Too Big to Know? So What?

The other day someone pointed out an article for me by David Weinberger which appeared in The Atlantic, plugging his new book Too Big to Know. It was a strangely breathless article, but I'm not sure that Weinberger's point is a very interesting one. Essentially, he seems to be saying that we have been developing data sets that are so vast they are beyond what people - with our limited brains and short life-spans - can possibly analyse and understand without the aid of computers. What's more, when we let our computers loose on these huge data sets, the derivation of any new knowledge they come up with (usually by running computer models or simulations on the data) is not accessible to us. To understand why the weather bureau's model predicts a 40% chance of rain in South-East England today would take teams of humans years to calculate by hand using the same rules and the same data. To all intents and purposes, these models might as well be black boxes. Worse than this, there are programs that can derive new mathematical and physical laws and relationships - new knowledge whose creation is forever shrouded in mystery because the cost of understanding how it was discovered is astronomically high for unaided humans. 

While some gasp at the epistemological implications right along with Weinberger, my own reaction is one of puzzlement. After all, isn't this and hasn't it always been how nearly all knowledge comes to us?

At one level, we have been hugely successful at seeing the underlying patterns of the world, without the aid of computers - General and Special Relativity, and the Standard Model reduce everything to a handful of very simple equations and constants. On another level, we have the complexity of chemistry, biology, fluid dynamics, and so on, which, while following the rules of basic physics, have lots of interacting parts that we can only model statistically. That the predictions of some of these statistical models can only be made if they are based on huge data sets and worked out by big, fast computers, doesn't fill me with the same kind of trepidation with which it seems to fill Weinberger. Even the fact that the predictions of many such models are acutely sensitive to their initial conditions is hardly cause for concern (unless you're planning a camping trip and need an accurate weather report).

It's true that the models themselves can be generated or learned by second-order systems and that we do not necessarily have any meaningful way of knowing how they work (something researchers in neural networks have been grappling with for several decades already). But that isn't a particular cause for anxiety either. Such models are in principle analysable, if we should ever want to do that (which, I suggest, removes any hint of scariness). Generally, it is not important to know how a model does its job, as long as we are confident about how it was constructed and have verified its behaviour against the data. If we want to verify their outputs or increase our confidence in what the models are doing, we can always set up a second, third, or nth model to cross-check the first or poll their outputs. (Weather models tend to be run over and over and their results combined, for instance.) The thing is, these models tend to be of systems that do not have the scientific significance of E=mc^2, although they may have ample practical significance for campers and drug companies. 

I used to work in artificial intelligence and I made a particular study of a field called "argumentation". It's all about how and why we find arguments convincing - like a modern Rhetoric. The early pioneers of expert systems understood well the issue this article raises. If you run a system with more than a handful of rules, it quickly gets to the point where you can no longer understand or predict the outputs - not without a disproportionately huge effort to delve into the workings. So they tried to devise schemes for expert system to explain their own reasoning (which boiled down to traces of rule activation - presented with varying degrees of clarity). I worked on some particularly massive rule-based systems and I can attest to the fact that presenting a conclusion is not enough - people need more - but presenting the machine's reasoning is a very difficult task.

However, I believe it is doable. People just haven't put much work into it yet.

There is an example of a massively parallel supercomputer of immense power but which is virtually a black box as far as the question of how it reached its outputs are concerned. In fact there are many such examples. One of the best was Albert Einstein. This processor came up with some astonishing physical laws by a process that nobody understands even a hundred years after they were derived. However, the Einstein processor was able to explain its reasoning and the derivation of its laws in a way that satisfied everyone who was able to understand (and the rest of us have been happy to take their word for it). I've read a few books on relativity now and I must say, the fact that I don't know how Einstein derived it from what was known at the time doesn't bother me at all. The rules are logical, consistent, match the evidence, and (having been shown the way) are derivable by other, similarly-endowed processors.

Certainly machine-derived knowledge raises questions in epistemology and ontology. Does it mean something different to know a physical law derived by a machine, for example, especially where the reasoning processes involved are hidden from us? My argument, already stated, is that it doesn't. In fact, it is similar in all important ways.

The question of how much we can trust machine-derived knowledge is a different kettle of fish. Here, I'm happy to use all the usual methods of improving my confidence - particularly the Gold Standard, empirical testing.

There is a possibility that knowledge could be derived by machine that is so far beyond our human understanding that only other machines of similar capabilities could peer-review it, or understand how to devise and run empirical tests, or interpret the results of such tests. When that day comes, we are put in the position that most of us are in now vis-a-vis the great scientists. Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Einstein and the rest may have been able to understand and devise tests for each others' discoveries in quantum mechanics, but most of humanity could not. To us, it is entirely a matter of trust - even of faith.

It's like the climate change "debate". Here the science is simple enough that any intelligent layman can follow it. You could replicate John Tyndall's experiment that first measured the greenhouse effect in your own kitchen with some pipes and jars and rubber tubing. Yet still, for the majority (especially GOP politicians), it is all incomprehensible scientific mumbo jumbo. They can't grasp the principles. They can't separate out the scientific claims from the denialist obfuscation. They are so far from being able to judge the validity of what the scientific community is telling them, that they can have no confidence in what they are hearing - leaving them free to dismiss it as "scare-mongering" or a left-wing conspiracy to increase government regulation of our lives, or any bizarre rationale they can come up with.

One day, even the brightest of us will probably be in that position, when the machines have taken it all to a new level, way beyond our understanding. Will we look like simple-minded denialists to them when we question what seems to us to be the unfounded gibberish they will be spouting? I think so. Or maybe, being so much cleverer than us, the machines will be rather better than human scientists at explaining what they mean and why they're saying such outrageous things.  

Review: The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution by Timothy Taylor

(This review first appeared in The New York Journal of Books on 23rd August, 2010.)

The Artificial Ape is a book with a plausible idea, but that is all it has. If you are looking for a convincing argument that “technology changed the course of human evolution” or even some compelling evidence, this is not the book for you. However, if you like informed speculation about humanity’s prehistoric past and you enjoy surveys and summaries of this immensely long and fascinating period, The Artificial Ape will keep you turning the pages.

Taylor is a well-known and popular archeo-anthropologist and is beginning to make himself a name for controversial speculation. His Prehistory of Sex takes us back 8 million years and The Buried Soul makes some startling claims about how widespread cannibalism and vampirism were in prehistory. The Artificial Ape follows in this tradition.

Taylor’s main contention is that tool use in early hominins was a necessary step to allow us to develop our large brains. In particular, he speculates that the invention of the baby sling must have occurred about two million years ago (although there is no actual evidence). This would have allowed a hairless ape with an upright gait—and thus a restricted pelvic gap—to give birth to increasingly immature babies, ones that could not cling to their mothers and would need to be carried, thus allowing the brain to continue to grow and develop outside the womb. As Taylor puts it, turning ourselves into artificial marsupials.

He makes much of the fact that tool use in hominins began about 2.5 million years ago, long before signs of accelerated skull-size began to be seen in the fossil record (after 2 million years ago). It is a puzzle that stone tools were being made and used before Homo ergaster and then Homo erectus began to develop their larger brains, and it is this puzzle that Taylor’s hypothesis attempts to tackle.

