Tag Archives: ForWestminsterHubble

Progressiveness and the Tribe

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As a for­mer sup­porter of the Lib­eral Democ­rats, I found my sup­port lean­ing toward Labour due to the Lib Dems’ ongo­ing dis­as­trous coali­tion with the Con­ser­v­a­tive party.  But in truth, the Labour party are just a con­ve­nient polit­i­cal marker for some of my opin­ions on eco­nomic and social pol­icy.  What I really care about, I sup­pose, is progress – chang­ing things that are bro­ken, try­ing new ideas until we dis­cover some­thing that makes the coun­try work better.

But all three main par­ties now label them­selves as “Pro­gres­sive”. (I sup­pose “regres­sive” isn’t much of a vote-winner.)  The minor par­ties mostly have lim­ited agen­das that make it impos­si­ble to sup­port them to the exclu­sion of all oth­ers.  Who, then, do I vote for? The truth is prob­a­bly that none of the UK’s polit­i­cal par­ties are as pro­gres­sive as I would like, but more than that — a politi­cian being pro­gres­sive on my behalf isn’t really what I want at all.

I want to design the future.

Then I want to engi­neer the future.

Then I want to sit back and think “bloody hell, we made that.”

That’s what gets me out of bed and halfway across the county five morn­ings a week, what keeps me sketch­ing inter­faces and gets me through design meet­ings, what keeps me cod­ing and sol­der­ing and get­ting cov­ered in grease and salt-spray.

I’m not pre­tend­ing that I could engi­neer the future of this coun­try by myself, or that I should have any more of a say than the other sixty mil­lion of us, but I’d like to at least have some input besides a sim­ple vote.  As far as I’m aware, there exist only two ways of hav­ing this kind of input — sell your soul for a career in pol­i­tics, or be ignored on e-petitions.

All of this leads me to the con­clu­sion that hav­ing our voice heard and our expe­ri­ence utilised on our own terms is not some­thing that a nation state can offer its cit­i­zens.  Our voices are heard and our expe­ri­ence utilised by our fam­i­lies and friends; at our places of work — tribes of a few hun­dred peo­ple at most — but not on a national scale

Is there some use­ful way for cit­i­zens to help engi­neer their future at the state level, or are we rel­e­gated to hav­ing that kind of influ­ence only in our hundred-strong social tribes?  Are there any coun­tries that are sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter at this than ours, coun­tries that progress with heavy cit­i­zen involve­ment?  Am I dream­ing of an impos­si­ble soci­ety, and most impor­tantly of all, should I go to bed and sleep it off instead of fill­ing the inter­net with my ranting?

Whither the State Religion?

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This so-far unloved peti­tion was shared with me on Face­book the other day, and while I can’t bring myself to sign it — I agree with most, but not the dis-establishment of the Church of Eng­land — it has got me won­der­ing why we still have such a thing as a “state reli­gion” in the United Kingdom.

Like I said, I have no objec­tion to the Church of Eng­land exist­ing (and like­wise its Scots equiv­a­lent).  I know many mem­bers, and I know it does good work.  What I can’t see the sense of, how­ever, is declar­ing it our country’s reli­gion.  It is the most pop­u­lar reli­gion amongst the peo­ple of this coun­try, and the reli­gion of our head of state, but noth­ing more.

We do not just live in a “Church of Eng­land” coun­try, or a Protes­tant one, or even a Chris­t­ian one.  We live in a Chris­t­ian coun­try, and a Mus­lim coun­try and a Jew­ish coun­try, a Sikh and Hindu coun­try, a Bud­dhist and Pagan coun­try, an Athe­ist and an Agnos­tic coun­try, a Pasta­far­ian and Sci­en­tol­o­gist coun­try (for bet­ter or worse).

There is an Eng­lish lan­guage, which there are some rea­son­able argu­ments in favour of requir­ing those who live here to speak.  Of course no-one in their right mind would sug­gest that peo­ple who live here adopt the “Eng­lish reli­gion”, so why have such a con­cept in the first place?  It can only serve as a small but nig­gling reminder to the nation’s Mus­lims and Sikhs that they aren’t quite as “Eng­lish” as others.

I find the num­ber of state-funded church schools quite odd too — in my town, there are only two non–faith schools, nei­ther of which we are in the catch­ment area of.  So I am pay­ing money in the form of taxes for my son to be taught as fact some­thing that is only an opin­ion, and one that I dis­agree with at that.

