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STATUS-Q


QUENTIN STAFFORD-FRASER'S BLOG

One should always have something sensational to read on the net...
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October 18th, 2022


QUOTE DU JOUR

October 18th, 2022

My French friend Cyril receives Status-Q updates by email, and after yesterday’s
post concerning hobbies, he sent me another quote about holidays:

“Les vacances, c’est la période qui permet aux employés de se souvenir que les
affaires peuvent continuer sans eux”. — E.J Wilson

or, roughly,

“A vacation is the time that allows employees to remember business can continue
without them.”

I love this. I learned a very important lesson many years ago as the CEO of a
small, fast-moving technology startup…

I think the company was only about six or seven people at the time, and we were
in that classic startup mode: working mostly from a garden shed, having
conversations every other day with investors or potential investors, watching
the cashflow very carefully while convincing potential customers of our robust
credentials and our ability to deliver.

But I wanted/needed to take a short holiday. Having gone from one startup to the
next, I hadn’t had one for quite a long time and for various reasons I needed to
take it now to coincide with other family plans. But I was torn: could I really
leave this small team without their leader at such a critical time? What would
the investors think? And so on…

In the end, I did decide to go, had a wonderful few days’ break, and came back
to the office in some trepidation to see what had manage to survive my absence.

“Hello everyone!”, I said. “I’m back!”

The team looked up from their desks, puzzled for a moment, and then said, “Oh,
yes, you’ve been away, haven’t you?”

It was a humbling and enlightening experience, and I’ve never forgotten it.
Nobody is indispensable. Even you.

Anyway, there’s a nice twist to Cyril’s message. When I looked at it more
carefully, I realised that he hadn’t just found a nice quotation to send back to
me.

It was the first line of his vacation email auto-response.

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Posted in: Quotes
1 Comment



QUOTE OF THE DAY

October 18th, 2022

“A satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious,
or irrelevant… a defiance of the contemporary… an assertion of those permanent
values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or
overlooked.”

— Aldo Leopold

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October 3rd, 2022


INCOMMUNICADO

October 3rd, 2022

Not being well up on Italian hits of the early 70s, I only learned about this
today, but I think it’s great.

In 1972, the singer Adriano Celentano released a single called
‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’. The words are gibberish, but intended to sound like
someone singing in English with an American accent – or at least, how such a
song sounds to a non-English speaker.

“Ever since I started singing”, he once said, “I was very influenced by American
music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like
American slang — which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian — I
thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the
inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics
didn’t mean anything.”

Video Player
https://statusq.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/acalentano.mp4

00:00
00:00
04:09
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.



(Here’s a direct link – your browser may give you a better viewer than the
player above.)

According to Wikipedia, the song was very popular, reaching the top 10 in
several European countries, and, if you search, you can find a couple of other
versions featuring Celentano, and tributes by numerous groups since. But this is
my favourite; I certainly found my foot tapping to its beat… and I thought the
choreography with mirrors was great!

All of this reminded me of a trip to Indonesia in my youth, where I ended up
playing guitar with a group of guys who thought that Eric Clapton sang about
“Snog, Snog, Snogging on Seventh Floor”. (I wrote a post about this and about
‘Mondegreens’ a little while ago… let’s see… gosh! – even that post was more
than 16 years ago!)

Anyway, today I started down this particular rabbit-hole thanks to Charles
Arthur pointing me at a Twitter thread containing some other linguistic gems,
including this clip of Sid Caesar’s performance at one of Bob Hope’s birthday
parties sometime in the 80s. A five-minute comedic performance with almost no
words that can be understood by anybody:



(Link)

Wonderful stuff.

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Posted in: Humour
Tags: language, mondegreen, music
0 Comments
September 29th, 2022


THE DANGERS OF A HEADLINE FIGURE

September 29th, 2022

If you believe my Twitter stream, there are a lot of people out there who think
that the UK government has capped the energy bills so they can’t pay more than
£2,500 this year. This is not at all true. But it’s been reinforced by the Prime
Minister’s interviews on various radio stations this morning when she said
things like “making sure that nobody is paying fuel bills of more than £2,500”.
Either she doesn’t understand it, or she’s not very good at explaining things
clearly.

The problem is that the media are so keen to feed people a single, simple
number, that for weeks we’ve been hearing about what’s happening to the energy
costs for the average household and referring to that as a capped number, when
in fact, of course, it’s the price per kWh that’s been capped. (More info here.)
If, say, you use twice as much as the average household, your bill could be
£5000. Some not-very-smart people even think they can use as much as they like,
because, hey, it’s been capped now, and they’re going to get a nasty surprise!
And similarly, of course, if you use half as much, you can worry a bit less
about that headline figure.

