What Really Pisses Hugh Off

Americans and Boundaries

I remember when the Gulf war was about to start, and I happened to be in a posh hotel in Chicago.

I got chatting to someone, who had heard that I didn’t have a (US) accent 😉, and so wanted to compliment me on the UK government supporting the US initiative.

He was pretty gung-ho, and I went along with it for interest, and found he was quickly suggesting that dropping a nuclear bomb on Baghdad was a good idea.

That is sort of an aside, but I found it interesting.

I tried to explore the idea that Iraq might be a sovereign state, and therefore the US might consider it inappropriate to interfere, and especially to send troops.

I finally worked out that actually he had no concept of a sovereign state, outwith the interest, and even control of the US.

If the US had interest, then it was perfectly sensible to do what was required to protect those interests. The question of any legal justification seemed of no interest at all.

My conclusion was that such people (because he was not alone) don’t actually see any well-defined borders anywhere.

There is some sort of continuous spectrum of how far their influence might be able to reach.

They start with their locality, perhaps County but more likely town or street, and then see the people who live in other Counties in their State as more foreign.

Further away are other States, which are even more foreign.

And they don’t really get the Federal government – I mean, what on earth is that about.

The further you are away from my street, the more foreign you are, but you should stil be doing what is in my interest, if I can get you to.

So why am I recounting this now?

Well, it is the boundaries thing.

What we are now seeing in the people who have gained political power in the US, are the people who see no boundaries between their personal interests and anything else.

Government policy is only set with the direct purpose of benefit to themselves or the people they want to benefit.

The benefit spreads through patronage, because such people in return will be of benefit to the ‘capo’, as in crime syndicates.

Looking for traditional political logic in the decisions made, such as closing some government department (Education at the moment), is a waste of time. Such policies don’t make sense as a political decision.

As a personal decision, ultimately benefiting themselves, it can often make sense.

Similarly, foreign policy towards Greenland, Ukraine, Russia etc, can easily make sense as a pure (often financial) profit-driven activity, where it might well make no sense as national politics.

An interesting aspect is that the beneficiaries don’t seem to see all this for the corruption it is.

This is because they lack any view of boundaries to their personal interests, as I said.

Of course, this is not exclusive to the US.

In fact, it may well be the norm, as I look around the world at the typical kleptocrats in power in many countries.

So, Trump and his cronies are just another bunch of kleptocrats.

It just seems strange to see it in the US, and to think of the US as being governed in the same way as so many countries that used to be criticised by them.

But maybe they are the smart ones, and it is the rest of us that are stupid. Trump and his ilk certainly think so, I suspect, and so do all the Ayn Rand followers.

I’ll finish with two further comments:

reportedly many of the people I’m talking about sadly don’t see boundaries in their sexual relationships either;
it is sobering and sad to think that in posting this message, it crossed my mind that a consequence might be that I would be denied entry to the US.

Recording Sex on Birth Certificates

Why does the government care what my genitals looked like?

Life would be so much easier if organisations that needed to know your sex (if any!) took their own responsibility for recording it, and no-one else did.

When I used to run training sessions in Diversity & Equality, I used to point out that at my advanced age, I could remember times when misogyny, racism, homophobia and more were commonplace and accepted by many as the norm. Now, to a large number of people, such views are abhorrent, and people are appalled that anyone could legally deny services, for example, based on such discrimination. A significant step in combatting the discrimination was to stop recording unnecessary information, such as marital status, sex, race, sexual orientation or date of birth when it isn’t necessary. This applied to all sorts of things, such as mortgage applications and hire purchase agreements, as well as the obvious job applications. There were times when the marital status of the parents or race were recorded on birth certificates, but not so recently in the UK. Recording race under apartheid regimes was hugely important in enabling discrimination.

To give a real sense of how things were, I used to try and think of something from the present that we all accept, but that will seem strange in the future. Of course this is a difficult, if not impossible, task. We all live in the time, and are part of the social norms that prevail. I wondered whether things like relationships with other primates might fall into the category, but decided that was too provocative, and I think deeply unlikely.

However, I now see something that I think will change, because we haven’t carried things through to their logical conclusion. We still record the sex at birth.

