So I want to see Shakespeare's R&J with Mary and Afonso tonight. I thought I'd blog about it, since it was excellent and I haven't seen a single review on the web that accurately explains why it's so good. SPOILERS GALORE, so if you have a chance of seeing this play in real life (it runs until the 8th of November in London) you should probably stop now.

The plot

Or rather, the plots. The basic premise of the play is the story of four schoolboys at a very strict catholic private school, repressed and regimented all day, who find escape and release through a copy of Romeo and Juliet, which they act out nightly. Other reviewers seem to have got the idea that the book is banned at the school, which doesn't make much sense for the classical education a "public"* school provides. Simply, it is an activity after lights-out, and hence is illicit.

The boys initially giggle at every word in the play, and appear confused by the language and embarrassed by the emotions in it, as you would expect four schoolboys to be when confronted with archaic language and a story based around ancient social values. But soon they begin to get into the play, and their actions and words become charged with enthusiasm, wrestling and dancing and drumming on the furniture as they charge through the plot, eagerly rifling through the pages of the book to find out what happens next, laughing in sheer joy at the beauty of the words and the depth of the story.

But the plot of Shakespeare's play and the relationship of the boys soon becomes intermingled as the boys playing Romeo and Juliet themselves discover that the words of affection they read from the pages echo deeper feelings they have for each other. As the play continues the perspective constantly shifts; some scenes are Romeo and Juliet, some are the boys themselves, and some are both at the same time, each line having two different and simultaneous meanings. The boys court and snipe and retaliate and reconcile, all the while using Shakespeare's words and Shakespeare's plot.

By the end of the play they have visibly matured, and while the lovers remain star-crossed in both Shakespeare's play and R&J which contains it, R&J leaves you with the feeling that there is a glimmer of hope, and that something has been gained.

The play

I have never heard Shakespeare like this. The enthusiasm of the actors for both plays simply cannot be faked. I often find when listening to Shakespeare that I have to take a step back from the language and not try to understand every word, just getting the general flow of the plot. Not here: every word and every line is charged with emotion and meaning; the actors spit out nearly every word loaded with emotion. It's Shakespeare so powerfully acted that you really do cease to notice the language being used, and it seems the characters are just talking normally, when in fact they are sticking strictly to iambic pentameter. It sounds so easy, so natural that you find yourself trying to speak that way yourself as you walk out of the theatre.

The dual nature of the plot is stunning. The play flicks recklessly back and forth between the inner and outer plots, being one or the other or both without warning, managing not to become confusing while still leaving enough ambiguity in places to leave you wondering "is he just reading, or does he really mean that this time?" This constant double interpretation makes for riveting viewing, as does the sheer physical energy the actors pour into their parts: they are literally leaping from one end of the stage to the other, dancing around, playing tug of war with the bolt of red cloth which is one of the plays only props, just as you would expect excited schoolboys to do.

The play is full of powerful scenes. The scene where three of the boys gang up to play the single part of Juliet's towering father, delivering a rapid-fire monologue in alternating sequence and three-part harmony, is truly awesome. So too is one of the other boys' delicate confession of his own unrequited feelings for one of the amorous pair, and the reaction of the object of his affections, all while remaining in character and not breaking the plot of the inner play. The duels somehow manage to be exciting and dangerous while doing nothing more than playing tug of war with a strip of red cloth.

The analysis

Not only does the relationship and the jealousy of the other boys reacting to the blossoming relationship of the two playing Romeo and Juliet echo the tension between the Montague and Capulet houses, but their reactions echo the more general reaction of heterosexuals to the realities of homosexual relationships: their confusion and disgust ring true, but so does their eventual reconciliation and acceptance.

Other reviews and takes on the play are all over the web; more traditional theatre types (predictably) dislike it as a bastardization of the bard's work, while others rave about it. Place me firmly into the "rave" category. Many of the more critical reviewers have suggestions on what could be done to make the play better: and while I often agree that following their suggestions would make for a good play, they would also be different plays from this one. This is not an "adaptation" of Romeo and Juliet; Romeo and Juliet is simply a sub-plot within this play, which is much more than simply Shakespeare, and has a lot more to say than that ancient tragedy of star-crossed lovers.

* British private schools are called public schools. Don't ask me why. It makes no sense at all. Crazy country.

