Yakkety-Yak. Tracked Talk Back

Here's a thing.

I went to Potlatch, a Typepad blog,  and was mildly interested in this article and wanted to comment. I've commented there before, but only occasionally. I never had any trouble in doing so under my 'internet name' of Charlie McMenamin before. But I did tonight.

I have an 'internet name' as I am self employed and do work for local authorities, not-for-profits and charities. I  have a personal website which advertises my wares under my real name. I also have a Facebook page, a Google+ presence and a Twitter account in my real name.

 I don't want folk Googling me and finding all my disgraceful political  opinions popping up. I can separate my work life and out of work life, but I don't want to leave a trail on the net behind me . Hence the nom-de-plume.  I know, of course, that anyone with a scintilla of IT savvy could break this light disguise in a matter of moments. But the folk I work for aren't like that: they just don't want anyone with baggage. I try to keep my baggage separate.

Tonight I tried to comment on Potlatch and found that this was the new understrap of the blog

So I pressed 'more' and got this:



I used the drop down box which gave me the opportunity to sign in using Twitter or Google and lots of other options as well as Facebook - or to registered with Typepad using the same spread of options - but all of them reverted to my real identity, presumably picking up on my registrations under other platforms. I suspect there must be a way to make some comment on Potlatch's blog as Charlie McMenamin but, blimey, its not obvious and its very, very hard to find.

Now, I suspect Potlatch can live with the pain of not reading my response to his post. To be frank, I've already forgotten what I was going to say anyway*.   But this has been a mildly sobering moment for me - all that stuff about the disappearance of privacy suddenly came home to roost.

Small stuff, perhaps. But then my impact on the internet world has been precisely small stuff. I just want the space to do it privately.



* But, hey, Will, for the record,  I'm a big admirer of your style of writing and width of reading. But a sentence like,"A perceived virtue of neo-classical economics, as a tool for public decision-making, is its simplicity." really won't do, at least not without expansion. Neo-classical economics' 'simplicity' is shrouded in Maths which most of us find very, very complicated. Perhaps it is there to disguise the underlying simplicity?

The Challenge of Avoiding Junk Food

Don't like McDonalds? But they're hard to avoid- each dot of light on that map above represents a branch. The answer says Weather Sealed is to move to South Dakota:

.... McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

Say what you will, Anglo American capitalism has always been great at providing choice, I'm sure you'll agree...

Via

Seven Deadly Sins: Their Distribution in the US

Yes, I've got John B's range of problems plus a few more, but once my family sorts itself out I'll start blogging properly again. Meanwhile check out Angie Androit on Sociological Images:

Some geographers at Kansas State University recently did an analysis of the spacial distribution of EVIL in the United States. Which part of the country is most afflicted by sloth? Lust? Greed? Envy? Wrath? Gluttony? Pride?

That’s right, folks – these geographers have operationalized sin, quantified it, then measured and mapped it. Pride is the aggregate distribution of all other sins, since it is supposedly the root of all evil (though one could also make a good case for apathy). Here’s how the sins are measured (and here’s a good view of the maps):

• Greed: Average incomes versus total inhabitants below the poverty line
• Envy: Total number of thefts (robbery, burglary, larceny, and stolen cars)
• Wrath: Total number of violent crimes (murder, assault and rape) per capita
• Lust: Sexually transmitted diseases per capita
• Gluttony: Number of fast-foot restaurants per capita
• Sloth: Expenditures on arts, entertainment and recreation versus rate of employment
• Pride: An aggregate of the six other sins

There are clearer maps over at Flowing Data.

Time Travel

Everyone goes to Strange Maps every now and again but it's possible to forget just how wonderful the really strange ones can be if you don't go there very often. Shown on the right is a map from 1981 distorted to show travel times (train domestically, air internationally) from London. Stranraer is apparently as far away as New York.

Now go on, I challenge you - go find a poet that would deny that particular truth.

But even more wonderfully, the discussion below that Strange Maps post led me to this: an interactive version of the Tube map which changes shape to show relative travel times depending on which station you start from. Go press Heathrow and see what happens. It's like Harry Beck on acid.

Supposed to fire my imagination

Here's a little story.

Like loads of people I have iTunes on my computer. Last time I switched it on - I'm not that big a user – a little box popped up offering me something called iTunes Genius. Basically it's a little app which looks at your music, looks at which other tracks have been downloaded from the ITunes store by people who also have the same tracks as you, and then makes suggestions for playlists on that basis.

It's like an automatic version of those compilation tapes you used to make as a teenager. If I click on any song in my iTunes collection it selects another 24 songs from my collection to put together with the one I clicked on. So far, so nerdish. The key thing to remember is that its criteria for knocking these playlists together is the overlapping tastes of millions of other people, I presume disproportionately American.