Taylor also points to the fact that an ape with an upright gait has a much shorter intestine than one on all fours. This means that not only meat eating but cooking may have been essential precursors to the development of bipedalism, simply because of the difficulty of finding sufficient nourishment from a vegetarian and raw meat diet with a short gut, at a time when we would have been extremely active and burning calories at a rate rarely seen in humans today.

Interestingly, recent evidence, published after the book was released, pushes the date for tool use and meat eating back to perhaps 3.4 million years—the pre-Homo days of Australipithecus afarensis. This find gives Taylor a 1.4 million year gap to explain before brain sizes begin to increase. But it does provide more time for full bipedalism to evolve after tools for butchering meat are first seen.

Given the paucity of the evidence, much of what Taylor proposes must be taken with a pinch of salt. For example, hominin skulls are quite plentiful across the last two million years, but there are only a dozen or so before that time. The graph of brain capacity against time that he presents is quite compelling but it would not need many new data points in the pre-2 million years’ range for it to look very different. More critically for the argument, there are just three hominin pelvises that have been found covering a period of almost 3.5 million years. While they approximately match the required changes in morphology for an ape specializing increasingly in bipedalism and immature neonates, it is very little to base an argument on.

So the book is disappointing in that, having made its surprising but apparently reasonable claim, it then provides scant evidence and only weak arguments in support of it. It is disappointing in other ways, too. It contains long and frequent digressions into areas of human cultural evolution that are not strongly connected to the main argument and which tend to dilute and confuse the message.

While fascinating in their own right, Taylor’s discussion of neolithic art and culture do not contribute much. Similarly, his extended discussion of why Tasmanian aborigines had apparently “regressed” to a level of tool use and a style of living not far removed from that of chimpanzees, while a very useful antidote to Victorian condemnation of and dismay at their lifestyle (which still persists in a mild form in academic circles today), does not strengthen his argument appreciably.

Some discussion as to why other hominids (the great apes) have not taken the same evolutionary path as humans, despite the strong probability that they were as proficient with tools as our distant ancestors were, would have been worthwhile. It is likely that chimpanzees have been using tools for as long as us, yet it has not led either to bipedalism or to increased brain size. The same problem arises with birds. Modern studies show extremely surprising sophistication of tool use in crows and other species of bird, yet we do not see the same evolutionary tie to tool use that Taylor suggests for ourselves. Birds have not become “artificial avians.” Why not?

And the same problem arises with dolphins, which also use tools. Bird brains also raise the interesting problem for Taylor’s hypothesis that their brains are notoriously small. Claiming that tool use (technology) enables increases in brain size, in the face of a crow’s tiny brain, begs the question as to whether the evolution of technologies and brains is causally linked at all. It would have been useful if Taylor had addressed some of these issues.

The Artificial Ape is a good read. It is full of interesting and provocative ideas and information. Yet, while it is interesting and its main idea is appealing, in the end, it fails to make its case.

Review: Epitaph Road by David Patneaude

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books on 12th May, 2010)

Epitaph Road is the latest in a string of successful young adult novels by David Patneaude. In 2067 a world reeling from recent nuclear brinkmanship between the USA and China is suddenly devastated by a virus that kills almost every male person on the planet. Only those males at sea or in remote places survive.

Thirty years later, the world is populated and dominated by women. There are a few more males, but strict birth control laws ensure that the male population cannot rise above 5%. It is a world free of much petty crime and war but one in which the remaining males are subjugated and controlled, and the women in power have all the vices that political elites have always had. 

Kellen Winters is fourteen in 2097, the son of one of the few survivors of the plague they called Elisha’s Bear. He lives with his absentee mother, an important person in the new North American government, and dreams of leaving one day to join his father, who lives as a “loner” among male “throwbacks” on a kind of reservation. He is preparing for his citizenship exams and coping with the oppression and subjugation that is the role of all males, when he and two female classmates stumble on some information that leads them to delve into the origins of the plague that changed the world and which still recurs from time to time. What they uncover sends them on a journey to find his father and warn him about a potential new outbreak. But powerful forces don’t want Kellen to reach the throwbacks, and police and other agencies are searching for him as he and his friends stumble upon another shocking and deadly secret. 

Epitaph Road is a straightforward adventure story in which a group of youngsters fight the forces of an oppressive and hypocritical adult world. It has good pacing, is nicely written, and the adventure runs its course as it should to its proper ending. Yet it is a most unsatisfying story, with two major flaws that spoiled it for me.

The first is the aftermath of the plague. Almost overnight, half the population of the world dies. And it is the male half, the half that hogs most of the power, dominates all industries except the lower-paid service industries, and has a near stranglehold in areas such as engineering, construction, power, transportation, communications, and so on. Yet, the world carries on, civilization carries on as if nothing has happened. The supply of electricity keeps flowing, the farms and food distribution keeps going, the communications networks stay up, the domestic water and sewage networks still operate, and billions of bodies are buried. There is no mass starvation; no millions dying in that first, unheated winter; no disease; no cessation of oil supplies; no massive shortage of doctors. Within a handful of years, countries have merged, a new world political order is established, new education systems are put in place, and massive social change is underway. You might think that, possibly by 2067, there is sexual equality and the work and power disparities of today no longer exist, but according to the story, that is not the case. If anything, male dominance is worse by then.

With a pinch of suspended disbelief, you might get past this issue, but it is the kind of “world building” problem that leaves me very uncomfortable. Worse, however, is the fact that the bulk of the story is set in 2097—almost a hundred years from now—but no technology seems to have advanced beyond today’s level. True, the desktop computers have touch screens, the smartphones are called “e-sponders,” and electric cars are commonplace (although the throwback men still drive old petrol cars), but there are no new technologies.  

The idea that civilization could progress for 90 years without radical new technologies appearing is just incredible. Even if we suppose that technical innovation ended in 2067 when the men died, we should still expect fifty more years’ worth. For example, the Internet is just twenty years old as you read this. It was barely known to the world at large before 1995. Yet the Web and texting (a technology which is about the same age as the Web) are supposedly still the technologies in use by kids in Epitaph Road, eighty-seven years from now. 

This is such a massive failure of the imagination, and introduces such a jarring credibility problem, that the question has to be asked: Why didn’t Patneaude set the book in the present? Without more than this minimal nod in the direction of world building, this is not science fiction. So why not make the date 2007 instead of 2097 and let this become an alternative history novel? 

It is a young adult novel, and is intended for children, but that is no excuse for not treating his readership with more respect. The description and development of the book’s main characters, their complex feelings and motivations, is well up to scratch, the plot is simple and easily anticipated but nicely executed and suited to the genre. However, the book is badly let down by the credibility of a major plot element and the complete failure to present a believable future world.

A Post on Behalf of Electronic Frontiers Australia

I received this email from EFA and I reproduce it here in full, in case anyone out there would also like to help in the campaign against Internet censorship in Australia.

Electronic Frontiers Australia needs your support to protect online
civil liberties in this country!

Over the past few months, EFA has been working hard campaigning for an
Open Internet against Government censorship of the Internet
(http://openinternet.com.au/). While we are proud of what we have
achieved in that campaign, the Government's decision to delay the
introduction of the legislation means that it will be prolonged and
ongoing campaign. Moreover, that is only one example of EFA's
activities and interests (http://www.efa.org.au/projects/). In
addition to Internet censorship, EFA also campaigns on a wide range of
issues relating to Internet regulation, including copyright,
defamation, R18+ for computer games, telecommunications, ISP
liability, privacy, domain names, trade marks, and the digital
economy.