So, ordinarily, I wouldn't have anything to do with a sordid story like this, especially since I really don't care about football, and have never heard of most of the people involved. But a minor scandal has broken out in the UK over 8 famous footballers being accused of rape by a 17 year old girl. By law, none of the UK papers can name her or her attackers, but the names have predictably leaked out onto the net -- just as they would have leaked out by gossip and word of mouth. However, lawyers representing the footballers are shutting down forums which discuss the allegations, under libel laws. This offends me greatly, simply because I like the free flow of information and think the Internet should be free of that kind of restrictive bullshit, especially since it's unenforceable anyway. For good and ill, the 'net is about the completely unrestricted transfer of information. And since they're doing a pretty good job of shutting down this information at the moment -- Google has it, but I had to google for quite a while -- I thought I'd help out with a heavily-linked post and hope Google finds this page.

Basically, the girl claims that she was having consensual sex with one of the footballers when the seven others entered the room and assaulted her, at which point the Sun says she claims "she was gang-raped and forced to have unnatural sex", by which I suppose they mean anal sex. The name of the players are alleged in this thread, and have NO MORE STATUS THAN RUMOUR. The relevant post:

Thought you may be interested to know this.

Those Premiership players in the gang-rape story are Newcastle: 
Bramble, Dyer, Bellamy, Ameobi, Bernard, Ambrose and Jenas. The other 
player, with whom she consented, is Carlton Cole (Chelsea).

Now, I'll probably get taken down too, although they'll have a bit of a time making their case, since I'm quoting another source, clearly identifying it as UNSUBSTANTIATED RUMOUR, and my servers are in New York, where the UK's laws don't apply, and where there are no similar laws about libel. But it's the principle of the thing, and anyway the Google cache will save this post for a bit longer :-)

So, the season premiere of Smallville series was Wednesday, I think -- my downloaded copy arrived last night, a mere 9 months in advance of its scheduled release in the UK... :-) Am I the only one who watches this show? It's my guilty secret.

[Spoiler alert! If you do watch the show and haven't seen this episode, stop reading now!]

Anyway, in case anyone does watch the show, AAAAAAAAAAAAH! What the fuck is going on? The plot holes from the season finale are just ridiculous! How are they explaining Clark's mysterious three-month abscence, and the huge crater in the middle of the Kent farm from the explosion? Why did Lex's wife suddenly become evil? How is Lana explaining away the fact that Clark is in two cities at the same time? If everybody is going apeshit looking for him, why the hell didn't Chloe mention that she's known where he is for two months, and if she's so hell-bent on keeping it a secret, why did she suddenly blurt it out just because Lana was looking a bit bummed? How the hell are they going to get rid of all the people who now know "Kal" is bulletproof? How on earth did he get the lease on that phat apartment without having to show any ID? It's all too stupid for words.

Why do I even watch this show? Oh yeah, Tom Welling. And special effects. Has anyone else noticed he seems to spend more and more time naked with each passing episode? This can only be a good thing.

More Google fodder... I'm a willful sod, aren't I? That post containing the alleged names again:

Thought you may be interested to know this.

Those Premiership players in the gang-rape story are Newcastle: 
Bramble, Dyer, Bellamy, Ameobi, Bernard, Ambrose and Jenas. The other 
player, with whom she consented, is Carlton Cole (Chelsea).

Interestingly, Bernard has been previously accused of rape (along with four "unnamed others") and cleared because of "insufficient evidence". So in his case, he's already been publically accused of rape -- so is it still "damaging his reputation" to say it again?

Looks like Google's found me... I'm the second result for "premiership rapists" (oh, the joy...). Things will probably get interesting from this point. Meanwhile, a few people have e-mailed to scold me for posting this information, saying it will ruin these players careers, even if it's untrue. And of course, a few accuse me of libel.

li·bel

1. A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation.
2. The act of presenting such material to the public.

Fuck all of that. The person who has ruined their careers is either themselves (if they're guilty) or the girl (if innocent). I am just a member of the public, reporting what I've heard by word of mouth, just like the people I heard it from, who heard it from friends and so on until someone along the line was hearing it either from the witness, the police, or someone who works at the hotel. I'm not "publishing" this information -- I'm not broadcasting it, or presenting it as part of a "respected" publication, to which standards of accuracy and reliability apply. I'm just talking. It could be bullshit; I'm not making any claims. And I'm not forcing this content on anybody: to find my page, you have to specifically request it. And it seems, in the US at least, the law is on my side: webloggers cannot be held liable for libel.

