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Are Paper Books Economically Viable?

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:59:00 +0000

This week, online seller Amazon announced that it would begin selling books in the form of one-off copies printed onto paper. The question is, is this a viable business model or just a passing fad?

The New Format

When the new format was announced, there was much puzzlement. A modest library, of say 1,000 books, currently fits onto a memory card the size of a fingernail. In the new format it would take up a whole room. Who would want that?

For booksellers though, there are many advantages to the new format. For example, because copyright only lasts for a limited number of years the vast majority of all the books every written are now out of copyright. This is why the electronic versions of these books are free. But you can print and sell a paper version for the same price as a new book and just keep the money that would be paid to the author.

There is also the issue of re-selling. Paper copies are not only damaged by the reading process, they eventually rot even if they are not read. They can also be, lost, burnt or even stolen. As a result of these things, consumers will eventually be in the position of having to buy a new copy even though they have already paid once!

This has already led to speculation of a backlash from authors and consumers.

It is my opinion though that there is an even greater flaw that will sink the new format: piracy.

Piracy

Quite simply, because of the nature of the new format there is no possibility of Digital Rights Management. Forcing each customer to add their name or photograph their copy is all very well, but who would police it?

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that sooner or later these paper copies will change hands. People will sell books to each other and not one single penny of this sale will go to the publishers, let alone the authors. The owners will sell the books on to reduce clutter and get some of the purchase money back. People will buy them because not only are they they are cheaper than legitimate copies, but there is no delivery delay. There may even be people who lend, share purchase price or just give copies away. Either of these is a lost sale (and therefore a theft) from the publisher. And let us not forget that this sort of thing funds terrorism.

Furthermore, I foresee that this problem can only get worse. Somebody who has purchased a pirated book is less likely to have any moral qualms about selling it on. Even now our children and young people might be being exposed to sinister 'book clubs'.

The End of Publishing?

Experience of MP3s has shown that the more pirating occurs, the more acceptable it becomes. So, although pirated books my start out as furtively exchanged black-market items they will eventually become common place. Charity shops would of course avoid them but not all shops will be so ethical. I predict that criminals, operating from small premises in obscure side-streets will eventually sell them openly!

It is even possible to imagine the nightmare scenario of a 'Public Library'. Allow me to explain. This would be a building containing legitimately purchased copies of books that anybody could go and read. Once established, their popularity would be such that Police and Government would have no choice but to look the other way. If only one of these were successfully established they would spread to every city. So many people would have access to them that the entire publishing industry would collapse.

Caprica Review

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:14:00 +0000

What do you do with a show that everybody likes but nobody watches?

The HBO series The Wire, is now famous as a gritty and shockingly realistic study is the drugs war in the United States. But when it launched, it was described as a 'cop show'. The writer, David Simon, says that this was a necessary Trojan Horse. The new series Caprica is billed as a 'family drama' a necessary Trojan Horse for science fiction. Why is this Necessary? Because 'genre' programs still find it almost impossible to break out into the mainstream.

Battlestar Galactica

In 2004 the pilot for the new Battlestar Galactica emerged in a blaze of glory. It was a little ponderous and it seemed to have more characters than it knew what to do with but it was full of drama and left you wanting more. As a pilot should. But, as the series progressed, it became obvious that it was something special. Nothing stood still and nothing could be taken for granted. The characters were deepened and dissected and forced into situations that destroyed the audiences preconceptions about 'goodies' and 'baddies'. Some of the characters grow and change, some are damaged, and some destroyed. Rewatching the pilot today, it is striking that none of the people are really who we believed them to be.

The fans loved it. Critics loved it. The viewing public watched American Idol and the studio began to get very upset. There were two problems that just would not go away:

The name of the show is Battlestar Galactica and memories of that old 1970's show just will not die.
There are space ships in it.

The quality of the show simply could not translate into viewing figures because these two issues prevented people from watching it in the first place. Hence Caprica, the trojan horse.

Is it a good Trojan Horse?

Indeed it is. The colony of Caprica is the state of California. It never looks like California, but it always feels like it.

It the pilot, as much of the plot as possible is focused on the characters from the two families that will be the backbone of the series. (A tried and tested soap formulae). For example, although the families are from different planets (Caprica and Tauron), this fact is only used to give their characters an ethnicity. Capricans tell us that Taurons have a distinctive smell because they eat dirt and father has to explain to his son (who was born on Caprica) why his family changed their Tauron name. So, we never see Tauron and the information we are given about it tells us more about Capricans.

This promises to be a show that people can tune into and not even notice that they are watching science fiction.