Most of this campaign work is carried out by elected Board Members,
who act in a voluntary capacity and are not remunerated for their time
spent on EFA projects. This will not change. However, if EFA is to
continue to expand and launch further campaigns, we need money for
media, organisation and lobbying.

That is why, starting today, we are launching a fundraising drive so
that we have the necessary funds to effectively protect online civil
liberties in this country.

Visit http://www.efa.org.au/support2010/ and learn more about what it
is that EFA does and what your money will be spent on, and then please
give whatever you can afford. The recent debate in this country
around Internet censorship demonstrates that we cannot take our civil
liberties for granted and that EFA is in the best position to campaign
on your behalf.

In addition to donating, please forward this email to your family and
friends, and encourage them to support EFA.

You can also show your support by participating in the Open Internet
campaign (http://openinternet.com.au/) and by becoming a fan of EFA on
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/EFA-Electronic-Frontiers-Australia/36777331283?v=wall).
You can also now buy EFA merchandise on Zazzle
(http://www.zazzle.com.au/efa_oz).

Thank you for your support.

Electronic Frontiers Australia

Saints Alive!

You know what? You don't cure cancer with magic. You cure it with medical procedures. You take thousands of scientists, thousands of doctors, and they work on the problen night and day for decades and decades. They train for the best part of a decade, they devote their lives to chipping away at this monstrous problem, they spend their whole careers doing it, just so they can pass a few, precious scraps of new knowledge down to the next generation of scientists and doctors.

And, after decades of intense, worldwide recearch, the results start to come. When I was a child, cancer was a death sentence. If you had it, you asked, "How long have I got?" These days, the rate of curing cancer is about 50%. If you get it you ask, "Can it be fixed?" It's one of the triumphs of our age that we have come so far in fighting this hideous disease.

So it really pisses me off that the Catholic church, has canonised an Asutralian woman because she cured cancer by a miracle. A miracle! Those fat cat bishops, controlling vast fortunes, running an organisation that has only last week scandalised us all by its sexual abuse of small children in Germany, have said that this woman cured cancer by magic!

Magic!

Well, I'm sorry. You don't cure cancer by magic. You cure it by applying brilliant minds and inconceivable amounts of hard work and resources for year after year after year. That's how you do it. You don't cure cancer by magic! And it's an insult to all those men and women who have worked so hard all their lives to even suggest that you do.

If the Catholic bishops really want to do something about cancer, they should give up their silly mumbo-jumbo canonisation rituals, stop talking crap about magic cures, sell some of their staggeringly huge assets, and invest the money in cancer research. That might actually help someone.

The Price of Christmas

I see that a priest in York, England has recommended that his parishioners steal the things they need this Christmas since no-one else is going to help them out. Is conspiracy to commit a mortal sin a sin too? The theology could get tricky. However, the humanity is plain and simple. The plight of the homeless in the UK - while not nearly so bas as that of the homeless in the USA - is heart-wrenching. No decent person can witness it without revolting against the system that creates and sustains it.

And that system is capitalism.

Christmas may be a good time to remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The food heaped on our plates, the mostly-unwanted gifts, the treats and indulgences, the lights and the shiny, plastic baubles, all have to be paid for.

In a capitalist society, the payment is made by the consumer - you and me - from money we get by selling our labour to the people who control the capital. They get their money by selling the product of our labour back to us in the form of meals, plastic baubles and so on. The magic of capitalism is that, by this process, capital increases. Somehow value is added by the act of production. Where does it come from?

It comes from various kinds of exploitation, but two in particular: the exploitation of workers, and the exploitation of the environment. Workers are exploited by not paying them anything like the value of their product would suggest they should be paid. The excess goes to the owners of the capital. These days, when workers in the consuming countries ask to be paid more fairly, their jobs, and the exploitation, are moved overseas to places where workers are paid even less and can be more thoroughly exploited. That this leaves people with no source of income because they have lost the ability to sell their labour, might be seen as a bad thing, but for capitalism it is good, it means that labour becomes a plentiful commodity that can now be bought more cheaply. (This is also one of the reasons why capitalists like population growth.) It means that the workers who were once in danger of earning enough that they were no longer so badly exploited, but who lost their jobs, are now forced get new jobs at lower wages and be properly exploited again. To keep capital growing, exploitation of workers has to be increasingly efficient and widespread. It is called 'productivity'.

Even so, you can only take the exploitation of workers so far before the rate of increase declines. For capital to keep on growing you have to keep pumping new wealth into the system. That's where the environment comes in. Along with people's work, the environment is the source of all wealth. Fuels and materials dug from the ground, animals and plants taken or farmed in the seas and on the land, are the raw feedstock of capitalism. To keep capital growing, the people with access to these resources, must keep acquiring them in ever-larger amounts. The consumption of raw materials by our 'primary industries' is nothing less than the consumption of our planet. With increasing speed, capitalism is taking whatever is usable from the world, using it to fuel growth, and dumping the rest as polluting slag - on the land, in the seas, and in the air. What's more, like the exploitation of workers, the exploitation of the environment must also be driven to ever-greater efficiency.

It is clear to everyone who thinks about these things, that capitalism cannot survive forever - or even for very much longer - without finding more things to exploit. The 'global market' has now, pretty much included every possible worker on the planet in capitalism's web of exploitation. There is plenty of of opportunity for growth there still, but the resource - us - is finite. The environment is starting to show signs of breaking down under the strain. Global warming, peak oil, extinctions of fish stocks, and global food shortages, are all signs that we are using up what is there at an unsustainable rate.

Technology has always been capitalism's friend. The need for more efficient exploitation has always driven technological development. The people who control capital - and the people who depend on its products - are in a precarious position just now. It looks as if the environment might collapse, or run out of key materials, before technological fixes have been found for these problems. We need new places to exploit - the asteroids? other planets? - before this one runs dry. We need ways to keep the environment patched up long enough to bring these new resources online. And, we need more efficient ways to exploit labour (global recessions are good for capitalism, but they do carry the risk of revolution.)

Capitalism is great for the owners of capital, it's not bad for many of the rest of us either (as long as we temper its worst excesses with democracy,) but it isn't a free lunch. In the end, we will have to pay the price for all this wealth.

Some, like the homeless, the people on welfare, and the working poor, already pay that price for us. It is by putting a certain proportion of us in such misery that capitalism ensures the low cost of labour and hence adequate returns on investment for the owners of capital. The suffering of the starving and the homeless in our cities is helping to put the lights on our trees, the iPods in our pockets, and the piles of food on our plates this Christmas.

Is it really so bad if they snatch a can of ravioli from a supermarket shelf in their desperation?

Help Me Out, America

Calling all Americans. I need your opinion on something.

I've written a book and it's going to be published in February 2010. It's a near-future thriller set in Europe. The background to the tale is that the world is just recovering from a very serious depression brought on by us hitting peak oil. The depression, which lasted fifteen years, was worse than anything experienced yet - millions starved, resource wars were fought, governments toppled.