Meanwhile, the lockdown continues, and has spread to TV, with all sorts of extra measures being taken to prevent the names accidentally being broadcast (by chants from the stands, for instance). Of course, since officially nobody is supposed to know what clubs are involved (there were six premiership teams playing in London that weekend, apparently, more than I'd heard initially), they can't say where they're putting these extra measures into place. Aston Villa has been the first to break ranks and categorically deny that any of its players were involved; if the other clubs follow suit Chelsea is going to be screwed, but it probably won't matter since Chelsea has been named as the club involved by the Mirror.

"Whoa."

2000 hits in the last 24 hours since Google indexed me (up from ~300 usually). Ya'll come back now, y'hear?

Anyway, the girl's story is looking less credible all the time. As I already mentioned, I've read that Bernard has an alibi -- he was in the hotel, but with another girl who vouches that he was with her the whole time. And U.TV (and this morning's Metro) both carry claims by Nicholas Meikle, a regular clubbing chum of famous footballers, that there were fewer people present than eight, and that she in any case consented. It does seem a bit odd that she had breakfast with them the next morning.

But who knows? I'm not one to judge; I'm not even one to speculate; I'm going to be in enough hot water as it is :-)

I also don't want to see what Google is going to make of "gay sex" and "rape" so close together on the same page. Oh dear. I swear I don't do this kind of stuff on purpose. Why couldn't I have been posting more intellectually uplifting stuff the last week? I write sappy poetry, I swear!

My housemate Dave and I were discussing recyclable packaging materials this evening. More specifically, we were arguing whether the new reusable-but-plastic Oystercards are better for the environment than the zillions of paper tickets they currently use on the Underground):

D: Basically, paper is the best, most environmentally friendly material because it's so recyclable.
S: Well, except glass, but it's not like you can package lots of things in glass.
D: Yeah, but glass doesn't grow.
S: But it comes from sand! There's no shortage of sand, mate*!
D: Those fucking arabs 'ave got everything.

I found this hilarious. YMMV.

* I speak Bloke when talking to my housemates.

Incidentally, did you know he has a degree in business and economics? Or that he was a self-made millionaire (selling mail-order body-building equipment) by the age of 22 -- long before he made any movies?

Maybe, just maybe, I'll reserve judgement.

As I sit here, five terminal windows open, 24 emacs buffers open, 3 browser windows with a few tabs each, operating on two operating systems in four separate languages, juggling data streams and file formats, weaving together a coherent information system using nothing but little words I type into a cheap plastic keyboard, I am reminded of the power and the beauty of code: I can take my thoughts, make them concrete and plastic at the same time. I can write down a little piece of my brain, and get it to run separately, whizzing away while I make more and more of them, creating a huge spinning machine much more powerful than the mind which invented each piece.

There are times when I love my job. It's sort of sad, but sort of cool at the same time. Am I weird to think this? Or are there other coders who occasionally look at what they're doing and think "Wow. This is so cool!"?

...and on a completely unrelated note: oooh! Shiny!

Bob and the rest of you, your comments are genius, so I'm pulling them out of the Javascript-obscured comments [0] and putting them onto the main page, where Google can find them -- let me know if that pisses you off. Freedom of access to information is the whole point of this conversation, after all. Meanwhile, hits are holding steady at about 1000 per day, coming from all over the world, with search strings like "Carlton Cole rumours". It's conversations like this, rare as they are, that make a blog really worth having. Un-annotated comments follow (I have restored the line breaks that my rather crude comment system removes; use HTML in the comments!):

Bob wrote:

I tend to agree with liberal policies, being on the side of transparency, freedom, autonomy, bottom-up power, and any number of other buzzwords. For me this is very important, and even has a deeply rooted philosophical underpinning, being linked to my views on Popperian epistemology and politics.

However, thing is, no matter much we want systems, such as the scientific community, or the media, to allow autonomous forces to shape the flow of the theoretical landscape, it always seems to end up best to put a few, extreme-case blocks on things. Certain types of argument -- for example for the racial superiority of one race over others -- are simply discounted and ignored. There is a legitimate debate to be had about what, if anything, defines a person's race, and whether or not there are any differences between people besides minor phenotypic, pretty well superficial discontinuities. But there are certain weapons one simply cannot use in this debate, however open and unabashed we want to be about it, certain argument forms (like "But it says here in this ancient text...") are generally going to be ignored by the scientific community. Of course, such a rule should also always be open to revision, (someone might draw pertinent /evidence/ from an ancient text, for example, even though our rule permits taking it as ... well, gospel) but it is a rule (of sorts) nonetheless, blocking a certain line of enquiry, (tentatively, hypothetically, revisably.)

