The Cheerful Insanity of Me

I seem to have been scooting around the country quite a bit already this year, and although it's nice to get up north or into the countryside (and even better when you can do both), there's still something magical about London that you don't find in places like the Peak District (where I was last weekend).

This city is like one big vat of cultural soup. You've got all different ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, hair colours, shoe sizes, etc, etc all in one place, and other than a few nutters who want to rid the world of all the people who's toe nails are too long, everyone gets on fairly harmoniously.

However, this doesn't stop us getting all protectional about any other cultures coming into the soup, as they might steal our jobs. Strange really, as I've never met anyone who's owned a job, only people who get paid for doing them.

This evening, I wandered over to a debate on "Capitalism vs Socialism". The Capitalism side was given by someone from the Adam Smith institute with the SPGB arguing for Socialism, so it was more "this capitalist system is pants, what's the more ideal theoretical alternative free markets or common ownership". One of the arguments came down to which would be more efficient at providing aid to the third world.

Certainly one of the major problems of the world inequality of wealth, especially between nations. While it's nice that everyone has been enthusiastic about sending aid to Haiti recently, there's always suffering and those worse off than us even when it's not hitting the news headlines.

However much we try to do things like growing crops in the desert, we are always going to be in a situation where some places have more abundant supplies of certain resources than others. If I'm hungry in a room with a buffet at the other end, it's going to be far more effective for me to go over to the buffet to get food rather than for others to bring it to me.

Come winter when food becomes short, birds don't lay down in their nests and have aid flown in from their friends on the continent to help them survive. Instead many of them fly south to where the food is, but then they don't have to worry about passports, visas and immigration controls.

It's good to provide aid to these places, but if you truly want to give them equal access to the resources we have, the only way to do this is to give them the access to come and get them. Then the fundamental issue of a system based on competition such as capitalism, whether or not you have free markets, is that competition isn't about being equal anyway. Who plays games aiming for a draw?

Is capitalist competition necessary to drive our development though? I'm not convinced. OK, you get product innovation from companies trying to get one step ahead of their competition, but you've also got things like free software. OK, some of these have more than a little capitalist input, but you've also got the millions of little applications written by people tapping away at their computers in their free time in the middle of the night (who know why they do it, but they seem perfectly happy). Many of these may be pretty much dead, only going ping if your really lucky and poke them enough, but in amongst these you get Goliath programs that can sort your entire life out, whilst creating world peace and making the tea.

Even if you put the equality issues to one side, you still face the fact that, if you drive the production-consumption flow from the production end, then you will end up with people consuming far more than they actually need and place a greater burden on the world's resources. If you buy the top of the range mobile phone one week, there is really no need to upgrade to the next model the following week just because it's got an extra pixel in the bottom right hand corner, but the producer will try to convince you otherwise as it's in their best interest to do so.

I still remain unconvinced that the world's problems are solvable within a capitalist system as it seems to push us in the entirely wrong direction no matter how you tweak it.

There's been a lot in the news recently about Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing who has recently been released by the Scottish government.

So the experts are saying that he's "terminally ill" with his survival likely to be a matter of months and more importantly that he doesn't represent a risk, at which point surely it's totally reasonable to let him have compassionate release?

I've said before I don't believe in "life means life" as the justice system shouldn't be about revenge, but reforming these individuals. If, therefore, one of these individuals is deemed not to represent a risk to the population, why keep them locked up? I therefore think the Scottish Government has made the right decision.

However, I don't think this decision should have been in the hands of the government. Although the laws the justice system makes decisions on are decided by acts of parliament (and rightfully so) how these are interpreted and fit individual cases is up to the courts which are a separate entity. Justice should be separate for government and therefore so should a decision like this.

Things like international relations shouldn't be a factor in deciding an individuals freedom and the opinions of people like Barak Obama are irrelevant for this. As soon as you put a political influence in individual cases you start punishing people out of revenge, which just makes us as bad as them.

The one thing I feel disappointed by with this case is the fact that Megrahi has had to drop his second appeal in order to be released. If there is enough strength of evidence to suggest that an appeal is in order and that may put in the conviction in doubt surely this needs to be listened to in the interests of truth?

When I went veggie, the average response when telling people seemed to be something along the lines of "Won't you miss Bacon?".

The standard response to the vegan thing appears to be "That's admirable"

Has the world change that much in 6 years? or just my friends? or is it just more socially acceptable to be vegan?

I suppose the fact I was veggie, put me over in that direction in the eyes of most meat-eaters to start with, so it's just become a more extreme version of what I was before rather than something new.

I also wasn't broadcasting the intimate details of my life on the internet back then either, so that probably affects who I've had comments back from as well I suppose. After all, internet forums are renowned for their habbit of often being more liberal than the outside world.

I suppose also, the fact that a blog is more one sided then a conversation changes things a bit as well. Whereas most of the feedback for the veggieness came from conversations including lines like "I've become a vegetarian", a lot of the feedback for the vegan thing has come from the post I made which also explains a lot of the reasons behind the decision.

It's been somewhat surprising how positive the comments I've had about it have been so far, but *shrugs* I'm certainly not going to complain about that, even if it is bizarrely unexpected.