It's a very minor part of the story but it is mentioned that of all the countries of the world, worst hit was the USA. It's dependence on oil and its strongly consumer-driven economy meant that the effect of peak oil was worse there than anywhere. The economy collapsed. Tens of millions were unemployed and most of them were starving. Riots and civil unrest threatened to turn into civil war as an ineffectual government dickered around with fiscal stimulus. Things looked bad until a strong, right-wing government, with fundamentalist Christian roots was elected and immediately took a firm grip of the situation. (Imagine a strong George W Bush, or a Sarah Palin with brains.) Unfortunately, they use their emergency powers and a mandate from a population scared to death about what is happening, to push through some constitutional changes - abolishing the separation of church and state and ensuring that only candidates affiliated to the official church can run for office.

Over the next couple of decades, the new government does, in fact, stop the country from plunging into chaos, but at enormous cost. Opposition parties are banned, many universities - hotbeds of anti-government sentiment - are closed down under the new blasphemy and insurrection laws. The ones that remain are 're-focused' on theological teaching, with the closure of many 'blasphemous' science departments, especially the biological sciences, geology, astronomy, philosophy, and physics. Theology replaces science teaching in schools. Many, many people are arrested and executed for anti-government and anti-religious crimes and the FBI is turned into a feared and energetic prosecutor of the new laws and policies.

Ironically, although peace returns to the streets and Americans are being returned to work and the homes they had lost, the country's prosperity, without the leading edge science and technology that once powered it, has nose-dived. With GM crops and livestock classed as 'abominations', the (future version of the) Internet strictly censored, and other countries surging ahead in the recovery, America is actually receiving massive food aid shipments from Europe and Asia - a fact the Christian fundamentalists in power are suppressing through their control of all media.

OK.

Here's what I need help with. As an American, does this scenario seem so far fetched, so completely unbelievable, to you that you would have a low opinion of a book in which it occurs?

Australia is Endangering Global Democracy

Just thought I'd point this out in case any Rudd government ministers are reading.

Even children's groups like Save the Children oppose the Australian government's plans to censor the Internet. Since the government censorship plans are ostensibly to protect children, surely this should give them pause.

Or maybe they would rather just go ahead and put their censorship technologies in place and then come clean about the real reason they're doing this? On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't. Their whole attitude seems to be, "Stuff you, Australia, we're going to censor the Internet and nobody can stop us."

Maybe other Western countries should start agitating against this move. After all, once one Western democracy has taken complete control of the Internet and what its citizens can see there (yes, just like China) won't other Western governments want to do the same? Once there is a precedent, it will be much easier for this to happen in the USA and the UK too.

The scary thing is, no-one seems to understand the danger that government-controlled Internet filtering poses to Australian democracy. Why is there no national and international outcry against this?

Not A Twit After All

I'm not saying I'll never twitter again, but I have noticed that I havent tweeted for several weeks now. So the grand experiment is over. It seems I'm not the twittering type...

...unlike millions of others. According to research by A C Nielson from March this year, unique visitors to the Twitter site grew by 1,382 percent year-on-year, from 475,000 in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. Plus, there were another three-quarters of a million people accessing Twitter via their mobile phones and about a million sending and receiving Twitter SMS messages. I guess you could say it has become popular. It all adds up to about 240 tweets per user for the quarter to Feb '09. That's more than 2 per user per day. (No variances were given but I suspect there is a broad spread of usage patterns.)

I averaged just over half a tweet per day i the four months since I started.

Mind you, I picked up some interesting followers, including one young lady whose picture shows her posing in a latex catsuit.

I won't be closing my account or anything but I think I should acknowledge that this is not for me. Honestly, I don't care what someone I barely know in Indiana is having for breakfast, or that their dog just threw up on the carpet. And that @reply feature, where you get to see half the conversation someone you follow is having with someone you don't (about poetry markets in Belgium, or their holiday plans) is about the most useless load of nonsense I've ever seen. You'd think it would be intriguing, wouldn't you? Well, it's not.

Maybe when I've got something to sell, I will start stalking following hundreds of people the way everyone else does. Until then, I just don't see the point.

It's All About The Guns, Stupid

Another damned mass murder, this time in Winnenden in Germany.

The boy who did it was described by Heribert Rech, interior minister of Baden-Wuerttemberg state as "completely unremarkable, there was nothing in his background to suggest this could have happened." Except the boy was a trained marksman! Except he had access to firearms! Except that he was an isolated loner who played computer games all day!

For God's sake, wake up! If you give weapons and training to disturbed children, some of them are going to go nuts and shoot people.

Here's a simple way to stop young men from shooting their classmates: don't let them anywhere near guns! It isn't hard. It isn't rocket science. If you give kids guns, they will shoot people. Incidentally, the same goes for grown-ups.

And while I'm ranting on the subject, how is it we can, as a society, spend billions setting up evesdropping services like the famous Eschelon, that listen to everybody's phone calls and read everybody's emails, trying to protect us from the extremely minor 'threat' of terrorism, but we can't use the same technology to monitor the Web for kids who openly brag that they are going to shoot their classmates? Like the German killer-nutcase did seven hours before he went on the rampage in Winnenden- and as so many others do. If we're going to lose all our privacy to the NSA and MI5 anyway, why can't they at least do something useful with their supercomputers like stopping assholes shooting children.

End of rant. Thank you for your patience.

What Kind of Twit Twitters?

Well, you're about to find out. Look near the bottom of the left-hand column and you'll find my new twitter stream.

I've been resisting Twitter for quite a while now. Honestly, it just looks like a waste of bits. Yet so many people rave about it - people I would otherwise think quite highly of - that I suppose I ought to give it a go.

First impressions:

1. It's easier to do than I expected. I just leave the Twitter page open and type a quick burst of rubbish into it when it occurs to me to do so. The 140 character limit is actually a big help here. It stops me being as prolix as I'd like and therefore saves me from wasting so much time.

2. I'm just as likely to type in a random thought as to answer the question 'What are you doing?' which is supposed to be what it's all about. Maybe my random thoughts will be more interesting than the fact that I'm just off to have lunch. Twitter says its for the bits of your life in between blogs and emails. Well, maybe for me it's for the bits of my mind in between more coherent utterances.

3. Even after just half-a-dozen twitterings, the whole is looking far more interesting than the parts. Maybe a twitter stream is going to be a far more valuable and entertaining read than each individual utterance.

4. The word 'twitter' is very irritating. It's like 'twitcher'. An individual twitter entry should be called a 'twitch'. Maybe the next big thing will be like twitter but with a ten word limit. We could call that a 'tick'.

Anyhoo, I'll try it for a while and see what it comes to. Maybe I'll enjoy this mental twitching enough to keep at it for a while. If you're one of the twitterati (a twitcher,) then follow my twitchings by clicking the 'Follow me on Twitter' link at the bottom of my twitchings.

If you can bear it.

National Australia Bank Behaves Stupidly

I just had an interesting conversation with the National Australia Bank. The NAB is our credit card service provider and has been for many, many years. Yet, while Wifie was in town this morning attempting to pay for a ride-on mower we just had delivered (see picture), the eftpos machine in the mower shop said our card had been cancelled.

She called me and I transferred some cash (we have our other accounts with another bank) so she could pay for it and then I got on the phone to NAB to ask them WTF?