I under­stand the his­tor­i­cal rea­sons behind the sys­tem, why the Church of Eng­land exists and why the con­cept of a state reli­gion exists.  But is it not a lit­tle out-dated now?

I admit that this post comes across as flame-bait, but I gen­uinely can­not think of an advan­tage to hav­ing a state reli­gion, and I hon­estly wel­come any com­ments that offer a rea­son as to why the state reli­gion is use­ful to our society.

Why I’m Voting “Yes” to AV

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A while ago, I blogged my indif­fer­ence to the Alter­na­tive Vote sys­tem, and pol­i­tics in gen­eral at that point, in a post enti­tled “Meh” to AV.  My main objec­tion was that AV would increase the like­li­hood of the coun­try being gov­erned by bland cen­trist coali­tions.  How­ever, now hope­fully some­what more edu­cated about the sub­ject, I am now given to under­stand that AV would in fact reduce the like­li­hood of coali­tion gov­ern­ments — and given how well our cur­rent coali­tion is work­ing out for all con­cerned, I sus­pect that a greater chance of out­right major­ity gov­ern­ments may be a good thing for Britain.

Over and above this, the biggest advan­tage of AV in my opin­ion is that it removes the desire to vote tac­ti­cally.  Thus far in my adult life I have res­olutely voted Lib Dem in my con­stituency, where they trail the Con­ser­v­a­tives with about 30% of the vote com­pared to 40% — not exactly close, but not far off.  As I find my incli­na­tions swing­ing toward Labour (15%), the exist­ing First Past the Post sys­tem means I now have a choice: sup­port Labour by vot­ing for them, or oppose the Tories by vot­ing Lib Dem.  (Not that that’s work­ing too well at the moment.)  The AV sys­tem gives me the abil­ity to prop­erly express my opin­ions: I’d like Labour first, the Lib Dems sec­ond, and the oth­ers not at all.

But in case none of that was con­vinc­ing, I sug­gest you attempt the fol­low­ing pro­ce­dure, which has thus far done me no harm in life:

  1. Fig­ure out what a bunch of stuffy old-Etonian toffs and/or big­oted racist dicks want you to do
  2. Fig­ure out what the oppo­site is
  3. Do that.

Whether it’s for fairer rep­re­sen­ta­tion, for bet­ter allow­ing you to express your opin­ion, to Stick it to the Fore­head Man, or just for the lulz — please join me in vot­ing “Yes” to the Alter­na­tive Vote sys­tem on May 5th.

In Praise of Disjointed Communities

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Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron is set to make a speech on immi­gra­tion today which, to the very vocal dis­plea­sure of Vince Cable and doubt­less many Lib Dems, is designed to appeal to the core and right of the Con­ser­v­a­tive party. Accord­ing to the BBC arti­cle:

Com­mu­ni­ties have been affected by incom­ers who are unable to speak Eng­lish and unwill­ing to inte­grate, [Cameron] will argue.

“That has cre­ated a kind of dis­com­fort and dis­joint­ed­ness in some neigh­bour­hoods. This has been the expe­ri­ence for many peo­ple in our coun­try — and I believe it is untruth­ful and unfair not to speak about it and address it.”

Granted, I’m prob­a­bly far from the aver­age mem­ber of the pub­lic in my opin­ions, and cer­tainly I’m far from core Tory mate­r­ial. But I see that dis­joint­ed­ness as more of a good thing than a bad one.

Many years ago, I lived for a while in the vil­lage of Eas­ton, on Port­land. It was blessed with both a Chi­nese restau­rant and a Chi­nese take-away, as far as I am aware the only two on the island. When I was there, the restau­rant was staffed with Chi­nese peo­ple (or at least those of Chi­nese descent) — whether they lived on the island or not, I have no idea. But the take-away? Well, I guess they ran out of Chi­nese peo­ple. It was staffed entirely by Brits. 96.8% of the pop­u­la­tion are of white eth­nic­ity.

I come from, and have since returned to, Bournemouth. Just 30 miles away, it has a pop­u­la­tion more than 10 times that of the whole of Port­land. Dur­ing most of the year it is home to thou­sands of uni­ver­sity stu­dents; in the sum­mer it opens its doors to thou­sands more for­eign lan­guage stu­dents and a never-ending influx of tourists. I live in an area with a high Brazil­ian pop­u­la­tion. Ori­en­tal and Middle-Eastern shops are everywhere.

