just try to get a fucking actor to understand anything, he says.

Yoz Grahame, who worked on the game, says in comments that it ws Neil Richards and the Starship Titanic is still going. Amended accordingly. These were contemp notes, typed as we talked.

Posted in Journalism | 4 Comments

pub crawling into handbags

Posted on March 31, 2004 by acb

Felix and I met in the Lamb, and discovered how to beam numbers with IR to each others’ mobiles. Could anything be sillier, or more fun? The Lamb, in Lamb’s Conduit Street, is a wonderful pub, the closest thing in London to the Fulminating Fascist King’s Head of Saffron Walden. There is neither music, nor electronic noise, but there is quite a lot of Edwardian cut glass. Small square hinged mahogany windows are arragned above the bar counter, open or closed apparently at random. People sit at small tables and talk, or read in silence, though the readers all seem to smoke, another civilising touch.

There was a group of variously paunched and bearded men at the next table. Believing that the British Interplanetary Society had been started there — can this be true? — we decided that they were all science fiction writers. Certainly, they were talking about computers, though this, nowadays, proves nothing. In a spirit of tribute to those noble pioneers, I solemnly wrote “Can you hear me Mr Watson?” messages on the palm pilot and sent them via radio mast and satellite across the polished wooden table, with a brass rail around it, to Felix’s phone, which was almost two feet away.

The Palm pilot turns out to be a delightful widget. It took me some time, and a reboot, to get the bluetooth going, but now I have it all synching with Ecco Pro on the real computers, and then dialling any of Ecco’s 2,400 numbers from the new bluetooth phone even when this is in my pocket. This also means that there is at last a civilised way to text people, by writing the message with a stylus in my hand.

One thing I hadn’t foreseen, and perhaps none of the pioneers of spaceflight dared to dream about, was that this is a technology that lets you look into strangers’ handbags. Trying to get the thing working on the train, I found four other phones in the same compartment responded to the mating call of my bluetooth device. I understand that among young people these discoveries are followed by mating calls at a higher protocol level. In any case, it was very strange to look around the dusty WAGN compartment and wonder who was the Nokia and who the Sony cameraphone.

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cameras like computers

Posted on March 30, 2004 by acb

Engineers can see at once that something labelled the LC52C LA-DC52C is likely to be vitally different from an almost identical piece of plastic called the LC52D LA-DC52D. Shop assistants can’t. That’s why I’m expecting a new camera to take on holiday in a fortnight.

Little Canon compacts, like the Powershot A80 I brought six weeks ago, have a zoom lens that sits flush with the body when it’s off, and then protrudes with a whirr about 2cm when you switch it on. If you want to attach a polarising filter, which people who love fish and water will want to do, you have to buy a conical plastic tube that clips onto the front of the body around the lens, and has a screw-in fitting the other end, about, as I said, 2cm away. It could be a little more. It could be a little less.

On the Canon Powershot A70, it is a little less. On the Powershot A80, it is a little more. But they both have the same bayonet fitting at the end. So when I asked the man in Jessops in Cambridge if he had this device for an A80 (that will be the DVtiddlypumpLD LA-DC52D), he poked around in the stockroom, and came up with the fitment for the A70 (the DVtiddlypumpLC LA-DC52C). I bought it, screwed the filter in, and, outside, switched the camera on. The lens, whirred, protruded, and then the whirring changed pitch and the damn thing wedged itself into the filter.

So, yesterday, back to Jessops where I explained that none of the photographs taken since then were properly sharp at infinity. To their credit, they made no fuss, and arranged to repair the old thing and give me a loaner while it was being fixed. Some time today I will hear about a G3 to play with.

It’s really a lot like software, when version 3.15e is identical to v3.15g except that it causes catastrophic data loss. Oh, and, if software goes wrong and breaks something, you’ll find you have no recompense at all. Just a thought.

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needy nerd request

Posted on March 27, 2004 by acb

Does anyone out there have experience of a palm tungsten T? I see some being sold off as binends, and I am horribly tempted.

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Strange Meeting

Posted on March 26, 2004 by acb

To the Guardian Unlimited party last night, which was painfully hip even by the standards of Guardian parties. For people of our impeccably fashionable instincts, thought only slows you down, so it makes sense that here you really couldn’t hear yourself think at all. The treble was champagne-fuelled voices and the bass was rolling out of huge speakers around the edge of a low-ceilinged room with two or three hundred people in it. It would have been a solecism to call it anything but a space. I felt ten years older than everyone else in the room; I would learn there were at least four people older than I.

Everyone was dressed in black, even my editor, Ros Taylor, who was also wearing glamorous black-framed spectacles. Rusbridger, greatly daring, had a white shirt under his black suit. He made a speech that I haven’t heard since 1990, on the Independent — the one where an editor recounts a genuine success. In the course of this, he made a joke about Eric Hobsbawm’s being present. I took this for surreal humour, but after the speech, as the noise rolled us over like big surf, I saw in the corner an old man with wattles and a fleshy nose, dressed in blue and grey. It really was Britain’s foremost Marxist historian with his wife.

What was he doing here? No one seemed to know. So I went over to talk. His son, he said, worked in the Internet business. I shouted a bit about this: it seemed damn foolish to ask him what he made of the interweb thing. Then I asked him whether he thought that ethnic cleansing would ever lose popularity. Yes, he said. Urbanisation will stop it. So I signed him up to go on the programme and staggered out, ears ringing, into the night. There appears to be a number for him in my contacts book, so I had better ring him and organise this.

Posted in Journalism | 3 Comments

Beelzebub addresses the Palestinian Authority

Posted on March 20, 2004 by acb

… what peace will be giv’n
To us enslav’d, but custody severe,
And stripes, and arbitrary punishment
Inflicted? and what peace can we return,
But to our power hostility and hate,
Untam’d reluctance, and revenge though slow,
Yet ever plotting how the Conqueror least
May reap his conquest, and may least rejoyce
In doing what we most in suffering feel?

(Paradise Lost, book 2, line 330)

Yes: when I remember the way that Arabs in Jerusalem look at Jews, I think of that: “what peace can we return,But to our power hostility and hate?“

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