But will it give me my Battlestar Galactica fix?

Only time will tell, but indications look good.

The family dynasty structure is well suited to long story arcs with lots of twists. From the start, expectations are ambushed and nothing is as simple as it seems. Rich teenagers from the a posh school are fodder for a terrorist recruiting cell. The scientist grieving the death of his daughter has a day job designing intelligent weapons.

The pilot is also happy to deal head on with the fact that the 'baddies' believe in God while the 'goodies' do not. (The first series of Battlestar Galactica was so squeamish about this that it cut it out.)

The fact that it is a prequel does not rob it of any tension. It is set 50 years before the parent show and all we really know is that there will be a war in 10 years. In fact, it will be interesting to see how this war is dealt with. It is difficult to believe that they a so optimistic as to think that they will reach it a rate of one serial per story year. Will it be a grand finale? Or will they put off doing it at all until ratings flag?

I want more.

Fluorescent with Rage about CFL Bulbs

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:17:00 +0000

Incandescent light bulbs increase your heating bill.

My New Years resolution was to stop getting would up about idiotic science stories in the press. But if I read one more time that incandescent light bulbs reduce your heating bills then they will be able to plug me into the national grid.

The Daily Mail has declared war on energy efficient light bulbs and this bizarre myth seems to be everywhere:

It was even reported as a fact in a pro-CFL article in the Guardian, although here it was only thought to be true if no lampshades were used.

So Here Comes the Science Bit

Incandescent bulbs are energy inefficient.
Therefore they are hot.
Therefore they heat your room.
Therefore your heating system needs to do less work.
Therefore, (if we ignore the cost of running the bulb), your bills are lower.

The bit in brackets you will only read here.

What does 'Efficiency' Actually Mean?

It can mean many things. In this context, it is a measure of how much of what you want you get for your money. So, I have a bar-heater and a light-bulb and I measure how much heat and light they give me for every pound I put in to the meter. My bar-heat gives me 10 units of heat and 1 unit of light and my light bulb that gives me 1 unit of heat and 10 units of light.

What is the cheapest way for me to heat my room to 20°C? Obviously the bar-heater is 10 times cheaper. So, for the very lowest bill possible, 100% of my heat must be bought from the cheapest source. If any of my 20°C is bought from anything but the cheapest source then the cost will be higher. The hotter my bulb becomes, the more of my 20°C will be provided by it and the higher my bill will be.

I need to spell this out:

Heat from anything but the cheapest source can only increase the cost.

So Why the Confusion?

I can only imagine that people somehow believe that the heat from a bulb comes free with the light.

The lamp shade idea is presumably caused by the fact that you cannot directly feel heat being radiated through a shade. But the bulb is heating the shade and the shade is heating the air so all the heat is still there.

Hot Air and Global Warming

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:59:00 +0000

When NASA sends probes to other planets they are never asked to justify how such places can be real if they are unimaginably far away. They are never criticised for wanting to study the atmosphere of Neptune rather than relying on common sense. Nor do they have to deal with the idea that the very fact that they are trying to find out proves that 'science does not know everything' and is therefore a waste of time.

This, of course, is because nobody has ever been upset by anything they ever heard about Neptune. When people hear about global warming on Earth, they hear lots of things that they do not like. And too often their reaction is to just drown out the bad news.

An excellent example is the blog of Roger Helmer a Member of the European Parliament. I have picked this blog because it is a better summary of the position than rambling rants on the subject.

He makes the following points that I will look at one at a time:

We have good records about the past environment.
The temperature rise over the last 150 years is consistent with the cycle for the last 10,000 years.
We see warmer and cooler periods every 1200 years or so.
The world is cooler now than it was during the Holocene Optima (sic), the Roman Optimum or the Mediaeval Warm period.
CO₂ levels have been much higher in the past and there was no 'tipping point'.

We have good records about the past environment

We do indeed. But it is important to remember that there is no one single source of information. They come from scattered locations and become less accurate the further back in time you go. Nevertheless, the boundaries of error are quite well understood and you cannot pick and choose when to heed it.

The temperature rise over the last 150 years is consistent with the cycle for the last 10,000 years

There are places in Antarctica where it snows every year but never thaws. The snow turns into layers of ice that preserve information (including temperature) about the time that the show fell. Here are some data from two such places:

The x-axis is 'thousands of years ago' so the present day is on the left.

This graph does indeed show the last 10 thousand years has show a steep increase in temperature from -6C to 1C. Case closed.

That graph looks awfully empty; what does the rest of it look like?

