Human nature

This is a story from before Windows NT, and before Windows 98, and before Windows 95, and before Windows 3.1, but I think it has a timeless message. In the old days, the last word in user friendliness was to have a start screen on your computer listing numbered options which started the various programs. My computer at work had ended up with a lot of options which either didn't work or led to removed programs, so I tidied up the menu page text to create new options. For obscure reasons, I found I couldn't remove or edit one of the numbered options, only change the text label: people could press it but nothing happened. To discourage them from doing so, I re-labelled it 'Self Destruct Device'. One of my colleagues used my computer one day, and came up to me afterwards. "You know that self-destruct option on your computer?", he said, "It doesn't work!".

Blogs and usability

Jakob Nielsen is a leading proponent of usability: the principle that the design of website and user interfaces should be based on how users behave, rather than how a crazed web designer wants to impress other crazed web designers. His website is usually a fount of common sense in a world where such things are still rare. However, in his most recent column, he addresses the principles of usability as applied to blogs. He says some sensible things: that a 'journal', sequential, structure, may be easy to set up but is a real pain for latecomers trying to find popular entries, so you really need to provide links to favourite old posts (it is no coincidence that I have done this already). But he also claims that users will judge a blog partly on its domain name, and be very sniffy about those who really of free resources like Blogger. To me this smacks of the mentality of those who buy a gold fountain pen to lend their writing style, or buy an expensive sports car so that they can sit in a traffic jam in style. The whole issue of domain squatting has a nostalgic feel to it these days- as if anyone tried to find Charles Dickens' website by typing in www.charlesdickens.com. They certainly wouldn't try it twice, since this would inevitably lead to a strange Biblical prophecy site, online poker, or dating (interesting sidelight on who they think uses the Internet, isn't it?).


UPDATE
Nielsen's comments have led to many responses, predicatbly, since he has been annoying web designers for years by saying things like 'Flash is crap'. I understand he now believes Flash is great, but, no, he was right first time. There's an interesting
parody of a usability report on a portal to initiate nuclear war. The authors do not realise, however, that they actually support what Nielsen is saying- that website users do not want to have to learn to use every new website from scratch, that poor usablity will discourage less-motivated users, and users need to be able to control their visiting experience. In recommending that (commercial) websites avoid 'cutting edge' untried innovative techniques in favour of established, dull, run-of-the-mill ones that work, he is giving good advice to the world outside the design community. I sometimes wonder whether Gutenberg spent his entire life trying to persuade his unadventurous customers to explore the potential of his new technology: "oh, sure, you can read it- but I have these flashy new typefaces which give a real trendy feeling-or we could print pages alternately up and down so that the reader isn't constrained by that stale old left-to-right start-to-finish straitjacket- or we could print on light-degradable papers so the user can experience the book falling apart as a he read it"

Yes, his site looks crap- it is simple and text-based. It's almost like a blog, strangely enough.

Theology 101

The Garden of Eden story is strange, isn't it. I assume you have a copy of Genesis 3 to hand:

v3 God says to Eve "You musn't eat the fruit of the tree of life or you will die"
v4 The serpent says "You won't die if you do"

v22 God says he must send Man out of Eden "lest he eat of the tree of life and live for ever"

So God was wrong in v3 and the serpent was right- eating the fruit does NOT kill you, it makes you live for ever.

They say that lies make a poor basis for a relationship.

Absolute power corrupts? Oh, absolutely!

As the ID Bill trundles inexorably on, we are finding out the cost of freedom. About £30 each, the charge to be imposed by the government on those applying for a card they are legally obliged to have. And legally obliged to replace whenever they move house. For some people, this hardly matters, since they are rich and have stable jobs and live in one place. For poor families, moving more frequently, this is a significant additional cost. But at least it will keep us safe.

The true cost of the cards is a bit higher: initial government estimates had put it at about £80, but it's now figured to be £300. So every time someone moves house, not only will they have to pay out, the government will too, spending tax money. But at least it will keep us safe.

One scene you don't see on CSI or Without a Trace, as they search across the criminal records database or look at the interactive street map or 3D model of virtual Miami, is the one where the master-criminal evades justice because someone has input his surname as 'Terry O'Rist' rather than Terrence O. Wrist. The government has cited as one of the benefits of ID cards that it can bring together all the data already held separately by various departments and agencies. So not only can we catch terrorists, we can fine them for not having a TV licence, and reclaim some tax credits, like those from people who spent money PAID OUT IN ERROR BECAUSE THE COMPUTER SYSTEM WASN'T WORKING PROPERLY. But at least it will keep us safe.

