Autodialers are Despicable (2024-10-14)

An early wired telephone, an 1896 swedish model designed by Isak Gustaf Clason via wikimedia commons.

For awhile I leaned toward declaring autodialers merely annoying, however, I have been forced to give up that leaning due to my observations of how often they call my office phone. According to the call log, bearing in mind autodialers are like spam emailers, they spoof their identification, my office has received over a hundred calls from different places in england, nearly as many from predominantly the southern united states, and around fifty pretending to come from three choice provinces in canada. They are not as bad for filling up voice mail boxes as they used to be, so now I rarely need to clear out snippets of immigration scammers trying to scare mandarin speakers from mainland china, tax scammers trying to convince me there is a warrant for my arrest for fraud, or the special subset who try to mimic credit card providers and banks. That said, the result for my regular office number is that it is all but unusable for incoming calls, since unlike a personal or home phone, my office must inevitably receive phone calls from people and businesses who have never called that number before. Instead, the conversation has to start via email so that we can mutually vet each other's credentials and agree on a time to talk. Of course, this is the least of the despicable results of autodialers. Any time a person gets caught up in a scam is far worse than a phone number rendered almost useless for its original purpose. I shudder to think how terrifying it must be for those not forewarned and forearmed against the immigration scammers, let alone the credit card and tax scammers who can squeeze the vulnerable ruthlessly for cash. Yet the deeper level of odiousness of autodialers is how they are representative of the current malaise of a society suffering from late capitalism and its attendant hyper-cynicism.

All the most unattractive features come together in the autodialer, which represents to start with one or more people desiring quick and easy money by means of theft. Those people have ready access to automated tools to inflict their attempts on more people than ever before, ensuring that less than five per cent take up is necessary for them to make money. Set it, forget it, and wait for the marks to pick up the phone. I suspect the most cruelly skilled don't take long to reel in their victims, especially if by chance they have experience in call centre work in its legal manifestations. Then again, the brains of the outfit in the autodialer world probably outsource the work of speaking to those so unlucky as to answer and confirm they are a live human rather than a voice mail system. It resonates with some of the early legal stuff advocated by Tim Ferriss in his most lifestyle coach phase, in which a whole range of tasks was to be delegated to a digital assistant working in a call centre overseas, usually in india. Ferriss' point at the time was to encourage delegating as much small and routine stuff as possible, in order to focus on the more important things in life. This is not necessarily a bad strategy, but out of context it is an amoral one. After all, delegation is all very well until somebody gets the hell exploited out of them. In the earlier, headier, arguably even more innocent days, Ferriss' suggestion did not guarantee anyone would be exploited.

Maybe that is suggests a better and more explicit issue the autodialer ties to, that of delegation of responsibility. Ferriss' point, and the usual positive, ethical, and legal use of delegation, is to help a person who is otherwise overburdened with tasks. In many situations, it can indeed make excellent sense to delegate when the issue is too much to do in too little time, and needing to let go of tasks that others can do while the formerly overburdened person focusses on the ones only they can do. In the not so old days, this was how new hires built up their experience and polished their skills at their work. However, delegation is also abused in other circumstances in order to avoid responsibility in case things go wrong. The scammers making heavy use of autodialers with spoofed identification and outsourced first line responders are delegating with a view to keeping ahead of law enforcement. Mechanized military history is full of examples of delegation used in order to make it as difficult as possible to punish high ranking officers for ordering or encouraging subordinates to do heinous things. In that context delegation, also known as the "just following orders" gambit, is rightly not considered a valid defence.

So the odious and despicable nature of autodialing truly lies in it being such a great example of abuse of delegation that started by hijacking a potentially useful, but fundamentally amoral at best technology. Furthermore, the hijacking and abuse has in turn damaged still other tools and wrought havoc on many other people, and one is too many when it comes to the severe havoc the worst autodialer scams can cause in a victim's life. (Top)

Competition is Destructive (2024-10-07)

April 2018 photograph of an attic black figure amphora held at the british museum depicting horse racing youths by José Luis Filpo Cabana, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license via wikimedia commons.

The title of this thoughtpiece was inspired by an especially ridiculous outcome I observed at my workplace recently, and would likely have faded away as lots of snap statements of this sort do. However, unlike the majority of cases in my experience, I found myself caught by an unexpected feeling of resistance to it. Unexpected, because while personally I am not terribly interested in competing with others if it can be avoided because regardless of who wins, bad feeling is a near impossible to avoid outcome, other people I respect insist competition is of great value, and there are competitive sports I enjoy. Well, at least there were what are usually considered competitive sports I used to enjoy, but like many others late stage corporatization has done damage to them. (Exhibit A, the utterly heinous state of the practice of calling games, because now the starting assumption is that nobody listens to games anymore, so the plays are all but ignored in favour of "colour commentary.") Then I found myself pondering some of the ancient greek philosophy I have read, where the writer was deeply concerned about the meaning of justice and how to ensure the better prevailed over the worse. Plato is quite a famous philosopher working in this vein, as was his teacher Socrates if we agree Plato is giving us a more or less accurate description and not an idealization. In his own way, Aristophanes, yes another of Socrates' friends, puzzles over the same issue. Yes, a chain of associations rather than an argument, but a promising one, as it turned out.

A quick session with the dictionary explains that when people compete, they are trying to get something by keeping whatever they are trying to get away from others. Not a stylish sentence, but I am trying to avoid evoking synonyms and be more specific. In the most simplistic form, pursued by the youngest of us, we could take as a founding example, of children playing "keep away" with a ball. This is easily recognizable as the original and perhaps ignominious ancestor of most organized sports. The end of the game is when the other kids finally give up, or the mothers call the kids away to supper or bedtime. Stripped down this far, "to compete" is silly, and hardly seems likely to lead to much character building or the personal networking so revered by many of the people who are sure competition, especially sports competition, is so useful. On the other hand, I am well aware that inducing competition among students in an effort to drive them to learn more and do better schoolwork is a technique developed in patriarchal cultures to prod spoiled and cosseted males into doing something more or less useful. It isn't necessary to try such tricks if the person, male or female, has an internal drive to learn and improve, they simply need better quality examples to compare themselves to and learn from.

Thinking back to Plato, Socrates, and Aristophanes, they each take up in varying degrees the puzzle of how to deal with lawsuits. The trouble being in their day as in ours living in "western" cultures today, although this is a among the few points of genuine parallel, how to deal with the problem that a person who should not win their lawsuit could win anyway, so long as they could speak well enough or hire a good enough advocate to speak for them. It is not just for a person who is in the right to lose just because they happen to be either poor or tongue tied. Yet a highly skilled speaker can create better than even odds of getting just that result, especially if they are unscrupulous or view the suit as a sort of competition rather than a serious matter for society at large. This suggests that competition and lawsuits don't mix, although as Plato's dialogues reveal, competition can be the least of the problems a person might face when going to court. At least as expressed in the present day in north america and based on my sample of observations, competition has become an especially individual practice, and the metaphor generalized as "life is a game but not a team sport" is everywhere, whether it makes sense or not.

Even between teams though, competition readily slips into a destructive mode. Hence the superstructure of referees, demands for "sportsmanship" and "honour" intended to stop proceedings before that happens. The trouble is, all these types of superstructure are retrospective. The referee blows the whistle and calls the penalty after the foul, not before. Persistent and widespread fouling leads to attempts to reward people for not indulging in fouls, with hopes of making the pay off for behaving big enough to outstrip the often faster and bigger pay off of the foul. In contact sports, think of the role of the enforcer, who is often a poor player overall, but big and fast enough to protect more fragile better players or do meaningful damage to key players on opposing teams. Even if that player is thrown out of the game for injuring a skilled player, the opposition has lost more because the enforcer is not equivalent in skill. They are sacrificial, a nasty sort of pawn. Fundamentally, competition derives from a preconception that there is scarcity that cannot be resolved in any other way, or that competitors refuse to resolve in any other way.

I don't think that competition can truly be made useful or tamed. It encourages a fixed mode of behaviour, a constant seeking for "the rules of the game" and means to guarantee a "win" to the exclusion of all other sense. This is how grown men can persuade themselves that it is worth it to risk terminal cancer and other medical issues by indulging in what they call "performance enhancing drugs," or demand constantly growing military spending to "make sure the bad guys can't win" or avoid having their profit margins slip. By nature, competitions lose contact with the real world and social relationships, therefore they and the broader practice of competition cannot be other than destructive. (Top)

From Zork to Applescript – Thoughts on Computer Languages (2024-09-30)

Screenshot of the introductory screen of the text-only adventure game Zork from an emulation of BSD 4.3 on a VAX machine by Huihermit, used under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, via wikimedia commons.

As far as I know, there are not too many younger programmers or gamers who spend much time with the text-only adventure games emulated in various ways from back in the days just post-dinosaurs of computers. That is, the computers the games were originally played on were not of the sort anyone was likely to have at home, but they could log into a mainframe on a university campus to run it. Those mainframes were still technically limited access, locked up the way servers typically are today. There was a brief interval when it was possible to peer at the "big machine" with the most RAM that programs with bigger datasets were sent to run on, but in those somewhat more innocent days they were perhaps not so interesting. After all, they were headless and easier to access by remote login anyway, provided you had the credentials. Fortunately, games like Zork and its many clones did not need much memory at all, and could be a great deal of fun, provided the player was able to figure out the game's vocabulary, which was not necessarily so simple. The problem was not nouns, in my experience, but verbs, and depending on what was going on, prepositions. Due to further experience and study of linguistics, I am now aware that these are the typical difficult parts of many human languages.

This is hardly a revelation, of course. However, what led me to go back to this experience again was a comment on a website I read regularly to the effect that what we usually call "computer languages" are not languages. Due to the fast-moving nature of the conversation and how the comment was an aside to the main topic, I never had a chance to find out what the person commenting meant in order to confirm I had not misread and to learn their reasons for making this declaration. It had never occurred to me to question the elision between the terms "computer programming language" and "computer language." Yet it is quite intriguing to do so, because one of the "computer languages" most vaunted as being "english-like" is applescript, and really, it isn't. Yet, it also shares the difficulties of text-only games like Zork when it comes to verbs and prepositions, with their echoes of human language learning challenges. The parallels come from the fact that humans develop and implement languages intended for use in programming computers, and in that sense they are means of communicating between people, at least indirectly. The various manuals, standards, and textbooks are all about saying to newcomers to the computer programming language, "here is how you tell the computer what to do."

Flipping to my usual dictionary, the OED, it duly informs me that a language is "a method of human communication... in a structured and conventional way." The implication is that the human communication of concern is reasonably direct, there is not the equivalent of a compiler step to make the language understandable, typically speaking. Thinking over what I have learned about computer programming, I am aware of the critical role of abstraction. It is possible to program computers using machine code, but it is painful and error-prone (and undeniably a great learning experience – and I am not being sarcastic in saying so). The basic actions of a general purpose computer in its most simplistic forms only has a limited repertoire of tasks it does, and these can be built up into more complex actions. So in time the first level of abstraction was to define a computer programming language that had subroutines that consistently ran the same chunk of machine code to do a particular task. The levels of abstraction have been getting higher ever since, with at least a few wonks claiming it should be possible to program just by dragging boxes around on a screen, having gotten a bit delirious after the successful implementation of a similar-looking approach to connecting objects when designing window managers using object-oriented programming. (Their exuberance is understandable, window management is far from trivial.)

But, perhaps what the commenter was getting at when they said what we program computers with is not a language is, humans don't communicate like this. We don't use higher and higher levels of abstract terminology in order to somehow invoke the same remembered event or behaviour every time. This is not the way we humans work. In fact, we can see the truth of this in the type of struggle we can have with learning computer programming languages, because their rough mimicry of the most challenging elements of human language when we learn another besides our mother tongue simply reflects our ways of thinking and learning. There is no communication because the computer has no intelligence to respond with, and it cannot achieve the sort of pattern-matching we can when necessary. Humans don't get stuck when in one language you get on the plane to fly somewhere while in another you go inside it. We can make sense of a great deal of surprising language via context, whereas computers can't handle what happens to fall outside of the map of the abstractions they were programmed with. Perhaps the key feature is that real life human languages are constantly extensible and changing, while every effort is made to keep computer programming languages as static as possible and minimize their capacity to produce unexpected results from running them on computers. It may be possible to generate startling and novel errors while programming computers, but the causes go back to only a few causes such as running out of memory, garbled pointers, and so on. Once the bug is traced to where it came from, it is completely predictable.

