Why I spoiled my ballot paper

Alun Uncategorized 4 Comments ,

It’s elec­tion day for the Dyfed and Powys Police and Crime Com­mis­sioner elec­tions. I think they mean Police Com­mis­sioner. I don’t think it’s Con­ser­vat­ive Party policy to have more people com­mis­sion­ing crimes too. I think if were to con­jure a scheme to ali­en­ate people from demo­cracy, the Dyfed and Powys Police and Crime Com­mis­sioner elec­tions would be an excel­lent model to follow.

Labour’s can­did­ate is a former agri­cul­ture min­is­ter who was cen­sured for fail­ing to deliver on prom­ises. The Labour gov­ern­ment removed her from office on the eve of the big agri­cul­tural show in Wales because they thought that would be less embar­rass­ing than hav­ing her con­tinue in office.

I can­not vote for the Labour can­did­ate. That leaves, and I’m pedantic enough to list every single party, the Conservatives.

That’s it.

To be fair to the Con­ser­vat­ive can­did­ate, he does sound sane. He’s in favour of help­ing drug addicts with rehab­il­it­a­tion. I think a Con­ser­vat­ive can­did­ate who favours things that work over dogma is a good thing and I’d like to sup­port him. And there’s the bonus that you’ll be able to say with con­fid­ence the police really are the para­mil­it­ary wing of the Con­ser­vat­ive Party. And that’s the prob­lem. I have com­plete con­tempt for the elec­tion and it’s the Con­ser­vat­ives who’ve fois­ted it on the coun­try. A vote for the Con­ser­vat­ive can­did­ate is a vote of approval for the sys­tem and this is abso­lutely the wrong system.

Polit­ical rep­res­ent­a­tion to the police is not the thing I have a prob­lem with. There are issues that are polit­ical with a small p that need rep­res­ent­at­ives. My prob­lem with the elec­tion is that we already have them. We have a local coun­cil, we have a county coun­cil, we have a national assembly and we have the UK Par­lia­ment. There’s plenty that’s wrong with them, but as far as poli­cing goes they have a fant­astic advant­age. They’re plural.

The law should be impar­tial. Politi­cians often are not, and even those who are need to be seen to be impar­tial and it’s dif­fi­cult to do that with a party tag round your neck. How­ever with the lay­ers of gov­ern­ment even if I do think there’s polit­ical bias, I can find a rep­res­ent­at­ive who I can at least talk to. The local Con­ser­vat­ive can­did­ate is clear that he will aim to rep­res­ent all people in the region. Great but why would the Con­ser­vat­ive Party want to bypass the demo­crat­ic­ally elec­ted bod­ies like the local coun­cil (no Con­ser­vat­ive major­ity), the county coun­cil (no Con­ser­vat­ive major­ity), the national assembly (no Con­ser­vat­ive major­ity), or the UK par­lia­ment (no Con­ser­vat­ive majority)?

If I can’t vote for either then not-voting makes sense. The prob­lem with not-voting is that it’s indis­tin­guish­able from apathy, which is a sig­nal to all parties that they can do whatever they like. That leaves spoil­ing the bal­lot paper.

Spoil­ing the bal­lot paper is futile in the UK. It makes no dif­fer­ence to the res­ult, but to me at least it’s an action. Police Min­is­ter Damien Green has con­tempt for people who don’t vote http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20257552 and you can see why when so much of the elect­or­ate has con­tempt for him. I can now at least com­plain I have tried to take part in the pro­cess and a lack of choice includ­ing the choice to re-open nom­in­a­tions is exclud­ing me from democracy.

If we were allowed to write in can­did­ates my choice would be Jackie Roberts. I think she has exper­i­ence, know­ledge of the local area and, see­ing as she’s Chief Con­stable of the Dyfed-Powys force, she’d have an office in the heart of the organisation.

The com­fort is that pre­sum­ably Damien Green will be out of his post tomor­row. His sin­cer­ity that Police and Crime Com­mis­sion­ers are a good idea must surely mean his own post of Police Min­is­ter is redundant?

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How much is Stonehenge worth?

Alun Uncategorized No Comments ,

You can now use Eng­lish law to work out what Stone­henge is worth in this blog post from Ulla Rajala. Someone has been fined for des­troy­ing a quarter of one of the Priddy Circles in Somer­set and you can work out from the fine for that what the fine for bull­doz­ing Stone­henge would be — if Eng­lish law were consistent.

The bonus ques­tion What gets the biggest fine, bull­doz­ing a quarter of a pre­his­toric monu­ment or installing uPVC win­dows into a lis­ted farm­house? is easy to answer.

