Olympic torch nonsense

All this fuss and bother over the Olympic torch relay could have been avoided by one simple thing: the relay should have been managed from start to end by the IOC, or by it’s national counterparts. That China as host is in charge of the relay is responsible for making it a magnet for protests about China’s record on human rights. If China was not involved in the running of the torch, then the focus could have remained on the games and the “Olympic Spirit”, and there would have been much less opportunity for protests.

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Tags: Olympicgames, torch relay, protests, human rights

Shame, Julia, shame!

Juts now watching the Insiders talking heads program on ABC, we had Julia Gliiard talking about the 2020 Summit in Canberra, and she apologised for “sounding like a scientist in this interview”. Now. much as I admire Julia, this is the sort of thing that really gets my goat. We need science — without it we’d still be living in caves — and we should all admire the work and intelligence that goes into science. There’s no need to apologise, and Julia should instead be promoting and supporting science and scientists. Which I’m sure she does, but we need more people to push the idea that science — the application of intelligence — is a good thing.

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“People you may know” — New Facebook feature?

I’ve only just today noticed this, so I’m guessing this is a new feature on Facebook : on the home page, there’s a new box on the right hand sidebar showing “people you may know”. Clicking on “show all” expands this to show you the details of how you may know these people, by listing the friends you have in common.

This is a fairly obvious feature to offer, but I’m stunned by the coincidences in common friends that it throws up. For instance, that Katie knows Romana and Pru and Simon and Toby — which doesn’t sound surprising, except that as far as I know, none of these people know one another, and knowing them I have no reason to expect that they should know one another. (Except that Simon seems to know everyone, but …)

Maybe this is the “Adelaide Syndrome” — that everyone knows everyone in Adelaide, with only two degrees of separation. But I still find it astounding.

And cool. Thanks, Facebook.

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Tags: Facebook, social networking

Open Facebook?

Facebook is a wonderful thing — I love it, and so (apparently) do 55 million others. It is an excellent example — perhaps the definitive example — of a social networking application. We can maintain contact with friends through messages and the Wall, and share stuff — our photos and videos, and things we’ve found on the web.

But I have one gripe — which is rather ironically counter to the persistent media concerns about social networking. My gripe is that Facebook is a a closed system. You have to be a member of Facebook in order to see its contents (apart from Pages, which can be made public).

Case 1: I use Flickr to share my photos with the world. Flickr is OK (in fact more than just ok), but it is only good for sharing photos. I can’t get the rest of my life in there too. Facebook also allows me to share photos, but only with my Friends, or members of my Network. So what I’m doing now is sharing photos in two places — Flickr for the world, FB for my friends. And it’s becoming a little tiresome, what with having to decide where to post each picture, and whether to upload it twice, and so on. Right now, the best I can do is use the Flickr widget on my Profile to include my latest Flickr posts.

Case 2: Facebook provides Notes, which I could happily use as my Blog, except — nobody can see it except my friends and people in my Network. If I’m going to spend time writing a carefully crafted work of genius, such as this post, I want the world to see it. I want Google to be able to find it and toss it up to the world in response to their search queries. So Notes cannot be used the way I like, and I’m forced to use an external [see that word, "external"?] blog application, which I can then feed back into my FB profile using RSS or an app. (I’m actually using the excellent WordPress application, so I don’t really have much reason to whine.)

Of course, I’m not alone in using these widgets to bring in external data into my Profile. Many, many users are doing this. Which suggests, surely, that many of us would not actually object to non-FB users being able to look into our pages and see (some of) our gathered content.

But, there’s no option in the Security settings on FB to do that. I assume this is deliberate policy, but is it for our protection, or is it, as I suspect, FB protecting its market share?

In the long term, it may not matter that much. (In the LONG term, it doesn’t matter at all, of course.) FB is growing so fast that pretty soon everyone on the planet will have an account. We already have 11.5% of all Australians, and an astounding 25% of Canadians. (Must be those long winters.)

So until then, I’ll just bypass the otherwise excellent FB tools, and use third-party apps to bring in my stuff from elsewhere.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

What the heck is a peck? Actually, a peck is a unit measure of dry volume in the Imperial and US systems, equivalent to two gallons, with four pecks to a bushel. For all I know, this is still a measure in common use amongst farming types, in relation to wheat and so on.

I bring this up because I’ve been pondering the introduction of the metric system of weights and measures, along with decimal currency, in Australia, and wondering if that marks the beginning of the process of turning us into a nation of dumb-asses which culminated in the celebration of the turn of the millennium one year early.

When I was a lad, life was a rich texture of complicated, antique and arcane systems of measurement, which we learned to deal with by memorising tables in beautiful blank verse, which I can still sing-song in my head to this day: “eight pints one quart / four quarts one gallon”; “sixteen ounces one pound / fourteen pounds one stone; eight stone one hundredweight” etc.

Calculations of currency offered similar delights, with our twelve pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. Not forgetting sixpences, zacs, two-bob and guineas. Humans have a natural tendency towards invention which delights in such complexities.

Yes, these were complex systems, but they had the advantage of offering an intellectual stimulus, a challenge to our brains, providing continuous and regular exercise of our mental faculties. Yes, the metric system is simple and direct, but it lacks the beautiful complexity of these old systems, and delivers none of the same mental advantages; it’s the pre-eminent dumbing down of society, and we’re poorer for it.

More Vista weirdness?

Kay just solved an interesting problem with her Vista laptop :
She was looking up journal articles for her course, and frequently found she could not read them, because the text was gray on a black background (or sometimes some other ridiculous colour combo).

After some mucking around, she found an option in Adobe Reader preferences, under Accessibility, to “replace document colors”. This allows you to override the document settings, and specify black on white.

Since I’ve never seen this problem before, and the same pdf documents were fine on my Ubuntu laptop, I’m guessing this is a problem caused by Vista.

Google Translate v. Babelfish? No contest

I still hear people talking about AltaVista’s Babelfish translator, but a quick comparison of this venerable web utility with the version from Google shows there’s no contest. Here’s a snip from a Facebook group description in French:

Un journaliste du monde a écrit un article où il expliquait comment aujourd’hui, n’importe quelle personne pouvait créer un groupe sur Facebook et toucher 100 000 personnes en quelques semaines . Il demandait donc à Facebook de surveiller de plus près le contenu des groupes et les messages véhiculés.

Here’s the Babelfish translation:

A journalist of the world wrote an article where it explained how aujourd’ today, does not import which person could create a group on Facebook and touch 100 000 people in a few weeks. He thus asked Facebook more closely to supervise the contents of the groups and the messages conveyed.

And here’s the Google Translate version:

A journalist from the World wrote an article in which he explained how today, anyone can create a group on Facebook and reach 100000 people in a few weeks. He therefore called on Facebook to monitor more closely the content of groups and messages.

Still not perfect, but much, much better. The Babelfish version is barely intelligible.

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Tags: webutility translation bablefish Google