This desire to reduce things to one number causes problems in many situations.
Remember when the only way most people had to assess the PC they wanted to buy
was based on its CPU’s GHz? (Or MHz for those with longer memories?)

Now, the headline figure for every electric car is the number of miles it can do
on a charge, when lots of other factors will affect how easy it is to use in
reality, like how fast it charges, or its drag coefficient (which affects how
its energy use varies with speed). For many people, long journeys are relatively
rare, and the important question when embarking on one will actually be
something like, “How fast will this be able to recharge at the type of chargers
available about 150-200 miles from my house?” And even that question is much
less important if the chargers happen to have a nice cafe or restaurant next to
them!

The kind of gamification that reduces things to a simple score is always
appealing. But whenever you see things being compared with just one number,
remember Ben Goldacre’s warning: “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more
complicated than that.”

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September 28th, 2022


THIS BOWLED ME OVER!

September 28th, 2022

Have you ever wondered how the machines at the end of a bowling alley work?
Well, probably not very much, because you’ll have other things on your mind like
defeating your friends and family.
But it turns out that they’re terribly cunning.



(Direct link)

I’m not sure who impresses me more: the inventors of the machines, or Jared
Owen, who created this animation explaining them.

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Tags: engineering, leisure, sports
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September 23rd, 2022


ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT…

September 23rd, 2022

At the Southampton Boat Show yesterday, I spotted lots of fun things that, while
I might not purchase, I would certainly like to try!

One of them was an inflatable boat with a proper sliding seat for rowing. But
the oars had a funny mechanism in the middle that I couldn’t quite fathom.



Was this so they could fold up? To give them a higher gearing? To put the
handles at a more efficient angle…?

Than I realised. It means you can face forward.



(Direct link).

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September 21st, 2022


LE MOT JUSTE

September 21st, 2022

I like the instructions on a French device I’ve just bought:

>  1. How to put the battery?
> 
> 1) Turn the lid of battery’s room counterclockwisely and remove it.
> …

If counterclockwisely isn’t a word, I think it should be.



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September 20th, 2022


MAY FLIGHTS OF ANGELS…

September 20th, 2022

While I don’t really have very strong feelings about whether or not we should
have a monarchy now, I do believe that if you’re going to have one, then ours
has been about as good as you could get! It’s not at all clear to me that
countries that have got rid of theirs have, as a rule, received something much
better in exchange.

So with that in mind, and being aware of history in the making, I settled down
to watch some of Her Majesty’s funeral today, and got hooked… and gosh, it was
rather well done, wasn’t it? It’s very pleasing to think that, after recent
embarrassments like Brexit and Boris, there are some things of which we as a
nation can still be proud. The combined ranks of the BBC, the Crown, the Church
of England and Their Majesties’ Armed Forces can pull off some impressive stuff
when they set their minds to it.

My mind, of course, also kept drifting to the technical achievements. The
wonderful camera angles, with no other cameras in view. The enormously long but
very slow zooms vertically down from the ceiling of the Abbey. The shallow depth
of focus on the jewels atop the crown. The very great depth of focus over
Winston Churchill’s shoulder as his statue looked down on the passers-by below.
The synchronisation of marching video and drum-beat audio, when the cameras must
often have been far enough away to delay the audio by a noticeable amount. (I
realised after a while they probably had radio mics near the drummers so as to
transmit the audio at the speed of light instead.) It’s hard enough for most of
us just getting the audio levels right when recording a single bagpiper. To pull
off this kind of production at any time is quite a feat, but to do it live,
spread across an entire capital, and pretty much flawlessly… well, count me
impressed. If the Duke of Norfolk didn’t already have a duchy, he would have
deserved one for organising this! But this was mostly the achievement of
thousands of anonymous and very skilled people.

Then I wondered, too, how many bytes of data iPlayer had to cope with today, and
took my hat off again to whomever was responsible for keeping those millions(?)
of livestreams going for hours on end. It really wouldn’t have been the time for
unexpected network load to crash your routers, or for sudden reboots caused by
unexpected software updates. I bet the technical team are breathing a sigh of
relief tonight!

This was the first occasion I had actually sat down and watched any live TV in a
very long time. The last time, I think, might have been when the armoured cars
started rolling into Iraq in search of those weapons of mass destruction… So
that would have been… 2003… nearly 20 years ago. Gosh again! I do watch lots of
things on a television screen, but they’re almost all movies, or recordings or
streamings of shows that other people discovered a decade ago and we’re only
just getting around to binge-viewing now! We’ve been in this house for five
years and I haven’t got around to connecting the TV to the aerial yet, so we
watched today’s events on iPlayer — which was probably higher resolution anyway
— and it looked fabulous rendered by AppleTV on our nice 4K TV.