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Priddy Circle ver­dict: how much is a monu­ment worth?
This week brought the sen­ten­cing of the case of the par­tial destruc­tion of one of the Priddy Circles in the Mendips in Somer­set. A retired busi­ness­man who had bought the farm house near the Circles ha…

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Not a good writing day today

Alun Uncategorized No Comments , , ,

Actu­ally an abso­lutely lousy writ­ing day today. I’d writ­ten myself into a dead end. There’s two ways of deal­ing with that.

The clever way would have been so have accep­ted there was a prob­lem that I wasn’t going to fix in a rush and moved on to the next sec­tion. After get­ting that done I could return to the prob­lem point and re-write to get from there to here.

How­ever, I thought the sec­tion I was stuck with might affect how the rest of that chapter works, so I looked for a fix. And looked. And looked. I finally have one, but it’s prob­ably cost me a day’s writing.

I have a party I have to go to tomor­row, so it’s a bit of a stall on the writ­ing at the moment. This is a slight pain as my cal­en­dar tells me it’s just day 2 of #AcWriMo . I would have been nice to get to day 3 before run­ning into a big­ger problem.

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November Writing

Alun Uncategorized No Comments ,

Over at the Extel­li­gence Exper­i­ment I’ve put up some plans for writ­ing a short book in Novem­ber. The aim won’t be to get some­thing per­fect done, but a work­able draft I can hack around. The daft part of the pro­ject is I plan to upload sec­tions as I go along, so if it goes wrong then it will go wrong repeatedly and embar­rass­ingly through­out November.

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Novem­ber Writ­ing
I’ve recently had more test res­ults back fol­low­ing an oper­a­tion and found out that the thing that’s kept me busy all sum­mer wasn’t can­cer, merely some­thing that could eas­ily be mis­taken for …

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More ways to date a Neanderthal?

Alun Uncategorized 2 Comments ,

This is use­ful inform­a­tion for archae­olo­gists. Car­bon Dat­ing would be fant­astic if the pro­duc­tion of Carbon-13 were con­stant. It’s not. This means that archae­olo­gists need samples of known date to cal­ib­rate their car­bon dates. That’s pos­sible when you have things like a his­tor­ical record to match mater­ial against, but not so easy when you have no con­scious record­ing of a date.

The usual answer has been to use trees. You can date tree samples from the pat­tern of yearly growth. The pat­tern of thick and thin growth rings acts a bit like a fin­ger­print for earlier peri­ods which means you know the date of a sample to a year. You then car­bon date the sample to cal­ib­rate your car­bon dates. The prob­lem is tree-ring data only goes back to the latest parts of of the Upper Palaeolithic.

This new data could push dat­ing back as far as the Middle Palaeo­lithic and allow the dat­ing of later Neander­thal material.

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Reshared post from +Kristina Killgrove

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Car­bon Dat­ing Gets a Reset: Sci­entific Amer­ican
Cli­mate records from a Japan­ese lake are provid­ing a more accur­ate timeline for dat­ing objects as far back as 50,000 years

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Security Two-Step

Alun Uncategorized 4 Comments ,

I’ve finally got round to set­ting up two-step veri­fic­a­tion for my Google account. I should have done it sooner after read­ing this account of hack­ing http://www.emptyage.com/post/28679875595/yes-i-was-hacked-hard but it’s taken a while because it can be a pain.

The way it works is by com­bin­ing a pass­word with a veri­fic­a­tion code sent by a text mes­sage to con­firm any major changes to your account. By itself it’s just the slight extra hassle of keep­ing your phone with you when you make changes, like adding access for a new program.

In real­ity you can’t use veri­fic­a­tion codes with a lot of pro­grams, so you also need to gen­er­ate a lot of one-shot pass­words for each applic­a­tion. My mail pro­grams on my phone and my desktop both use dif­fer­ent pass­words to my account pass­word. If I give any­thing else access like laptop or tab­let, that will need a new one-shot pass­word too. If I try to get this pass­word for my laptop while using my laptop browser for the first time, then that will need text veri­fic­a­tion to get into my account.

It is a hassle.

It’s even more hassle because I’m for­get­ful. There’s a good chance I could for­get where my phone is. Or it could break or get stolen. So I also have to get some more access codes to take account for that, print them off and store them some­where. Not any­where near a device, in case they’re stolen with the device, but access­ible enough that I can get them when I need them.

It is a pain, but even if you keep your pass­word secure you can’t be sure every­one else will keep your pass­word secure. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/ If you can get into your own account with no effort, how much effort is it going to take any­one else? You can decide for your­self if two-step veri­fic­a­tion is neces­sary for you by work­ing out how much you might lose if your Google account were hacked.