The 10 thousand year window has been chosen very carefully to include the ending of the last ice age. Take a look at the whole graph 1:

As you can now see, ice ages are regular events. It is also sobering to notice that they last far longer than periods between them.

But the cycle covers hundreds of thousands of years. There is nothing here that would be noticeable within the blink of a human lifetime. So the one degree temperature rise in the last century is not 'consistent' with the seven degree rise in the last 10 thousand years, it is huge acceleration.

Another thing that you can see from looking at the whole graph is where we are in the cycle. We are at a point of level-ish temperature, far closer to the beginning of the next ice age than the end of the last one. So any increase in temperature at this point is a break in the pattern.

We see warmer and cooler periods every 1200 years or so
and
The world is cooler now than it was during the Holocene Optima (sic), the Roman Optimum or the Mediaeval Warm period

You can indeed see from the full graph above that the temperature line is a jagged one, not a smooth one. But think again about the timescales. Glaciers advance and retreat, forests come and go.

Here is a closer look at the las 12 thousand years, the flat-ish bit we are in now2.

This graph looks a lot messier because it shows data from more places. This is actually better because it means that the average temperature (the bold line) is much more reliable.

What support is here for the claim that the Holocene(Climatic) Optimum was warmer than today? You can raise the average by selectively ignoring colder data but that proves nothing because you can also do the opposite. You could also argue that because the data do not catch any changes of less than three centuries then the temperature might have been higher. By the same argument, they might have been lower.

Notice also, that the change from zero thousand years ago and 2004 is too steep to show at this scale, hence the inset.

Can we zoom in any further? Indeed we can2:

Here, the x-axis shows years AD so the present day is on the right. At last we are on a comfortable timescale.

There have certainly been changes. In the 9C there were vineyards in northern Britain and in the 17C public fairs were held on the frozen river Thames.

Again, there is nothing that suggests that the average global temperature approached today's level. If anybody has any data to the contrary then they must present it.

CO₂ levels have been much higher in the past and there was no 'tipping point'.

When? Antarctic ice has also recorded levels of carbon dioxide for the past 400 thousand years3:

None of the recorded levels are anything like the levels of today.

What is not Said

But the real problem with lists like the above it not what is said, but what is inferred. And the main inferences are that:

If you can pick holes in the Greenhouse explanation then global warming is not happening

Facts generate explanations but they are not generated by them. If you fall from a cliff you cannot avoid the ground by writing a witty critique of Newton's law of universal gravitation.

If global warming is happening it is natural and therefore alright

This is something we all need to be clear about. There are six billion people on our planet. We need to breath and eat. We are utterly dependant on the ecosystem to provide these things for us and we are appallingly vulnerable.

Says Who?

Sources

Wikipedea

The graphs I have used were contributed to wikipedia by Dragons filght.

Denialism

The War Machines are Here

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:10:00 +0000

As the war on Afghanistan gets messier, the boundaries of who is fighting who become harder to define and the tactics used, on both sides, become more and more desperate. In the middle of all this, stories like this flare up and are then forgotten.

Suspected US drone kills six in Pakistan hit (www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/02/pakistan.usforeignpolicy)
US drone strike kills eight militants in Pakistan: officials (http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g5k6lGPAZTdG4hdOkCLQ-L79WCLg)

A Robot has killed a Man

Yet again, we have crossed a line without even noticing. I admit that it might not seem to be much of a line. Booby traps and landmines have been killing people for centuries. And attacks have been ordered on the basis of information provided by machines.

Nevertheless, we need to stop and think about the fact that the point of decision has moved. A human being is dead because a machine decided to kill him. The robot/drone was allowed to kill by human decision and deployed by human decision but the actual decision to kill an actual human was made by software.

I am not even going to get in to the fact that was done in a country that is not even part of the battlefield against an enemy that is not an army but an ill-defined mass of tribal, political and religeous affiliations.

The Future

What of the future? More of the same. Sending in machines rather than people is an irresistible idea so the machines will become more and more autonomous. For symmetrical warfare this will result in battles being fought between machines. Possibly with helpless locals trapped in between.

But symmetrical warfare seems to have been left behind in the 20^th Century. What will be the effect on asymmetrical warfare? In short, more terrorism. These machines will be attacked where they are most vulnerable and that means taking advantage of the difficulty in distinguishing friend from foe. More attacks will take place on civilian populations and in civilian areas.