I have been turning over in my mind an argument that mathematics is indeed a language, not in the either romantic or insanely hubristic sense implied by claims mathematics is "the language of nature," but in the sense that humans use it in a structured and conventional way to communicate with one another. We don't use it expecting mathematical arguments or formulae to somehow serve as irresistible directions to take certain actions outside of the narrow confines of mathematics itself, or at least, I expect no one sane does. An interesting aspect of mathematics is how a few properties defining a certain type of number or set can be logically applied beyond their original usage. One of the most famous examples is the parallel line postulate, which can't be an axiom and led to the formalized discovery of non-Euclidian geometries. Based on the results of the study and application of computer programming approaches so far, it is not possible to do something similar in that context. There are styles of programming, such as functional or object-oriented, or ways of programming assuming different fundamental objects such as the list in lisp. There doesn't seem to be any strong argument for one higher level programming approach over the other, and they don't reveal anything new, except insofar as they reveal how much we still don't understand about how we think. Mathematics does not necessarily help us understand generally how we think, but that has never been a pretence of the subject. I suppose if the declaration "computer programming languages are not actually languages" is true, it would be most reasonable to declare mathematics to be at minimum especially "language-like." Meanwhile, Jef Raskin's description of a game as an undocumented program can be extended to what we usually call "computer programming languages" as follows: an undocumented computer programming language is a game of the type represented by Zork. Nobody wants to deal with a poorly documented computer programming language when they are trying to do work. Trying to make a computer programming language "seem like english" does not help people adopt it for use and generally does it no favours on the software engineering side of things, pace applescript. (Top)

Writing By Computer (2024-09-23)

Seventeenth century painting of Gesina ter Borch writing a letter by Gerard ter Borch, via wikimedia commons.

While trying to solve a scripting puzzle in BBEdit recently, I happened upon the now fairly quiet macOSX software and hardware documentation oriented blog of Pierre Igot, Betalogue. Hopefully this blog is quiet because he is no longer experiencing any issues related to his computer set up, due to their being permanently resolved by happy means. If so, I am glad he has opted to keep the blog online, as his series of three posts (1, 2, 3) on scripting BBEdit to provide paragraph selection behaviour he preferred were most helpful in solving the issue I was working on. I also can't deny quietly enjoying a brief experience of the early-style web again, in the form of an information-rich, text-favouring blog post with no frills. While wandering about the blog archives, I happened upon a series of posts from 2016, the beginning of the dreadful era of the final destruction of the iWork suite, the pale reflection of the mighty ClarisWorks in even its best days. Today most people would have little nice to say about ClarisWorks, but I have mentioned in at least a very early thoughtpiece or two the extraordinary stability of that program, and how while it was not as fancy as today's office suites, it was brilliant at its job. It was ultimately the primary reason I and so many others never had to suffer the insult of purchasing a license for the execrable microsoft office suite to do work. As software its stability was such that if it became persistently unstable or had other issues, the right answer was to take the computer in for a detailed hardware diagnostic. By necessity I ended up moving on to Pages and the rest of the programs in the iWork suite a few years later, and at first that was primarily an improvement. The updated interface, added editing features, and ready access to the system's built-in pdf support were all tremendous additions. The miserable state of the keyboard shortcuts was infuriating, but could be corrected via the extensive applescripting support added to each program. And then apple began developing iOS, and the resulting changes to Pages in particular were and are excruciating.

Like many writers whose main computer is or was some kind of macbook or similar apple computer and who has a thorough aversion to microsoft products, I trundled along the upgrade series right up to iWork 9. It had never occurred to me apple might decide to fundamentally cripple applescript support in the iWork suite, let alone in Pages. Taking such a step just seemed utterly foolish, considering apple had already invested so much in supporting "power users." (Now it looks like apple has nearly abandoned applescript too.) But apple certainly had, destroying my hard won collection of scripts providing a whole manner of useful tweaks and features I had then assigned keyboard shortcuts. It was not an immediate wipe out, but the results were so bad I began to test alternative software, starting with NeoOffice, one of several vigorous forks of the OpenOffice suite. Even though NeoOffice was compiled to run natively under macOSX, it just was not working for me circa 2012. Nevertheless, I appreciate it was there, and it led me to research the various forks of OpenOffice, and it is good to see that the NeoOffice team is still going strong. It took some time, but eventually I wended my way to libreoffice, which despite the coding team's annoying habit of slavishly following microsoft office's graphical user interface and burying the most used tools under feature bloat, finally won out over the alternatives for smaller-scale, styled text documents. In the end, although I did stick to Pages for an awfully long time, it was the problem of file formats that finally killed it, exacerbated by the "update" foisted upon iWork suite users in 2016.

File formats are among the worst challenges for writers, because as soon as the document has to have any styling applied, the problems of undocumented proprietary formats begin proliferating almost as fast as proverbial rabbits. The OpenDocument initiative is necessary and laudable, and we can depend upon microsoft striving to ignore or suborn it unless or until its blight on office software finally ends. Apple is a bit player on the proprietary office document format side of things, but it still has its own, and has stopped caring at all about backwards compatibility. That is scary enough. However, I have also had the grim experience of a corrupted Pages document, and the prospect of potentially losing all the work bound up in it. Determined not to lose that much work, I began a crash course in modern document formats, learning how today they are customarily based on a compressed archive, or in the case of the iWork suite, a bundle file. "Bundles" in the macOSX world are folders with a variety of documents and often additional folders inside them, and they are trivial to open so long as you realize that is what they are. So I was able to resort to making the bundle contents of my ruined document visible, but this was before the document preview version was a pdf as it is in more recent versions of Pages. The jpg preview was illegible as a thumbnail, unsurprisingly, and its larger version corrupted. The document preview was yet another file, and it too was corrupted. But luckily, there was still one more file, and it had the actual text in it, along with all manner of gibberish and recognizable sgml-type tags. So after some duress I got my data out of the wrecked file, although I never did figure out what caused the issue in the first place, and that meant Pages would have to go.

Libreoffice is not the prettiest of office suites out there, and it had a series of versions with an infuriating graphics library-related memory leak through most of the 6.x series the coding team refused to fix for unclear reasons. However, it doesn't have to be pretty, it has to work, and it was possible to isolate how the memory leak was triggered and avoid it. Libreoffice is scriptable, luckily with other languages than applescript since the libreoffice team has not added support for it in their macOSX versions. (It is still possible to applescript it if necessary via System Events.) It is possible to assign keyboard shortcuts to just about anything a person could think of, including obscure menu items and scripts. The template folder is a bit counter-intuitive at first, especially when making and saving new ones, but a bit of experimenting quickly resolves those issues. Now a person may choose between the old-time toolbars layout or an imitation of the microsoft ribbon. I hate the ribbon and stick to the toolbars, which are completely customizable. The autocorrect is fast and effective, and also easy to customize such that it provides a sort of poor man's "type it for me" facility. It supports the various fields and autogenerated tables of contents professional writers expect, and so long as the document isn't based around one or more large tables, libreoffice handles documents up to four hundred pages in length with relative aplomb. It can be a bit slow on first load, but once opened the document is responsive, and libreoffice provides facilities to insert internal links to help with navigation. Actual internal links, not a drawer-based navigation pane that depends on document styles to work. If you have libreoffice, you don't need to worry about microsoft office, as it is able to convert files to and from microsoft formats. The only thing I have not quite figured out how to do yet is exporting and importing my settings and customizations, which are probably in xml preference files. Overall, there is definitely good reason to donate to the libreoffice project to keep it going. And so in the end, it has replaced the iWork suite and I have no plans to go back. (Top)

"Trauma" is Not a Get Out of Responsibility Card (2024-09-16)

Circa 1840s illustration from the Alain-René Le Sage novel Le diable boiteaux, via oldbookillustrations.com.

This strikes me as one of the strangest thoughtpieces ever to write, because on one hand it is about what I had understood was "commonsense," even though on the other hand I understood nevertheless that it was more commonsense in the honour than the breach. We all know, and this is one of those rare cases where it is genuinely possible to say, we all know numerous examples of people for whom there is simply no consequence for what they do in general. Those people are generally the richest men. In these grim times, male violence against women and children has been almost completely decriminalized worldwide, even as penalties for so-called "property crimes" are as draconian as ever if not worse. This is why formerly enslaved people and women generally have spent so much effort on winning and keeping respect for themselves as property owners who at least own their own bodies. If that can be held solid, then it is possible to enforce penalties against any person who attacks or injures them based on it being a property violation. I agree with any reader whose response to those last two sentences with something along the lines of "that's crazy!" in its more polite versions. However, in an insane system in which justice hasn't even the decency to be an ass, a person at cruel disadvantage must try whatever they can. Hence, I do appreciate the temptations of the new narrative of trauma.

In this new narrative, we aren't supposed to talk about anything so crude and operative materially as oppression. No, no, a thousand times no, that is cause for cancellation. No, because oppression is about absurd rationalizations developed and applied by groups against selected "others" who have been reduced to precarious material circumstances. Examining those rationalizations and the bad faith actions they are meant to cover might lead to uncomfortable questions and effective opposition to glorified bullies and their complicit friends. It might lead to considerable disruption of the cosy pay off the complicit get for being complicit, the addictive bribe that keeps them tied in. No, we can't have anything effective and useful and real life as all that. Instead we must have a whole pseudo-discussion of "trauma" which lends itself to complete appropriation and use within an oppressive system in an effort to keep it running without too much messy, obvious, and inconvenient violence.

The new "trauma" narrative apparently comes down to, "I am traumatized, therefore no rules apply to me and I am entitled to do whatever I want and have whatever I want. If you aren't happy to go along, well, obviously you're oppressing me and now I am going to harass you by every means at my disposal." Alas that I am not making this shit up, let alone how this narrative does heinous disservice to people who really have had as the OED summarizes, "a deeply distressing or disturbing experience; emotional shock following a stressful event or a physical injury, which may be associated with physical shock and sometimes leads to longterm neurosis." I haven't heard too many people taking note the word "trauma" comes from a root meaning "wound," and how this indicates trauma is no joke, but it is also entirely possible to heal, although the healed person won't be the same as they were before. The point though, is to start by not exacerbating the wound and reinjuring it, literally or figuratively speaking. Living in and constantly evoking trauma, real or imagined, is certainly inconsistent with not making things worse. It is at best psychological snake oil, the kind of "best" which is in reality among the worst possible things. Still, the apparent license for any person, especially any male now, regardless of whether he is "rich" or not, who claims to have "trauma" is irresistible to a telltale minority who are now regularly the centre of attention in sensationalist journalism.

At the moment we are in an uncanny retread of the conditions exploited by authoritarian-minded groups repeatedly in the twentieth century, in which they have encouraged lawlessness in a specific social group who have been rendered outsiders on some basis. All the better and more convenient if the "outsiders" have made themselves that way or can be perceived to have done so. All the better when, if those authoritarians get their way – and it is by no means given that they can or will this time around – to wipe out and imprison their unruly but useful idiots who have been creating conditions better suited to helping them seize power. It isn't difficult to look up what happened to the original "storm troopers" in nazi germany. It is important to acknowledge the nazis did not invent the idea, rather, they took it to an extreme because the "SA" was a threat to the power of the central group who ran their party. We can find much earlier, less immediately deadly examples from the early days of the european invasion of the americas, such as the dispersal of the scots who helped impose the highland clearances in scotland and their victims to the "new world," or indeed, the general encouragement to former soldiers who took part in "reconquering" southern spain from the Umayyad caliphate to go to sea or "on crusade." (Top)

Thoughts on a Weird Argument (2024-09-09)

June 2011 photograph of a tri-coloured bumblebee in nova scotia by Jacy Lucier, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license via wikimedia commons.