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Tentacles of Doom

Alun Uncategorized 1 Comment ,

Venus Fly Traps aren’t the only plants with fast moves when it comes to catch­ing prey. Ger­man sci­ent­ists have dis­covered a Sun­dew with tentacles that cata­pult insects into its hungry leaves. You can read the paper free, or down­load more video at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045735

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I’m glad I don’t have to do a poster for a conference any time soon

Alun Life No Comments ,

I’m glad I don’t have to do a poster for a con­fer­ence any time soon

Bet­ter Posters is a help­ful site for poster design, but every so often I’ll see some­thing that makes me glad I’m not com­pet­ing for atten­tion in a con­fer­ence poster ses­sion. In this case there’s a poster with aug­men­ted real­ity. At the moment I think it’s more gim­mick than must-have, but it’s cer­tainly some­thing that’s worth keep­ing an eye on.

One of the factors that does bother me slightly is the expense. In my case when I had a poster I wanted to tour I was look­ing at the prob­lem of anim­a­tion. Anim­ated sec­tions for parts of the poster would have helped. For example it could explain how I was meas­ur­ing stuff over time by allow­ing an image to have 2D + time dimen­sions instead of just 2D and a lot of text. I looked ser­i­ously at len­ticular print­ing and decided that was insanely expens­ive and not good enough.

Now, with cheap-ish sub £70 tab­lets avail­able it becomes more of a prob­lem about whether you can incor­por­ate film in a poster. It is expens­ive, but print­ing is around £50 for an aca­demic poster. Adding moun­ted video dis­plays now doubles or trebles the cost of a poster, but it’s no longer in the region of a mag­nitude more expens­ive. When you add travel and accom­mod­a­tion costs for big con­fer­ences, video dis­play is now cheap enough that it’s a sane expense, but expens­ive enough that it’s a big hit for self-funded students.

The answer isn’t to ban aug­men­ted fea­tures to posters. That makes as much sense as ban­ning laptops above a cer­tain spe­cific­a­tion because not every­one can afford them, but maybe enlightened depart­ments could be put­ting together reusable com­pon­ents for poster dis­plays for their stu­dents. This may be boards and sup­ports in some cases and, if so, cheap tab­let dis­plays that can also be re-used at suc­cess­ive conferences.

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Bet­ter Posters: An aug­men­ted real­ity poster
I’ve talked about vari­ous ways to make posters more inter­act­ive, from using QR codes to show­ing video. This is another step in mak­ing posters more dynamic: using aug­men­ted real­ity. Jump to the 4 minut…

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Visiting Stonehenge and Purchasing Spirituality

Alun Life, Politics 1 Comment , ,

I’ve remembered it’s com­ing up to that day again. I went to Stone­henge for the sol­stice once. I’m glad I went, but I doubt I’ll go again. There were a couple of big disappointments.

One was the lack of a vis­ible Eng­lish Her­it­age pres­ence. There were an estim­ated 20,000 people there who wanted some con­nec­tion to the past. I would have thought that was a good tar­get audi­ence for EH. At the very least there’s money to be made with the Sol­stice 2012 t-shirts to be sold. The offi­cial sol­stice blankets for those who for­got to bring one, sol­stice kagouls and umbrel­las for when it rains and so on. It’s also an excel­lent time to attempt guilt-tripping people into join­ing EH to sup­port access to ancient sites. They might have trouble with this last one as they’re not known for sup­port­ing access to Stone­henge on the sol­stice, but it’d be worth a try. The impres­sion I got (rightly or wrongly) was that EH had aban­doned the site for the night.

Drunk man standing on a stone at Stonehenge acting like an arse.

A rev­el­ler wel­comes the arrival of lager and, pos­sibly, the Sun.

The other was the sheer mess around the site. Every­one got a bag as they went in for their rub­bish. It doesn’t have to look like this. After all the fight­ing over access in the 1980s and 90s, is this a place people come are they here to cel­eb­rate or to conquer?

On the plus side I got a les­son in the dif­fer­ence between mod­ern Pagans and New Agers. The Pagans ten­ded to look dig­ni­fied and patient. Quite a few had their cere­mo­nial robes on, but not all. The easi­est ones to spot were those who’d let their beards down for the night.

In con­trast the New Agers were laden with mys­tical kit, and were often very purple. They’d looked agit­ated and annoyed. Every time someone elbowed in the ribs, she’d be wear­ing a pointy hat as if to com­pensate for the clothes she was wear­ing would ideally be on someone taller. There’d also be a purple scarf and purple jumper hid­den beneath at least half a dozen medal­lions. I should have heard them com­ing with the vari­ous eso­teric bangles and brace­lets they were wear­ing.
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