There are parallels everywhere. I want my children to be raised in an open world, without fear, and in great honesty. But I might not allow just anyone to talk to my children, for example, (if I had any). I might protect them from some few certain influences that might shape their malleable personalities in directions that I consider highly undesirable. (Again, I might as a general rule not allow my children to talk to drunken strangers, but this might not apply to their mother, if she was just a bit tipsy, so the block is flexible, revisable.)

This is the only economic way to run certain systems. Your brain doesn't remain absolutely open to all input, for example. You might think it would be in your vision's interest to be completely "open" to all data it could pick up from the world at any moment, but it doesn't, because its more economical to literally make educated guesses about much of what is going on in your field of vision.

Perhaps the best comparison is to a computer virus. I don't want to allow free flow of information onto my desktop, because some of it is not in my interest, and neither is it in the interest of others to whom I may further transmit the encoded version of mallicious gossip.

In the case of rape accusations, we seem to have completely lost the meaning of the phrase "public interest". It is certainly not in the public's interest in the sense of being to their benefit to hear about these investigations while they're at speculative, early stages, however /interested/ some people may be in those stories, driven by an instinct for gossip. We are biologically and culturally programmed to prick up our ears when we hear gossip about sex, violence and high status members of our clans, and this particular story contains all those elements. The sotry is a virus, culture is its niche, and our penchants for sex, violence and status gossip are the chinks that it exploits.

But its a strange kind of virus, because instead of harming the people who hear it, incubate it, trasmit it on to others, the infected harm the people that its /about/.

I replied:

As I've said, I really find the whole rape angle pretty distasteful. My stance revolves around a deep-rooted objection to censorship of any kind.

Censorship involves making decisions about what other people can see based on principles that are always, at the deepest level, arbitrary and subjective, no matter what they're based upon. I hold that if it's arbitrary, then it has only at most one chance to be exactly right, and an infinite number of chances to be wrong. So it's probably wrong, and so subjective judgements are always flawed, so we shouldn't make them. Given that information dispersal in this situation is effectively free (you need to start making value judgements in real-world publishing, when it's expensive) then total free flow of information is the only way to go. And since at this point someone generally trots out the child-porn argument, I'll tackle it in advance and say yes, even though it's disgusting to me, I'll let it through, because the judgements involved are simply too arbitrary.

Of course, you can still prosecute child pornographers who are making money by distributing or worse, creating this material, but attempting to stop those who are distributing it for free is pointless: people will always find a way. Just as they will with any other kind of information.

Information wants to be free. And knowledge is power. So the more information we have available, the more powerful we will all become. Those who seek to limit your access to information seek to have power over you.

Bob responded with:

You say all value judgements are "arbitrary" and "if it's arbitrary, then it has only at most one chance to be exactly right, and an infinite number of chances to be wrong. So it's probably wrong, and so subjective judgements are always flawed, so we shouldn't make them." As far as I can make out, this is an expression of total relativism, not just of an ethical kind but of an antirealist bent, because you /are/ a subject, /all/ your decisions are subjective. You're saying you shouldn't make /any/ decisions, about anything. I think we can be right and wrong, and that there are very subtle and sophisticated explanations of how we have knowledge, and how we can make decisions. Even "value" judgements of a kind.

As to the argument that we should attempt to cut off child pornography at the source but not act to prevent its free distribution, I think this does show a contradiction in your position. It feels like censorship, because surely all the website owners are doing is propagating images that were already shot. But if child pornography is wrong then simply giving up and saying they will always find a way is defeatist and, also, wrong. There are laws about what you can depict, and surely they -- along with cultural taboos -- help depleat the amount of child pornography. It may be that things we try to disallow will always seep through somewhere, but giving up on this basis assumes that total eradication was the aim, which, as you rightly point out, it cannot be.)

"Information wants to be free. And knowledge is power." You assume that information and knowledge are the same thing. Of course, we could define them as such, and information and knowledge are often used to both mean "correct descriptions of the world". But we can and I think should make a distinction, in this context, between bare organised data (information) and good, corroborated candidates for truth (knowledge). Information is not power. How does knowing that someone has accused celebrity sportsmen of rape give you power?