It’s part of the world in a way that Eas­ton is not.

By and large, immi­grants nat­u­rally pick up enough Eng­lish to get by — instead of impos­ing require­ments on their pro­fi­ciency with the lan­guage, how about we try to learn each oth­ers’ languages?

Instead of impos­ing some require­ment to “inte­grate” with soci­ety (pre­sum­ably that means read­ing the Daily Mail, drink­ing tea and moan­ing about the weather), why not cel­e­brate each oth­ers’ cultures?

More to the point, why not stop pre­tend­ing that there’s a sin­gle homoge­nous British soci­ety for peo­ple to inte­grate with in the first place? My com­ment about the Daily Mail was only partly in humour. How do you define such a neb­u­lous concept?

I don’t read the Daily Mail, and I rarely drink tea. My instinc­tive reac­tion to the phrase “Oh dear, it’s come over all cloudy again, hasn’t it? Typ­i­cal.” is an impo­tent rage as I realise that no mat­ter how much of a trav­esty of con­ver­sa­tion it is, in the eyes of the law, it’s still not cause enough to legit­i­mately punch some­one in the face.

Like most Brits though, I do love French food, Ger­man beer, Ital­ian cof­fee, chow mein, pizza and chicken tikka masala.

If I’m try­ing to make a point here, it’s this:

  • Every­one else’s cul­ture is just as good as ours

  • Every­one else’s lan­guage is just as good as ours

  • And by the way, every­one else’s food is bet­ter than ours.

Let’s stop cling­ing to an idea of British cul­ture that we can’t even define, and pre­tend­ing our way of life is under attack from Poles or Pak­ista­nis.  Let’s not be Easton.

There’s a whole world out there.  Let’s live in it.

When Science met Big Society

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Yesterday’s announce­ment that the Arts and Human­i­ties Research Coun­cil will, on pain of los­ing fund­ing, devote a “sig­nif­i­cant” amount of time to study­ing the notion of “Big Soci­ety” is frankly shock­ing. If it is indeed true, it smacks of incred­i­ble ego­tism on the part of the government.

The government’s money is the people’s money — if we’re not going to leave the job of decid­ing what to research to the actual researchers, why should the government’s whims be involved? If there were a ref­er­en­dum on it now, what pro­por­tion of the tax-paying pub­lic would label the Big Soci­ety as a steam­ing pile of shite that we shouldn’t be throw­ing any more money at?

Con­versely, how many of the government’s other sweep­ing changes — the pro­gramme of cuts (Warn­ing: least impar­tial sum­mary ever) that we are now sub­ject to, for exam­ple — have been the sub­ject of such hopefully-independent research?

A future UKIP gov­ern­ment promises to ban global warm­ing research, and apart from the cli­mate change deniers, I’m con­fi­dent the pub­lic would not sup­port that par­tic­u­lar aspect of gov­ern­men­tal med­dling in research. So why are we putting up with this?

(And on a related note, does any­one else think it’s a lit­tle odd to com­mis­sion research on a pol­icy after com­mit­ting to it?)

tl,dr: Hands off mah sci­ence, government.

The فراشة Effect

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Two months ago, a young Tunisian vegetable-seller killed him­self in protest when offi­cials in his home town of Sidi Bouzid pre­vented him from sell­ing his wares on the street.

That was Decem­ber. Now it is Feb­ru­ary. What became known as the Jas­mine Rev­o­lu­tion swept through Tunisia, exil­ing its Pres­i­dent of 23 years and ush­er­ing hope for free­dom and democ­racy. Egypt fol­lowed, oust­ing Pres­i­dent Mubarak from his 30-year rule after a protest in Tahrir Square that saw more pro­test­ers’ chil­dren in impromptu day-care groups than molo­tov cocktails.

Unrest has swept the states of the Arab League. Protests have rocked Morocco, Alge­ria, Jor­dan, Syria and Yemen. Ten­sions are flar­ing once again in Iran. Bahrain ordered its sol­diers to open fire on their peo­ple. And tonight Libya lies on the brink of rev­o­lu­tion or civil war, the east of the coun­try report­edly under civil­ian rule as army units defect, police sta­tions burn and hun­dreds lie dead.

I won­der if Mohamed Bouaz­izi had any idea, back in Decem­ber, that his death would be the cat­a­lyst for the great­est unrest the region has seen in decades?