I had the usual fun with the telephone menu system. I sat through many minutes of chatty little adverts and reassurances that my call was very important and they'd get to it real soon now (by which time I was shouting into the phone that they would better demonstrate my importance to them, and they'd get to me so much sooner, if they just put more staff on at their call centre - or words to that effect.) Finally, a very young woman for whom English was clearly a second language, started asking me 'security questions'.

I asked her why she was doing this because I wasn't interested in playing. I just wanted to know why my card had been cancelled. It seemed she wanted to verify my identity so she could set up a phone banking account for me so that I would be able to talk to the credit card department. I told her I wasn't going to do all that. I just wanted to ask someone about my card. She was totally flummoxed by this, so I suggested she put me on to someone who was more senior.

So I went back to the ads and the assurances for several more minutes until a young man came on the line asking me if I was having a good day. I explained that I was not. This was the young foreign woman's supervisor, it turned out, and, although he sounded even younger than she was, he at least spoke good English. He explained again the need to establish my identity so that I could be issued a PIN for telephone banking, so that they could be sure of who I was. I explained again that I didn't want to waste my time doing that and would he just answer the damned question.

It took a while but he finally persuaded me that he was completely incapable of taking any initiative and I'd just have to follow the very stupid procedure. So I said, OK, fire away.

We started off with some easy questions - my date of birth, my middle name, etc. - then he asked for my current account balance. I pulled out the folder that holds my NAB statements (I was sitting in Wifie's office and she has such things beautifully organised) and read out the value at the bottom of the last statement. And the boy said it was wrong.

No, no, you halfwitted monkey, I explained politely. That is precisely the number you sent me. But it isn't the current balance, he complained. I checked the dates on the statement. The statement was for a period ending near the end of November. That's it! I exclaimed. The December statement won't have reached me yet. (A small side explanation ensued concerning my remote location, the unreliability of the mail - often two weeks late - and the fact that Christmas and New Year have happened between the end of the last billing period and today. In fact, it would be a miracle if I had received a statement for December.)

Sorry, he said, I had to give him the latest account balance. But I haven't had it yet, you stupid robot! I remonstrated. Nevertheless, he went on in his best 'customer service' voice, that is the only answer he could accept. So tell me my current balance, I said, and I'll tell it back to you. Sadly, for that, I'd need my telephone banking PIN and we haven't established that you are who you say you are, he explained. So, I said, allowing myself a moment of sarchasm, if I'd stolen this month's statement instead of last month's I'd be OK now. I shouldn't have said it, I know, but it worth it to hear the silence at the other end.

We seemed to be at an impasse and I was just about to ask if there was someone even younger I could speak to when my adversary found a solution. If I were to go to my nearest branch and ask them, they could tell me my account balance. Then I could call him again and we could carry on with our delightful little game. I asked him if they even had a branch where I lived. He looked it up and said they did, in a town 20 km away. I said it would take me at least an hour to drive there, talk to the branch and drive back, just so I could do something I don't even want to do, so he can tell me why the hell his stupid bank had cancelled my credit card. Tough, he replied, as politely as possible.

I was not exactly happy by this point, so I explained to the youngster that if I had to travel 40 km and queue in one of their branches to get some information they already knew just to prove that I am who I am and not someone fraudulently demanding to know why their credit card had been cancelled, I would be closing my account and moving it to another bank. Wouldn't it be so much nicer if he just told me why they had cancelled the frigging card.

For the first time, he stopped sounding so smug and robotic and spoke as if he was a real person. I imagine he was thinking about how these calls might be recorded for 'quality assurance purposes' and how his side of our conversation might seem from a third party's perspective. I mean, it's all well and good doing exactly what you were trained to do but if that ends up with you losing a customer (two if you count my wife) I suspect you haven't actually achieved what you set out to. And, given that so many banks are struggling at the moment... So, probably against all training directives, he told me that the words 'card cancelled' can appear on a shop's machine for 'hundreds' of different reasons - almost none of them meaning that card had in fact been cancelled. Line outages, software errors, and any number of temporary glitches in the system will lead to the same message - 'card cancelled'. Why?For the love of God, why? I cried. Surely that is a completely insane way to design a system? Surely only the most stupid moron who ever lived could conceive of something so utterly crass? Well, he explained, the bank never sends actual account statuses down the lines to shops, so it sends the 'card cancelled' message instead. Nice one, NAB. Way to piss off your customers!

So is my card cancelled or not? I asked. He couldn't say. And there we left it.

I called Wifie after this and asked her to drop in at the branch in town while she was there. She had a similar experience, I gather, but got the anwer that the transaction she was attempting (worth about AUD4,000) would have taken the account a few hundred bucks over the limit. So they sent the 'card cancelled' message, BUT all such messages come with a code number. Shops, it seems, are issued with books that explain what the code numbers mean and the shop assistant should have been able to explain it there and then. Clearly the shop assistant (actually the owner in this case) had not known that he was an integral part of the NAB error-reporting system, or he had somehow failed to understand the esoteric intricacies of the NAB's security procedures. Whatever it was, NAB caused me and my wife a lot of grief, wasted masses of time, and cost themselves about an hour of staff time - all for nothing.

They also lost two customers.

Now, I'm not saying you don't need security on people's credit card accounts but when that security becomes so tight that legitimate account holders can't get a simple question answered, it is a sign that something is very, very wrong. I would prefer to be with a bank that made a little less money because it was a little more open to fraud, and instead treated its customers with a bit more trust and consideration. Even if the security system was a bit more intelligent, it would have helped. After all, in this case, what was at risk? What was the bank saving me from that was worth wasting so much of my time and its time and, ultimately, losing two customers for?

And as for the practice of telling shopkeepers the customer's card has been cancelled for every damned reason under the sun, well, it just creates embarrassment, bad feeling, and a lot of wasted time. It is a really stupid thing to do.

Finally, there is the problem at the root of all this. We exceeded our AUD9,000 card limit by a few hundred bucks. Firstly, I wonder why the limit is so low. Fourteen years ago, when we left the UK, we had a GBP9,000 limit on our credit card and the bank was always clamouring to raise it. That's two-and-a-half times the current limit - and a lot of inflation under the bridge since then. What is wrong with Australian banks that makes them so stingy with their limits? As I say, I've been a customer of this particular bank for about 12 years and have never once failed to make a payment or in any way transgressed their rules. Yet this is how I'm treated when my credit limit is marginally exceeded on a single, large transaction. Well, if I don't even get one chance, if I don't get even the slightest consideration for my long-term custom, then they don't get a second chance either

Sod 'em.

Censored

I wrote to the Minister a little while ago regarding my concerns about the new Internet censorship scheme planned for Australia. His office sent me back a pro-forma PDF document explaining the scheme and the various additional measures (including additional policing and public awareness campaigns) they intend to put in place.

It was interesting and I'd love to share it with you but the communication also included this paragraph:

"The information transmitted is for the use of the intended recipient only and may contain confidential and/or legally privileged material. Any review, re-transmission, disclosure, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited and may result in severe penalties."

Since this effectively gags me, I cannot tell you what the government's plans are. Sorry.

I might just say, though, that if the harmless publicity material they sent me had to be suppressed by threats like this, doesn't it speak volumes for the kind of people who are running the country? How can we trust them to build and operate tools that will censor the Internet when they think even their own vague and bland assurances have to be censored?

