Oddverse

The Gods vs The Internet

2010-03-10T14:30:33Z

Oh.

In the beginning, was the universe. The universe was very big, very confusion, and full of things that people couldn't understand. Things like the sun, and seasons, and death, and all sorts of things that if you were to stop and think about them would make you basically sit in a field all day going "Ug".

So, early mankind made up stories that explained observed phenomena. The sun was drawn across the sky on a chariot, and if you didn't eat your porridge it might not come up. Death was a doorway to a greater truth, but killing people was wrong.

That's fantastic. That's the beginning of a code of laws, the beginning of science, the beginnings of community. It also lets people stop worrying about what it's all about, and start focussing on really important things like inventing wheels and printing presses and processed cheese.

It's also the beginning of specialisation. If you've got one man who knows how the universe works he can worry about making sure it keeps working, and you can make sure that there's still bread on the table. He doesn't need to worry about yeast, and you don't need to worry about the laws of physics suddenly changing.

There's scope for a healthy degree of debate between the two of you. You might suggest, perhaps, that maybe eating Wob-meat gave you food poisoning, and he might oblige by checking with the Gods and finding out that Wob-meat is unclean. And he may suggest that the Gods have said that bread should be made with sand rather than flour, and you might oblige by telling him that you tried that and it didn't work.

What there is, though, is a healthy respect for the fact that you are the expert in baking, and he is the expert in the universe. If you say that Wob-meat gave you food poisoning, rather than declaring Wob-meat unclean, he may issue divine guidelines on how to cook Wob-meat properly, and thereby appease the thousands of Wob-farmers he might otherwise put out of work. He's got a different perspective. A wider perspective.

Of course, information is the enemy of this sort of specialisation.

Ulysses' Boat

2010-03-04T13:33:15Z

You've probably not heard of Ulysses' Boat. It's a little story. It goes like this.

Ulysses goes on a long journey, and as he goes, he replaces part of his boat. Upgrades, if you like. At the end of the journey, none of his boat is the original boat. However, a canny Scotsman on his crew has been keeping all the discarded bits of boat and uses them to recreate the original boat. Which boat is Ulysses' Boat?

As with boats, so with Sugababes.

I read today that Mutya Buena is applying for the trademark of the name Sugababes. Possibly, the original three members might re-form. But the rights to the name currently sit with Universal.

There are real examples of this sort of thing going on all the time. Companies change staff and change ownership. Football teams evolve over time. People die, people are born - the population of the Earth changes from one moment to the next. The cells of your body die and are replaced. Only ideas really have continuity, perhaps.

This case isn't just about the name, though. It's about the rights to merchandising, to back catalogue. It's about intangible things like money and expertise (money, by the way, is intangible - really). It's not purely sentimental. It's intrinsic to what makes the Sugababes what they are. So perhaps the courts might view the Brand almost like a member of the group... and all it has done is changed its back-up singers...

I pay your salary

2010-03-03T09:23:00Z

I don't care how much the chairman of the BBC gets paid. Nor should you. Because it is none of your business.

Oh yes, you pay your licence fee - a tax by any other name - and that makes the BBC accountable, down to the last paperclip, the last penny of your money that you have paid to fund your BBC.

You're entitled to demand the removal of Jonathan Ross, the reinstatement of 6 Music, to moan about too much sport, or not enough, or whatever the heck you want.

This is a fantastic degree of transparency and openness. But it's flawed and ultimately kind of pointless and destructive.

Say you're a private contractor, working in some field of technical expertise. You're brilliant at your job and you can charge £500 per hour for your time. You get hired, a lot. Do your clients have the right to ask what they are going to get for their money?

Of course they do. They want some piece of technical knowledge that you either have, or can generate for them. You've obviously set your rate at one that you think fairly covers your costs, pays off some of your student loan and mortgage, has some contingency in it to cover the fact that as a private contractor you may not be working full time. You might have loaded it up a bit because you know the client is prepared to pay more for you. You might have rounded, or put in VAT at 17.5% when you're currently only paying it at 9%. At the end of the day, you are not a charity.