The Three Laws of Robotics

So much for the Three Laws of Robotics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_laws_of_robotics). These were created in 1942 by Isaac Asimov because he was irrated by the fact that so many science fiction stories were lazy re-tellings of the Frankenstein myth. To him, it seemed nothing but common sense that a machine capable of making a deadly decision must be prevented from doing so. Knives have handles he said.

But for the foreseeable future, our relationship to robots will be this:

It is also worth remembering that a lazy re-telling of Frankenstein is still the most popular science fiction plot. So nobody can say that we were not warned.

Books

I Robot

Like Water for Octane

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:16:00 +0000

Water to Fuel

Recently, my local news paper carried a story about a local man turning water into fuel.

The article starts of fairly reasonably. It even manages to avoid the dreaded words "water powered car", perhaps to avoid sounding like something from The Lone Gunmen. In fact the tone is so restrained that many people I know have been taken in by it- hence the blog. So, lets work through it.

Can you power a car by water?

No. In fact all so called water powered cars produce water as a waste. They are no more powered by water than a torch is powered by a flat battery.

So what is happening here?

Water is being split into a highly combustible mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. This mixture is then added to the petrol in a car and burnt along with it to propel the car forwards.

But that is the same thing!

That is indeed what you are being invited to believe. But the energy is not coming from the water.

The Science Bit

The First Law of Thermodynamics states:

You get nowt for nowt.

The car is being propelled forwards by some energy. The first law tells us that this energy cannot be coming from nowhere. So where does it come from? It comes from the mains. The machine splitting the water needs to be plugged in and the energy it takes pushes the car. All that is happening is that your fuel bill goes down and your electricity bill goes up. And where does the power for the mains come from? Burning oil.

But it only takes as much energy as a light bulb!

This figure is meaningless and irrelevant.

Meaningless

It is meaningless because it does not say how long you need to run the generator for to produce a given volume of gas. Nor do we know how long a given volume of gas will run the car. Remember, if the generator uses as much power as running a light bulb for a year to produce as much gas as it takes to push the car for a second then we could still make this claim.

Irrelevant

It is irrelevant because it does not matter. The energy given to the car will always be less than the energy taken from the mains.

The Madness Continues

But wait; I have saved the best till last! Mr Thompson goes on to say:

Something like this, maybe a little more compact in time, could be mounted in a car and you wouldn't have to refuel. You could drive along and produce the gas as you're driving.

Now we are completely into the realm of magic.

Several people I have showed this to take this to mean that a car can be built to run on nothing. Let me bend over backwards and imagine the most reasonable interpretation of this sentence. A unit like this could be fitted to a petrol powered car so that the motor generates hydroxy gas as you drive. The hydroxy gas improves the fuel efficiency of the car.

Sounds perfectly reasonable until you remember that the energy making the hydroxy gas comes from the petrol. The energy in the petrol is all you are putting in and that is all the energy you will ever get out. Even if you could make the machine weightless and 100% efficient you still need to add the weight of the water (which was not there before).

In other words, a car with this device would never be an improvement on a car that did not.

An Age Old Dream

Machines like this have been imagined for centuries. For example, it is perfectly possible to design and even build a water wheel that lifts buckets to return the water used. But these machines never work because you can never get out as much energy as you put in.

Books

I am a Web Page

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:10:00 +0000

(how I followed Max Headroom into Cyberspace)

At the moment, if you are reading this on a mobile phone, then you are officially a Geek. I can say this because the way to this page is a physical mobile object: me. Sadly, it also means that the rest of the page will be of no interest you you because you already know it.

The Portable Internet

We are currently at a very interesting time in the development of the Internet. Mobile devices with Internet access such as the iPhone are just hitting the mass market.

This does not sound very revolutionary. Compared to a comfy chair in front of a 19″ screen it sounds like a step back.

In fact, the user now has a very interesting property that they never had before- location. And if web pages can also be given a location, or be made to respond to a location, then lots of interesting things become possible.

Think about those handsets you get in museums and art galleries. They give you information about the object you are next to. Imagine if the Internet worked like that.

How Do You Attach a Web Page to a Real Object?

There are lots of ways. The way I did it was with a type of barcode. Like the ones you see on, um, everything. Barcodes hold information which the barcode reader uses to examine a database.

What you need is:

A web page with information.
A barcode storing the page's address.
A physical object to slap the barcode on.
A barcode reader to get the web address.
A browser to display the page.

Example: Attaching a Blog to a Blogger

All I needed was a piece of Quick Response (QR) code. QR code is 'big in Japan', which means that either it will be big here, or it will disappear without trace.

