Rants

Define disaster?

What is a disaster and how does it compare to a catastrophe or a tragedy? A few months ago I began thinking about this. I wanted to use this as part of a future lecture on the effects of technology (and probably an advanced form of procrastination). The basic idea is that most of us have short memories. We trust technology implicitly and we see the failure of technology as a brief, unfortunate anomaly.

While writing about the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident these thoughts came back and I began to dig for a suitable list of man-made disasters. The man-made is an easy criterion since all technology is man-made (this is a specie-ist argument where I am brutally discounting tools made by animals and aliens). But what other criteria should be involved when attempting to demonstrate the failures of technology and their connection to trust?

  • War is a disaster but it is for the most part intentional.
  • The slow erosion of the ozone layer may be a disaster but â?? do we include it?
  • How does one differentiate between extinction and natural selection in relation to the disaster?
  • What about â??naturalâ?? disasters which have been triggered or aggravated by technology?

Therefore for the purpose of a lecture on trust in technology events can have disastrous consequences without being disasters.

Feel free to add comments on this! To be continuedâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

On minor annoyances

Train travel is great! I like sitting and working on trains. Its like an office with a view. Today the Swedish trains have wifi (not very good but still wifi) which means that even online work can be done (unless it demands heavy bandwidth). The main problem is battery time. I try to book seats next to the power outlets (sad â?? isnâ??t it?) but on this trip I could not. Usually this can be fixed on the train.

Across the aisle from me a policeman (the gold braid suggests an officer) had a seat with the power outlet so I asked politely if he was going to use the outlet or if he could consider changing seats. He gruffly stated that he needed the outlet, drank his complementary coffee and fell asleep.

I worked fast and now I feel that I wanted to blog this on the last dregs of my battery life while the policeman snores gently to the rocking of the train.

Nobody likes to exchange seats, but most often do. Am I more annoyed by this man because of his occupation? Was his gruff response due to a need to command the situation? Did he ever intend to use the outlet?

Technology based life is driven by lots of small annoyances – the search for power being among the foremost. But our appliances demand more care and attention from us. Their control over our behaviour can be seen in the way in which we are reminded by the appliances to do their bidding. Washing machines, tumble dryers and microwaves annoyingly remind us to empty them â?? they will not be silent until we react. Most mobile devices remind us of their battery status, cars remind us when doors are open or seatbelts are unused.

The tyranny of these devices is for our comfort and security â?? but at the cost of our annoyance. They police use by their presence and remind us of their needs. The same can be said of the sleeping policeman across the aisle. He rests in full knowledge that his occupation is vital to society â?? something he takes advantage of â?? this is symbolised by non-use of the power outlet. He is like the tumble dryer I filled before leaving home that will beep noisily, annoyingly, in futility until I return.

Posted on by mklang

Nationality of torture

In an article on the British post WWII torture camps the Guardian writes

A few were starved or beaten to death, while British soldiers are alleged to have tortured some victims with thumb screws and shin screws recovered from a gestapo prison.

This is followed by a quote from Nick Harvey (Liberal Democrats defence spokesman)

It’s too late for anyone to be held personally responsible, or held politically to account, but it’s not too late for the MoD to acknowledge what has happened.

What???

Would this sentiment be equally applicable to the guards in Nazi concentration camps? So its OK now for these remaining guards to step forward and not expect to be punished for what they did?

What Mr Harvey needs to learn is that torture can never be legitimised by nationality!

Posted on by mklang

War and Peace

In an article entitled You and the Atom Bomb, George Orwell wrote about the relationship between military technology and democratic development. National self-determination is, according to Orwell’s technologically deterministic argument, a product of the ability to develop efficient arms.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle…Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccansâ??even Tibetansâ??could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only threeâ??ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weaponâ??or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fightingâ??not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant. (full article here)

The concept of war and peace has changed since Orwell published this article in Tribune (19 October 1945). Those old enough to have experienced the world wars (either as participants or spectators) claim that we have had peace. This is strange to as I cannot remember a single period in my life when we were not at war with some nation (echoes of Orwell’s 1984?)

This peace is therefore an illusion, a consensual hallucination, if the interpretation of reality claims that we are at war then we are at war. If the claim is that we are at peace then we are at peace. Naturally this does not effect the fact that people are being killed, or that military forces are attacking each other. It just does not mean that we are not living in peacetime.

The atom bomb nicknamed Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki exploded at 11:02 A.M on August 9.
It left an estimated 70,000 dead by the end of 1945.

While living in this myth of peace the threat of all out war remains a threat but in reality war remains based in the use of the rifle or rifle-like weaponry. Since there is no real war in (or with) Afganistan, Iraq, India/Pakistan (Kashmir) or Indonesia (For lists of ongoing conflicts look here and here) but only ‘conflicts’ the struggle remains focused around the rifle.