As long as the client is happy that the service received is worth the money that they have paid for it, everyone should be happy, shouldn't they?

They might not be. There might be a negotiation. Happens all the time. Cut a few quid off here, scale back a service there. All fair enough.

Never in a private business relationship does the client - who pays the wages - have a right to demand to know how that money is spent. They can't see how much you pay your PA, they can't see whether you've shopped around and got the cheapest energy provider to supply power to your office. They wouldn't expect to.

Paying for something does not give you an automatic right to control it.

I'll admit that there is a difference between a private contractor and the BBC - there are many - but the key one would be that the BBC - like the National Health Services and the Government - isn't in a competitive playing field. But the same principle applies.

Compare the benefit received to the price paid. Get that sorted first.

The Hurt Avatar

2010-03-01T09:25:00Z

Between them, husband and wife duo Avatar and the Hurt Locker have eighteen Oscar nominations this year. They're directly against each other in seven categories. Here's how I think they'll do.

Cinematography

The Hurt Locker is beautifully shot. Iraq (shot in Kuwait) feels intimate, close, open, familiar, alien. Heat and tension emanate from the screen. Avatar, on the other hand, redefines what Cinematography means, using a bizarre mix of camera styles that has never been tried before - and succeeds. And the Oscar goes to The Hurt Locker, because it's real even though it's not.

Film Editing

Film editing is critical in defining the pace of a film, fine tuning the audience experience. The Hurt Locker vs Avatar here is a fine balance between the traditional art taken to its extreme, and the art of film editing completely redefined. And the Oscar goes to Inglorious Basterds, because of the opening scene in the house in the fields.

Original Score

A tough one here. Good scoring underlines the themes of a film and stays with the listener far beyond the cinema, while at the same time being almost inaudible and unmemorable. Both of these movies are triumphs of subtlety, so it's very hard to choose. And the Oscar goes to Up, because it made me cry.

Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing

Two categories in one here - both are about the art of creating a fictional reality, about adding depth to a two dimensional picture. And the Oscars go to pretty much anyone. These are really technical awards, and not likely to garner much attention. Star Trek could win.

Directing

Both The Hurt Locker and Avatar are strongly directed. Of the two, Avatar is clumsier and clunkier, but nonetheless interesting. The Hurt Locker is tense and intimate, but it's somewhat unvaried. It's a symphony in beige, with explosions. The art of the director is the art of creating a cinematic experience that utterly absorbs. For me, therefore, the Oscar goes to Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino's strongest film to date by quite some way, a huge step up in terms of his talent and confidence.

Best Picture

Well, it's not going to be Avatar or The Hurt Locker. Avatar looks great, it's got smurfs and dragons, and the plot of Pocahontas, and bits of Aliens soldered on for good luck. In a cinematic environment where anything can happen, cliches are bound to happen. I guess.

The Hurt Locker is a turgid plop of a film. Based on some things a journalist saw once, it's tense, you grow to care about the characters to some extent, but it's a dramatic mess, and the performances are all un-nuanced. There's a reality to it that's hard to achieve in cinema these days, mainly because it's not interesting.

And the Oscar goes to... something else.

Anything else.

Anything.

Freedom of Speech

2010-02-26T10:50:24Z

Freedom of speech is an interesting thing, isn't it. It's what allows you to sit in the privacy of your own home and say "Oh, I don't like Cormorants, they wet their nests", without the pro-Cormorant lobby breaking down your door and carting you away to the funny farm, there to be rehabilitated.

It is - like most concepts - hideously abused by some.

Just because you have something you want to say, it doesn't mean that I have to listen to it, agree with it, or give it any credibility at all. You have the right to say that you think that all children under the age of three should be shot. I have the equal right to say that you are a slavering idiot.

In the post-blog epoch, the place to get your rabid pointless message across to the masses is in the comments section of an online newspaper. It's brilliant. You don't need to justify your opinion, you don't need to read anyone else's comments, you don't even need to read anyone else's reply. You can just shout your meaningless shite into the ether, and because you are brilliant, everyone who reads it will come to your support. How brilliant is that?