Ean chipped in:

I think you should really think about what you are posting about the footballers. I don't know about the good ol' U S of A but over here it is innocent until proven guilty. Yes there should be freedom of information but not when it jeapordises somebodies life (I have heard there are already gangs baying for blood, thats before a verdict or even trial). The one thing you will notice is that the girl has not been named anywhere, What if she is making all of this up, what if she is screwing up these peoples lives and all you say is "oh well there should be no censorship." I am sure if somebody was raped in your town and your name was posted as a suspect on a local forum censorship would be one of the first things you would ask for. Really think about it, put yourselves in their position, if they haven't done it how much is this screwing with them, how damaging is it to their family. And then there is the age old adage "mud sticks"

We have recently had a case where a minor celebrity was accused of being a rapist and his name was leaked on a Channel 5 news broadcast, that is the reason for all of the crowd mic's being turned off and all of the TV censorship. Luckily the man accused did not sue channel 5 but he could quite easily have done, the TV companies realise that hence the caution.

And this is the bit where i admit to finding your site by searching for the footballers names so yes i am being hypocritical but i also know that i am responsible for my own actions and know that i am not going to cause trouble, you however cannot rely on every person who reads this to be the same.

I responded outside the comment system:

(This was originally the full body of this post; I have placed it in context rather than duplicating it)

Some really fascinating conversation has been going on in this month's comments (top right, everybdoy; click the bubble). Here is my response to both Bob and Ean's latest comments:

This issue is a conflict of principles. Those "principles" are themselves value judgements; I don't believe that they are impossible, because everything you say about total moral relativism is true. One of those principles is that of innocence until proven guilty. The principle it is conflicting with is that of freedom of information, and it is the latter principle I hold more dear.

Information of this kind can indeed be very damaging; lives can indeed be ruined, as John Leslie's was by those rape allegations (even though he is now profiting from a video-diary series "my year of hell", which seems somewhat callous). I'm not saying that's a good thing. But sacrificing freedom of information for the suffering of a few people is not a fair trade. Making moral judgements about information leads to censorship, censorship leads to political abuse of that power, which leads to suffering for thousands if not millions. Censorship is the slippery slope upon which we cannot step even a foot.

And no, information is not power, and information is not knowledge; my choice of words was deliberate. But information is the soil in which knowledge grows. It does not all need to be the best, it is not always the same, but the more of it you have, the more knowledge you can grow. What knowledge, what power do I gain from knowing these rape allegations? I have two responses:

1. If this information has given me no power, then what are all these people doing at my site? Why, they seem to be turning up in a hunt for information. The desire in others to seek information is its own power when you have more information than them, just like money is power.
2. What power do I gain from any specific piece of information? I may know that gravity is 9.8 metres per second squared, but that means nothing unless I know the theory and the equations surrounding it. These allegations may mean nothing by themselves, but in context may reveal something. We shall have to wait and see.

And in the meantime, if anybody comes up with the name of the girl, I will post that too; fair's fair.

(Incidentally, Ean, I'm in the UK, not the USA -- my server is in the USA)

Bob countered with this:

I think our difference, Seldo, hinges first on the "slippery slope to censorship point". I disagree with slippery slope arguments, and I think there's a big ol' world of difference between "censorship" and limiting a few extreme types of "information".

I think the word "censorship" has negative connotations -- it is associated (by connotation only, I accept) with selective reporting for the purposes of evil agenda or to inforce spurious moral norms. And the word "information" has very positive connotations, its something shiney and desirable. But the information we're talking about here is not something that will make people who read it happy, or enlighten them in any worthwhile sense of the word. With my apologies to the Googlers who have found this site, the vast, vast majority of people interested in this story are interested because it contains a killer combination of base media ingredients; non-consentual sex, aggression, high status males, and soccer.

Yes, this is information in a technical, abstract sense of the word, but in any lay sense it is gossip; plain, simple, bile-ful, tabloid-type gossip. Don't get me wrong, it /could/ be interesting: the sociological study of how a group of high status males can collectively rape a single individual, if it were true, or how a single individual could either inaccurately reconstruct in her own mind or lie about events that took place, if it is not. But that's not why people are here and that's why it is damaging.