While I can't claim to have ever had an argument with historical analysis based on material observations, nor Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' critique of capitalism, which still holds up in its basics to this day, an element often repeated from their work has long bothered me. This element is at once very small, yet it gets trotted out again and again, especially by labour activists, and I have encountered people who look at me when I question it with real wonderment. How can I question it, and even a great many people who would consider themselves capitalists accept it, although they apparently take it in different directions. The element I am concerned with is Marx's description of the argument from the behaviour of bees versus the behaviour of humans. It is not wholly clear to me whether Marx firmly accepted this argument, or if it was part of the set of capitalist assumptions he was setting out in order to follow through their results and logic in the real world. I suspect the question has been thoroughly aired and sorted out and not being a specialist in studying Marx's or Engels' writings I have simply never encountered the results of that work. With all that acknowledged, here then is my understanding of how the argument works.

First, consider bees, which make regular and impressive honeycomb structures and larger nests, raising and maintaining large colonies of insects at various stages of life in an organized fashion. This is remarkable and impressive. But according to Marx, and most scholars including entomologists to this day, the behaviour of bees is not at all intelligent or motivated in the human sense. No indeed. They are piloted about by instinct, guided by a set of interleaving rules brought together by the ruthless pressures of evolution. Or, to reframe that nineteenth-century-esque statement in more current and less anthropomorphic terms, the bees act upon behaviours that enable them to survive, which are encoded in their genes. Second, now consider humans. Humans are self-directed, they imagine a structure or a society or what have you, then they make them happen by application of self-directed reason. From the contrast between humans and those peculiar genetic automata, all other animals and the other types of organisms in the world, it cannot be correct to exploit humans in the way those other organisms may be for human profit. Unlike those other organisms, the humans are aware whether or not they are exploited, or if somehow deceived or prevented from doing so, they feel pain and suffer cruelly when prevented from sharing in the rewards of their reason and labour.

This argument gave me a whole new perspective on the continuing fixation on bees of all sorts among entomologists and other scientists. I was already aware of the weird caricatures of insect behaviour, especially those living in colonies. Scientist and ant-specialist Deborah M. Gordon has been carrying out illuminating and award-winning research on ants for decades, including demonstrating that many older studies were based on seriously warped preconceptions or interpreted through such perceptions. Insects living in colonies were supposed to be the ultimate biological automata, and all the better for not necessarily demanding microscopes to watch them. However, the actually not very old assumptions about such insects have been in a great deal of trouble of late, including evidence from the bees that are making it harder and harder to deny that yes, insects feel pain and are conscious beings. Bumblebees seem to be a particular favourite for study, and scientists have been learning some very interesting things. For example, already in 2016, evidence was building that Bumblebees Can Teach Each Other Learned Behaviors (report by Catie Colliton at the Urban Beekeeping Lab) and at the end of 2022 that bumble bees play with toys (report by Tessa Koumoundouros via sciencealert).

These details finally helped clarify for me what was bothering me about this oft-repeated argument from the presumed nature and behaviour of bees. I don't think it is ethical or even factually correct to presume to have the right to exploit other than human beings because it is possible to find ways to do so while avoiding or denying their suffering. I get very tired of animal rights activists who like to come down on Indigenous people for hunting because supposedly Indigenous people should all be vegans and ceremony and practices are about pretending to feel bad for killing animals in order to eat them and use other products from their bodies. No. The whole point of ceremonies and the restrictions on how to behave towards other than human beings who provide humans the necessities of life we can't generate within ourselves is to reinforce the understanding that those other beings suffer and have their own lives. We need to be humble and sensible of these realities, because without such knowledge and feeling, we can slip into practices that are not just senseless and cruel, they prevent those other beings from surviving as species in their own right. We humans are not exempt from the complex network of life on Earth bound together by relationships including predator-prey and symbiont-symbiont. Parasites and hosts don't have longterm relationships, although they might manage medium-length ones under bad conditions. In very broad strokes, there is something of the other than human beings side of the problem. The argument is not so hot from a human perspective either. How helpful is an argument that starts from the premise that it is necessary to "prove" that humans are "not animals" and therefore have reason and feel pain, and so they have an inherent right to respect, autonomy, and the necessities of life? It is hardly the slam dunk some may think. It's easy to get around, the historical examples abound. Just come up with any excuse for denying a given group of humans have "real" reason and autonomy and furthermore how exploiting them is "for their own good" and the exploitation can continue. Not only continue, but expand, while those doubling down on their pseudo-reasons for the exploitation get an extra benefit in having a strong sedative for their consciences.

It seems to me that the stronger and more consistent basis for opposing exploitation is the one so many Indigenous peoples have developed in different expressions over time. It is wrong to take without giving back and to take purely in order to waste, indeed it is wrong to simply "take." Each of us alive needs to find what we need to survive in a way that gives back to the others whom we derive the necessities of life from. It is a safer bet to assume it is better to minimize suffering and waste and do our best to benefit the other beings from whom we derive our needs, especially those whom we are not able to easily understand. Symbionts survive and thrive over the longterm, not parasites and beings who by evil choices or horrible mischance expand beyond all bounds until they threaten others. Overall, this sort of "hedging bets" strategy seems far better grounded in evidence than the version raised by those who want to claim it is safer to believe there is some sort of deity than not, because in the deity case the presumption is that any deity must be a super-sized version of a narcissistic and violent bully. (Top)

Tone Deaf Businesspeople (2024-09-02)

Circa eighteenth century french caricature of a greedy doctor, Wellcome Collection item ICV No. 11940, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license via wikimedia commons.

We all have our moments when we fail to read the room, that is a frailty to which all of us are victim. But we are only victim a time or two, after that our amazing human capacity for pattern recognition and hopefully the assistance of colleagues, friends, and relatives corrects our misperception so that we do not repeat the mistake. At this point, I am seriously wondering about the businesspeople who are repeatedly given access to the media in order to whine about how hybrid work arrangements and teleworking are supposedly wrecking their businesses. One week it is the people who run businesses in downtown cores, next those who are in tourism ventures, next piss-poor managers whose idea of managing is constantly intruding on employees and glorying in their capacity to force people to come to "the office" whether it makes sense or not. The last group are unable to figure out why they have such horrific retention problems too. It shouldn't need to be pointed out that the rest of us who are not capitalists don't owe these yahoos profits or ego strokes. And isn't it funny that now "the market" has changed, suddenly they want new rules to force things somehow back to the way they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. A very few admit these changes had begun before the pandemic, and are of longstanding. They don't want to admit what is really emptying downtown cores in particular, let alone wreaking havoc on tourism.

Let's take up the downtown core issue first, because it is a symptom and result of frankly vicious neoliberal and neoconservative policies. Both neoliberals and neoconservatives hate cities, and city dwellers. The only people they hate possibly more is yes, rural dwellers (I know, what the hell?) and definitely they hate "the poor" wherever they are without limit and without shame. There is no point pretending otherwise, considering these policymakers have actively imposed anti-public-health and anti-labour policies that are increasing poverty by leaps and bounds and the fomenting of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which is driving unprecedented modern death and disability rates. I tried to resist concluding the people who advocate and impose these policies were actively evil, but after a point there is nothing left to conclude but that they are. They are evil, and they are cruel. These are the people whose policies have included driving up the cost of housing into a monstrous speculative bubble pricing most people out of ever owning any sort of home, and more and more people out of renting one. Their policies obsess on forcing cities into a "business primary" or "business only" downtown core with a ring of car-dependent suburbs. The little housing there is in many downtown cores is more and more insanely expensive condominiums, plus buildings that have become unlicensed hotels due to airbnb. They attack and defund transit, except for mega-projects to build things like high speed train lines for the convenience of wealthier suburb dwellers, but they also hate to fund transit security. The cost of a personal vehicle with a combustion engine has done nothing but go up, and electric and hybrid vehicles are no better, plus the cost of fuel for both also keeps going up. More and more people literally can't afford to commute, it doesn't matter whether they are willing to work or not.

So what do we get out of that? A growing tendency for people to find themselves unable to afford housing in downtown cores, and/or unable to afford to commute to where many "on site only" jobs are. But if a person is lucky and determined, they can make a go of teleworking or hybrid working, and those may be the very options that enable them to work enough hours to avoid ending up homeless or hopelessly in debt. For small businesses anywhere dependent upon foot traffic and spur of the moment purchases, it is going to be tough for them no matter what, because so many people are in difficult financial straits. Inflation of restaurant eat-in and take out food prices has been high for years, to the point that it costs a minimum of $10 or more in most parts of canada. People simply can't afford such prices on average. With the more recent price gouging by corporations hotly anticipating a manufactured worsened economy, the fallback position of picking up lunchables at the grocery store instead of restaurants or food courts is teetering on the edge of infeasible for those who could afford that option. In my experience of having lived in or been on extended work residencies in seven different diverse canadian cities, local access to groceries and clothing let alone furniture or housewares without a car is typically between low and none. If people need a car to get basics, even when they do have the money they are not going to be walking around keeping eyes on the street and supporting local businesses. They'll be in a car or crammed in a bus or train out to where those things actually are and then back. Then we see the compounding of all this, because as the cost of living rises, people need more work hours and better wages to even try to keep up. Small businesses can't keep long hours or raise wages if they are not making sales. So they close early, although the ones with a better thought out approach maintain later hours at least a couple of days per week, usually thursday and friday. But not as many people have money to spend in those small businesses. And around and around we go.

These are not intractable problems, but they are another example of how as a society we can't endlessly prioritize the profits of a bunch of speculators who are just fine with making it impossible for everyone else to survive as long as they can always avoid the impacts themselves. Not all businesspeople are in the speculative mode, only a proportion of them are in the rightfully infamous "finance, insurance, and real estate" sector. But there is a wild sort of identification between them and businesspeople in other sectors, who seem to believe that any policy that serves that sector must serve them, and anyway, neoliberal or neoconservative policies are all about capitalist fundamentalism. I suspect because capitalist fundamentalism is a faith position encouraged among people expecting to own or at least manage businesses, it can be hard to resist it and therefore identify with "the winners" in capitalism rather than "the losers." No doubt this encourages their failures to read the room and not realize it is less than politic to complain in the press about the consequences of the policies they have supported, often for decades. Of course, they are complaining because the impacts of those supposedly reasonable and "good for the economy and society" policies are now inconveniencing them. How nice for them, to be merely inconvenienced. (Top)

Feminist, Innovative Science Fiction Writer – Modernist? (2024-08-26)

Photograph of Cicely Hamilton circa 1910 by Lena Connell, via wikimedia commons.

There is an excellent biography of Cicely Hamilton at the Time and Tide website. It touches on the major points of Hamilton's life and career as expected, from her early education in germany to her prolific writing and acting career, to her important work on the enforcement of women's rights in general and women's suffrage in particular. The english National Portrait Gallery includes a wonderful charcoal study of her from probably the late 1940s, confirmed in her decision to refuse to marry and her feminism. The anonymously-written gallery text has an unfortunate tone. Luckily, the image is far more powerful than any half-hearted text would be. One thing that neither of these sources mention, which seems a bit strange, is that Hamilton wrote a powerful work of speculative fiction, such that she has an entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The encyclopaedists note "Hamilton is one of the first – and among the darkest – of those UK sf novelists whose vision of things was shaped by World War One, which they saw as foretelling the end of civilization; she herself served throughout the war, either in hospital work or with Concerts at the Front." I was particularly struck by this point due to having tried to sort out what "modernism" was supposed to be in art. It so happens that Hamilton's writing indicates that the description developed in Literary Questions is reasonable on a broader scale than the most commonly cited authors and artists. (I am not claiming to be the first to develop such a description or make the argument, just to probing at it a bit more.) While Hamilton wrote steadily throughout her life, including a last book Holland To-Day published in 1950, it is true she did not continue writing in the vein of the novel first titled Theodore Savage (1922) and in its second edition as Lest Ye Die: A Story From the Past or of the Future (1928), although it sounds like her next novel Full Stop (1931) may be in a modernist vein. Nevertheless, much of her writing was engaged in what is simply considered non-fiction now, including numerous profiles of "modern" european and neighbouring insular countries, and an important anti-fascist treatise published in 1940, Lament for Democracy.