The trouble with wide-ranging arbitrary powers is not that it criminalises everyone. States wielding absolute powers have not all been draconian. For all the idiosyncratic power of a Roman emperor, his writ only really extended to the court. His plans, however mad, for the millions of citizens could only be carried out by his subordinates, whose efficiency and keenness depended on their view of the wisdom of the policy. Even in feudal states, where serfs belonged to their lords, tyranny was limited, since serfs could run away to other masters, or to towns, if it got too bad, and although their lords might hope for support from their peers, class solidarity seldom overcame personal interest. Even East Germany, where I understand 25% of the population was employed by or informants for the secret police, people slipped through. There was plenty of information, but no way to manage it. There is a paradox within Orwell's vision of 1984; even if surveillance was focused on the Party members, the Ministry of Truth employed a lot of people, who needed to be watched by another Ministry of Truth. So I do not believe that suddenly the government will micro-manage the entire population. No. It too will focus. It will focus on the poor, the black, the immigrant, the excluded. But at least it will keep us safe.

Now there are those who say that identity theft is an established part of terrorist operations, and therefore fake ID cards will be manufactured, which may not match the real ones but will be better than nothing. And there are those who say that the July 7 bombers were UK citizens and would no doubt have had ID cards anyway. And there are those who say that criminalizing the excluded does little to make them less excluded. And there are those who say that the government's record on data collection and the creation of large computer systems is appalling. And there are even those who say that pretending that the costs have been accurately estimated and will not eat significantly into spending money on more useful things is a deliberate attempt to side-step the issue. I'm one.

Wisdom

If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone.

SNL Deep thoughts

Say it isn't so

As well as being a novelist-who-can't-finish-a-novel and a mainly unpublished poet, I am also a songwriter manque (or, as someone said, a manky songwriter). I have put together a demo of songs, which I would rate (as far as I can tell) as very good songs played moderately well and sang borderline bearably. (The songs include Have to remember to forget you and Cuts both ways.)

But I have been encouraged by Erin Monahan's more generous view:

Now, in his note he warns me that he can't sing, which as far as I can tell is pure English modesty, or a good ole crock'o'shit because I thoroughly enjoyed each song.

If anyone is interested enough to want a copy, just leave a message so I can get in touch.

The long and the short of it

It is not hard to make it seem as if you know that of which you write if you use long words- in the mind of some, they are signs of truth. Can all life be shrunk to words of one short sound? I'm not sure. The Word of God is, for the most part, a short one: Thou shalt not kill; Let there be light. Which is not to say that long words are just used in Hell. They turn up in board rooms, schools, blogs- in fact, all sorts of place where, as the quote says, one man speaks in the sleep of the rest.

It used to be good style to go to great lengths to find terms so that you did not use the same word twice on the same page. Such tricks are taught no more- most would choose to call a spade a spade, not a tool to dig soil with (or a tool with which to dig soil, as some would say was right). But this has a price- the clang-clang-clang of the one word can drive you mad, or at least take your mind off the sense while the sound grates and pounds.
Some who take up their pens will not mind. But those who read will!

Overheard in a supermarket, late Saturday

MAN: I'm looking for a will to live - I've lost mine
WOMAN: If you see one, get one for me too.


(All right, it was me!)

My sporting heroes

I don't like sport, as I have said before. That's not quite true- I do enjoy some sport as a participant (those which do not feature mud, rain or physical injury). But spectatorship has always baffled me. I'm not sure quite what the frighteningly large proportion of the world's population that says it supports Manchester United mean when they say it- apart from in the captitalist sense of supporting the owners of the club through their purchase of overpriced merchandise. Even if their good wishes were somehow assisting the team, it seems doubtful that the most expensive players in the world would need much assistance, any more than gravity, death or taxes need supporters clubs. 'Good team beats bad team' is hardly news, any more than 'bad team beats worse team'. Those who are triumphally lording the English cricket team as the best in the world are missing the point. The thrill of their victory derives from the knowledge that it was barely deserved. Even back in the 1970s, before things got apparently irreversibly bad, England was known for its knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, usually by a batting collapse. Essenetially, therefore, the national rejoicing is the result of the success of the underdog. This is always cited as a specifically British trait, certainly a non-American trait, wrongly, I think. The maverick-who-needs-to-defeat-his-personal-demons-before-he-can-defeat-his-rival is a stock of Hollywood sports and other films (Top Gun) and one which goes some ditance to the saying "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser". The maverick storyline always seems a con-trick to me, since it implies that the troubled genius is better than their carefully trained untroubled opponent. No wonder kids today... Having said that, it is of course perfectly true that the clinical perfection of Bjorn Borg or Pete Sampras, for all its record-breaking reliability, can inspire no feeling warmer than a mild admiration, while watching England try to win a Test match is like watching your child take their first steps- a mixture of pride, doubt and fear.

