Matt's Blog

Scary

Apparently the chance of two randomly-selected people having a DNA match is only one in 7,000, which means that the number of matches in the UK would be expected to be about 1,000. Now that’s scary…

September 24th, 2007

Buy a tonne of “cool”

The Global Cool Foundation is taking donations towards buying up carbon credits and other climate change projects. And, of course, giving celebrities and musicians the chance to showboat. I guess its a pretty obvious idea that everyone thinks of sooner or later.

February 3rd, 2007

Carbon

The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) allows carbon dioxide emissions, by the tonne, to be bought and sold like shares. At the current price of about €8 / tonne (I think… there are very few free sources) and given that a transatlantic flight emits about 1.2 tonnes, you can purchase back your own CO2 for less than £7. Sadly, I don’t know if ETS even allows public trading and I couldn’t find a site on the web that does it either.

The total EU budget for carbon dioxide is about 245,430,000 tonnes per year, but there are about 456,953,258 people in the EU. Even if only one in 100 bought carbon we’d only have to spend about £30 / year to buy up the whole carbon budget – forcing everyone to become carbon-neutral. The companies would probably just pass the costs straight back to us, but its an interesting idea nevertheless.

December 1st, 2006

Bigotry

Watching Last night’s Question Time discussion of bed & breakfast owners’ rights, or lack thereof, to refuse entry to homosexual couples was very disturbing. The opinion of a sizeable portion of the panel and audience seemed to be that the rights of homosexuals was infringing on “the rights of Christians” who believe that same-sex relationships are wrong. They seem to be suggesting that, because of their religious views, they have the “right” to discriminate against others on the basis of their sexuality. From the number of comments on the QT site, they’re not alone. Did I miss the announcement that its now OK to be a bigot?

Lets consider another case: was the taxi driver who refused to allow a blind woman’s dog into his taxi simply using his “religious rights”? Would it be the “religious right” of someone belonging to the Nation of Islam to hang a sign in his B&B saying No Whites?

Clearly the answer to both of these is “no”. Showing tolerance and love to others, even those who are considered wrong or sinful, is written into the scripture of Christianity, Islam and many other major religions. As the article above says, Islamic scripture does not prohibit being near dogs and, according to the Muslim Council of Britain one must wash before praying. I realise that I don’t understand the intricacies of Islamic doctrine, but the fundamental point is that the taxi driver used his religion as an excuse, possibly because it would be easier for him to refuse the dog than to perform the required purification.

The same is true of any Christian refusing homosexuals lodging in a B&B. I seem to remember the Bible has a lot of stuff in it about loving your neigbour (like Matthew 5:44-47, but thats only one example) – they’re using their religion as an excuse for not exercising their responsibilities as Christians to love their enemies as well as their friends.

Clearly, the rights of all humans should be upheld and the right not to be discriminated against (on the basis of their gender, race, sexuality or religious beliefs) is one of those fundamental rights. There is no basis in logic, law or even religious scripture itself for the “rights” of religious people to practise discrimination.

The one thing that a tolerant society cannot tolerate is intolerance.

December 1st, 2006

Self-fulfilling

Steve blogs about the Department for Education asking universities to pass on information about extremist students to Special Branch. Steve notes that this won’t work because most lecturers don’t bother to learn students’ names. I think it’ll work for the extremists – what better way to make people feel like outsiders than by saying they’re being monitored, informed-upon? I don’t recall the government asking this for Irish students in the 70’s and 80’s, nor for left-wing students in the 60’s. Maybe the government should just go the last step and rename the Home Office the “Ministry of Love“.