It's not brilliant. It is, occasionally, funny, though.

I found myself teetering on the brink of doing it. On the BBC News web site, home of the deliciously random "Have Your Say" vitriol columns, where people with too much time and spare and unrelated opinions can persuade themselves that they matter. Hundreds of comments on a story that in itself was a report of a piece of research that reached inflammatory conclusions - possibly because they were the conclusions that it set out to reach. Yes, this country may have gone to the dogs, Have Your Say readers. However, by yapping away and thinking you matter, you are not part of any solution. Don't think that you are.

You do not represent the "moral majority". Yes, other people on the talkback agree with you - because the majority who disagree with you really don't think you're worth talking back to. You are a tiny yapping puppy in a big bucket full of them.

It's ironic that I am ranting about ranting, I know. I'm aware that by posting this online, I am in some ways just as bad as the "ban everything" brigade that annoy me so much. I know all that. But I'm not expecting anyone to read this. This is just for me, just for myself. Tell me how much you agree with me in the comments.

To close, though, a word from one of the wisest people I ever knew.

The right to freedom of speech does not include the right to be taken seriously.

Nanny State

2010-02-15T18:27:47Z

In 1988, the most subversive programme on British television was Doctor Who.

In a thinly-veiled satire on contemporary society, The Happiness Patrol oozed on to our screens. Everything was sugar-coated, lift muzacked and synthetic. This, we were told, was good. Entertainment for the masses.

Sheila Hancock (mother of Tony and Roger) oozed Thatcherly charm as Helen A, devoted leader of the people of Terra Alpha, and not a thinly veiled political alligator at all. She loved her people, she just wanted them to be happy, and she was genuinely unaware of the stifling stranglehold she had on them. She didn't care about the little people. She saw the big picture.

Mind you, this was the story with some indigenous life forms whose lines were unintelligible, and a giant Bertie Bassett thrown in for good measure and not just to annoy confectioners, honest.

This, of course was what led to the downfall of Thatcherism and the dawn of the modern age. Or it would have done if Coronation Street hadn't been on the other side.

Health Scare

2010-02-08T16:25:38Z

The other day, I was involved in a disagreement with a so-called "expert" who shouted me down, saying that seatbelts are indisputably safe for all toddlers and that parents of children with leukemia are "just a bit mad".

This is in the wake of a study that found a positive correlation between wearing seatbelts and childhood leukemia! Admittedly, the study has been discredited, but I've heard stories about parents taking their child to hospital in a car, wearing a seatbelt, and being told that their child had contracted leukemia. Coincidence? I don't think so.

This is another typical response from those bullies who don't want us to protect our children from leukemia. It is simply irresponsible to assert that seatbelts are appropriate in all cases, and to shout down anyone who disagrees as somehow educationally subnormel.

Some children have an allergic reaction to peanuts. Most don't. Does that mean you feed peanuts to all children? Of course it doesn't. In fact, most schools have banned peanuts. So, by analogy, we should also ban seatbelts. And watching television, reading, crossing the road and

Do you see what I did there? I took two unrelated concepts - one of which is a safety measure, and one of which is a tragic illness, put them together and - hurrah! - I look like an idiot.

Link : I'm not a scientist.

bReader

2010-01-27T18:00:00Z

I've come up with a brilliant way to encode the written word in such a way as to make piracy virtually impossible.

The idea is this.

eBooks, as they currently stand, require two purchases - the purchase of the reader, and the purchase of the eBook itself - the classic separation of content from player. So far so good. This allows the content provider and copyright owner effectively to reproduce the content as many times as it wants, and sell licences to as many people as want the content. Tying the user in to a particular player creates built in obsolescence, so eventually there will be a resale opportunity where the eBook you want to read is no longer compatible with your hardware, so you have to play it again.

The bReader combines player and content in a way that effectively forces the reader to purchase both at the same time - leading to the purchase of one book player for every book purchased. This is good, because it means that the text of the book is hard-coded in to the player rather than being delivered via the internet - true, there is a loss of immediacy of delivery as a solid bReader must be delivered rather than just content, but this means that the content itself is never stored online. As no encryption or DRM system is entirely unbreakable, this drastically reduces the opportunities for piracy.