Lots of software is available to generate QR codes. I used this one, which gave me this:

My next obvious step was to tattoo this onto my forehead. Unfortunately, the tattoo parlor was shut so to make my deadline I had to make a tee-shirt instead.

The Clever Bit

Now, the clever bit: getting from the tee-shirt to the blog. This is possible because modern mobile phones are small computers that have cameras and browsers. The camera sees the QR code. The computer extracts the web address. The browser displays the page.

Actually, there is a little cheat here. The phone needs software to read the QR code which you need to know about and download. But this is already very common in some parts of the world. In Finland for example, this technology is used to tell people standing at bus stops when the next bus is due.

Is this the Future?

Alas no. Two things will probably happen with mobile phones that will make the solution redundant. The first is that Optical Character Recognition will improve to the point that the phones will be able to read printed text. The second is that the ability of phones to know where they are will improve to the point that they will be able to search the Internet for pages that relate to them. (Postcodes are already appearing in metadate to help with things like this).

But this technology certainly has the power to introduce the potential of the mobile Internet to the masses.

Legal

QR code is trademarked by Denso Wave, inc.

Who's Afraid of Political Correctness?

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:17:00 +0000

If there is one piece of journalistic laziness that continuously astounds me it is 'Political Correctness gone mad' stories. I am not annoyed by the fact that they invariably turn out to be nonsense- I expect papers to contain stories like that. No, what annoys me is that otherwise rational people seem to accept them without question.

The basic premise is as follows. Somewhere in the world, there exists a vast left-wing 'political correctness' lobby who exert a sinister control over free speech. This is resisted by a few Lone-Voices-of-Reason who dare to speak out. I call them Lone-Voices because they all talk about themselves. Even as they cut and paste each others stories.

Lets have a look at some examples.

Young Children now have to sing 'Baa Baa Rainbow sheep' because 'Black Sheep' is Racist

Sometime around 1986 a number of charity-run nursery schools in Oxfordshire started increase children's vocabularies with the following exercise. Children sang the same songs over and over with different variations of words. In this song for example, the words 'boy' and 'girl' were alternated, and the sheep became happy, sad, bouncing, hopping, pink, blue, white and (yes) black.

Nobody quite knows how many nurseries used this exercise. But it may have been as many as two. And yet, a quick google will get you 3,040 Lone-Voices-of-Reason protesting against this example of 'political correctness gone mad'.

(Nursery Rhymes, by the way, have never had a standard traditional form passed down from the dawn of time. They have always been fluid and deliberately re-written by various people. Most of the ones we know today were heavily sanitised by the Victorians.)

Christmas is being banned because it offends non-Christians

There are so many versions of this that I cannot go into them all. So I will cover best known example: Winterval.

in 1998, the department of Birmingham City Council responsible for helping local businesses created some advertising material for a new marketing concept called 'Winterval'. This was a umbrella term for various celebrations that run from Hallowe'en in October to the New Year events in January. Using the umbrella term was much cheaper that making separate material for thing like Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes night that occur very close together. The main aim of the exercise, of course, was to bring as many people in to the city centre as possible at the time when they were doing their Christmas shopping.

The media went into a frenzy, and all of the local papers reported the same story- Birmingham Council was banning Christmas. The implication was that this was done to avoid offence to non-Christians. Letters pages, radio chat shows and blogs often went far further and took it for granted that the Council has 'caved in' to Muslims.

All this despite the fact that:

The Winterval material pushed Christmas as its biggest event
The money spent on Christmas through Winterval was in addition to the normal Christmas money
The Council's Christmas celebrations went on as normal

One result was hostility for the council from local businesses. Why, they demanded to know, is the Council wasting our tax money banning Christmas? Don't they know how important Christmas shopping is to the economy?

The term 'Brainstorm' is offensive to Epileptics so we should use 'Thought Shower' Instead

This one is my very favourite because the very source is a 'political correctness gone mad' story.

In 2003, Liz Lightfoot of the Telegraph newspaper published this article which denies that the term 'Brainstorming' is offensive to epileptics. She even goes as far as to contact the National Society for Epileptics to confirm that they have never heard of such a thing.

What is wrong with that? Surely she is working hard to de-bunk a myth. Unfortunately, this is the myth. The word 'Brainstorm' had never before been used to describe an epileptic fit. No guidance existed telling people not to use the term.

Nevertheless, the story continues to gain momentum. According to Wikipedia, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment and the Welsh Development Agency both ask their staff to use 'Thought Shower' instead. And I would not be at all surprised to hear epileptic fits called brainstorms.