1 comment October 17th, 2006

Mistake

It has been widely reported (here, here and here) that Accenture is subcontracting the remaining blame for the failure-to-be that is the NHS’s “Connecting for Health” project to CSC. My employer has outsourced all of the company’s IT, from cabling infrastructure to web management, to CSC and I can’t say that CSC’s involvement with the NHS fills me with joy. I’ll just post my CSC experiences…

Regularly, about once a week, someone in my department of forty will have their Windows profile overwitten or deleted for no apparent reason. You can see the expectation is that everyone will have theirs buggered about once a year, or more. What you have to do then is call the woefully mis-titled “Help Desk”, where someone who doesn’t really understand what they’re doing takes you through The Ring-Binder Of Questions in excruciating detail.

Maybe there are some people who call the help desk without having checked that their power, network and keyboard connections are plugged in. Maybe there are some people who aren’t sure whether this is what their desktop looked like yesterday, who don’t remember deleting all their e-mail. And I’m not saying this is easy – its really, really difficult to diagnose a problem on someone’s computer without actually being there. So, after about 15 minutes of pointless questions they give a reference number and send someone from the local office over.

Perhaps ironically, the CSC people from the local office are actually knowlegable and helpful. Its such a pity we don’t deal with them directly.

So, when one in forty patients are given the wrong drugs or the wrong operation, we’ll know to check that their catheter is plugged in correctly.

Sadly, I very much doubt that

1 comment October 1st, 2006

Nonsense

There seems to be a lot of nonsense in the news recently. First off, there is the strange claim that magnets can create energy. Following close second, the claim that market forces are the best way to run a country is hidden within an article apparently about the lack / surplus of UK scientists.

Lets have a look at the perpetual motion machine ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H marvellous new free energy invention. It is, of course, impossible to rule out, but it seems to run counter to at least 150 years of science and a good deal longer of observed natural law. This reminds me of the whole “cold fusion” thing. I guess its technically impossible to prove the first law of thermodynamics and what we’re seeing may be the first counterexample, which would be very exciting, but my cynicism is telling me (and some other people) that they’ve made some mistake; maybe they’re somehow extracting energy from the magnets or ambient (broadcast) electromagnetic waves. Anyway, hopefully it’ll be all sorted when their “jury” of 12 scientists is able to publish papers about it.

Moving on to the ill-thought-out scheme to extend the rule of market forces to every sector of society, which Ian quotes (maybe as a joke?). The central thesis of the article is that there is no shortage of UK scientists and we shouldn’t feel the need to “keep up” with the scientist-production of other countries any more than we’d keep up with the production of any other commodity, but seems to creep into the territory of extreme free-marketism. It ends with a couple of choice paragraphs, which I shall quote (with attribution totally to Jamie Whyte!) here:

Alas, the urge does overcome them when it comes to skills. Science degrees, like all degrees, are already massively subsidised. Students pay well under half the cost of providing a science degree, even though they receive well over half its benefits. So there is almost certainly a surplus of British scientists. Which would explain why scientists earn relatively little – a fact that the science lobby always complains about, except when it is too busy bemoaning the shortage of scientists.

Right. So we shouldn’t have state schools (school kids pay nothing, but receive all of its benefits?), a police, judiciary or armed forces? Maybe the government agrees, which is why it keeps trying to cripple the NHS? I completely fail to see his argument – is it that we should pay for all services we use? Should we pay proportionally to the amount to which it increases our prospects? Maybe our kids should pay more for their ‘A’ grades than for failing (on their huge student debt, of course)? I should have to send cheques to the BBC whenever I watch something educational on TV.

The next paragraph is even better:

Those who lobby for state support – be they French farmers, US steel-makers or British scientists – claim to be the backbone of the nation, the foundation of the future or something similarly fabulous. But it is a perverse argument. If what you produce is so valuable, why can you not find willing buyers at the unsubsidised market price? Let us hope that educational standards soon rise to the level where the producers of such self-serving nonsense can find no one willing to buy it.

This argument is facetious. These groups lobby for government support precisely because the products or services they provide are undervalued by the market. In the case of farming, this is usually due to the low wholesale prices offered by supermarkets in the face of cheap imports from countries where the cost of production is lower. In the case of scientists, it is because they may be conducting research into so-called “pure” areas where the commercial sector is not interested, or possibly because they want to work outside of “big pharma” and allow any discoveries they produce to be used gratis, for the benefit of all mankind.