Indeed, the storage mechanism within the bReader will be analog, so there is no quick way to rip content from the device. True, analog:digital conversion is possible, but it is intensely time consuming and will almost certainly require the destruction of the original bReader.

There are also opportunities for re-selling content. Users may view bReaders as disposable, so they may not retain the content indefinitely. bReaders can be mass-produced cheaply in low quality, so they fall apart after a period of time. It is anticipated that some users would even purchase new bReaders to match existing bReaders on their "bReader shelf" as we are tentatively calling the bReader Storage Environment (bse).

Some may say that replacing eBooks with bReaders is a fanciful solution to a problem that doesn't exist. But isn't that the point?

Have you heard the Wispa?

2010-01-19T17:11:19Z

Cadbury is being bought by Kraft Foods.

Many people see this as a bad thing, it seems. Setting aside the 185 year history, the Cadbury family's groundbreaking interest in the welfare of its workers, and the whole "sale of a British company to a Colonial power" side of things, there's an important question here.

What will the impact on Dairy Milk be?

It's not as if Kraft are not already in the UK chocolate market. They delight us on a regular basis with Terry's Chocolate Oranges and Toblerone. They also bring us Kenco coffee, and Philadelphia cheese, market leader in the white cheese spread market. But I digress.

Terry's Chocolate Orange is known for two things. Firstly, it tastes almost entirely unlike oranges, or chocolate. Secondly, it is impossible to break pieces off nicely. Oh, you can try, but there's always the spindly bit down the middle. The most effective way of breaking a Terry's Chocolate Orange apart is by the insertion of a blade in to a convenient fault line - hence, presumably, the reason why knives are a popular fashion accessory with many of our nation's youths.

Toblerone fortunately come in handy "miniature" sizes these days. They used to only come in 1kg bars, designed to look like the alps, and with mountains that neatly "snap off". I never managed to get one to snap off. Plus, the only way to eat them was to shove a whole triangle in your mouth at once, or risk losing a tooth - tricky when you are six, let me tell you. However, I suspect that's where many people learned how to dislocate their jaw at will, a skill which can make you popular in certain circles, I hear.

So is that the future for Dairy Milk? Increased solidity to the point of being impossible to break?

The Pursuit of Happiness

2010-01-18T09:33:48Z

It seems today that all we see is violence in movies, and death on television. I've been to the cinema twice in the last week, and both times the movie showed a broken world, post-apocalyptic and bleak. And I've not even seen The Road, which is supposed to be even worser than those.

All very gloomy and doomy. Even Being Human is looking more drama than comedy - although a show in which one of the main characters is dead is either going to have serious overtones or be a Classic comedy. Then I get home to the horrors of Haiti. There is a definitely dark vibe in the air.

Fortunately, I am enjoying Glee. A show about life's great shallownesses, a show that while being partly Ugly Betty has a good chunk of Pushing Daisies and even Ugly Betty when it was at its most camp.

I'm hard-pushed to guess at the target audience for Glee, though. It's too cynical to be aimed at the Disney Market, and too camp and cutting to be aimed, really, at anyone other than Gay Men in their 30s to 50s. Not that I'm complaining about that...

Writing Human

2010-01-15T11:01:40Z

The "Supernatural-Comedy-Drama" is a curious beast.

Writers and showrunners often find it hard to balance the components - make it too funny and the dramatic elements are ineffective. Make it too dramatic, and the comedy feels forced. In the case of the recent episode of Doctor Who, make it too sentimental and leave hundreds of hungover fanboys scratching their heads. But I digress.

Being Human - season 2, episode 1 - was always going to be an interesting one to watch. The first season tied up a lot of the plotlines from the pilot, leaving the question of "where next?" - and the second season picked up a month later - with some characters having found closure, some having found new wounds. The episode set up new threads for the new season, while at the same time re-establishing the characters and their desire to be "normal" humans.