Schools now have to say 'Whiteboards/Chalkboards' because 'Blackboards' is Racist

Britons call them blackboards because they are boards that are (usually) black. Americans call them chalkboards because they are boards for chalk. The general rise of the use of Americanisms in Britain has caused a rise in the use of 'chalkboard'. At the same time, modern classrooms are now being fitted with the whiteboards (so called because they are white) that you get in offices.

This example clearly shows how a little genuine confusion is enough to trigger the template.

The Template

This is the template :

Somebody decides to use a different word for something.
Therefore, they are being forced to change by Powerful-Them because of potential offence to Whinging-Them. (Sometimes, they are the same Them).
Therefore I (Lone-Voice-of-Reason) am being coerced by Powerful-Them too.
There for I will recite the magic spell "It's Political Correctness Gone Mad" and Whinging-Them will be confounded.

Notice that neither Powerful-Them or Whinging-Them have any input and do not need to even exist. Notice also that no matter how many thousands of Lone-Voices-of-Reason scream the same thing in unison they cannot concieve of themselves as anything other than a dissenting mionority.

The Process

So, somebody hears 'whiteboard' where they expect 'blackboard'. Somebody must have decided to stop schools saying 'blackboard'. That somebody could only be the Government. But why? Clearly because black people would be upset to hear the word black.

Interesting

A couple of very interesting things are happening here.

First of all, our Lone-Voice-of-Reason is standing up for the right to say what they like. But they are doing so by complaining about the fact that somebody else has chosen to say what they like. So, in their heads, what everybody should be saying is the same thing.

Secondly, only a racist would believe that black people would be offended by the word 'black'. The thought would never occur to anybody who had no problem with the fact that some people are black.

What Happens Next?

The crazy thing is that these stories often go on to have an effect. Put simply, there is no 'Politically Correct' lobby who decide changes in language. It fact, there is nobody at all who can decide or enforce this. Of course, there are lots of people who try- but they can only succeed by genuinely convincing a majority of people.

Instead, the language changes all the time because some people change the use of a word and other people like it enough to adopt the chage.

And who has the most influence? Not the 'Politically Correct lobby' because they do not actually exist. Not bloggers (even I do not read my blog.) No, lazy journalists read my millions of people have all the clout.

Imagine you are a blackboard manufacturer. You read that some people are offended by the use of 'blackboard'. This is not an academic issue: you could be losing money because of this. So, what do you do? Do you campaign to redeem the word? Of course not because you do not actually care. You just start calling them chalkboards. Not because Powerful-Them forced you, but because Lone-Voice told you about it. The same Lone-Voices who see chalkboards for sale and say "See! I told you so!"

But Why?

Two common factors in these stories are:

That the the author is prevented from doing A because They are doing B ("A teacher calls it a chalkboard, there I am not allowed to call it a blackboard").
That some minority group is the ultimate reason for all this ("Why can't Muslims understand that they are living in a Christian country?")

These account for the general tone of angry defensiveness of the stories. I think that there is a simple explanation. The authors want it to be true. To be more specific, the want the world to work in this way.

They want it to be true that if somebody says or does something then other people are some how forced to do the same. They want it so that by bravely speaking out they they too can wield this mysterious power.

They want it to be true that authorities are forced to act due to complaints from minority groups. They want it because they have so many complaints that need to be acted on.

They do not want to live in a world where people listen to opinions, observe examples and then decide for themselves what to do.

But, what are they frightened of?

Bonfire Night

I leave you with a traditional British rhyme to celebrate this time of year. If I walk down the street singing it I would probably be arrested. A clear case of 'Political Correctness gone Mad'.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason Why Gunpowder Treason Should ever be forgot.

A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!

What is wrong with 'Click Here'?

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 19:03:00 +0000

Don't use "click here" as link text.

Quality Tips for Web Masters W3C

Don't use "click here" or other non-descriptive link text.

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 Jakob Nielson

Google returns 1.3 billion search results for the phrase ('click here')

Wikipedia

Too little of what is written on the web is written for the web. Ideally it is written by somebody who knows the subject and then rewritten (I refuse to say 'repurposed') by somebody who knows about the web. I am one of those rewriters and removing the words 'click here' is something I seem to do every day. And I am forever explaining it. And if I am ever over-ruled, it will be about this.

But users need help

Committees tend to be the worst offenders. There is always somebody who insists that just because a user has

turned on a computer;
opened a browser;
used a search engine to find a site and
navigated to a page

it does not necessarily follow that they know how to use a hyperlink. They will always demand the safety blanket of instructions for the link. Instructions that appear anywhere but the link.