Very few online articles actually quote any of Hamilton's writing, although many report that she wrote the lyrics to the Women's Social and Political Union anthem "The March of the Women" with music by Ethel Smythe. An honourable exception is Spartacus Educational. This is a shame, because she was a keen political analyst and an equally sharp humorist and observer. Pulling a few snippets from her currently available works on the internet archive for example:

Man in the mass and as member of an organization will take on himself a responsibility for evil which he dare not shoulder alone for if blame should come, or failure, he can fall back on orders or on votes. For lack of the sense of individual responsibility the conscience of the system the nation, the society is always inferior to the conscience of the decent individual; thus the measure by which German ruthlessness has excelled the ruthlessness of other nations is the measure of Germany's superiority in organization of human material, of her power of converting her nationals into irresponsible machines.... Nor is the temptation to sink the individual conscience in the conscience of the crowd one that confronts the German alone though, so far, he most thoroughly has yielded to it; on the contrary, the civilization of the system, or organization, is a problem for all democracies. Senlis (1917), pages 13 and 14.

They believed most firmly that "German" stands for "good," and that what they willed was right because they willed it; and it is characteristic of those who are sure of their own righteousness to go straight and cruelly to their end. Senlis (1917), pages 41-42.

With even the average man love and marriage may be something of a high adventure, entered upon whole-heartedly and because he so desires. With the average woman it is not a high adventure – except in so far as adventure means risk – but a destiny or necessity. If not a monetary necessity, then a social. (How many children, I wonder, are born each year merely because their mothers were afraid of being called old maids? One can imagine no more inadequate reason for bringing a human being into the world.)... The marriageable man may seek his elective affinity until he find her; the task of the marriageable woman is infinitely more complicated, since her elective affinity has usually to be combined with her bread and butter. The two do not always grow in the same place. What is the real, natural and unbiassed attitude of woman towards love and marriage, it is perfectly impossible for even a woman to guess at under present conditions, and it will continue to be impossible for just so long as the natural instincts of her sex are inextricably interwoven with, thwarted and deflected by, commercial considerations. Marriage as a Trade (1909), pages 23 and 24.

Given a sufficiently large number of persons destined and educated from birth for one particular calling, with no choice at all in the matter, and with every other calling and means of livelihood sternly barred to them, and you have all the conditions necessary for the forcing down of wages to the lowest possible point to which they will go – subsistence point. Marriage as a Trade (1909), page 40.

Here are perhaps unexpected early intimations of Simone de Beauvoir's analysis first published in Le Deuxieme Sexe nearly forty years later. Considering Hamilton's formative travel and war service experience and her years acting and writing in the theatre, she had considerable evidence before her about social construction and its effects on women. But now for a couple of her more sardonic comments.

I realize, of course, that it is quite impossible for a male reader to accept the assertion that any one woman, much less any class of women, however small its numbers, can be indifferent to or scornful of marriage – which would be tantamount to admitting that she could be indifferent to, or scornful of, himself. – What follows, therefore, can only appear to him as an ineffectual attempt on the part of an embittered spinster to explain that the grapes are sour; and he is courteously requested to skip to the end of the chapter. It would be lost labour on my part to seek to disturb his deep-rooted conviction that all women who earn decent incomes in intelligent and interesting ways are too facially unpleasant to be placed at the head of a dinner-table. I shall not attempt to disturb that conviction; I make it a rule never to attempt the impossible.Marriage as a Trade (1909), pages 25-26.

I have myself been told by a man that he would never be so foolishly discourteous as to praise one woman in another's hearing. I, on my part, desirous also of being wisely courteous, did not attempt to shake the magnificent belief in his own importance to me which the statement betrayed. Marriage as a Trade (1909), page 40.

Based on the information available at OpenLibrary and curiously enough at a website for questioning christians called starcourse.org – the sources for the latter are properly identified and all reasonable, though the article itself is something of a stub linked back to a page on E.M. Delafield, who is herself featured for not immediately obvious reason, apart from being an underrated author (admittedly, more than enough reason for me) – Hamilton wrote around 35 book-length works, some but not all, derived from her journalism.

I think it is fair to conclude Hamilton would be deeply troubled by the political and social currents visible today, wondering if part of what has happened is that too many people have sought not to change from what is destructive and deadly to what is constructive and helpful, but to somehow force all the world to become and remain some version of an authoritarian hellhole. She had seen all too directly for herself the consequences of a blindly held belief in her feminist work to oppose oppression on the basis of sex, service during both world wars, and observations of the aftermath of world war two. (Top)

A Stranger Tale (2024-08-19)

Image from the 1907 edition of *The Golden Staircase: Poems and Verses for Children,* by Lowey Chisholm and M. Dibdin Spooner via wikimedia commons.

Among the common books of my childhood were books of fairytales, by that time usually expurgated versions of those made famous by the Grimm brothers in beautiful hardcover editions with reproductions of painted illustrations that simply aren't printed anymore. One story always stuck in mind in apart from the others I had read, that usually referred to under the title The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The story had some magical elements, but it was really strange compared to the others in the collection I read it in. The other stories had talking animals, including the animals made temporarily into people in the famous story of Cinderella. But really, the story was not especially magical. The plague of rats were not say, sent by an insulted wizard or something, the way most misfortunes were in such stories. Somehow it just didn't seem to fit with the others, although I remember being quite impressed with the pied piper's clothes, and too young too understand "pied" referred to his clothes in the first place. In fact, I think in my child's understanding "pied" must have just seemed like one more weird word that didn't actually refer to anything. The Grimms did indeed collect a version of the story, but the story I read was probably from Robert Browning's rendition in verse. On further reading for this thoughtpeice, I discovered this story had a clearly defined year that it happened: 1284, and a very specific number of children lost: 130. The place is specific too: hamelin, in german hameln, a port town in weser in lower saxony, germany. Insofar as this was a "fairytale" then, it was perhaps on its way to becoming one.

This stubbornly eerie story has won its share of detailed research over the years, and as early as 1998 professor Jurgen Udolph, a historian and linguist at the university of gottingen found himself in the news due to his results in this area. Imre Karacs summarizes it in a 27 january article in the independent-uk newspaper, Twist in the Tale of Pied Piper's Kidnapping. Udolph found that these "children" were young adults who had left hameln for a region now split between eastern germany and poland, based on the recurrence of hameln place names and their own family names there. They named at least two still existing home-from-homes "hameln," one north of berlin, the other near stargard, poland. These young adults were persuaded to leave by a recruiter who drew attention with his pied dress and piping, calling on the willing to help colonize lands after the teutonic knights managed to take them over by driving out the earlier invading danes. The detail about these young people's names is added by Raphael Kadushin in his description of Udolph's research in 2014, bbc.com: The Grim Truth Behind the Pied Piper. It seems the 730th anniversary of this infamous event led to a follow up after the 1998 excitement. Based on the frequency of occurrence, Udolph argued that the main area the young people came from was uckermark and prignitz near berlin. From the sound of it they travelled a minimum of 140 kilometres from their original homes. This doesn't sound very far today, but that is a product of modern day ease of travel. Considering they would have passed from familiar lands into an unfamiliar region depopulated and smashed by warfare, the trip was probably even tougher than usual for the time. All a far cry from Robert Browning's lighthearted rendition of the event of the pied piper recruiting away a significant portion of the youth in hameln in 1284.

Pages 13-23 from The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Other Poems, New York: Houghtin, Mifflin, and Company, 1897. Original scan accessed via the internet archive. (Top)

Such Slow Sites (2024-08-12)

A sample of potential range of web font variation prepared and released into the public domain on wikimedia commons by Austin512, july 2009.

Perhaps this just reflects how long I have been working on and researching on the web, but I do remember a time when webmasters and web designers were seriously worried about page load speed and the legibility of their sites. They even chose to do daft things like have their sites rendered into the google-grift called "amp" lest their sites not appear in the carousel of gamed and thoroughly manipulated search results. This was supposed to fix the problem caused by their sites loading with too many huge images and built on the fly from grotesque databases of snippets plus plenty of javascript to inject insecure advertisements and intrusive pop ups demanding money or that the person use their even less secure "app" instead. At one time javascript was at least as much about trying to ease the load on early web servers as trying to spy on everyone with the temerity to visit a website, but at first the trade off did not seem ridiculous. It seemed quite reasonable to have client-specific things rendered by using the resources on the client's machine, so long as nobody thought through how intrusive that could get. Now of course, there is a big push on to get everyone onto expensive new "faster" machines or else obsessively "surfing" the web with a phone or mini-tablet, by which the propagandists really mean getting constant dopamine hits from asocial amplifiers that have contributed to the toxic quality of so much of the internet and the derogation of the actual web. With things in such a mess, I figured, well, this situation looks like a potential "pendulum swing" sort of situation. It'll ricochet back the other way and be absurdly minimalist, then settle back into something like a happy medium. So we can hope anyway, until the next extreme swing.

So I thought, until the past several months. I generally access the internet with javascript off by default, enabling it on a site by site basis should that seem necessary or important. On a different browser that doesn't allow such fine tuning, the web, let alone any other internet-accessible online resources are grindingly slow. The rest of the computer's behaviour is normal, it is just the browser that feels like trying to surf the web on a windows xp machine with internet explorer, pop ups, advertisements, and dreadful loading times all there. Yet I have noticed that now even with my regular browser in its more locked down state, apparently plain looking sites have grown noticeably slower. Among the culprits besides the massive graphics and attempts to load in multiple remote javascript libraries and insistence on using blogging software that is supposed to make it easier but depends on a slow-moving backend database, now there are remote fonts, and new "clever" methods attempting to track and profile visitors. I have also observed a proliferation of shocking stylesheets that actually render the maintext invisible against the background colour on the page. My hypothesis is that this is a rendering failure induced by a clash between "dark mode," ostensibly "responsive" stylesheets, and I suspect remote web fonts too. More and more often when rendering falls over and even turning off the stylesheet doesn't help. Rarely do I end up copying and pasting the text from the page into a text document in order to read it, as that isn't worth it for many things.

And I haven't touched on the ridiculous phenomenon of making the web browser into another operating system, and the excitement over web assembly which is doubling down on that. The whole reason I don't build my entire workflow around emacs is because I already have an operating system on my computer, it works well, and I can audit and patch it as needed. The more elaborated so-called "web applications" get, from "phone apps" to the horrors of "office 365" in the browser, the slower, less dependable, and awful the results. Please note that I am not arguing with the reasonable use case of having a web browser interface to do basic work on a headless server, i.e. just restarting it, checking its logs or whatever.

I guess if the hope of the people pushing these "solutions" is that either everyone will flee the web and much of the internet for what back in the day we used to call "aohell" with all of its advertisements, spying, and attempt to control what people see and think, then those people are riding a high at the moment. They have done a great deal of damage, and it seems like there is a widespread attitude among younger people looking to build sites or write blogs online that html is too much for them to learn, and more than that, an insult for needing to be learnt. Yet these are the same people who will iterate through blog software platform after blog software program, getting acquainted with multiple interfaces and plug in systems, while complaining about cracks, data corruption, and how hard it is to change the software because they have to redo everything. That's a lot of time and effort, study and memorization. It would take no more than three hours in an afternoon to learn enough html to do the majority of what many people want. True, that is absolutely not the case for large publications with multiple authors, huge archives, and comments (which have to be managed in databases no matter what). But not many of us are running an institutional website or high-interaction blog. Funny how so much effort is going into doing things that have the opposite effect of what the narrative about the internet in general and the web specifically are supposed to be. I am still floored by a blogger who uses a "static blog generator" that produces a thick shell of cruft around each maybe two paragraph post, and each post can have a loading time between 5 (okay) and 15 seconds (I have high speed internet and a decent computer and cable modem) to reveal a page that has illegible text. He isn't self-hosting either, so this can't be imputed to a cranky raspberry pi or something (Cheapskate's Guide consistently loads up in less than 5 seconds and the proprietor is self-hosting.) That blogger is being wronged by their software and hosting stack, and they are not the only one. (Top)

Desktop Design Philosophies (2024-08-05)

Sample GNOME desktop screenshot from the 3 march 2023 edition of the ThisWeekinGNOME blog, which is an excellent resource.