I've been thinking a lot recently about banks and the way they interact with society, and the more I think about them the more bizarre the concept seems.

So, on the surface, they hold on to the excess money of the rich and lend it to the poor, which sounds a good thing, as it's taking a resource from those that have more then they need and sharing it with those that are short.

However, given these are large companies, their main focus is profit. They need the money from the rich to invest to do this, so they need to encourage the rich to leave it with them and hence pay them a small fee for this and likewise charge a fee for loaning to the poor.

The result being that although there is a temporary flow of money from rich to poor through the bank, the longer-term flow of money goes the other way from those that need it to those who don't. In effect, we seem to have built wealth inequality amplifiers and placed them centrally within our society.

OK, things are a bit different with the co-op and building societies, but they're much less influential to society as a result. You just have to look at the number of the later that demutualised to in order to compete to see that.

There's also North Dakota with it's state owned bank (rather than one the state is bailing out). Although there seems to have been some interesting ideas behind it's setup, as far as I can see it doesn't actually do a lot other than focus it's loans and investments on local industry.

All in all, banks seems a bizarre idea really. What could be a useful public services have been forced into being profit hungry monsters in order to survive.

There's been quite a lot in the news today about cocaine, how it's cut and whether or not it's declining. As part of this the Today programme had someone on this morning arguing that the prohibition seems to be causing more problems then it solves.

I do wonder whether he has a point. No matter how much you ban things like this, people will find access to them and you risk promoting them by making them cool. It certainly seems to me that tobacco seems more appealing to those under the legal purchase age then those over it.

As far as I can see most of the issues with using these types of drugs effect the user rather than society as a whole, at which point is there not an argument that if people want to use them and they are aware of the effects, why not just let them get on with it if it doesn't affect the rest of us?

It seems to me that the only effective way of preventing people getting into these things is education rather than prohibition and legalising it would give government a lot more control over what is in circulation and help reduce the issues of cutting agents.

At the end of the day, I don't want to buy any, so it doesn't effect me, but it does make me wonder. Is this really the best way to discourage their use?

So, on Wednesday evening I popped over to the Dana Centre for a talk on The War of the Sexes.

Bit of an unrepresentative title as the most of the research discussed was to do with inter-gender differences rather than cross-gender ones.

In short the findings of the research covered suggested:

- Men are generally better at whole arm movements then fine hand and finger movements and can generally work better with objects in far-sight.
- Women are generally better at fine hand and finger movements then whole arm movements and can generally work better with objects in near-sight.

It was speculated this was due to originally being hunter-gathers. The male hunters would need whole arm movements to use tools for hunting and defending and would generally be looking at distant objects. The female gathers would generally be using fine finger movements to pick, gather and care for the young and would generally be looking at objects close by.

There was no discussion as to how the ranges over-lapped for men and women though.

- People colour preferences can be measured as a combination of a red-green and blue-yellow scale. Women generally have a preference for the red end of the red-green scale, but the same is not true for men.

This apparently showed up in cultures where there wasn't such a strong social connection between pink and girls. Although, it was speculated that this explained the pink for girls, blue for boys thing, there didn't seem to be any strong preference for blue in boys, but then thinking about our culture the blue for boys thing doesn't seem as strong a cultural norm as the pink for girls.

It was once again speculated that this was down to our hunter-gather origins and the need for gathers to pick out red (e.g. berries) from green (e.g. leaves).

- If you put a child in a circle of toys they tend to play more with the ones stereotypical for their gender.

It was clear how much cultural expected impacted on this though. However, it was apparently also true to an extent for monkeys with female monkeys tending to play more will dolls and male ones more with cars. Obvious maternal instinct was speculated as the reason for the dolls. Apparently they had a habit of turning them upside down to find out what sex they were.


All in all it was an interesting talk, but wasn't quite what it was advertised to be. I got the impression there were a lot of people there who were expecting to be able to discuss how much gender difference should influence roles in society, which this didn't even touch upon.

There certainly didn't seem much here to argue for the traditional partitioning of roles between the genders, especially when most modern roles require less manual labour and are more service based.

As yesterday's post on voting received a number of comments on ID cards, this has got me thinking about the planned scheme.

In today's world we quite regularly need to prove who we are and generally the suggested forms of ID to use for this are Passports and Driving Licences. However, not everyone has these, so you could not use them for things such as proving your identity when you vote. As such having an ID card seems a sensible idea in principle.

As far as I can see, the simplest way of doing this would be to put the passport page with all your details on into a card form. You could then use this to prove your identity in situations, such as collecting parcels, where you might currently use your passport. The security issues would be unchanged.

However, the government's proposed scheme does seem a bit more complicated than this and it's proving very difficult to find out exactly what's involved from independent sources without getting drowned in media hype.

The Home Office's own Identity and Passport Services site does give a broad overview of what's planned and in general sounds fairly reasonable. However, it's obviously not going to be unbiased and will be spun to make it sound as reasonable as possible.