The government should decide that it has no interest in your sex for the vast majority of its work.

Gender recognition certificates? – No need, or even meaning?

Same sex marriage? How would they know; so they don’t care. If the government wants to get involved in relationships, marriage (or equivalent) is simply a contract that has a standard set of clauses that has been given a stamp of approval by the lawmakers. We have sort of got there, but in a complicated way. No record of sex would make it all much simpler.

I can’t actually think of a field where government might have a sensible reason to know. For health planning, of maternity and other specialist facilities maybe, but that would be part of a more comprehensive survey of the different categories of people that have certain requirements. In any case, if there is a statistic that we can infer with accuracy, it is that about 51% of births will be male, and planning doesn’t need to know about individuals, just populations..

Oh yes, toilets. And prisons. They really should not be an issue, but unfortunately they are. Everyone should have an expectation of being treated respectfully wherever they are. I like clean and safe toilets. Were I to go to prison, I should be able to spend my time there without imminent fear of rape and abuse.

But I can’t. And nor can many people, most noticeably women, reportedly.

I see the problem here is that we fail to treat and protect people properly. If you start from a position that sex is a significant characteristic, then you end up in weird places. So don’t start there.

Religions and sports and other service providers may decide they want to know about an individual’s sex and/or gender. That is fine, within the constraints of any local discrimination laws. But there is no reason for the government to be involved. Such organisations can take whatever (legal) steps they like to define the categories they want, using whatever criteria is suitable for their purposes. And of course there is no reason why any two organisations would need to agree on criteria.

OK. And so I know that this wouldn’t immediately solve all the issues we may have around sex and gender. But it is a significant shift that would put things on a firmer footing. After all, why did the people in control start recording sex? It certainly made it easier for the men who controlled the world to discriminate against and even subjugate women? So then they only needed to focus on identifying the “wrong” people in the other half of the population. You need the law to identify groups before you can pass laws controlling and disempowering them.

We should now recognise that the time of sex discrimination is coming to an end, we hope. And so discarding the mechanisms and superstructure that enables it is an important step. In apartheid South Africa, it was the dombook (pass book) and racial classifications that had to go as a step towards equality.

Still no Proper Icon Dictionary

We see more and more icons and symbols that are meant to be language-independent and obvious, and they just aren’t.

Back at the end of the last century, I decided that everyone liked using icons and symbols, but people had no idea what they meant. Just what does mean on a clothes tag?

So I registered icondictionary.{com,org} and set to work.

And failed 😀

But it was a good idea.

It was going to be crowd-sourced from around the world. A Spaniard travelling to Norway would be able to find out what Norwegian-specific road signs (such as the brilliant “Merging by the zipper method“) means, in their own language; be it Castilian, Catalan or something else I don’t know about.

And perhaps, surprisingly, it would be of great help to people with visual impairment.

Because the user would be able to get descriptions too (the modern alt is rarely enough, as you need proper description in detail) – it must be so frustrating to be reading a book and told that “his nose looked like some road sign”, when you have never seen one clearly, or ever had it described to you.

In fact, what does a poison icon look like on a bottle? Sort of important to know and detect.

So I planned to be able to capture images and look them up. This was before smart phones, so cameras were a problem, but they were coming along, and once the data was there, it would all work. I already had a C-Pen that could scan lines of text, so it couldn’t be long. And then anyone could scan a bottle and find out if that obscure symbol that someone thought was obvious was in fact saying the contents would kill them.

There was even a bit of business proposition here. The site would have decent quality images on display, but also behind, wherever possible there would be SVG versions that could be purchased, if a designer wanted high quality. With payment going back to the crowd-person who created it. Oh, and I had moderators/editors taking responsibility for areas, such as flags or laundry symbols, and also languages. With all the database permissions that entailed.

I had a student (Peter Dibdin) build a java app that enabled me to hand craft SVG documents to their highest quality or even a perfect description, and keep them in collections. It would then allow export in jpg at different resolutions, for different purposes. It still works nicely, by the way.

Given that SVG was only submitted to W3C in 1998, and you needed an Adobe plugin to view in a browser, you may get a sense of how ambitious this all was!