What is interesting, is that these are often the same people who oppose technology neutral phrases for disabled people because there are hardly any of them.

Yes, help is good. But why is a hyperlink singled out as being difficult? There is tons of literature about the fact that users do not scroll, but I have never seen instructions for a scoll bar on a site.

We do not publish books that have 'please turn over' in the corner of every page. We are not told by BBC 1 that to watch the programme on BBC 2 we need to change channel. We do not need 'click here' on a hyperlink.

'Click Here' Wastes Space

Whever 'click here' is used as the link text, it needs to be accompanied by an explanation. Space is precious. Compare these examples:

Click here for the July Report.
July Report.

Once the link describes itself, the rest becomes redundant.

This division of the link and the explanation for the link is also inelegant because in forces you into using a particular phrase when that might not be what you want to say.

'Click here' Wastes Ink

A web page is still a web page if it is printed out. No, that is not a zen riddle. A book is still a book if it is a PDF. Printers and screens are just two different methods of viewing the data. So it is always a good idea to be as format neutral as possible.

Not Everybody 'Clicks Here'

This always seems to come as a surprise, but not everybody accesses the Internet in the same way. Teenagers use their mobile phones, yuppies use PDAs and there are even browsers that read text aloud. So, links are 'followed' in a variety of ways.

Since the physical workings of the browser are nothing to do with the content of the page, there is not need for the page to refer to them.

But everybody else does it

The fact remains that 1,300,000,000 pages use 'click here' and I have just made it 1,300,000,001. Why? Two big reasons are banner advertisements and standardisation.

Banner Ads

Banner ads are everywhere. Even on this page, I admit it. More and more of them work on a 'pay-per-click' system so they scream 'click me'. The sheer volume of all this normalises it.

Standardisation

The same Jakon Nielson who complains about 'click here' also coined:

Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience: users spend most of their time on other websites.

In other words, if everybody else does it so we should too. In fact, when people do object to having their content rewritten, they often insist that they put it there because everybody knows that that is the way you are supposed to write it.

This is the reason I have saved this point until last.

Search Engine Ranking

Do the people who are ranked fist for something worry about it? Do they say Everybody else is lower down, surely that means that I should be lower down too!

Oddly enough, the do not think that. In fact, they are often in that position because they have paid good money for a Search Engine Optimiser. SEOs are people or companies that go through a site and make it as easy as possible for search engines to correctly index their pages.

Now, I mentioned disabled users above. Search engines are the most important users of your site- and they are blind.

Look at this example:

Dogs are very important. For more information about them click here.

Now, imagine that you are Google and that you need to know what the destination page is about. What can it tell about the page from here? Absolutely nothing.

Now look at this:

Dogs are very important.

The page is about dogs! How do we know, because the text that links to it contains the word 'dogs'. The association between that page and the search term 'dogs' is now stronger. Not much stronger, but every little helps.

But let me emphasise this. Small changes, like the removal of the words 'click here', make such an accumulated difference that people can make a living out of them. Now, wouldn't it be easier if we all just stopped doing it?

The War Machines are Coming

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:46:00 +0000

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer.

The War of the Worlds (1898) H.G. Wells.

The Tripods

The war machines described by H.G. Wells were a vivid foretelling of the tanks that would eventually appear on the real battlefields of the Somme.

They also present an interesting biomechanical problem- how can a tripod walk?

Why should a tripod walk?

A tripod in the simplest stable supported structure. It is also the only supported structure that is still stable if the legs are of uneven length. Walking is the best way of moving over different types of terrain, especially rough terrain. So, in theory, a walking tripod would be a very useful thing.

But in practice this is not so. As soon as a tripod lifts a leg to take a step it becomes a distinctly unstable bipod. It is probably significant that no known living creature has ever walked the Earth on three legs. This contributes to the 'aliennes' of the war machines in The War of the Worlds.

The Problem Solved

The problem has now been solved by researchers at the RoMeLa laboratories in the United States. Their gait uses the the same leg to both push off and advance. This solves the stability problem because the tripod 'falls' in the direction if the walk. They have built an experimental robot called the Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot (STriDER) to test this gait.

Watch the full-size video

Interestingly, for this to work, the body needs to flip over which is probably not something a biological creature would do.

War Machines?

So, will I ever have one of these in my house pushing the vacuum cleaner? Unlikely. The research is being paid for by the military. The RoMeLa video describes the robot carrying Cameras, for surveillance of antenna for communication. If it can carry a camera, it can carry a gun.

What is Wrong with Comic Sans?

noreply@blogger.com (Yet Another Geek) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:32:00 +0000

Questions Clients Ask. Part 1.