What's Up With Printers, Huh?

I bought a new printer yesterday. Funny thing is though, I only went into the shop to buy some printer ink.

My last printer (a Canon MP160) I bought after the one before that broke down. I found it in a KMart going cheap. At $67, I didn't much care what it's features were as long as it worked. And it did. Very well. When I ran out of ink, I went to but a new cartridge and found myself paying $94 for a pair (one black, one colour) - and this was a very good price. Since then, I've seen then at anything up to $120 a pair!

When I went out yesterday to buy another cartridge, I didn't have much time. I could only take 10 minutes in OfficeWorks in Brisbane in between other appointments. To my dismay, the black cartridge I wanted was $58. However, to get to them, I walked past a pile of Canon MP480 printers - almost identical spec to my Canon MP160 but with a much more attractive number - going for $99, including two full ink cartridges. It was a no-brainer really, especially when I discovered that the refill ink cartridges for the MP480 cost about half as much as those for the MP160. So I bought one. A new printer, that is.

The whole transaction has been bothering me ever since. For a start I can't understand why printer ink is SOOOO expensive. Is it just the printer companies ripping us off, or do they really make it out of orchid pollen, platinum, and the gonads of endangered bats? Something must account for why it is one of the most expensive liquids in the world, costing as much as $8,000 per gallon ($2,100 per litre) according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Secondly, since the printer, its software, its manuals and all that packaging is collectively worth about as much as one ink cartridge (because two cartridges and the printer (etc.) come to the same price as three cartridges) and it has circuit boards, lamps, motors, a colour LCD screen at least as good as the one on my 3G phone, many moving parts, and the look of something they paid an industrial designer to cast her eye over, why aren't all consumer electronics dirt cheap too?

And thirdly, given that printers are essentially disposable now (like the similarly-priced ink cartridges) where do printer companies get off not running printer recycling schemes so you can dump your old one responsibly and pick up a new one when your ink runs out?

There is something horribly wrong with this whole situation and I suspect it all comes down to massively inflated prices for printer ink. Why, for instance, are there so many different cartridge sizes? There have been printers around for decades now and nobody has come up with a standard format? And why are ink cartridges not refillable (and I mean from a bottle of ink I can pur into a reservoir in the printer)? And why don't ink cartidges say what their content by volume is? Or their content by square centimetres of printed surface? Or give any clue whatsoever what their capacity is? Could that be so that you can't make a rational choice about which printer to buy or which manufacturer's cartidges?

This has got to be a scam. Someone is cheating and profiteering. Call me paranoid but, when it gets so bad that a printer costs less than a complete ink refill, I smell a rat.


(Picture is from the San Francisco Chronicle, see link in text.)

Australian Labor Party Continues to Disappoint

While I'm moaning on about the Australian Labor Party's support for religious fundamentalist and moral pigmy James Bidgood and how this reflects on the party's ethics, I should also mention the new Internet censorship laws they're about to introduce.

Ostensibly a measure to filter out child pornography, Australia's new net censorship laws will allow the government to manage a blacklist of all the sites it does not want Australians to see and ensure that ISPs block them. The list has not been made public and, as far as I know, never will be. They simply want us to trust them that they're acting in our best interests and 'only' offensive sites will be censored.

Well I don't trust governments to know what is in my best interest (or the best interest of my children) and I certainly don't trust them to censor only offensively pornographic sites. It will only be a matter of time before political sites are on the blacklist (if they are not already). If you give the government the power to control the Internet, you no longer have freedom of information or freedom of speech. If you no longer have freedom of speech, you no longer have democracy. If you don't have democracy, you're stuffed.

The government may even think it is trying to do the right thing with this terrible law but it is not. It is creating the technical and political infrastructure that will allow totalitarian regimes to control our access to information.

This appalling state of affairs is barely mentioned in the media but it is not slipping by unnoticed. A series of protest marches is being organised for 13th November and I urge everyone who can to get out on the streets and let the Australian Labor Party and Kevin Rudd know what we think about this monstrous threat to our freedom.

As for what this says about the moral integrity of the Labor Party, someone calling themselves 'Megaport' writing on the geek site Slashdot put it very nicely. I quote him or her in full:

Just as the USA have lost their moral right to castigate countries who use torture as a tool of statecraft, so too has Australia now given up her right to criticise those authoritarian regimes who would limit the freedom of communication of their citizens.

Given that all the experts (yes, ALL the experts) agree that it won't stop anyone who actually traffics in this despicable content from peddling their filth even for a moment, can anyone here tell me what else we're buying for the price of our moral high ground on this issue?

China will be laughing their socks off at us next time we try to mention the censorship of news and internet in their country - no matter what language our leaders speak the message in.

The point about the ineffectiveness of the measure is actually a good one since there will be many ways for people who actually want child porn to get around it. So you have to ask yourself just why Kevin Rudd wants to go ahead and do this. It can only be that his government would like the general ability to censor material of which it disapproves.

Telstra Wastes Another Day of My Life

I see that Comcast, over in the States, has just put a cap on its broadband packages of 250 Gb/mo. SprintWireless, however, still has its service uncapped for $50/mo. This puts into grim perspective the awful day I had yesterday but to appreciate it, you'll need a bit of background.

I'm a Telstra NextG wireless broadband customer - by necessity - there are no other broadband suppliers in my area at all. Since the NextG service stared, 2 years or so ago, Testra has insisted that each customer has a separate account, a separate modem, and fixed the technology so that you could not use a router. This made the service hugely expensive. For a 1Gb/mo. download limit, Wifie and I paid $80 each (yes, each, plus $250 each for our modems). Then, a couple of weeks ago, Telstra announced that it would actually supply a router with the service so families could have a single account and share it - welcome to the 21st Century, Telstra!

Since Wifie and I also have a Telstra NextG mobile phone and a Telstra land-line (don't get me started on that!!) - as I said, Telstra is our only supplier out here - we decided that, with the router now available, we could bundle our services and save money. In fact, since we only needed one NextG broadband account, we could now get the absolute top-of-the-range package which has a 3Gb/mo download limit and costs a mere $109/mo.. So we ordered the router and set up the bundle. Rather than wire the house for ethernet, I also bought a wireless PCI card for my desktop machine (Wifie is a Mac user so already has bluetooth and WiFi as standard.)

Yesterday was the day when all the equipment arrived and we could plug it all together. (I won't dwell on Telstra's cock-up with the parcel delivery, or the online parts shop I first ordered the Wi-Fi card from which lied about the part's availability.)

It took seven hours work yesterday and another hour this morning to get it working. Now that may just be because we're both stupid (which we're not) or because we have non-standard equipment (which we don't) or because the network we were building is vastly complicated (which it isn't) or because I didn't have the necessary 25 years in the IT business needed to sort out the problems (oh, hang on a minute, I do have 25 years in the IT business).

The real reasons it took so long were:

1. The Telstra router came with no instructions beyond saying you should follow the instructions in the software wizard on the accompanying CD. The wizard, of course, helps you cater with the simplest possible case then dumps you. Naturally, it has no trouble-shooting guidance for when things go wrong.
2. Telstra's phone support covers only one computer attached to the router. To anyone except a marketing executive, this might seem ridiculous as the only point of having a router is to make a network consisting of multiple computers. Still, I suppose it saves Telstra money, so that's OK.
   