Even language stuff was new. I wanted to do all the stuff to distinguish pt-br and pt-pt etc., but even RFC 1766, trying to standardise it all, had only came out in 1995.

Clearly all this was hugely ambitious. Although the biggest problem was of course that I didn’t really have the skills 😀. And when I tried moving from a database to an RDF store, as the Semantic Web developed, since what I really wanted to do was at a semantic level, that was clearly going to be the final nail in the coffin!

Also, Google had recently come along, and was developing now, so search seemed to be much easier, and surely these huge corporations could do it – it was only a matter of time.

Then, of course, Wikipedia came along, and it looked like that would make it all redundant – it was only a matter of time.

But NO, it hasn’t happened yet.

Google Lens tells me that the Norwegian zipper sign is “A Norwegian Road Sign” – woohoo! Yeah, I sort of knew that because it is on the side of the Norwegian road I am driving down.

LLMs & ChatGPT? – it's only a matter of time!

We see more and more icons and symbols that are meant to be language-independent and obvious, and they just aren’t. I still can’t point my camera at one and find out what it means. Even though my car shows me what speed limit sign I last passed!

I didn’t finally (almost) give up until a couple of years ago. It would all be so much easier now. But I have other things I am doing that are being successful, and starting over in my 70s is probably not the best thing. But I only let the domains go in 2022, though 😀. Possibly mainly because I can always find another one, in this modern world of not needing com or org 😉.

Fackbook wouldn’t let me post this

“Too many line breaks”

I don’t recall why it went to Leigh and back, but this is the text of the document I was discussing.

From L.N.White Fri Aug 23 12:36:48 1991
From: Leigh White
Message-Id: 1777.9108231205@vicky.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Subject: Typing from Leigh
To: hg (Hugh Glaser)
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 91 13:04:54 WET DST
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Status: O

              Interviewing UCCA Candidates

Introduction

It has been suggested that I could document how I interview. Here is
a brain dump of what I remember. Obviously sometimes I dont do all
these things, but they dont take as long as they look. Without
questions I think I take around 15-20 minutes.

General

Candidates-centered – the candidate has a problem to solve: which
University to choose? I am here to help with the problem.

What I Do

If collecting, just smalltalk on the way to the office, usually about
department/office accommodation.

On entering the office I introduce myself, and my function in the
department. Depending on my mood and the look of the candidate I
variously say

    . Senior Lecturer
    . Lecturer
    ."I teach in the department"

I shake hands and offer the candidate one of the more comfortable
seats, and a hanger for their coat if necessary.

I then sit and pick up the UCCA form and interview slip. Nowadays I
never read the UCCA form before the interview. I verify that I have
the right form.

I explain that the interview is for them to see the University an have
the opportunity to see a member of staff personally. That the fact
they are being interviewed means we think they will probably be
suitable, and that the offer they will receive is usually simply the
level at which we will correctly restrict numbers. I often say that
it is therefore a straight forward competition, and A levels, rather
than interview, are the best way of differentiating between a large
potential set of adequate candidates, such that the candidates can
understand the rules. Sometimes a word about the restriction being on
pure numbers, rather than candidate quality.

Next I suggest we get the interview card out of the way. I ask the
candidate the required questions. This sometimes leads to discussion.
It gives me the chance to discuss how they feel about the standard
offer. The implication here is that I am open to negotiation. This
usually puzzles them, so I ask if they are having any problems with
specific A levels, such as a teacher leaving, which we should take into
account. Rarely is there any comment, so I explain I’m ticking the
standard offer box.

Card out of the way, (and incidentally any worry they have about the
offer) I explain the easiest way to conduct the interview is for them
to ask questions. This often meets with a blank stare, or at best one
or two questions. (This may change when we interview in the morning).

Assuming there is time, the only other thing to do is discuss their
University choice. Referring to the UCCA form, I then have a
discussion about each of their other choices, and whether they would
be more or less suitable, in view of the candidates interest and
character. I ask whether they have been to them, and what offers they
have received, writing the offers down in view of the candidate. All
this also gives me the opportunity to demonstrate some knowledge of
other departments.