This issue came up where I work recently because a client wanted it. This immediately triggered a discussion about the best way to get the client to change their mind.

As we all know, Comic Sans is a bad font and must never be used. But why is it a bad font? Why do clients ask all the time? What is a 'bad font' anyway?

One of the reasons people ask for it is that they like it. And one of the reasons that they like it is this:

There is nothing wrong with Comic Sans.

There, I have said it.

Reasons for not using Comic Sans

Comic Sans is overused

Complete rubbish. The vast majority of websites use Arial or Times New Roman. So overused are these fonts that people become blind to them. And when they do notice, they cite it as evidence of how good the fonts must be.

Comic Sans is Badly designed

For what? So it might not be a masterpiece of kerning. But it is very readable. Call be old fashioned, but I like what I read to be readable.

Comic Sans displays poorly at small font sizes

By far the feeblest complaint. All fonts have a lower resolution limit. Sans-serif fonts generally do better at low resolutions.

Reasons to use Comic Sans

When something needs to look unofficial and unthreatening
When something needs to be clear to children or people that do not have English as a first language

Comic Sans was designed to imitate the clear handwritten lettering found in the speech bubbles of comic. The rounded strokes look friendly and informal. The resemblance to the lettering you saw when you first learned to write makes it highly readable.

If this font is misused, it is because of the lack of better alternatives.

But there are many better fonts!

Indeed there are. Hundreds.

Arial Rounded MT Bold has the friendly rounded edges
Lucida Handwriting has the informal handwritten appearance.

But none of them are among the so called 'core fonts' that are installed on the vast majority of computers. CSS solves the problem of font availability by allowing you to specify backup choices for the fonts you want to use. So no matter how good the fonts you want to use are, you will still need fonts like Comic Sans as a safety net.

Yet another geek blog

This blog has moved

Are Paper Books Economically Viable?

The New Format

Piracy

The End of Publishing?

Links

Caprica Review

What do you do with a show that everybody likes but nobody watches?

Battlestar Galactica

Is it a good Trojan Horse?

But will it give me my Battlestar Galactica fix?

Fluorescent with Rage about CFL Bulbs

Incandescent light bulbs increase your heating bill.

So Here Comes the Science Bit

What does 'Efficiency' Actually Mean?

So Why the Confusion?

Hot Air and Global Warming

We have good records about the past environment

The temperature rise over the last 150 years is consistent with the cycle for the last 10,000 years

That graph looks awfully empty; what does the rest of it look like?

We see warmer and cooler periods every 1200 years or so and The world is cooler now than it was during the Holocene Optima (sic), the Roman Optimum or the Mediaeval Warm period

CO2 levels have been much higher in the past and there was no 'tipping point'.

What is not Said

If you can pick holes in the Greenhouse explanation then global warming is not happening

If global warming is happening it is natural and therefore alright

Says Who?

Sources

Wikipedea

Denialism

The War Machines are Here

A Robot has killed a Man

The Future

The Three Laws of Robotics

Books

Like Water for Octane

Water to Fuel

Can you power a car by water?

So what is happening here?

But that is the same thing!

The Science Bit

But it only takes as much energy as a light bulb!

Meaningless

Irrelevant

The Madness Continues

An Age Old Dream

Links

Books

I am a Web Page

(how I followed Max Headroom into Cyberspace)

The Portable Internet

How Do You Attach a Web Page to a Real Object?

Example: Attaching a Blog to a Blogger

The Clever Bit

Is this the Future?

Legal

Links

Who's Afraid of Political Correctness?

Lets have a look at some examples.

Young Children now have to sing 'Baa Baa Rainbow sheep' because 'Black Sheep' is Racist

Christmas is being banned because it offends non-Christians

The term 'Brainstorm' is offensive to Epileptics so we should use 'Thought Shower' Instead

Schools now have to say 'Whiteboards/Chalkboards' because 'Blackboards' is Racist

The Template

The Process

Interesting

What Happens Next?

But Why?

Bonfire Night

Links

Advertisements

What is wrong with 'Click Here'?

But users need help

'Click Here' Wastes Space

'Click here' Wastes Ink

Not Everybody 'Clicks Here'

But everybody else does it

Banner Ads

Standardisation

Search Engine Ranking

We see warmer and cooler periods every 1200 years or so
and
The world is cooler now than it was during the Holocene Optima (sic), the Roman Optimum or the Mediaeval Warm period

CO₂ levels have been much higher in the past and there was no 'tipping point'.