A quick google search throws up several sites against ID cards, mainly along the same lines as the one for No2ID. Any valid points on that site are completely lost in hype with little evidence to back it up. Even there "leaked documents" don't actually say a huge amount to back up what they are trying to say and there annotations are frankly unhelpful.

The Conservative and Lib Dem websites both give details of the drawbacks to the scheme. From this the major drawbacks seem to be the cost and the aims of the scheme. ID cards won't work to stop terrorism, etc, but could be quite useful when we need to prove who we are in day to day life (such as when opening a bank account, picking up a parcel and ideally when voting).

Then there's the issues regarding the database. I personally don't see any issue with the government putting my name, address, etc in a database as they probably already store this data in countless databases as it is. They shouldn't put sensitive personal data in there, but there site says they won't. It would seem reasonable to use the identity number from this in other databases to help services look up my details as long as these were kept as separate databases. If someone wanted all my details they would still need to access all these various databases to get it. If someone hacked in to these databases they could get all my sensitive data without the identity number without too much hassle, so I can't see that it makes a huge difference there.

The main issue then appears to be the fact it holds information about when you use the card. Does it need to? If you scrapped this point then the database would seem fairly reasonable again.

Cost of course is the other issue. The governments site doesn't seem clear how this is going to be funded. Personally, I think the funding should come through taxes rather than requiring individuals to pay for their own identity cards. The governments site says that individuals will pay for their own cards, but the cost will be kept down to £30 or less, which is not ideal. The conservatives and lib dems both come up with figures of £93 including passports, but it's not clear how old these sites are.

I suspect the Conservative and Lib Dem sites are both from the last election which makes them both fairly dated given the number of changes to the scheme there appears to have been.

The articles in the media suffer the same fate, as many older articles reflect previous ideas of what should be included in the scheme.

The most recent article a search on the BBC site was this Q&A, which although it seems a good overview, seems to contract the details of the NIR given on the governments site by saying the details will not be held in a central database, so now I'm utterly confused what the actual situation is.

For all the information out there on the cards, there seems to be a complete lack of information and it's all very confusing. Can't someone just say, this is the proposed ID cards scheme, this is what the proposed register will hold, etc without covering it in hype and spin?

I was at Euston station earlier today and noticed looking at the last set of escalators coming up into the main station from the underground, that on the left of each step were 2 polished stripes parallel with the direction of travel running from the outer edge about 3 quarters of the way to the inner edge.

It seems to me that it is probably due to people scuffing their feet along the step as they walk up the escalator. It just amazed me that it could make such a difference, but I suppose there must be hundreds of people using that escalator every day.

I checked the escalators at London Bridge on the way back, but there weren't any stripes, but then I'd expect London Bridge has slightly fewer people through it day (still a considerable number though), so now I'm wondering what the minimum requirements are for the stripes to appear.

Following on from some recent discussions on language, I'd appreciate some feedback on what people think of by the term "understanding", how much this varies and whether people generally think of it in a different way to me.

So, without looking at a dictionary, what do you think it means to say "Person A's understanding of the term B is C"?

Having got my new computer a couple of months ago, I've recently been spending quite a bit of time thinking setting it up and thinking about what I want on there and how I want it set up. Part of this is obviously transferring my email addressbook from my old machine.

So having this in mind and with the ever present messages from Facebook, the obvious thought occured to me that as a large number of my friends were on Facebook and have their contact details on there then perhaps I could just import these into my mail client. Apparently not, Facebook offers no export functionality and all the third party programs that offer this functionality break Facebook's terms of service. There even seems to have been one user banned for using a script to pull this data off, which is fair enough really as having signed up to the terms of service before putting your info up there, you'd expect it to be treated in accordance with this.

However, it has got me thinking about contact details shared on these sites and what that implies in terms of user privacy. As a Facebook user you have free choice how much of this information you want to enter into the site (with the proviso that you need an email address there, but you can make that private) and can set the privacy settings for these as you please (can prevent people seeing these details all together, make them only open to your "friends", etc). You can also restrict users to only seeing a limited profile (although I've never tried this out). With so much control over who can see this data, you would think this would be enough to allow them to use it in a reasonable away (eg adding contact information to personal address books or even contacting you with it)?

Personally, when I joined Facebook it seemed such a good way to share contact details with people I know that I put them all up there, but limited them all to my friends only. People on there are free to put them in there address books if they want to and to use them to contact me in any reasonable way. After all, a lot of them are already published to most of Croydon in the phone book and what's the point of contact details if you don't share them with people.

Given how difficult it is to pull contact details from Facebook, it seems strange that any Facebook application one of your friend's runs can have access to any of the other details you make visible to that Friend (eg Birthdays, Education Info, Work Info, etc) in fact you can apparently export all this data to CSV using the FriendCSV application. Surely this is the bigger worry for data security, as it's here that the answers to your security questions, etc may lie?

Add to that the fact that Facebook applications seem quite capable of spamming you anyway (unless you block them individually) and this seems fairly inconsistent and doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

To top all this off Facebook have now joined The DataPortability Workgroup which seems to imply they'll end up sharing this data in the end anyway, so maybe one day we'll be able to integrate the useful details of those friends who are willing to share them into the places they are most useful.