At the moment I am facing the question of whether GNOME desktop has frustrated me enough to switch to one of the others I am already experienced with (my plan is to experiment with KDE on a non-daily driver this winter, as I haven't tried it yet). But it seems so damnably absurd that I am having an ongoing issue with how GNOME is handling application assignment to specific desktops so that they automatically move to their assigned desktop. Instead of this being built in the way it is in MATE or most BSD variants, it is necessary to use a not entirely dependable extension or research how to set it from the command line. I first used GNOME before the changes leading to the MATE fork, and so am aware that specific decisions were taken at GNOME on interface design. So it seems a deliberate decision was made to as far as possible force people using GNOME as their desktop to drag their applications to the desired desktop each time they restart using the mouse. That and their apparent decision to declare users may have just 4 desktops by default. Due to my adventures using MATE, I know about dconf and so knew it was not necessary to put up with such stupidity, but it is proving far more involved to deal with the desktop assignment issue due to the misbehaving extension that used to do the job. It does make sense to test new interface tweaks by providing the GNOME Tweaks program, since they have decided to support an extensions system instead of the dconf interface MATE provides. (Yes, I know it is possible to add a dconf editor to GNOME.) But this is simply nuts. It should not be necessary to research how to make an ordinary interface setting tweak for hours because it turns out GNOME higher ups decided "the user" doesn't really want or need to assign programs to specific desktops automatically so they don't have to drag the windows around with the mouse. Being primarily a laptop user, I rarely keep an external mouse around, and it is a fact that trackpad drivers under gnu/linux are tetchy beasts without a consistent way to declare the whole trackpad one button, which for me has turned out to lead to the fewest drag and drop issues.

The various teams working on desktops, gnu/linux variants, and the established mainstream systems like macOSX and windows all have very different philosophies. It fascinates me how often gnu/linux discussions about desktops compare one or another gnu/linux desktop to macOSX. Like it or not, macOSX and before it the system 1-8.6 series have established a truly iconic look and highly influential interface guidelines. I am keeping a close eye on helloOS, because to my knowledge that is the only project striving to reimplement a universal menu bar, which in my view is simply superior as a use of space on-screen. The fact that GNOME has adopted the wretched hamburger menu to provide additional menu options and overcome the mess the menu bars have become on that desktop reinforces the point. I admit that if they are inclined to stick to their current menu approach in GNOME, then perforce the hamburger menu is the best option. Still, in neither case does that respond to the issue that many people have with both GNOME and macOSX who use gnu/linux of some type, that in their view they each present a desktop that "tells them what to do." I sympathize, and hopefully the first paragraph of this thoughtpiece clearly shows why. It's hard to say which is more frustrating, a desktop just about set to what you prefer on start up with just a few adjustments needed, but with an insane amount of effort required to make the adjustments that are evidently possible to do, or just feeling annoyed by being presented with a bunch of uncongenial presets. GNOME is edging ever so dangerously towards an obsession with aesthetics over actual usability, an edge apple has hurled itself over with macOSX, unfortunately.

Averages are horrible things in user interface land, where the best to be hoped for is to annoy the majority of people the same amount and provide readily accessible means to adjust things. For all its faults, macOSX managed this all the way up to 10.9. MATE does a solid job, I was pleasantly surprised by their approach to exposing dconf settings, which includes excellent labels. It must have been a tremendous amount of work, and even if a person doesn't want to change anything, it is worth going through them in order to learn a bit more about MATE and the system it runs on top of, if desired. All completely optional. In the meantime, some basic things are easily done right on the desktop without too much fuss, such as if you have a dock or taskbar enabled, you can right click on application icons to assign them to a single desktop or all desktops. Hence, no "tweaks" application. On this score macOSX and GNOME now have the same attitude: research it for hours and figure out how to make the alteration from the command line. It took a lot more before I ran into the edge where this was necessary under macOSX than GNOME though, and of course, apple programmers make it just about impossible to make effective preference changes from the command line, especially to do such basic, sensible things as force itunes to stop starting just because bluetooth found head phones to pair with. I think it is not coincidental that many of the gnu/linux mavens who decry "authoritarianism" in GNOME and macOSX work extensively with sound and video, because GNOME is also badly behaved on the sound input and output management side of things. However, I don't think anybody wants a desktop that spends the first moments of its activation peppering the user with desperate requests for instruction about what to do next and how to make things look.

Maybe it all goes back to Melvin E. Conway's observation that "Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." At the moment, for the macOSX and GNOME cases, that structure is apparently led by a committee that values appearance over values, to the point that they strive to tie the hands and feet of the user lest the user spoil their beautiful interface. If the default settings interfere with the user's workflow, that is a recipe for rage. There is no "average user" so much as there are I think styles of working with computers. For some people, their style is highly mouse-oriented, for others very keyboard-oriented. Part of why I prefer laptops even when trackpad drivers frustrate me is that the trackpad is close to the keyboard. My more mouse-inclined friends would not dream of doing without their external mouse if they had any choice. But this means that if somebody is more mouse-oriented, then they are going to be quite happy to drag around their windows all the time, and resize them with the mouse when needed too. A more keyboard-oriented person is going to set up their workspace and then apply keyboard shortcuts wherever possible, so they will lean towards "set it and forget it" interface elements, but it is necessary to do the setting if the defaults are not useful. Trying to force everyone to use a mouse whether they want to or not does not make an interface better or a computer easier to use, and taking steps to prevent people from adjusting the interface to their needs is disrespectful. Maybe a more accurate description of the protests of those who are most frustrated by macOSX and GNOME's approach is, "Stop calling me stupid!" and that is certainly a fair point. (Top)

Use-Awful Tech Forums (2024-07-29)

Circa 2014 stack overflow logo via wikimedia commons.

I have been binge-listening to podcasts on gnu/linux lately, catching up on a backlog of episodes, and was fascinated to discover one discussing, albeit briefly, the state of gnu/linux user support. In general there is not much formal assistance out there, not unless a person has a personal subscription or works for a corporation that has a subscription with a company that provides gnu/linux support. The usual sources people are expected to turn to after the documentation are the various fora, which I had a dubious time exploring when trying to find a solution for implementing parallel columns in a document several years ago, an experience I described in Quixotic Columns. It has been over five years since then, and the people involved in the discussion are longterm participants in the gnu/linux development community, including work in hardware and software support. I figured there must have been quite a bit of change, and that there must be new options available and no doubt options I missed back in the day. Discoverability is a perennial challenge, and not just on the web! Somewhat disappointingly, the discussion turned out to be an annoyed response to a blogpost protesting about the rude uselessness of the responses on so many gnu/linux forums, such that it was a real barrier to getting people to switch to gnu/linux because it was difficult for them to get help. The discussion participants basically sniffed at this and said people ought to read the fucking manual and quit whining. Well, wonderful as an encapsulation of exactly the bad attitude that blogpost was decrying as that conclusion was, it was not helpful. Honestly, I was a bit surprised because it was not at all like this particular crew of podcasters to treat a topic this way, even if they disagreed with the original prompt.

Now, I do understand that experienced gnu/linux users and the people who actually do more technically demanding tasks with gnu/linux like server maintenance and the like are not inclined to help out beginners with what seem to them absurdly simple questions. I agree that it is important for people to get started helping themselves by digging into the manual, but the sad fact is that very few gnu/linux systems come with the equivalent of the trusty README file in the later apple systems before the switch to macOSX. The README file gave quickstart instructions including how to start the help system or open the online documentation if it was in a pdf, and a few other pointers such as how to add a printer. The closest approach to this I have seen in the gnu/linux world is in PureOS, where after setting up a new user, when that user logs in the help system presents a hyperlinked start page that can be used to quickly check keyboard shortcuts, get an orientation to the desktop they are running – the version I was looking at was running GNOME – and it even had a few clever and useful animations. (Seriously, animations are cool but surprisingly hard to target for usefulness.) Otherwise, my experience is that a gnu/linux machine, unless I happen to have used the desktop it comes with before or one similar to it, is an undocumented program. Jef Raskin pointed out in The Humane Interface years ago that an undocumented computer interface is a game, and a game is totally unwelcome when your locus of attention is focused on getting work done. People don't generally read books about user interface design for fun, so it is not a given that many people on a user forum will have the effect of locus of attention in mind when a gnu/linux neophyte posts a seemingly dead simple question. (For a quick introduction to Raskin's classic book, there is a relevant thoughtpiece here, The Humane Interface.)

There is another approach to the "getting started" problem with gnu/linux, and that is the "frequently asked question" page provided on many wikis and forum front pages. But there is a problem with these, one of those awful tail-eating ones. FAQs are all too often written based on what the authors think people should ask rather than what they do ask. Where authors try to bring together such questions from real life forum exchanges, the hostility of experienced gnu/linux users effectively prevents this type of question from being asked, or from being answered in a useful way. Worst of all is how often one or more respondents will answer something destructive and may not be downvoted or yanked fast enough to prevent an inexperienced user from suffering as a result. I suspect most people who manage these forums are too busy to go through other forums to try to make a "super-FAQ" that combines their findings, which could overcome this. Arguably it could be something managed over git, so that once set up, forums could use the git system to propose and pull updates rather than try to reinvent the wheel. Who knows, maybe this is already happening, and I simply have not encountered examples or realized it is in use.

An interesting feature of most gnu/linux forums I have encountered is that they reflect the way gnu/linux desktops present themselves, in that the majority of the time a person is chucked in at the deep end and ordered to swim. Teaching is not an easy task, and not everyone is able to easily self-start when learning a new interface and way of doing things more generally. The solution to this in my view is not to slavishly imitate windows or macOSX in a gnu/linux desktop, nor flame hapless newcomers who are trying to get certain acute needs met before they can relax enough to begin developing the more rounded view even intermediate users have. Perhaps this is because so many gnu/linux forums were founded by enthusiasts with little to no experience in teaching people in person as opposed to the horrible for everyone experience of trying to provide tech support over the phone. This need not be an impossible to fix issue. Ideally at the start these forums would be set up with beginner, intermediate, expert, and wizard areas. It's a bit awkward to set those up later, but it can be done, and then the ground rules are much easier to set out. There is no excuse to attack someone for posting a beginner's question in the beginner's area, or even if they post in one of the areas for the more experienced. It should not be difficult for a moderator to move their post to the right area with a quick notification to that effect, although I admit that does add a task to the moderator's list.

Yet such an added task might be one of those wonderful value-added multipliers. Helping people direct their questions effectively in the first place can help enforce more constructive and respectful responses, which would improve the quality of the forum overall for everyone. It would also help improve support for gnu/linux for those who are not in a position to pay for it except by in-kind participation, such as by helping answer questions correspondent to their level of experience. This does not solve the issue of there being a core group of gnu/linux partisans who think that the hoi polloi should stick to other operating systems, but we can leave that unpleasant and unproductive group to themselves. (Top)

Why Read About That? (2024-07-22)

Public domain scan of an 1891 painting of a woman reading by Kuoda Seiki, original held in the tokyo national museum via wikimedia commons.

An interesting question came up awhile ago, as to why anyone would bother reading books by people arguing that there are at minimum, other plausible candidates for the author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Besides the usual quotient of people who assume such arguments are only made by cranks and therefore it must be a waste of time, there are those who find it an odd and pointless thing to do. While nobody can win respect from another person with a closed mind and a belief that nobody who gives non-mainstream ideas a fair hearing deserves a hearing themselves, I have always found this apparent hostility to hearing the other ideas out puzzling. The bad ones really don't stand up to scrutiny, and the ones that seem to take off didn't do so merely because they were bad, but because they were taken up by nastily clever people who took advantage of a local societal tendency to groupthink in their time. We are all defenceless against bad ideas if our only way to deal with some new idea is to cling all the more desperately to "what everybody else says," the very mental habit the unscrupulous take advantage of to expand and drive groupthink. Therefore it seems to me that it is good practice to read and engage with alternate perspectives and arguments where the stakes are not life and death. The gently rumbling Shakespeare authorship controversy is a nice example, although from the look of it there are people who have strong partisan feelings on the matter and would insist that I am not giving the question its due weight. Some would say I give it too much, others too little. To which I say, all the more reason to practice with this particular question. My purpose here is not to make some kind of declaration on the "Shakespeare question," I am not sure anyone can truly make one. Instead, I am going to point out some of the intriguing things we can learn about once we follow the question out of the assumed stories about the man from Stratford.