I'm a big fan of the fantastic, magical-realism style writing. I like worlds which are almost real, which could be happening just around the corner, and which reflect on our own reality in metaphorical ways. Being Human manages to stay just on this side of the line beyond which lies pure escapism. It succeeds because it is less about vampires and werewolves and ghosts, and more about the problems of fitting in to society when you feel slightly out of it. I think most people feel that at some point in their lives.

We interrupt your normal programming

2010-01-07T10:00:35Z

BBC one, possibly the nation's most popular channel, interrupted its regular programming last night to bring us a half hour bulletin about the weather. It turns out it's been snowing - a fact which might have escaped me had it not been for the fact that it's been bloody freezing for weeks and there's snow outside. Everywhere.

Due to the lack of competition from other channels, I sort of sat through this, mainly trying to work out what it was for.

Officially, the line from the BBC was that they'd had a huge amount of interest in the weather - an extra four hits on their weather site, people wanting to get travel news and so on. All fair enough, because the local situation affects local people. That didn't really square with what was, really, just an extended news programme.

The content was interesting, though. A lot of human interest stories. Praise for the emergency services. Horror stories of people trapped in snow drifts, power cuts, exploding drains, rabbits caught in headlights. This news programme was designed to make you feel better about being at home, on your sofa, watching television, sandwiched between Nigel Slater and Zoe Wanamaker.

It will probably turn out to be the most popular programme of the week - half mogadon, half schadenfreude.

Christmas Time in Hell

2009-12-22T10:24:08Z

Scotland doesn't grind to a halt when it snows.

Everybody has a happy glow
Let's dance in blood and pretend its snow
Even Mao Tse-Tung is under the spell
It's Christmas time in hell!

It's that time of year again, when things start grinding to a slow, inexorable halt. The shops, running low on powdered egg again. And in the queue at the post office, the terrifying pleasure of being trapped between two women who were discussing the Direct Debit™ issue. For thirty minutes.

The issue being, simply, that they don't trust them. They've never had anything go wrong with them, but they just don't trust Direct Debits™. They've seen Watchdog, they know that sometimes Direct Debits™ do go wrong, and yes, it can be pretty hellish getting them sorted out again. So they like sticking to cheques, or in this case popping in to the post office for a nice chat, a moan about how long the queues are at this time of year, and a lengthy and tiring chat about how her daughter wants her to go back to BT, but she really can't be arsed with them. That was her word.

90p stamp, sorted.

How Many Miles To Babylon?

2009-12-17T13:55:31Z

He came by again, the following Thursday.

The same routine, a sharp double-knock on the door, a polite "Excuse Me, Miss Sanderson, if I may" as he stooped to step over the threshhold, not waiting for confirmation, passing Ophelia his hat as he so did. And then a "Cup of Tea? That would be most kind," as he escorted himself down the narrow hallway and in to the front parlour, where he sat down in Grandfather's chair, all without so much as a "Please", or a "By your leave."

Ophelia was not impressed. Far from it. Nonethtless, she scurried off to the scullery, placing the Homburg carefully on the chair at the foot of the stair, and popped the kettle on to the stove.

The question arose - as it had the time before - should she poison him?

The first time, it hadn't really been a serious thought, just an idle whim as she noticed the rat poison pushed in behind the caustic soda and the tin of refried beans. She had disliked him immediately; the pushiness of his manner and the grim ashen severity of his features had done little to change that reaction. Later, after he had gone and she had heard her father sobbing, she had vowed to bar the door to him should he revisit.

And yet, he had been polite and firm, and she had reacted in the same way a second time. This time, though, she reached for the rat poison as the kettle came to the boil.

How much would be enough?

My eyebrow moves across my face

2009-11-04T17:01:11Z

They never warn you that in your forties, your eyebrows will take on a tufty life of their own, gradually but firmy reaching out with eyebrow tendrils, desperately trying to join up with their demonic cousins, the tufty ear hair.

No, they just tell you that mascara can make your eyelashes eighty seven times more alluring.

Who plucking cares?