In some ways, the new popularity of cricket will be cursed by those who have been watching since the 1970s. They have not suffered as we have suffered. They have not been in the wilderness. They have not seen hope after hope sink under the weight of better, fitter, faster opposition. On the other hand, even the constant mention of 'sportsmanship' cannot conceal the genuinely friendly nature of the competition- what would have been called 'sporting' if that word did not, these days, mean drug-fuelled, cash-obsessed and violent. Now they are superstars, I wonder how long it will last.

Without a trace

They are now showing the third series of Without a Trace on UK TV, which some have criticised for having too much personal stuff, but is still way ahead of most programmes. Last night's episode, 'American Goddess', featured Elizabeth Berkley as the post-surgery dumb blonde. I'm not sure why her agent suggested she make a career comeback in a show called 'without a trace', but then you're talking about someone whose career went downhill after Saved by the Bell (into Showgirls and then... that's about it). The producers didn't have the courage of their convictions, employing someone else to do the pre-op stuff and covering her face in bandages for the last scene. It's hard to pin down what is so good about the programme. Partly I think it benefited from the focus on the story rather than the team: the rot set in in ER when the patients became incidental events to break up the child custody wrangles, sex changes, partner swapping, dying etc of the staff. Of course Anthony LaPaglia does a lot, by doing almost nothing- he has saint's eyes, understanding all, forgiving all, suffering, but still caring. You would not recognise him from 'Frasier', where he played Daphne's Cockney brother, any more than you'd recognise his Cockney accent (closest I can get is drunk Australian). (and how did Daphne have a Cockney brother?).

George Orwell wrote in praise of the English murder (actually real murders as reported in the sensational press of the 1930s), reflecting as they did the code of morals that said that to get divorced would incur social disgrace so murder becomes the better option. These days, of course, fictional murder has become the main form of TV programme and a major form of fiction. Death is usually necessary: attempts to write crime fiction based on other crimes lack the apepal, mainly, I think, because there's no point pondering over a mystery when the victim can turn up at the end to explin what happened.

The cleverness of Without a Trace is to take the strong narrative line of the murder story (with a death acting as an opening into a particular social milieu) and then , by using the 24-style countdown (enough on its own to start adrenaline pumping) allow itself the option of different endings, so that there is, for once, real uncertainty about where a plot is heading. Catharsis, I don't know about - heart attack, sure.

Clive James on books and civilisation

There's a very good defence of the importance of books and libraries to any civilized society at Lecture: Our First Book, which is also hilariously funny.

Clive James and me

Me and Clive James go back a long way- back to the mid 1970s, when his weekly TV reviews in The Observer were the cleverest and funniest critical writing to be found. I was surprised to discover his credentials as a literary critic, characterised by deep knowledge and common sense (not as common a pairing as one might think). And his Unreliable Memoirs were a definitive roman a clef of adolescence, if a little self-indulgent. Self indulgence, alas, was to become the theme of his later work, including an embarassing comic/satirical poem for the Royal Wedding in 1980, and then his TV series. Initially, his elaborate sardonic riffs applied to popular culture were refreshing, but solidified into a pose. And he admitted that he was star-struck by Hollywood. The point at which I switched off was when he interviewed Jane Fonda, smirking at his good fortune to be spending time talking to such a personality, having forgotten, presumably, that he once wrote that Jane Fonda as an activist was a superb consciousness-raiser, on the grounds that if he found himself sharing an opinion she held he immediately examined it.