3. The Telstra software was (as always) poorly designed and completely unhelpful. Still, it has nice graphics and zoomy logo things. As I ran through the set-up sequences over and over again, I couldn't help thinking that you can never have enough of seeing a company that is currently shafting you, advertise itself and its products over and over and over again, at the expense of your time and frayed nerves.
   
4. The Telstra business systems that should have made all this easy, were a mess. (I spoke to four different branches of their software support group before I got the one that knew anything about doing an installation on a Macintosh - and I only got to them because I shouted at the poor guy in the third group and got him to take ownership of the problem of routing me to the right support group. Then it turned out that the sales group which set up our username and password had stuffed up and I had to be guided through a little secret technical magic to reprogram the router!)
5. The fifth problem wasn't Telstra at all - which was a refreshing change. The software that came with my Chinese PCI card didn't work properly and came with no instructions whatsoever. Like all driver software, it is designed for propeller-headed geeks with nothing better to do than to learn hexadecimal codes and stick their noses close to hot chips. I tried the Wi-Fi card in three different PCI slots, reinstalling the driver each time I moved it, before I found one that it liked. Since I did most of this sitting on the floor, I had the additional joy of having my 4 month-old puppy, Bertie, slobbering excitedly in my ear and attempting to jump into the innards of my computer.
   

But that's all behind us now. The router works, our two computers are talking wirelessly to the Internet and all's well with the world.

Except that all we get for all this effort and stress is a low-speed broadband service with a 3Gb download limit. Gee, thanks, Telstra.

When is Comcast coming to Australia?

Focus Fusion: Will It Save Us?

I've been reading a bit lately about focus fusion – a radically new approach to producing power from fusion reactions. The research is spearheaded by Eric J. Lerner and his company Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc. (LPP) and has been financed mostly by Government organisations like NASA and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission .

The basic principle is to use Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) to confine a proton-Boron mix (pB11) at extreme temperatures (a couple of million degrees) so that a fusion reaction can take place. The DPF technology has existed for decades but the theoretical work needed to enable a controlled fusion reaction has not existed until very recently. Now, LPP has received a USD600,000 grant from Swedish firm CMEF (the first part of ten million dollars if all goes well) to develop a proof-of-concept reactor.

Focus fusion has none of the major drawbacks the Tokomak programme has laboured under. It doesn't suffer the plasma stability problems Tokomaks do, it does not generate 'hard' radiation like Tokomaks, and it can feed electrons directly into the grid without the need to generate heat to drive turbines. It could potentially generate electricity at a hundredth of the cost of existing power generation techniques. It is also suitable for small-scale, distributed power production (a 5MWatt reactor could fit inside a garage). That means focus fusion reactors could power railway locomotives, lorries, ships and aircraft. What's more, electric cars would vastly outperform petrol (economically). If focus fusion works, we could easily be looking at a completely petrol and coal free world in just a few decades!

Obviously this would be a disaster for the Middle East and for the big petrol and coal companies (and, hopefully, the governments they prop up). It would probably also be a disaster for the major coal-exporting countries like Australia – which is a bit unfortunate since that's where I live. It would also mean the end of renewable energy technologies (I don't suppose anyone will be sad to see the end of wind farms!) and it would, at last, kill off nuclear power as a viable commercial concern.

All-in-all, it would be a miraculous technical breakthrough that would save us from global warming and make electricity virtually free for the whole world. It is estimated that there is enough boron in the world to keep us in power for a billion years and the only wast emission you get from focus fusion is Helium – an inert gas with no greenhouse effect.

Too good to be true? In a world already beset by food riots and the first petrol riots, a world that is just a few decades from a catastrophic climate change tipping point, where the first resource wars have already been fought, for all our sakes, let's hope not.

What is going on at Blogger?

I'm getting pretty fed up with Blogger. It has been nothing but trouble in the past week or so.

One of the big problems is in the page layout code. I can't change the layout on my pages and I can't add new page elements. Irritatingly, the error message is simply 'errors on page'! Not exactly user friendy! Blogger's 'Help Centre' is a morass. There is almost no chance of finding a fix there. I found two other people who had reported an identical error - but that was back in 2007 and no-one had posted a fix. Someone who had posted a similar error got a reply saying stop using Internet Explorer and change to Firefox. So I tried this and, with Firefox I couldn't even log on to my blog admin page. This time the error message was an alphanumeric string of about ten random characters! Gee, thanks, Blogger.

The other big problem is that AdSense - Google's advert placement scheme - keeps telling me it can't 'crawl' my blog pages because it has been denied access. This means no revenue! The AdSense help pages explain how to adjust my settings to make it work - but only for a hosted domain of my own, not for Blogger or any other hosted blog site. Wonderful!

I've had good service from Blogger for almost two years now and I'm reluctant to switch - but this is becoming so frustrating that I may have to. Other people I know seem to prefer Wordpress - and perhaps I can see why now.

Unix and the Asus EeePC

Almost 25 years ago, I got my first experience of using an Apple Macintosh computer. Until that point, I had used various other machines, each with its different operating system. My favourite, at the time, was Unix, with which I had become quite proficient. Yet the moment I saw the Mac, I realised that command-line operating systems were dead and buried. The new windows-based operating systems were a quantum leap forward and there would be no going back.

How wrong I was! Even as Xerox, Sun and Apple tried to drag us into the future, IBM and Microsoft threw out a massively heavy anchor – the IBM PC, running DOS – that held the world back for 15 years while Microsoft slowly, painfully, caught up to where the great pioneering companies had long since been. Eventually, Microsoft Windows became a very good, windows-based operating system with high levels of usability.

In the years since I first saw the Mac, I have used only MacOS and (from Windows 3.1 onwards) Microsoft Windows. I've also used 'palmtop' or hand-held computers for writing with (as I have mentioned before). These each had their quirky little operating systems but I never did much with them so there wasn't much to learn, or complain about. The last of these, my HP Jornada 720 is a Windows CE machine – close enough to desktop versions of Windows that it was easy to use. I've been looking for a replacement for it for a couple of years now and there just isn't one. So when I saw the Asus EeePC advertised, I realised this was about as close as it was going to get and grabbed one. (Well, Wifie bought it for me as a present, actually, knowing how keen I was.)

The Eee is a little miracle – a fully-fledged laptop that is just a little bigger than a DVD box (that's it on the left as I was showing it off to some friends). It's twice the size of my beloved Jornada but packs in so much more – for so much less money - that I was willing to give it a go. The operating system on the Eee is Unix (although you can install Windows XP if you want to) but not the Unix I used to use 25 years ago. This is a modern Unix with a proper, windows-based graphical user interface (GUI). The machine has all the networking capabilities you'd expect in a modern laptop (including Wi-Fi) as well as three USB2.0 ports. All it lacks is optical media (DVD/CD reader) and the kind of fat memory we feel we need these days. For my purposes it is ideal. I only want it for writing on. What's more, it comes with the Open Office.org applications pre-installed – and they are the ones I use all the time now anyway (as I have also mentioned before).