For instance, we know that the printing press and the theatre were well-established in england and much of europe by the sixteenth century. There was also a strange situation developing around what today we refer to as "the arts," including writing poetry, plays, and various types of early fiction, as well as the burgeoning genre of published letters and the new journalism. These were, according to the aristocracy, activities for commoners to do and produce for the enjoyment of their "betters." But, in order to produce material of high enough quality to please those aristocrats, a person needed at least just enough education and the good fortune to win a decent patron to keep the bills paid in the apparently fallow periods of drafting and editing. So began to develop a very awkward situation in which the aristocrats and nouveau riche wanted more high-falutin' stuff, and some of them actually took up the pen or brush themselves because they turned out to have an interest and sometimes even a flair for it. But they couldn't publish in their own names or have public performances. Meanwhile, remarkable crossover works like Shakespeare's plays, with their interest to people of very different backgrounds, originally meant to make sure the theatre was full enough to cover expenses, but of superlative quality, increased demand. This is a big part of why there are so many famous playwrights from roughly the mid sixteenth to say, the eighteenth century. The artform was new and expanding in surprising ways. Alongside the materials signed by somebody, a remarkable amount of material, be it original poetry and plays or poetry and plays and translations appeared under pseudonyms or anonymously. The translations especially were not so easy for even the better educated commoners to complete and publish. By the eighteenth century crowdfunding was reasonably well-established, as Samuel Johnson's varied endeavours including his famous dictionary show. But what did people do before then, commoners or no, such that manuscripts could make their way to printer-publisher's hands?

One of the happy accidents of reading about the argument about who Shakespeare was, or wasn't, is that it has led me to read scholars who investigate this question. As we might logically expect, but it is important to have it confirmed by real evidence, the richer sorts who due to their own or the opinions of others would never be seen to do something so vulgar as present their work to the public, did other things. They wrote poetry and plays and had private performances. They developed early writer's clubs, exchanging each other's works to read and comment on in manuscript form. Their circles rarely overlapped with the writers composing for their daily bread, let alone the better off writers who could live decently on book reviews, chap books, and the like while working on something larger "on spec." I have not yet found studies that get into the role of copyists, those successors of the scribes of Chaucer's time who still hand-copied material for performance prompt books, scripts for actors, and the even busier music copyists. Lest it seem the evidence shows the not so rich didn't have their own writing circles, well of course they did, albeit not necessarily as long lasting or able to preserve their records. I am thinking here of families and their practice of shared letters, where correspondents customarily had letters shared just between one another or parts of letters just for one another with other sections or whole letters to be read to everyone. Today we underestimate just how widely used and how important letters were, not just as personal missives but also as a sort of personalized family news sheet. Yet another sort of scribe wrote out or read letters aloud for the illiterate after receiving a small fee.

These are just a few of the fascinating things a person can learn about from reading outside of the usual areas about Shakespeare's plays and who wrote them. Fortunately today as opposed to my days in grade school the books and articles students get to read about Shakespeare are more varied and do get into those things, so that "Shakespeare" no longer seems to be a weird, isolated alien growth that popped up in the middle of Ford's Theatre. Students also get better opportunities to see how their own ancestors could share letters in a way resembling the practices of people engaged in writing "for art's sake." By showing that the same tools were applied to different purposes, those students have a chance to feel a part of a writing tradition, not alienated from it. (Top)

About Credit Where It's Due (2024-07-15)

Cover of Devoney Looser's 2022 book, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës via Pamela D. Toler's excellent History in the Margins blog.

What I did not know a year ago and what I do know now is that during the eighteenth century, the majority of novels were written – by women! And the men were not amused by women's prominence. They did much to 'discourage' the competition of women and there are signs their backlash was successful. Whereas in the late eighteenth century when women were seen to be in the ascendency, men writers had used female pseudonyms to try and find a favoured way into print, by the 1840s the practice had been reversed, and women writers were adopting male pseudonyms in order to find a publisher.
- Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen. (London: Pandora, 1986): 4.

By one of those wonderful accidents that happen when wandering around inside the stacks of a well-appointed library, as opposed to an imitation of a library with a coffee shop and a few banks of computers in it, is stumbling on older books that remain absolutely, but also sadly, relevant today. Among these is Dale Spender's entire published oeuvre, and her book Mothers of the Novel really ought to be in print. Heedless of its age, it is a veritable goldmine of references, and among the first to begin firmly giving credit where credit is due, instead of going along with false, sexist narratives. Part of what turned my attention back to this book was to see if Spender had included the Porter sisters, those founders of the historical novel whose false friend Walter Scott went along with his boosters who pretended he created this genre of novel instead of them. Never mind that the Porter sisters were bestsellers and originally Scott was too cowardly to put his name on his early attempts at writing such novels himself. The remarkable lives of Jane and Anna Maria Porter and the sordid story of Scott and many other men's behaviour towards their work are the subjects of Devoney Looser's book Sister Novelists. For a snippet of it and an early review, it is well worth checking out Devoney Looser's october 2022 article in smithsonian magazine, and Pamela D. Toler's blogpost from the same month. As it happens, the Porter sisters' novels fell among those that Spender was unable to get to before time and page limits forced her to finish Mothers of the Novel and hand in her manuscript to the publisher. Nevertheless, she made it quite clear that she had hardly scratched the surface of what was out there, just in english, and just from the 1700-1800s.

Such active refusals by male-dominated historical accounts and marketing interests to credit women with what they actually did is not unique. Spender's description in the quote above neatly encapsulates the standard means used to erase women's participation. The men start by using female pseudonyms, knowing that they will almost always be selected ahead of real women in a sexist society, and that as soon as just one of their works, be it a book, a painting, or some wholly new thing women alone invented or did originally, they can reveal that oh, actually, that successful example was done by a man under a female pseudonym. They make sure not to mention the tremendous number of male failures, of course. Just like that the sexist beliefs of a multitude are restored to their solid state again, as they can point to the example and declare, "See, men are better at the women's [whatever practice] than women are, that's why this man's work is a bestseller." Then the men go right back to using their own names or male pseudonyms, the doors shut almost completely to women again, and the original women practitioners are ignored because supposedly they just weren't as good or effective at it as the men, so it doesn't count. Like how women invented agriculture, but when women do it it is called "horticulture" and primitive by male scholars, who add that women's "horticulture" had to be "superseded" by male "agriculture." This is so stupidly transparent, but involves plenty of pretence to just "telling it like it is." The same men become utterly furious if anyone has the temerity to impinge upon what they deem to be their "intellectual property," their "inventions," "patents," and "copyrights." On one hand, I get why. They see such "poaching" as stealing money from them. That is their official logic on the matter. On the other hand, I wonder why they would expect any other response, when otherwise they do the very same thing all the time whenever they can get away with it.

So much effort and so much collusion, none of which requires formalized arrangements, it just takes men, and a few traitorous women to go along with the process, and just like that the false image of human culture produced only by males is reproduced again and again. And for what? Mostly for the immediate gratification of easy profit (in whatever currency) and easy fame. It seems that as soon as women become successful in any way at something, whatever it may be, immediately the explanation many men insist on is that this could only be "unfair." They insist that women could not possibly be competent, so they must have been "allowed" to succeed. This stupidity is how it happens that a woman who excels in anything typically turns out to have multiple qualifications and anywhere from twice to ten times the experience of her most comparable male colleague. Which means that time and again women are forced to spend far more time and energy just running to stand still instead of contributing as much to society as they otherwise could. Meanwhile the usual sexist chorus complains that supposedly women aren't contributing enough, while women are also the primary backstop for every social and economic crisis in most societies. When there is not enough food, clothes, schooling, whatever it is, women are expected to somehow provide it without ready access to those things for themselves.

I can only conclude that the reason for credit where its due being so consistently denied women is about far more than mere sexism, which is itself a rationalization, not an original cause. The original cause is exploitation, and giving women due credit would make it too obvious and too impossible to deny that women are ruthlessly exploited, in the so-called "west" as much as anywhere else at the present time. The best way to stave off a guilty conscience for exploitation is to rationalize it, and the combination of sexism with denial of credit is an important combined strategy men are encouraged to internalize and apply from when they are small children. Even if mothers don't teach it, their fathers, grandparents, teachers, are likely to if they don't choose to behave otherwise. Based on the state of the world these days, more people had better start choosing otherwise, because this early training encourages a denial of reality that is extremely dangerous and contributing directly to the current dangerous conditions.

Novels are surprisingly revealing, aren't they? (Top)

It Would be Anachronistic to Call it Trolling (2024-07-08)

1801 and later flag of the british east india company, derived from the original file created by Yaddah and released to the public domain via wikimedia commons in june 2006. For more arcane detail on how and why the number of stripes could vary plus more flag examples including fictional ones, the flags of the world site has you covered.

In passing, a pair of commenters on a forum I occasionally visit got into an argument, quite a civil one all told. I had skipped over it to get to more interesting comments on the actual topic of the post, when part of the exchange caught my eye. One commenter asserted that perhaps the other might want to be more circumspect about the united states flag, since it was invented by the british east india company. Their counterpart did not challenge this, and it was such an intriguing idea I had to see if there was some real historical connections behind the claim. By this I don't mean any critique or claims about the united states flag as such. Flags don't give much room for diversity between size limitations, which colours stand up well to all weathers, and the sorts of symbolism desired. The various english and scots emigrants who led the founding of the united states were not unhappy to be english or scots. They were unhappy about what they deemed unacceptable interference in their efforts to make money and take over land in the americas. So it does make sense they would still want a flag referencing english or british history and commercialism. From an anachronistic perspective, it might look like an attempt at mutual trolling, as both the united states and british east india company flags went through changes before settling into their final forms. I am also sure that having a flag that could be mistaken for a british east india company flag under the right conditions came in handy more than once until 1874, when the company was dissolved.

Unfortunately, flags are miserably political things, especially in the current era of "nation-states." For awhile, probably due to yet another reflex of capitalism, there was a boom in more or less lighthearted flags. I remember it being quite unusual to see a sports-oriented flag, meaning not practical signal flags like those used at car races or thrown down in certain types of football games, but flags designed with the logo of a sports team as their primary symbol. Other than sports or national flags were certainly around, such as the infamous united states confederate battle flag, and frowned upon originals or copies of nazi flags. It took a long time for mainstream retailers to start profiteering off of the original rainbow pride flag, such that it could be found outside of shops owned and stocked by gay, lesbian, or bisexual owners and staff. I doubt many people thought much could be amiss with the obsessive restyling of different flags in different colours or to include more and more symbols. It was all just supposed to be marketing, and if it didn't sell nobody would design, make, and sell them. Such banality is certainly possible, however, it doesn't seem to be what is actually going on. Flags are a means to make political statements. They are a not so honest way to get around that in most places it is illegal to have a sign in the window stating the modern day equivalent of "no coloureds" (english example) or for a canadian example, "no indians."

Final version of the red ensign used as the canadian national flag until 1965, from the file developed and provided to wikipedia commons by Denelson83 from public domain information. Document accessed february 2023. For more specific information, the best starting source is the national flag page at the canadian heritage website.

It would be easy to take issue with the newly adapted practice in parts of canada of ostentatiously attaching large canadian flags to hockey sticks and then wedging the impromptu flagpoles into convenient gaps and tie downs on large trucks to go to any protest, parade, or outdoor party. Truth be told, I feel uncomfortable with this sort of flag display, because it does not seem organic. Instead it feels contrived, especially the hockey stick-flagpole, which has the unpleasant smell of marketing about it. I laughed along with everybody else at the last gasp molson canadian beer commercial with the guy pretending to rant against stereotypes of canadians while wearing a red plaid shirt, jeans, and a toque or whatever it was. That we could laugh at it didn't change that we could see it was contrived, and it didn't change anybody's established beer drinking habits. Since it is not unusual at all for canadian flags to make appearances at protests in large formats, be they pre-purchased or made at home by hand, I suspect it is ultimately the particular ways of deploying symbols of "canadianness" adapted from a far more united states-style approach that generates the unease. It's not bad per se, but it does suggest a level of internal social division that was not so visible or perhaps as deep in canada as it was before. Then again, maybe this is just the new dressing for arguments about who counts as "canadian" when before the changeover from the earlier red ensign flag in 1965. Perhaps before then, some would have carried the red ensign, while others set themselves apart by using the new maple leaf design. I have added an image of the red ensign to show that again, there are only so many ways to make a flag when starting from a british template.