I actually agree with some of the stuff he’s saying: Its true that there are easily enough scientists and engineers to fill the demand in the UK economy. (Thats why I’m paid so badly…) But I felt the need to refute the idiocy that the free market is always right, which is what he seems to be suggesting.

14 comments August 22nd, 2006

Elegance

After spending a lot of time designing software, you get a sense of where your data and functionality lie within a system. Hopefully, you’ve encapsulated the right data in the right classes or its time to start refactoring! You know when you’ve got it right, because there is a balance between the size of the class, its openness and its flexibility.

I call this elegance, and I think its a property that extends to people systems as well as software systems.

One of the central ideas in software design is the principle of least privilege, which says that you only allow code as much authority and resources as are necessary to complete its task. Even Microsoft knows this (although some might say they learned a little late). This happens at the operating system level (though user permissions, inter-process protection, hardware abstraction) to keep processes from interfering with eachother. This happens at the object level, too: class interfaces exist to encapsulate data and functionality, this time its to protect objects from becoming corrupted from improper use.

When you have too much privilege over data or functionality (a large class, the root user, etc…) the principle is broken, and the system is prone to instability or attack. When too much responsibility rests with one component this exacerbates the smallest problem with its implementation (i.e: a bug in important code is much worse than one elsewhere). On the other hand, when there is too little privilege, the system becomes brittle and inflexible, difficult to extend. When the balance is right you have flexibility, robustness and elegance. Elegant code is almost always concise code, which means less wasted resources.

I think the same applies (with slightly different terms of reference, of course) to systems of people, i.e: government. Apparently, John Locke wrote about the principle of least authority over three hundred years ago, and informed the writers of the American constitution (and I just thought he was a character in a TV show ). And I think the same conclusions apply.

When a single person or small group of people have too much authority over people or money or services, they become a liability for abuse or attack (like ID fraud). Of course, its possible to have such a system run smoothly, but people, like code, have flaws (bugs). And flaws in important people (or people in important systems) are more damaging than flaws elsewhere. This is inefficient because the government invests a lot of time and effort into maintaining its own power (by spying on the citizenry, for example). To go to the opposite extreme, too little authority in the government would prevent it from safeguarding our rights, collapsing into randomness, possibly anarchy. Then “government” would have to be carried out inefficiently at the individual or local level (vigilantes).

To carry the analogy to its logical conclusion: for elegant, efficient government the balance of privilege / authority has to be right. Everyone must have the authority and resource to do their job, but no more. Unfortunately, as I blogged earlier, I think we’re already off-balance.

Forgive me for looking at this in terms of software, but, as the saying goes, when you have a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. And maybe thats the problem – our PM has a legislature, so every problem starts to need a new law.

March 29th, 2006

Totalitarianism

So Steve and I were talking last weekend about the government’s plans for creeping totalitarianism and he blogged about it. This is very, very scary because it totally bypasses our democratic safeguards: our MP’s and the Lords. (Never mind that they’re increasingly being eroded.)

Ian blogs about the increasingly mandatory nature of ID cards. This is also very scary for two reasons:

One: First, the cards are optional. Then, the cards are mandatory, but you won’t have to carry them or present them on demand. Finally, you have to swipe them to go into pubs, pick up your benefits, check into hospital…

Two: First, the database (the National Identity Register) “just” has 49 items. Then, they “just” add a few more, extend access to all public services. Finally, anyone can subscribe to to the database commercially and it stores your medical records, psychiatric results, school history, every journey you ever made on public transport or through the congestion charging zone…

Add the two pieces of legislation together and its basically all over: we have to trust that ministers won’t abuse their power, that public servants won’t abuse our private information. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel very trusting.

March 28th, 2006