This is not, as Orwell thought, the technical ability to mass-produce this relatively simple technology but rather the ability to obtain cash or credits to be able to buy small arms (estimated black market trade in small arms range from US$2-10 billion a year). In conflicts such as these it is not the posession of advanced technology that resolves the conflict but rather the money and determination to accept heavy losses.

Posted on by mklang

Street Art & Advertising

Yesterday I saw this poster.

Its an advert for an energy substitute. The basic premise is that many people have a banana in their training bags but the banana is not good enough to help the body get the amounts of carbohydrates and proteins it needs after a workout. Therefore bananas are for monkeys.

While I could argue about the eating habits of monkeys (not that many bananas) that is not what I want to do. The point of this post is to talk about advertising.

The inspiration for this poster has been taken from grafitti – this can be seen by the imitation of stencils and the mock access paint running down the poster. The ad-company has obviously been inspired by street artists, such as Banksy. This is one of Banksy’s works below.

My question is wouldnt it be nice if the commercial use of art in advertising was openly recognised and acknowledged?
Advertisers tend to rely on the outside world for their inspiration but see no need to admit the fact that they are borrowing from a wider culture. I realise that this is asking a lot but shouldnt advertisers acknowledge these sources?

Posted on by mklang

Balmers Brainwashed Offspring

In an interview with Fortune Magazine Steve Balmer replied to the question do you have an iPod?

No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children–in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.

In a similar comment a few months ago the Swedish Minister of Justice has said in an interview that his children do not have any illegally copied music.

While I understand the needs of the fathers to portray an image. Why cant the children do what all other children do? Being a Swedish teenager today and not having pirated music is a serious social drawback. Copying and sharing music is part of the teenage experience. In my primitive youth it was the tape recorder that was an introduction to personal technology. In the same way that I learnt to speak by copying others, I learned how to create by recording from others.

Browsing the internet without google works but avoiding it on principle is just silly.

Posted on by mklang

War is Peace

While reading the Arundhati Roy “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” I came across a list of countries that the United States has bombed and/or invaded since WWII. The list is frighteningly long. Here are a few examples (the dates denote the starting time):

China (1948), Korea (1950), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959), The Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964), Vietnam (1961), Cambodia (1969), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980), Nicaragua (1980), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Bosnia (1995), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001) & Iraq (2003).

Looking around online it is easy to find lots more information. For example “Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the 20th Century” and Grossmans “Century of Military Interventions“. While looking through the latter it is difficult to maintain a positive attitude that peace is possible. Must a desire for peace be naive?

Posted on by mklang

More odd spam

Once again odd spam puzzles me. I recently blogged spam about Gouranga. Today it seems to be meaningless inspirational (?) quotes. My question is obvious – why bother spamming people with this. However the answer can only be why not? why blog? why do anything? Anyway here it is:

Subject: The ultimate security is your understanding of reality

If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

And here is the meaning? Well not really a meaning – more an identification of the sources:
The subject is a quote from H. Stanley Judd
The first line is a quote from Vince Lombardi (American Football Coach)
The second line is a quote from Harry Truman (American President)
The third line is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Poet)

What nothing more exotic?

Posted on by mklang

The patent myth

An important myth in our society is: Inventors make important stuff, Important stuff is patented and Patents equal money. Through Slashdot I came across this article in USA today

“Search for the most prolific inventors is a patent struggle Tuesday December 6, 8:44 pm ET

What living person holds the most U.S. patents? In this era of information and lightning searches – when patents are both more valuable than ever and a source of raging controversy – you’d think such a simple question would be easy to answer.”

The thing is what is it the most prolific US inventor was doing? Apparently floral related patents.

“Weder…has his name on 1,321 patents. Almost all have to do with items you’d find at a florist. Weder’s most recent patent – No. 6,962,021, granted Nov. 8 – is for a sleeve for holding a group of flowers. Before that, on Oct. 11, Weder was issued a patent titled, “Method of covering a flower pot.” On Sept. 20, he was issued a patent titled, “Method of covering a flower pot or floral grouping.””

While I am sure tha this is important stuff in Mr Weder’s business is it really the stuff that patent mythology should be about? Another example among the top patent holders was Mr Yamazaki

“…the USPTO database turns up 1,432 patents bearing his name, whupping both Edison and Weder. Yamazaki’s most recent patent, granted Nov. 22, was titled, “Reflective liquid crystal display panel and device using same.” His first patent, for a computer chip design, was granted in 1980. Yamazaki has averaged about a patent a week for 25 years.”

Can it be possible to invent something worth patenting every week for 25 years? The ideal of the patent as the icon of the industrial age seems to have moved along to another dimension…

Ok so I am not sure what this means. But it just seems strange. Not wrong, but strange. That patents are granted so readily. In the case of the floral patents – do all these patents really qualify as inventions? In the case of Mr Yamazaki, does an patentable increase of knowledge in society occur every week? For 25 years? Either we should interprete this to mean that the rest of us are bone idle, totally intellectually worthless or both. Or people like Mr Yamzaki and Mr Weder are their fields equivalents of Mozart.

Posted on by mklang