I am not of a mind to argue for the sort of strange flag practices a scoutmaster began telling me about some years ago. His troupe seemed to have taken up a whole range of superstitious behaviours including having something of a panic if the flag touched the ground, having a special folding procedure and the like. Yet I do appreciate why there is a social consensus on formal flag displays, that they should consist of an accurate flag hung right side up and not deliberately set out in a way to drag on the floor or ground. Since flags do carry political and social meaning, how they are used and displayed does matter. (Top)

More on Documentation (2024-07-01)

Illustration from page 1-12 of the Franklin ACE 1000 User Reference Manual, courtesy of David Friedman via his ironicsans substack, january 2023.

Last year a variety of experiences with unsatisfactory computer manuals and a well-used reference textbook led to a thoughtpiece called Documentation Woes. The major point I got to by the end of that exploration was an appreciation of how most computer manuals are two-headed monsters satisfactory to no one, and the probable reasons why. They often veer between such extremes as the equivalent of telling the reader how to hold a pencil, starting with reminding them such devices are usually held between the thumb and fingers of the dominant hand, and jargon and variable-filled explanations of how to load additional packages or set obscure variables to use a more arcane feature. One of the worst examples I have had to deal with was for setting up the compiler for a computer language I was learning. The details provided as to how to install the compiler and complete the basic set up were copious, repetitious, and utterly unnecessary. By the time a person has enough computer experience to add and configure compilers for relatively obscure older computer languages, they typically have such details down already. Where trouble ensued was digging into the material pertaining to networking. Not being a formal computer science major, I had never encountered the Backus-Naur form (BNF) used for representing computer languages in a systematic way before. Typically this has never been a problem, because reading it carefully and comparing simpler to more complex examples from the same language allows interpretation. However, there have been revisions and developments to the original format. The networking material in the manual went from 0 to 100 on the abstruse scale, and I had to spend considerable effort sorting out which variant of BNF the author was using. Then I could finally begin serious study of the networking subroutines. I am not unduly put off by having to do some research to complete a specific programming or research task, but the contrast between the blunt scissors approach in one section and gloves off, go play in traffic quality of the next was bracing, to say the least. Writing appropriately graded textbooks and reference books is a long-established practice for all the subjects feeding into what became "computer science" but somehow consumer computer mystique has blocked the application of that knowledge. In fact, it is possible that this blockage is partly a consequence of the fate of the franklin computer corporation, which tangled with apple and lost.

I learned about franklin computer and its unique early computer manuals from David Friedman, proprietor of the fossilized blog ironicsans.com who now writes on substack instead. In january 2023 he published The Strangest Computer Manual Ever Written, introducing those of us who missed the original february 2010 blogpost on the manuals for the ACE 100 and ACE 1000. Before they were found to be illegal clones of early apple computers, they were in high demand and the company needed to hack together manuals in a hurry. At this stage, the people interested in computers were now far more than hobbyists and programmers. More of them were hearing about the new technology, and believing the claims that these machines were the future, so it was important to get started with them as soon as affordably possible. Not having an established documentation production department, the founders of franklin computer did something both random and startlingly effective. They hired a technical writer who was not already familiar with computers, Sal Manetta, to write their early manuals. Yes, the results are strange compared to the sorts of manuals we are all too used to today, be they violently two-headed monsters or by turns hilarious and infuriating machine-translated gobbledy-gook. For one thing, they are deliberately funny, and the later ACE 1000 manual makes excellent use of illustrations and fonts. They also sensibly and respectfully impart information about things that at the time were far from obvious, including describing what today are recognized as classic interface failures now firmly designed away. For instance, it was not obvious to begin with that what we now call hot-swapping was not feasible or data safe, or that the powerful and useful, but dangerous reset switch was in a horrifyingly easy to accidentally push place. Now we are used to autosaving and various interface signals and confirmations about what is happening, but those are all new. To begin with what a person would have gotten was either nothing, just something not working, or a more or less obscure error code. Older machines already had generally-human readable feedback mechanisms, computers still didn't have these.

Franklin computer happened on a real and effective technique. It makes sense to bring in an experienced technical writer whose level of familiarity with the material to document is similar to that of the final audience. While this inevitably means the technical writer is going to go through a tougher than usual learning curve, they are in a position to ensure the detail level of the documentation matches the audience. They are also able to parse out unfortunate descriptions reflective of the frustrations and sometimes poor attitudes of the more experienced and arguably obsessed "techbros" with people who do not share their experience and mindset. Friedman's account, and the commentary provided by Sal Manetta himself suggests a sort "anthropological fieldwork" quality to the process of gathering information and working with the computers to write their manuals. Of course, as usual, this means a time commitment many mba and spreadsheet-poisoned organizations refuse to undertake, because the short term returns are too small for their liking.

This is really too bad, as well a reflection of the oddities of the ways computers were commercialized. Since they were actively designed at first to turn away the uninitiated, and people focussed on marketing and profits over accessibility saw their putative customers as a type of adversary, the normal teaching reflexes of technical writers were crippled, if any actual technical writers were involved in composing manuals and other documentation to start with. It boggles the mind to imagine what such simple appliances as toasters or tools like pencils and fountain pens had been designed with the attitude that anyone who bought them was fundamentally a thief or other sort of criminal. Well, perhaps not too mind-boggling, since bright sparks have been adding wifi capabilities to toasters and electric tea kettles in the hopes of persuading everyone to monitor them with a cell phone, so we are getting that sort of appliance now instead of at the beginning. (Top)

Not Just a Story (2024-06-24)

December 2014 photograph of a traditionally shaped and equipped cauldron from comté, france by Arnaud 25, via wikimedica commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

I don't remember when I first read or heard the welsh story of Cerridwen, her cauldron, or how the bard Taliesin came to have his skills in poetry, prophecy, and healing. (For something of a cole's notes version of the story and its associated meanings, see Judith Shaw at the Feminism and Religion blog, Cerridwen, Dark Goddess of Transformation, Inspiration and Knowledge, 30 october 2014.) Perhaps it was around the same time I was trying to look up more about the strange tangle of stories and imagery presented as "the story of the knights of the round table." It doesn't take much reading to find the "Arthurian legend" label has gradually been extended to cover a great many stories it shouldn't, primarily by more recent scholars and folklorists trying to arrange all the world's stories into one set of ur-stories. Tolkien was none too impressed by them as a whole, since he deemed them primarily french, the persistent celtic heritage of modern france notwithstanding. His suspicion that diverse materials were wound together from different cultures that were not necessarily celtic or "anglo-saxon" has been borne out by historical and ethnographic evidence. C. Scott Little and Linda A. Malcor present an intriguing and plausible case for tracing elements of what became "Arthurian legend" to scythians and peoples of the caucasus region in From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. While there are certainly parallels in cauldron imagery between the different peoples Littleton and Malcor discuss, including bathing in a cauldron to restore youth or life, that wasn't the element that stuck in my mind. It seemed to me the cauldron image must be more ordinary, so to speak. The caricature witch's cauldron, an obvious derogation of Cerridwen and her sisters in related celtic cultures seems likely to itself have a homely origin in the familiar sight of a woman using one of these all-purpose items over an open fire.

Cauldrons in their many sizes and derivatives, from cupels to crock pots are still at the foundation of daily chemistry at home and in factories. Originally it was the woman's set of such useful containers and her wide knowledge of recipes and formulae both memorized and written where these reactions and mixes were developed and used. Hence there could be a cauldron for cleaning laundry, dyeing fabric and yarn, sometimes not too far away from the cauldron with dinner simmering in it. A smaller set of pots would usually be used for brewing drinks and medicines. So in principle the extension to Cerridwen's all-powerful cauldron with its remarkable broth did not sound strange. What I found myself stubbornly puzzling over was the length of time the special brew meant for her son and accidentally taken by the boy who would become Taliesin remained simmering under constant attendance on the fire. One version of the story I have read said it had to cook for a year and a day, a sort of special number in the way of three, seven, and nine. But this didn't seem quite enough of an explanation. The thing about carefully passed down oral traditional narratives is that they don't pick out totally arbitrary numbers, the size and application of the number goes with whatever action it is applied to. A spiritually potent number will mark the actions of spirit beings, but otherwise the action will have echoes on the human scale in the ordinary world. I had never imagined a real life soup or stew a skilled cook could keep going for a year. Which just goes to show, the real world is amazingly capable of outstripping our imaginations.

The article that solved the puzzle is from Atlas Obscura, where Blair Mastbaum wrote about "perpetual broths" in december 2022. It is an excellent, medium-length article. I can't do it full justice with two quotes, so it is best read it in full to learn about broths that never stopped cooking until a world war literally flattened the cook's village.

Pot-au-feu – also known as perpetual stew, forever soup, hunter's pot, bottomless broth, master stock, or mother broth – is a culinary tradition that is practiced around the world. Food historians zero into two global regions for the origins of soups simmered for years or even decades. The first is China, and more specifically in the cuisines of Canton and Fujian, where there's a rich tradition of making lou mei, or master stock, which is used to braise and poach meats. These master stocks are never discarded. They're handed down from one generation to the next, with some lasting several centuries.

The other likely source for this technique is France, where decades-old soups like Perrotte's have been satiating hungry peasants since time immemorial. "It's classic poor people food," says British food historian Annie Gray. "That may be why there's still a stigma attached to it."

How terrible is it, that the staff of life for peasants is stigmatized when in truth all of us are descended from "poor people"? It's ridiculous, and also a cruel way in which people are cut off from their own deeper heritage. Then again, perhaps another major element of the stigma is that peasants were and still are the most persistent at resisting christianization or else firmly syncretizing elements of christian belief and practice into their own spiritual practices. People who maintain close links to the land are chary of dropping rituals and traditions they understand affect the abundance and quality of the plants, animals, and water they need to live. As many "westerners" are painfully finding out, such people are not superstitious simpletons.

In the meantime, it is worth taking a moment to ponder how profound the stories of Cerridwen and her cauldron must have been to the people who originally tended their own perpetual broths. A human-scale broth can be set on the back in the coals to stay warm enough for food safety, or today cooled and kept in the fridge until the next round of cooking. A broth that demanded an extraordinary range of ingredients, consistent heat, and a continuous watcher to keep it stirred would certainly represent superhuman effort. (Top)

Another Interesting Literary Coincidence (2024-06-17)

Photograph of Williamina Fleming dated to circa 1890 from special collections of the fine arts library at harvard university, sepia tone added by Margarita Contreras for her biography of Fleming at salientwomen.com.

Between the real world and literary world coincidences abound, not least because authors of novels shamelessly pillage what actually happened for scenarios to build their stories on. This is the nature of things, after all. In this case, while happily rambling through several different websites recounting the biographies of women in various fields and countries, I happened on the story of Williamina Fleming. For those who have convinced themselves that "single mothers" are a new phenomenon and all about supposedly irresponsible women who refuse to get married properly, Williamina Fleming's case probably won't change their minds. They are too committed to nonsense. Abandoned by her husband not long after her confirmed post-marriage pregnancy, Fleming did what many women in the late 1800s did when faced with such circumstances. Thrown on her own resources, she sought the most accessible "respectable" work for a single woman at the time, serving as a maid and housekeeper. This led her to an unexpected opportunity to work at the harvard university mapping stars, developing into a highly skilled manager and astronomer. Unfortunately, hiring women like her was not particularly good-natured on the part of the male administrators, who ruthlessly exploited brilliant women for the lowest wages they could get away with. Andrea J. Buchanan provides a solid overview of Fleming's life and career in The Maid Who Mapped the Heavens, posted at narratively. com in july 2019. Like the classicist Alice Koeber who bore an insane teaching load during long teaching days at brooklyn college in new york, carrying out her research almost wholly on her own time, Fleming struggled to do her research around an ever-growing burden of administrative and teaching tasks. Both died young, Fleming in 1911 at age 54 of pneumonia, her groundbreaking star research and mentorship of many brilliant women astronomers cut short. Just 40 years later, Koeber died suddenly at the age of 43, having completed a critical portion of the work necessary to decipher Linear B, a syllabic script adapted to use with an ancient greek dialect on the island of crete and the adjacent greek mainland. That's the real world parallel, a bittersweet one to be sure. The literary parallel is not nearly so close, and hinges very much on Fleming's unusual first name.