Let me say right now that the Eee is exactly right for my purposes. The only drawback is that it has Unix installed. What I've discovered since using the Eee is that Unix with a GUI is still the same old Unix it always was but with a prettier face. Unix, it seems, is not a patch on Windows XP. It is not a patch on MacOS X either. It looks superficially similar, it has windows, it has pointers, it has Help, and so on but it's usability is awful. When things go wrong, one discovers the Help is badly-written, minimal and obscure. The way things are done is hopelessly complicated – 'user hostile' is the phrase that springs to mind.

I'm an extremely experienced computer user, one-time programmer and one-time Unix user, yet I have been completely unable to solve trivial problems on the Eee – like loading and installing a new printer driver. (I won't bore you with this but it is so fabulously complicated that I have had to spend two days trawling through online tutorials and user-group forums just to get to grips with what I need to do. I haven't tried to do it yet – I'm saving that for when I have most of a day to spare!) I also haven't yet managed to get my Eee to network with my Windows desktop (partly because of the added complication of my crappy Telstra wireless broadband modem but also because the copious and well-written Windows XP help files assume you're connecting to another Windows machine, while the minimal, useless Unix help files assume nothing will go wrong with the simple wizard process that a child could follow without instructions.) I've spent about a day in the online forums on this issue too – enough to convince myself I will never solve it and I'd better call in a network guru.

Part of the problem with Unix today seems to be the plethora of slightly different versions that exist. If your printer company, for an example close to my heart, only produces a driver for one Unix version, you can't install it in another. Well, actually, you can but first you have to translate it using another piece of software. But then you discover this piece of software is written for yet another slightly different version of Unix than the one you have and you'll need to download and install a sizeable software environment all of its own just to make it work (which some experts in the online forums say you should really avoid doing if you can help it – which you can't).

Another part of the problem is usability. Usability is a deep and fundamental property of a system. It isn't a gloss you add to the surface. Apple has always understood this. Microsoft has gradually come to understand this. The Unix community just hasn't got a clue! However good the GUI on a Unix implementation, it will never have the usability of MacOS or Windows if the underlying user tasks are not themselves usable, or if the user support infrastructure (labels, layout, instructions and help) is not fully cognizant of the users, their mental models of the system, their tasks and their task knowledge, or if the underlying file systems and command structures are not fully consistent with the user's task model.

Finally, and this is also a usability issue, part of the problem is the shallowness of the GUI. It is assumed in the Unix world that, as soon as something goes wrong, or as soon as something complicated needs to be done, the user will abandon the GUI in favour of a command-line interpreter! I have only had my Eee a few weeks but I now have on my wall a summary of the Unix command shell syntax and a table of Unix commands. All you Unix evangelists out there, please take note. People will keep buying Windows (and MacOS) in preference to using Unix for free as long as Unix feels like a horrible, unfriendly kludge instead of a well-organised, intuitive appliance.

To be fair to Unix, its main audience comprises techies and nerds. You only have to look at the Unix online forums to see this – all those propeller-heads gabbling away to one another in impenetrable jargon. These are people who like to live with their heads under the bonnet. They are actually happy to see inside the machine and fiddle with the cogs and levers. But if Unix is ever going to make it into the real world, where people don't have the time or inclination to type hieroglyphs into 1970's-style 'Teletype windows' – a world where most people find even the complexities of Windows XP seriously challenging and completely irrelevant to what they need to achieve – then Unix is going to have to clean up its act.

This is obviously not impossible. The Macintosh itself is now a Unix machine but still (almost) as usable as it has ever been. So why isn't the Asus Eee?

One of the sad things about the Eee's usability failures is that it is a fantastically popular machine. Its price-performance level has made it a truly desirable little computer and it is selling like hotcakes. Which means that hundreds of thousands of people – eventually millions – will be getting their first exposure to Unix through the Eee and, I confidently predict, they will not be enjoying the experience. In fact, it will probably drive them quickly back into the arms of Microsoft. Soon, someone will have a machine out at the same price-performance point but running Windows out of the box and it will grab Asus' market away from them in a flash. I also predict that Asus will soon drop Unix altogether as a the OS for the Eee and will only sell it with Windows installed.

Frankly, Unix deserves this treatment. It is still a very long way from being a mass-market product.

Sterilising My Drinking Water The Easy Way

One of the many things about living out here in the bush with which I am unfamiliar, is the way water is collected and treated. My new house has three separate water collection systems. One is a ginormous plastic tank which collects the run-off from the house and shed roofs. The next is a small pond (or 'dam' as we call them here) that collects water that runs off the ground. The third is a pair of large plastic tanks which constitute a waste treatment plant for sewerage and other domestic waste water. The waste water plant generates relatively clean water which it then pumps out into a garden sprinkling system. The dam water is untreated and also has a pump, which we can use as required for garden watering or whatever. Water from the ginormous plastic tank that catches rainwater from the roofs, is pumped up to the house to provide our domestic supply.

The dam water and the treated waste water don't bother me. We only use them on the garden (or will, once we have a garden). It's this rainwater/drinking water system that bothers me. This water comes off the roofs straight into the tank where it sits for very long periods before being pumped into the house. The tank is closed (apart from two fat overflow pipes with a mesh over their ends) but the water that flows into it comes from the roofs and gutters. Apart from whatever airborne dust, smoke, pollen, and other organic matter landing on the roofs, there must inevitably be bird droppings and dead insects falling onto them all the time. Surely this means the water can't be quite sterile and must have quite a lot of stuff living in it?

It's not such a big deal because Wifie and I never drink unfiltered tap water anyway and any other water we consume in our food is always put through some kind of cooking process that would sterilise it. Yet it is just a little bit unsettling that the water we consume has been used to wash a roof with and has then sat in a big tank in the hot sun for weeks or months before we get round to pumping it into the house! Also, the fact that more and more people around the world are drinking re-cycled rainwater from just this kind of system and no-one is jumping up and down and saying what a health hazard it is, is actually quite reassuring.

Yet I have been wondering what to do to remove any risk whatsoever. And I think I have the answer: make rainwater tanks out of clear plastic.

I came across this idea in August 2000 when New Scientist reported on an Oxfam meeting that discussed the use of solar disinfection to combat a shortage of chemical disinfectants in Assam, India. (Issue 2253, New Scientist magazine, 26 August 2000, page 14. You may need a New Scientist subscription to read this online. Otherwise, your library probably has it.) A team of Swiss researchers in Duebendorf has show that filling a plastic bottle with water and leaving it in the sun can effectively disinfect it in as little as one hour. Martin Wegelin, who headed the Swiss research team, says that if you paint half the plastic bottle black and stand it on corrugated iron, it will heat up much faster and cut the time needed for thorough disinfection. The combination of heat (the water temperature goes above 50 degrees C) and ultraviolet radiation kills most micro-organisms, including 99.9 per cent of Escherichia coli, Vibrio cholerae (which causes cholera), and the parasite Cryptosporidium (which causes severe diarrhoea). This last is particularly interesting to me since I remember an outbreak of Cryptosporidium and that other popular faeces-borne parasite Giardia intestinalis that hit the water treatment plants in Sydney one year when I was living there and meant that we all had to boil our tap-water before using it for several weeks until they got the outbreak under control.

So, if it works for a couple of litres in an old Coke bottle, maybe it also works for five thousand litres in a clear plastic rainwater tank. If no-one has done the science yet, remember you heard it here first and don't forget to add my name to the patent, please.