So, feeling in a particularly 'young people today don't know they're born' type of mood, I decided to make a Genius playlist of old pop songs to try and wean my 12 year old off of only listening to bloody Green Day. But which song to start with?

First I tried Otis Redding's classic version of (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction. The result was a playlist including 24 other songs, all by black artists. Then I tried it with the Stones version of the same song, which resulted in 24 other songs all by white artists. If this represents the collective music associations of millions I can't help thinking Obama may be elected but he's still got his work cut out. It seems such a striking indication of a cultural apartheid.

Now, it might be that only sad old people like me download this sort of sixties stuff from iTunes and our generation is stuck in a racial time-warp. If a similar experiment had been carried out with a more modern song recorded by both black and white artists the result might have been very different.

Or so I hope.

$350 to Convert From Person to Information Node.

The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859

Well, yes - but what if, for $350, you can tap into the internet without a screen or keyboard, and wave your hands to access all the information in the world and project a dialing pad onto your palm at the snap of your figures? Where then does social being end and consciousness begin? Or do they become one?



If the video doesn't work, go here for a mind blowing 8 minutes (H/T Orgtheory).

ID cards suddenly seem the least of our worries.

A Modest Proposal To Do Less Evil

Don't Be Evil took a bit of a bashing as a company motto with all that China business, so Google did an evil scale apparently. Remarkably, it showed that doing what they wanted to do in the first place was less evil than standing up to the geriatric bureaucracy in Beijing. Now how counter-intuitive is that?

I only drag up this stale news because Richard Murphy has provided the Sunday Times with some interesting analysis which suggests it is, apparently, much less evil to pay tax in Ireland than in the UK. In fact it's £110 million a year less evil.

Here's an idea: let's abolish all tax jurisdictions for Google - and for Yahoo and all its other competitors. Let's say, instead, it will be taxed by the United Nations, and that national contributions to the costs of the UN and, especially, its humanitarian agencies will be abated in proportion to national usage of Google.

We Know Where You Live

Sometimes, just sometimes, people with whom you are in agreement do stuff which makes your blood run cold. I got that feeling about this map which shows the location of donors to the campaign behind Proposition 8 in California - the homophobic proposition which abolished same-sex marriage in the State. I'm trying to work out why this makes me feel a bit queasy, in the way that the escape of the BNP membership list didn't.

36,00 marriages were rendered subject to nullification by this evil little bit of reactionary bollox so its not as if I have any sympathy with the people outed as bigots on this map. I suspect what is nagging away at me is the sense that if 'my side' can do this, what on earth can the forces of the State do?

And it really does make campaigns like this look a little like shutting the stable door after the whole bloody herd has bolted.

Via CIF

Banish those 'getting bullied out of your dinner money' school blues forever !

OK: I'm freaked. I'm not normally too paranoid about personal anonymity stuff, but now I'm freaked.

I'm a school governor. We're building a new school - it's part of the Blairite Building Schools Eventually, sorry, Building Schools for the Future, programme. There's a lot I could write about the glories and inequities of this massive but madcap PFI scheme but that's not my purpose now.

No: I want to talk about school dinners, and not in a Jamie Oliver sense either. The kids pay for their food with a plastic card at the moment - it's suppose to stop them getting bullied out of their money but it's not 100% effective as, after all, you can make someone spend their money on you whether its cash or on a card. It also saves the school quite a lot of faffing about as it means we have totally cashless catering.

But we have another option for the new building: biometric cashless catering when the plastic cards would be replaced by fingerprints or even, I suppose, retina scans. The Head declined this cutting edge proposal I'm rather glad to say. But I wonder how many schools out there are quietly building up a data base of the next generation's biometric data - and I wonder how long before that data escapes into the either.

Three Unconnected Thoughts. (I Hope)

Back in the day, I used to get into arguments about nuclear disarmament. I thought it was a good idea. Still do. But 'wiser' folk that I would trot out a variety of arguments as to why I was being a muddle headed idealist. Eventually, one argument would come up again and again:

"No matter what Britain does with its nuclear weapons, they can't be uninvented so other countries are going to have them anyway...."

But, sometimes, things do get 'uninvented'. Go see Roman Bath and its underfloor central heating. First such heating became uneconomic as the Empire collapsed and then the whole technique was forgotten for centuries.

Why does reading this Wired article about the potential security flaws in the whole internet remind me of these two facts? It ends with the portentous quote ,

"There is no saving the Internet.... There is postponing the inevitable for a little longer."

I can't judge the validity of the article any more than a Roman grandee could have assessed the likelihood of Barbarian attacks on a distant border one day depriving his family of central heating. But I do believe that geeks are like Roman travellers, bringing back 'difficult-to-grasp' stories of exotic lands which, one day, may be more important to the Empire than most of can know at the time.