And I won­der how many other sit­u­a­tions, polit­i­cal or oth­er­wise, are sus­cep­ti­ble to the same but­ter­fly effect. How many other but­ter­flies are there out there whose sim­ple, local actions will end up tear­ing coun­tries apart?

The Pulse

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Another after­noon of high-volume Pen­du­lum and high-caffeine brain, blaz­ing through work on one screen while flick­ing my atten­tion over two oth­ers. Two news pages and four Twit­ter lists are open, poised. They all refresh auto­mat­i­cally, but each time my eyes focus on them I reach for the man­ual refresh but­ton purely on instinct.

It’s a con­stant stream of news that’s in real terms utterly use­less to me. I’ve never been to Egypt and I don’t know any­one there. I don’t know a lot about Mubarak’s regime or any of the alter­na­tives. In a world with­out the inter­net, maybe I’d buy a paper tomor­row and read about it with mild inter­est. But the inter­net itself, and the real-time access it brings, can ele­vate any topic to the point of obsession.

Some­thing big is going down in a coun­try thou­sands of miles away, in a coun­try where everyone’s phones are offline, inter­net access has been cut, and news agen­cies’ cam­eras have been con­vis­cated. But still the news comes. Phone calls trans­lated into tweets, live blogs pushed byte by byte over satel­lite modems, hand­held cam­corders stand­ing in for the lost news cameras.

The imme­di­acy of it, the raw trans­port of infor­ma­tion from real­ity to text and video, the process itself kicks off a lit­tle spark of adren­a­line, induc­ing a stress response, refresh, refresh, refresh until the source stops broad­cast­ing, then find a new one. Never stop. Dis­con­nec­tion is death.

The white-hot pulse of news flashes upwards from Tahrir Square out to low-earth orbit, back to the sur­face, across mil­lions of spi­der­web miles of cable and straight into my forebrain.

The real world feels so slow some­times. It can be min­utes between tweets.

It’s a con­ti­nent away and it doesn’t affect my life at all. But I don’t want to be a day late read­ing the news — I don’t want to be 30 sec­onds late.

Each day I carry around a plethora of devices that let me avoid that hor­ri­ble late­ness; allow me to find the pulse from wher­ever in the world it starts and catch it before it’s had a minute to grow cold. One day, we will be able to catch that pulse and ride it with a mere thought — and for me, that day can’t come soon enough.

Inbox Many

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There’s been a recent increase in productivity-related posts on Life­hacker, so inspired by that I thought I’d share how I “get things done”, and hope­fully swap tips with others!

My approach is sim­ple: I attempt “Inbox Zero”. And delib­er­ately fail.

After sev­eral years of attempt­ing to keep a clean inbox, hav­ing any mes­sages at all sit­ting there really annoys me.  I use that to my advan­tage and end up doing the polar oppo­site of “Inbox Zero” — that is, I use my inbox as my to-do list.  When­ever I think of some­thing I need to do, I write a short e-mail, usu­ally just a sub­ject line, and send it to what­ever inbox is appro­pri­ate for the task (work or home).

It has the advan­tage of sim­plic­ity — while cor­po­rate fire­walls could pre­vent me from using a todo.txt and a filo­fax could be left at home, there’s vir­tu­ally no sit­u­a­tion when I’m more than a few feet from a device that can do e-mail.

And the worry that “Inbox Zero” was designed to address — huge inboxes that get piled up with junk that never gets acted on — is avoided because hav­ing those e-mails in my inbox, even though I put them there, is annoy­ing enough that I clear them as soon as possible.

I’ve taken to call­ing the tech­nique “Inbox Many”.

So, great untamed hordes of the inter­net — I’m intrigued. How do you lot get things done?

“Meh” to AV

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There are four months left before Britain goes to the polls to decide whether to adopt the Alter­na­tive Vote sys­tem, and already the #yes2av and #no2av cam­paigns are hot­ting up on Twit­ter.

Barely a year ago, I would have shouted “yes” with all my might — the Labour incum­bents were more into spin and sur­veil­lance than the redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, and the oppo­si­tion Con­ser­v­a­tives appealed even less. But AV would have helped the Lib Dems immensely, maybe giv­ing them a shot at power. As the party of the young, in my eyes maybe more a party of the Left than Labour was, I was all for the Lib Dems hav­ing as much of a chance as pos­si­ble to win seats in the House of Commons.