I rarely hesitate to comment on another department or University’s
strengths. For example, if the candidate expresses an interest in AI,
and has chosen Essex as well, there is no harm in saying this is an
excellent choice. Perhaps the candidate will not like Essex when
visiting, and my awareness of Essex must raise the candidate’s
awareness of us.

A comparison of A level offers then follows. I explain that, although
our offer is as high as anyone elses, we do this to discourage them
from leaving us as an insurance. We prefer them to make decisions
based on whether they like the place or not, so we leave it as a
straight choice. I then ask if they understand the process that
happens once the A level results are known. In particular, I point
out that the first choice university is always asked if they want
a candidate, whether the candidate has achieved the offer or not.
Failing this the next choice is asked. Then clearing comes into play.

Finally, if there is time, I ask the candidate what criteria they
will use to make the choice, such as speciality, academic quality,
social or sports facilities. I sympathise with their problem,
commenting that in fact they cant really tell. They’ll know if they
make the wrong decision, but never be sure that they have made the
right one. That it will depend on the chance of what friends they
find, and if they find lecturers they get on with.

This is the winding-up talk. If the interview was short, I say I
trust they don’t feel cheated, but the main purpose of the day is to
get them to Southampton.

Finally on the way back, I express the hope that they will get the
offers they want, and then the A levels to match them.

I shake hands, making sure they know what to do next (used to be go
home).

The Crap Sewage Systems mean the Reservoirs are Empty

Since the last few months have been pretty wet, you might have thought that we must be going into the summer with nice, well-filled reservoirs.

No, we aren’t. And, yes, it is because of the water companies, but not in the obvious way.

It goes like this. Reservoirs get a lot of their water from rivers. The rivers get lots of their water from the heavens and run off. But when there is a lot of rain, the combined sewer systems can’t cope. So then those same fresh water rivers actually become sewers, and get lots of raw sewage in them, as we have seen. And you really don’t want to feed those sewers into the reservoirs. So the water companies don’t.

Consequently, despite the rain, this year we will continue to do the “emergency” water abstraction that we have done every year for yonks.

If we had better sewage systems we would have more fresh water.

The Metrication of English

Nobody would say “Give a centimetre and they will take a kilometre”, or “He hasn’t got a gram of common sense”.

So why do people write “He presented tonnes of evidence”?

It was always “tons”, and always should be “tons”.

Amazon Prime Media Protection

Right. I want to watch something on my Amazon Prime account, on my TV, which is connected to my ‘puter by USB-C to HDMI, or whatever it is.
But no, with my TV plugged in at all, it won’t even let me watch on the computer monitors.
I presume all this is so that I can’t easily snaffle a digital version and put it on bitTorrent, or whatevs, or maybe just because it is the third screen, as one of my monitors is also USB-C to HDMI.
So what is a chap to do?
I know, I’ll download a snaffled digital version from bitTorrent, and then I can watch it on any of my screens.
And since I have a legal account for watching it on Amazon, they would be hard pressed to do me for anything – just for the few moments when I am downloading when someone may get a bit of upload from me.
So the only things their awkward bloody protection acheives is
a) puts this customer to trouble and pisses him off;
b) gets me to share their content, albeit for a few seconds.

Random Streams Numbers on the Freeview Multiplexes

Specifically, Channel 4 assigns the data to different stream numbers: one programme might have the mpeg2video on Stream #0:5, and the dvb_subtitle on Stream #0:8, and the very next programme on Stream #0:1 and Stream #0:4 respectively.

OK, so most people won’t understand, and even fewer care. 🙂

I have a dongle (EyeTV, very nice) that records broadcast Freeview onto my old Mac (quite old, late 2006, but it ain’t broke, so doesn’t need fixing). And I end up with the raw broadcast mpeg file on the machine. Now I want to be able to move it elsewhere, and also compress it somewhat (MPEG-2 is not great compression).

I can simply tell EyeTV to export the video, and it will, although it takes a while to process (remember, 1.66 GHz Core Duo 🙂 ). Or I could even just move the mpeg file and use VLC to view it.