Well, I should modify the "unusual" descriptor, because it seems on further research that feminized variants on the name "William" were not necessarily uncommon in the late nineteenth century. At least in fiction, its more german-shaped form is probably indelibly associated with the paradoxical figure of Wilhelmina Murray created by Bram Stoker for his hit 1897 potboiler novel, Dracula (available to read in a fine scan at the internet archive). Wilhelmina, generally referred to as Mina for short is another of those fascinating female characters who began ever so inexorably to get away from the author, so much so that later writers could not resist revisiting her character and expanding her story in various ways. In the original novel, she is a sort of "new woman" who is a self-supporting teacher and a keen learner of the newfangled typewriter and transcription from shorthand. In the novel Stoker presents her as building these skills for the sake of supporting her fiancé Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor who is still working his way up in the field. The indications that she has a mind of her own and serious interests are there all the same, and she is clearly prepared to continue making her way on her own in the world if she must. Stoker strives constantly to reduce Mina Murray to a pliant and passive character by means of entangling her with Dracula, hypnotism and so forth. Yet a major part of what keeps Stoker's novel built out of the obsessive diarizing and newspaper-clipping productions of his main male characters from collapsing is Mina Harker. He can't manage to make the "damsel in distress" and "new woman" characters coalesce in Mina Murray herself or by pairing her with her beloved (and I think genuinely lovable) upper class twit friend, Lucy Westenra (whose fictional diary also features in the novel). I suspect this is a major part of why Dracula is another novel with adaptations on film and stage with so many changes to plot and character. How else to try to get an easily recognizable good guy against Dracula's evil, and sort out these baffling women?

Opinions about Dracula as a novel are inevitably diverse, and to some extent it has faded out of current popular culture. With the accidental resonance with Williamina Fleming's name in mind, and her quick-thinking and hard-working capacity to meet grave setbacks, including a serious attack on her respectability by her own husband, a different perspective on Dracula's original popularity appears. Yes, its inclusion of overtly erotic content outside of materials restricted to men's access or only to such "common" publication modes as pamphlets, chapbooks, and penny dreadfuls piqued wide interest. So did Stoker's skillful deployment of orientalizing tropes and armchair tourism in southeastern europe. He picked up on many social anxieties about "the new woman" and the increasingly unsupportable social issues fuelled by bluntly irresponsible men. Today we could also point to his remarkable encapsulation of british paranoia about immigration and "invasion" by outsiders from the east whose very being and culture would somehow be contagious and so sexually alluring all the british women would drop british men at the first opportunity. The worries and issues must always be externalized of course, and never a product of perverse social incentives for men to behave in ways that are self-destructive and drive away even the women who would be interested in them, as well as both complaining women are supposedly burdens while exploiting them to the point of snuffing them out with the best of their work left undone. (Top)

Disturbing Evidence (2024-06-10)

1867 illustration by Émile Bayard for the anthology Contes et Romans Populaires by Émile Erckmann via oldbookillustrations.com.

The great challenge for propagandists everywhere, is to somehow create and maintain an effective means for censoring and deleting annoying evidence of previous propaganda lines that are no longer convenient. George Orwell created the now widely used term for this means in his novel 1984, the "memory hole." Many, many governments with more or less authoritarian pretensions have sought to achieve this. One of the most effective enactments of mass censorship of the local historical record looks to be that engaged in by the man who managed to install himself as the first roman emperor, Octavian. Stubborn evidence of his efforts at arranging the record to his benefit remain all the same, and he probably had the best conditions available for the portion of southern europe he controlled most directly of anyone then or since. Despite extraordinary eras of social change including deliberate attempts to destroy all earlier records in the americas and china, those efforts still did not succeed. This is quite amazing to think about, and it isn't just a product of human stubbornness and rebellion. It is also a product of the persistence and unexpected ways records are preserved in all manner of materials. Time after time, media we might expect to vanish utterly still turns up and can be decoded thousands of years later, while what seemed most likely to last forever did the opposite, vanishing to leave little more than a tantalizing smear or memory.

More recent propagandists thought they finally had what they wanted, a true "memory hole" by way of the ever more distorted and manipulated internet and two of the subsystems it hosts, the world wide web, and "social media." I can't deny they may have that right on a technical basis, and only more time and experience will tell us all for sure. What I can say is, human memory and independent records from the internet will not be so easy to expunge. They never are. For the time being at least, the potential of the internet to route around censorship and authoritarian control seems to be working.

What led to my reflections on this was a strong sense of whiplash from the way aspects of the second world war and successor political and paramilitary groups to the supporters of fascism as expressed in that period in its spanish, italian, and german forms. The later followers of the nazi line have produced a whole class of problems. On top of that, the grim brew consisting of sloppy conflations of the "führer" principle in nazi germany with Stalin's personality cult in the early soviet union and an appalling amount of not so subtle Holocaust denial has inspired plenty of controversial writing and memorials. As a student of history myself, I have also seen how much confusion and distress this unpleasant mess of politicized and polarized formal publishing, media punditry, and outright propaganda causes younger students who hardly know where to start reading. They are principled and serious, and they are quick to notice when an effort is made to manipulate their minds by appealing to their emotions and keeping them from checking receipts and earlier accounts.

Where then, did this sense of whiplash come from in more specific terms? Well, as I said, it was the startling turn in a wide range of mainstream media venues to suddenly declare extremist neo-nazis heroes with excellent plans for the future. Like any person would, I did wonder whether my memory was at fault. However, it did not take much work to track down some widely respectable sources relevant to the point. Take for example, Richard J. Evans, whose magisterial trilogy on the history of nazi germany remains a stalwart on bookstore shelves in its penguin edition. He has more than one pointed reflection on the latest convenient media lacunae available, such as his London Review of Books essay, Who remembers the Poles? (4 november 2010). A media analysis with receipts comes from the excellent economics blog naked capitalism, Normalizing Nazis at Vogue, MSNBC, and "America's Largest Documentary Festival" (but not Catalonia) from 5 december 2022. Another is available at Moon of Alabama, also from 2022, Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemned. Having faced up to these materials, I also had to do some work to sort out the curious case of the sudden appearance of the term "holodomor." Long before the situation in ukraine shifted into outright warfare, this term began showing up in uncanny company with Holocaust denial. Yet there was also no denying that the soviet union suffered a terrible famine during its earliest years.

I had also been reading the new history books by historians from both western and eastern europe, including russian works translated into english and made available via mainstream publishers. Many of these have benefited by newly opened archives and generally improved ease of travel. From Catherine Merridale to Svetlana Alexievich, these books are varied and nuanced, by authors able to read in the original languages or working with co-authors able to do so. Among those working specifically on the early soviet famine, there are important works available by Mark Tauger and Grover Furr. I admit to leaning more towards Tauger as he is less inclined to accepting highly emotive titles – it is easy to forget that authors rarely get to select the titles for their books or articles outside of academic publishing – and there is an excellent archive and bibliography of his works available at the New Cold War website. My first introduction to Furr's work was via his 2017 article at CounterPunch, The "Holodomor" and the Film "Bitter Harvest" are Fascist Lies. And then there is the truly appalling travesty of Timothy Snyder's 2010 book and its subsequent 2022 edition, which purports to be about the famine that struck eastern europe between the world wars, and is treated to an in depth review and debunking at the World Socialist Web Site (in five parts plus timeline: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Timeline), including numerous all important references for the skeptical and thoughtful reader to do some further assessing of their own.

The evidence of propaganda and yes, lying about history is disturbing. Even the suspicion that the past may be presented in a way intended to deceive for political ends is disturbing and a grave issue. Yet it is a healthy thing to be disturbed, because that is a society and culture's immune system at work. Checking for consistency and evidence and not merely accepting the latest claim or article merely because it is the latest is the right thing to do, though admittedly not everyone has as much time as would be ideal to do it. But we do need to do it. (Top)

That was a Surprise – Not (2024-06-03)

Screenshot of 0:05:23 of eBuzz Central's anthology video explaining why the so-called 'windows subsystem for linux' and microsoft's actions more generally are bad for gnu/linux and bad for free/libre software, posted 17 december 2022. Hat tip to techrights for the original link.

A personal bugbear of mine, even though I do understand the reason the approach is so popular, is the penchant for reproducing the look and feel of microsoft windows in GNU/linux desktops. Due to the twists and turns of work opportunities, I have had to get familiar with and use very different desktops, from macOS in its powerPC and intel chip eras, Sparc unix boxes with something very like X-windows (that was over twenty years ago so the details are foggy), and far too many encounters with microsoft products. I have also gotten to know MATE, GNOME, and XFCE. A more recent, and very nice option I have seen turning up in installers is an option to choose layout style for the desktop, with the option to change it again later. Over the years I have also learnt how to make a desktop look very different using command line options and utilities. Well, except for in microsoft windows, in part because I have never had administrator privileges to try to make such changes. Probably that system would fall over if a person tried it, which I suspect is also true of macOS these days. Apple liked to protest that its earlier system should not have its look and feel altered for reasons of stability, that was simply nonsense. It was about aesthetic control, something which has since gotten so out of hand apple hardware is becoming a tragic embarrassment in the quest for "thinness" and preventing repairs and upgrades as much as possible. "Look and feel" really isn't just "look and feel" when it comes to computers, as many of us have learned one way or the other over the past decade or so. Nevertheless, it seems there is always something at once new and yet oddly expected in how things are developing.

At the moment it is hardly a secret that microsoft is in serious trouble as a business, and that its flagship project and entire underlying profit centre, "windows" is in dire straits. My own not quite serious hypothesis about it was that in the end microsoft might pull something roughly similar to Steve Jobs' strategy when he took over apple the second time. Jobs brought in a BSD-derivative and replaced the older current system altogether. The microsoft version could be an adapted GNU/linux variant branded to look as much like old windows as possible, which wouldn't be difficult. It even seems like Mark Shuttleworth is angling for an ubuntu variant to get the job, maybe via a licensing deal to help shore up his company. Microsoft's decision to make its own skin on chromium with extra spyware to replace internet explorer made this hypothesis look somewhat less silly. Then I watched the late december 2022 eBuzz video discussing the bizarrely named "windows subsystem for linux" which is not a microsoft-provided alternative to WINE, as a naive reader or viewer might expect, but what is in fact a sort of virtual machine for running pretend GNU/linux systems in. Perhaps this "subsystem" began as a convenience for committed windows users who also wanted to do things like GNU/linux reviews or write cross-platform software. I have no idea how stable or not this means of running an ersatz GNU/linux instance while still keeping windows as the host system is. Yet it also sounds like the sort of crazy, unwieldy way of sticking things together so characteristic of windows – from the perspective of a person who has never been in a position where I had sufficient privileges to do even the most basic scripting on a windows machine, except for a brief episode way back in the days of windows 95.

In the end for those interested in computers and what is going on in terms of free/libre software and its proprietary software-selling enemies, the strange saga of microsoft will continue producing things that could be surprising but aren't. I am sure there is a good argument for microsoft's strategies bearing a greater resemblance to ibm than apple, due to the greater similarities in terms of their business market saturation. However, I don't think that good argument could go quite far enough, because microsoft began "from the other way around" so to speak, as apple did: from individual workstations to eventual entry into providing servers and in microsoft's case bigger service contracts. Apple of course couldn't seriously break into that area, and turned back to its handheld device division and associated design ideas. (Top)