And that’s remarkable in itself. The last event of its kind — the funeral of
George VI — was the first royal procession to be broadcast on television.
Grainy, black-and-white, low-resolution cathode-ray-tube- & valve-powered
television… and so few people owned a receiver then that almost everybody would
have had to follow in audio-only form on the radio, and then read about it a day
or two later in the papers. How things have changed, in one reign.

I wish King Charles a long and happy life, but when his time does eventually
come, I expect we’ll be viewing it in some sort of fully-immersive holographic
projection. Though, as my friend Tim pointed out when I suggested it on Twitter,
fully-immersive holographic projection will probably turn out to be just a fad.
Remember 3D TV?

But in either case, I hope it’s still produced by the BBC.



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September 12th, 2022


MORISSON’S LAW OF HOLIDAY BUSYNESS

September 12th, 2022

A couple of years ago, my friend Richard Morrison posted this graph, which I now
think about whenever I go on vacation:



One way to increase the height of the second bump is to write lots of blog posts
when you get back, but it’s a welcome distraction from the process of getting my
unread emails back down to double-digits. 🙂

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1 Comment



CATCHING UP

September 12th, 2022

We’re just back from a few splendid days staying in a cottage on the
Pembrokeshire coast in Wales, followed by a weekend of sailing on the River
Crouch in East Anglia, with stops in the Wye Valley and the Cotswolds in
between. Fitting these into the same week-and-a-half involves rather large
changes in longitude combined with almost zero change in latitude!

Wales is a country whose great beauty is occasionally visible through the
downpours. I always love visiting, but when it rains, it really rains… and this
is from someone whose childhood holidays were often spent in the Lake District:
somewhere that is seldom described as arid! But we alternated the suncream and
the umbrellas, and only occasionally got drenched.

We saw lovely harbours, both man-made and natural:





We visited seals and lighthouses; castles, cliffs, and cottages; superchargers
and woollen mills, and we had some very good food. We saw ancient woods:



We saw the cathedral in St Davids, hidden so deeply in a valley that you can be
in the same small town and hardly know it’s there. but it’s a wonderful and
unusual place.





And then we rushed back across the country to go sailing in our little dinghy
with friends from the Tideway Owners’ Association.



Now, exhausted but happy, we’ve come back to normal working life to recover…

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DEEP THOUGHT STRIKES AGAIN

September 12th, 2022

I’m glad to see that Douglas Adams’s influence continues. I asked OpenAI, “How
many roads must a man walk down?”



I think Douglas would have approved.

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TIKTOK: TROJAN STALLION

September 12th, 2022

This is a great post by Scott Galloway warning about the influence of TikTok.
Some have accused it of fear-mongering, but do read the whole thing and see what
you think. Here are a few key points:

 * TikTok has over a billion users. This includes ‘nearly every U.S. teenager
   and half their parents’. The average monthly hours spent on it per user are
   way higher than for the other social networks. And the amount of data
   gathered about every interaction is vast.

 * All of its data are readily available to the Chinese government. TikTok is
   not actually allowed to operate in China, though, so this is purely data
   gathered about people in the rest of the world.

 * “Facebook is the most powerful espionage vehicle ever created and now China
   commands the most powerful propaganda tool”. The Russians have become very
   good at manipulating Facebook and Twitter, but the process is still much
   harder for Putin than it is for Xi Jinping.

So, Galloway warns, small changes in the configuration of the TikTok algorithms
— just a thumb resting on the scale — can have a massive influence:

> Dial up wholesome-looking American teens with TikTok accounts railing against
> the evils of capitalism. Dial down the Chinese immigrant celebrating the
> freedoms afforded in America. Push Trump supporter TikToks about guns and gay
> marriage into the feeds of liberals. Find misguided woke-cancel-culture
> TikToks and put them in heavy rotation for every moderate Republican. Feed the
> Trumpists more conspiracy theories. Anyone with a glass-half-empty message
> gets more play; content presenting a more optimistic view of our nation gets
> exiled. Hand on scale.
> 
> The network is massive, the ripple effects hidden in the noise. Putting a
> thumb the size of TikTok on the scale can move nations. What will have more
> influence on our next generation’s view of America, democracy, and capitalism?
> The bully pulpit of the president, the executive editor of the New York Times,
> or the TikTok algorithm?

Sobering stuff…

Thanks to the footnotes in John Naughton’s Observer column for the link.

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Posted in: Internet
Tags: facebook, social networks, twitter
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