But I like to have the subtitles.

Now, perhaps surprisingly, the subtitles on broadcast TV are not text – they are images! So the only thing to do is overlay the images on the movie.

Of course, when it comes to this sort of thing, FFMPEG is your friend
-filter_complex "[0:5][0:8]overlay", I finally worked out. But you will see that I need to know which streams to overlay. And the bastards keep changing them. And I don’t have a utility that will identify them (and FFMPEG doesn’t, as far as I can tell.)

This used to be a problem for BBC & ITV too, but now I have Get iPlayer Automator, which downloads those nicely for me.

Black people are trying to tell us something important

Black people are trying to tell us something important, and it’s actually something we should know, because it is bleeding obvious.
They experience discrimination differently to groups who can often look more like the general population, Jews being the most obvious example.
To suggest otherwise, and assert a false equivalence of experience is either antisemitic, rascist, or possibly both.

Do black graveyards get vandalised? I don’t know, but I suspect not like Jewish ones.
Do Jews often get stopped by the Met for “Driving While Jewish”? I don’t think so.

The Jews I know can walk around town and go anywhere I go without having a different experience to me.
That is not true of black people.
And certainly not true of people from the Far East around Southampton.

And that is what I think people like Abbot (& Winfrey) are trying to tell us. From their first hours on this earth, people who look different, such as black people, have a different experience compared to the more “normal”-appearing population, in places like the UK (and USA).
And it never goes away, and can’t be avoided.

Living in the UK, it is an experience I can only begin to imagine, and the rest of us should not tell black people what they experience, especially when it seems to deny much of it, and therefore belittle it.

Oh, and by the way, many Jews and others would say that the Jews are not a race, and therefore antisemitism is not racism.
And since I think they are distinct, but related, discrimination problems, it is unhelpful to treat them as equivalent; since possible solutions and remedies for the different problems are likely to be different.

Refugees and Migrants as Political Pawns

Back in 1974, when I was visiting Israel, we managed to get to Gaza City, and then even drove around a refugee camp nearby (and yes, it wasn’t the safest thing to do).
It was really interesting to me to see what a “refugee camp” might actually look like. I was sort of surprised to find it looked quite permanent, and had electricity, and I could see TVs in the houses. (There were was no colour TV in Israel at the time.)
The main thought, however, was “Why is this a camp, and not a town?”, since it has been there for 26 years.

I had similar thoughts about Sabra and Shatila in 1982.

In the case of the Gaza camp, I worked out that it was likely that the camp had benefited from the 1967 war. Up until that time, it had been under Egyptian control, and apparently had few facilities. More recently, Israel had found it politically useful that the conditions should be better than they had been, providing water and power.
And so the living conditions of the thousands of people had simply changed.

The underlying reason for the earlier poor facilities, and that people were not permitted to move out, I think, was that all the Arab leaderships needed to have the displaced people obviously there, and in poor conditions – if they actually allowed them to have proper lives, then the argument that they should challenge Israel would dribble away, along with a little of the anger.

There is also the issue that if they allowed the displaced people to be citizens or at least have sensible status, then it would change the political make-up of the host country, but there are other things that could be done, I think.

And with sensible status comes the opportunity to be more economically active, reducing the cost to the host country:- a win-win.

So now, what about the UK?

Why have we got 117,000 asylum applications awaiting an initial decision in the UK, comprising around 143,000 people?

Primarily because it is politically expedient for the ruling party.

And like the inhabitants of Gaza camp and Sabra and Shatila, these people are suffering in much worse conditions that they might otherwise have, to serve the political agenda.

I think the government knows that pretty much the only thing it can talk about that will benefit it is migration. So it is in its interests to have a backlog they can point at, costing large headline figures for accommodation, and needing to discuss where they might be accommodated in UK settlements.

What we should be talking about is the utter incompetence that they have presided over such a backlog of people in an awful situation.

But if there had been an efficient Home Office immigration assessment system for the last 5-10 years, dealing effectively and in a timely manner with applications, a huge part of what the government talks about what disappear. And the human and national cost would go with it, as the migrants could be economically active, reducing the huge cost to the government.