What a dif­fer­ence a year can make.

The Tories are dec­i­mat­ing the pub­lic sec­tor and some­how still believe that char­ity and the free mar­ket will make it all bet­ter. The Lib Dems are com­plicit and must be on course for break­ing the major­ity of their elec­tion pledges. Labour have a new leader who doesn’t seem to do any­thing apart from offer the occa­sional doom­ful pre­dic­tion about the coalition’s cuts.

The Greens would have me out of a job, UKIP are crazy, the BNP are evil, and I can’t bring myself to run as a Pirate Party can­di­date because I believe in far more than an end to abuse of copyright.

Who would I vote for if a gen­eral elec­tion were called tomor­row? Nobody.

In fact, the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate has almost brought me full cir­cle on the sub­ject of the Alter­na­tive Vote. Under a sys­tem like AV, smaller par­ties are likely to do bet­ter. But with a three-(major-)party sys­tem, it’s unlikely to be the case that we’ll see a Labour-Pirate or a Conservative-UKIP coali­tion or any­thing inter­est­ing — it’s still going to be Convervative-Lib Dem or Labour-Lib Dem, even with AV. And all that does is con­tinue the last 13 years’ rush for the cen­tre ground.

The Tories are rush­ing for it so fast that they’re alien­at­ing half their party. The Lib Dems, in the­ory, define the cen­tre, and despite elect­ing the younger Miliband, the Labour party has yet to decide if and how it’s going to stop its New Labour love affair with ‘Mid­dle England’.

What we absolutely don’t need, for the sake of the next generation’s inter­est in pol­i­tics, is an unend­ing suc­ces­sion of coali­tions, each one indis­tin­guish­able from the last.

So if it could hap­pen, bring on the Labour-Pirate coali­tion and the Conservative-UKIP coali­tion. Any­thing to keep things inter­est­ing. But if it can’t — and unless the Lib Dems utterly toast their pop­u­lar­ity, it can’t — then let’s have the next gen­er­a­tion of Mag­gie Thatcher and Michael Foot, let’s have some peo­ple with real ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences fight­ing it out in the Commons.

Bring me some­one I can believe in.

Until then, “meh” to AV.

Dear America, Your Missile Defence is not Broken

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@CampaignReboot, mak­ing a good point as always, ear­lier linked to this CNN arti­cle which bemoans the state of the United States’ mis­sile defence pro­gramme after the fail­ure of a Ground-Based Inter­cep­tor test.

Just to rein­force his point, let’s look at how insanely dif­fi­cult a task a Ground-Based Inter­cep­tor (GBI) mis­sile has.

An ICBM launch is first detected by detec­tors, usu­ally radar, at sea, on land, and in space. All this data must be fed back to the mis­sile base and analysed by a com­puter within a few minutes.

A GBI attempts to inter­cept it while it’s in its “mid­course” phase, which gen­er­ally lasts for around 20 min­utes — but it’s not as if the GBI turns around and tries again if it misses. You have one chance to inter­cept dur­ing that time win­dow. Dur­ing the mid­course phase, the ICBM is in space, over 1000 kilo­me­ters above the Earth. It’s mov­ing at sev­eral kilo­me­ters a sec­ond. In this test, it was over 4000 kilo­me­ters from the GBI’s launch point.

It’s around 10–20 metres long.

And you have to hit it.

This is, shall we say, not a triv­ial challenge?

Any­one assum­ing that their country’s mis­sile defence sys­tems entirely remove the pos­si­bil­ity of nuclear attack is kid­ding them­selves. Mis­sile defence is just a part of the great game of deter­rence played by the world’s few nuclear pow­ers. If any­one launches, the world is still screwed.

Luck­ily for any remain­ing Cold War doom­say­ers, the GBI’s 50% inter­cept suc­cess rate is pretty nicely matched by the Russ­ian Bulava ICBM’s 53% test suc­cess rate. And if your Red (/Green?) ter­ror of the month is North Korea or Iran, can you imag­ine their mis­sile pro­grammes hav­ing any­thing like the suc­cess rate of the Rus­sians’ or the Americans’?

So if all the ranty CNN com­menters could get over it, it would be appre­ci­ated. The US needs mis­sile defence, even though it isn’t per­fect and never will be. Aegis has a bet­ter record than the GBIs any­way, did you for­get that you had that too? North Korea is not going to nuke you tomor­row anyway.