Two Second Memory

I was recently reading an article by Nick Bostrom called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? (which I implore everyone to read) when I stumbled across an article called The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant which is about aging.

A few days later I was cycling to work when some huge four wheel drive (I’ll spare you my rants about 4 wheel drive cars (or should I say trucks) and their, in general, idiot drivers) accelerated past me emitting large amounts of black diesel smoke and I thought cars are so primitive. They are inefficient, they pollute and they are using a technology (internal combustion engine) that is well over a 100 years old. Shortly after this I thought the car/oil industry is like the dragon and car drivers are like the public in the fable.

Without giving the ending of the story (yes you do have to read it away the car/oil industry is just like the dragon and it needs to be slain. There needs to be research done into new technologies (this is starting to happen but it’s painfully slow) and we need to spend so much more on it. We — the public — also need to change our attitude. The oil industry consumes an unbelievable amount of money looking for new oil reserves if only a small percentage of this money where put into researching alternative energy sources we would be so much better off. We need to tell our politicians that the current status quo is not good enough, we need to tell the car/oil industry that we do not want their polluting ways. We know there are alternatives they just have to be made a reality and this will come at a great cost. Not doing it will come at a greater cost.

At the end of the paper Bostrom gives “… a number of specific lessons” each one of these “lessons” (with the possible exception of four) applies directly to the car/oil industry and our unwillingness to find alternate power sources.

Filed by rgh at 14:00 under Environment
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People often look at me blankly when I start ranting about Word and wonder what the hell I talking about (either that of just roll their eyes and sigh). The main problem with Word (amongst the many) is that it confuses content with layout.

For anyone who’s used the Word the problem is very obvious: if I hit the backspace key and the character before the cursor happens to be a formatting character the the entire layout on the page could completely change. Now I don’t know about you but I find this very off putting. If you use something like Latex which has a very clear separation between content and layout the problem simply doesn’t exist. A properly designed XML or SGML DTD will give you the same end result.

Now I’m not saying that everyone should use Latex or XML for everything but if you are writing a document that you are expecting someone to extract useful information from, then you should very seriously consider the tools that you use. This is not to say that you cannot get a good layout with Word (or any other “word processor”); you can. It’s just that if you use a tool that is more appropriate for the job at hand the problem becomes a lot easier. Oh and please don’t mention styles in word they are a half arsed, second rate attempt at typographic layout.

To beautifully illustrate the point I recently came across an article (from the ever wonderful reddit.com) which contains the following quote:

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. A printed work which cannot be read becomes a product without purpose — Emil Ruder

Or more succinctly put, a quote from one of the forefathers of computing:

What You See It All You Get — Brian Kernighan

Filed by rgh at 13:38 under General
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In the debate between oil and hydrogen how many times do you here people go on about the fact that hydrogen is merely a store of energy and that the energy will still need to be generated before it can be converted into hydrogen, thus consuming fossil fuels. Really, gosh I didn’t know. I now feel utterly enlightened and am eternally in your debt for passing this little nugget on to me. Idiots. Oil is also “only” a store of energy. It just so happens that conversion process happen millions of years ago and therefore obviously beyond the scope of the simpletons that peddle this stupid idea.

In science it is well known that some ideas only move on once the people who believe the old ideas die. It seems a little harsh I know but there you go. Read Simon Singh’s fantastic book Big Bang for more thorough discussion on this subject.

It would be a shame to have to wait so long for this misinformation to stop.

Filed by rgh at 16:47 under Environment, Rant
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