But to judge from his website www. clivejames.com, he is now back in the land of the sane, and his literary reviews are amusing and perceptive. As he says on the home page "It might seem strange to say so, in the face of the evidence, but this project is not meant entirely as an ego trip, although I suppose the Pharaohs said the same when they were approving the designs for their individual pyramids." His poetry has improved, too.

Thoughtcrime

I have always been rather wary of those advancing arguments to restrict freedom of speech. This may have started out, a long time ago, as simple self-interest, since I was once more radical than I am now, and wished to retain the opportunity to express my views (whatever they were: I'm not sure now, and may not have been sure then). It seemed to me obvious, though, that this freedom is as near-as-possible absolute, since as soon as you start restricting it, you are effectively imposing censorship by the government, the police and the courts, and while one would not of course suggest that this was their intention, the principle, once established, that politicians have a right and mechanism to gag their electorate, seems a dangerous one. For of course it is easy to allow freedom to those who agree with you: the test for a liberal democracy has to be its willingness to allow its citizens to voice dissent. I can remember in the 1980s that the Anti-Nazi League sought to prevent right-wing politicians from addressing student meetings under the banner of their "no platform for racists" policy. I can remember at the time being dubious of this argument: freedom of speech should not be so lightly surrendered just because you don't like how it is used. For the same reason, attempts to beef up prohibitions on racist and religious bigotry have caused alarm. Comedians have rightly quetioned whether the government really wants to get involved in deciding which individuals or groups of people can be safely lampooned and which cannot. And now with the anti-terror legislation, we are facing a government intent on stopping people saying some things as "incitement to commit terrorism" and even "glorifying terrorism".

This is wrong, as the opposition parties have noted. Identifying and punishing new criminal acts is one things. But the government is effectively criminalising the holding of certain beliefs. In doing so, it is making up law to suit its own agenda. One of the threadbare rights of a UK citizen is to complain about the government, or even to argue that the system is wrong and should be changed, if necessary by completing the works of Guy Fawkes, "burnt in effigy to remind the Parliament that it would have been a Good Thing", as those notorious anarchist subversives Sellars and Yeatman put it in 1066 And All That. These thoughts can be expressed through speech, letters, pamphlets, letters to newspaper editors written in green ink, or in the manifestos of new political parties. I would rather the BNP were open in their racism than for them to adopt the appearance of being a reasonable right-ist anti-European party whose members just happen to be white skinheads.

Because what the government is trying to do by targetting the rhetoric of terror is to control people's beliefs. I would say that rhetoric of war and imperialism (ie officially approved rhetoric) does not provide the basis for confidence in the application of common sense. There is a world of difference between saying that cars are crimes against the environment and blowing up a motor factory. A sensible view would be that people are allowed to think what they like as long as their actions remain legal. To do otherwise is to actually reduce the culpability of the terrorists, since they can argue "it wasn't my idea- he told me to!" as if this was some excuse. If we want people to take responsibility for their actions, then we must focus on their choice about whether to follow a belief into practice, not on some inflammatory preacher they once heard speak. If only Tony Blair were a lawyer, or knew one.*


* A note for non-UK readers. Blair was a lawyer, is married to a lawyer, and his best friends are lawyers.

A computer interface for real life

Things you wish your computer had:

http://www.tobynopoly.com/wish/computer.html

That's entertainment

One thing they say about the film industry is that "Nobody knows anything". It is impossible to predict which of the under-written over-hyped star vehicles that Hollywood churns out will turn into a billion-dollar money spinner and which will be a Heaven's Gate or Waterworld. Everybody says it, everybody knows it, but nobody wonders why. The reason why is simple: nobody knows anything because nobody learns anything. It seems just a week ago (but is in fact two years) that the BBC decided to re-launch Top of the Pops on Friday night to halt the decline in audience and in particular to recapture the elusive hip young audience (aka the dim and ignorant); their secret weapon was Fearne Cotton, who is as intelligent as she is talented (see my Live 8 post for details). Unfortunately, the radical redesign only accelerated the decline, and so the programme was moved: new channel, new time, new day, new look, new--no, same presenters. And what happens? New TOTP loses half its audience. If there's a common factor, I just can't think of it.

This reminds me of the story of the man in the hospital talikng to his wife "You were with me when I lost my job; you were with me when my dog died; you were with me when the roof fell off the house; you were with me when I was in a car crash; and now you're with me when I'm sick. Face it, woman, you're a f***ing jinx!"