The point of reducing the "information" in this context to "basely-motivated gossip" is to compare it to the damage it has already done if it is not true, and the damage it may still do. This is not censorship in the full, connotative sense of the word; it is a simple weighing up of liklihoods and the conclusion that in the case of alleged sex crimes any investigation should have passed way beyond rampant speculation stage before any reporting -- let alone actual names -- takes place.

Then to the slippery slope argument. In this case it is "What if you're so-called extreme-case limitations /do/ slip down the slope and become full-blown censorship of the media?" Slippery slope arguments simply do not work. Their form is wrong. It is simply not true that in any general case you can draw an inference from current events to a likely outcome. Imagine these other slippery slope arguments: "Once we start instant messaging its a slippery slope, and soon no one will talk to ayone else" or "If we allow sex education to cover homosexuality the teachers will soon be /promoting/ homosexuality and we'll be educating people in how to be gay". Those are perfectly well-formed slippery slope arguments, and when we hear the argument applied in this way it becomes clear that it doesn't work. You have to argue a very specific case before a slippery slope argument becomes at all feasible, and in this case I think there is a world of difference between a few, utilitarian limitations and "censorship".

(Another reason slippery slope arguments are bad is that if they /are/ correct and we /do/ end up at the bottom of the slope, we often quite like it there. Consider the arguments "But if we allow some of our slaves to go free pretty soon they'll be wanting more rights, or even equal rights" or "If we allow women property rights, pretty soon they'll want to be able to vote." Obviously, this criticism of slippery slopes doesn't apply because I agree that censorship (used to satisfy individuals' agendas or to enforce spurious moral norms) is of coruse not desirable.

So, if there's a challenge here, its this: why should a few limitations -- on poorly-motivated enquiries that will damage the reputation of the accused whether or not they are officially charged, let alone found guilty -- slide down the slope to "censorship" (in my "lay" sense of the word)? Given that we used to have more censorship and we now have less, I can't see how this can be realistically argued. We have moved (in general) /from/ state-controlled censorship to an open press with only a few, catch limitations (although those limitations are doubtless better defined that they were in the past). So why should retaining those few catch limitations send us /back/ down the road to censorship?

Secondly, our difference hinges on your holding freedom of information as an inalienable, absolute principle, or at least as more solid that many others. Unless you're a deontological moralist, principles are only valuable because of the ends they tend towards. If, as I have said, this is a case in which the likely result of the principle in question is negative, (as well as basely motivated,) then this is a case in which upholding that principle is itself damaging. It is for this reason that I don't speak of "principles", only "guides". Again, its largely (but not entirely) a matter of connation, but its too easy to slip into absolutism and rigidity if we try and uphold "principles". If we judge this -- and ever case -- as situationally-specific as possible our actions will be more accurately targetted, the results better, and "principles" irrelevant.

Then ficedula jumped in too:

Slippery slope arguments are always wrong - really? You pointed out, in some circumstances, the predicted consequences DO happen, and we prefer them. Saying "any censorship on the media will lead to total media control" is obviously wrong. However, saying "imposing any censorship on the media will make it easier for the government to impose *more* controls" is correct. You can't go from no censorship to complete control, but you can do it gradually. Dictators rarely go from peasant boy to insane emperor in one day; it takes time to establish controls over a people, which is why it's worth trying to oppose even small limits on your freedom if you feel they aren't justified.

I don't particularly think anybody IS using this story to launch a coup d'etat for the British government - who'd want it? - but I *do* think the government tries to control the media in this country too much as it is, so it's well worth fighting against.

If you're going to prevent people from knowing that somebody's been accused of a crime, because it could be damaging to their reputation, you'd have to make all court hearings private. Otherwise, people would actually KNOW who the defendant was, and that could damage his reputation! And, hey, even if they're found innocent, you'd better still not publish any details - somebody who thought they were guilty despite the judgement could go and hunt them down once their name was published, "XXXX is innocent".

Presumably you don't think that - so where do you draw the line? If you eliminate all forms of reporting that could potentially endanger somebodys reputation (wrongly) or life, then you've just killed 90% of all news, and if you go on to eliminate all forms of news that people don't really *need* to know, they just *want* to, that takes care of 90% of the rest of it. Like Dilbert said, once you eliminate everything dubious from the news, all you get is weather reports.

Finally, you should bear in mind here that the question "should all information be free" is *interesting*, but ultimately irrelevant - all you need is *one* person in another country willing to post news on their website, and that's it - your news block is broken. Unless you can convince every web user in the world to agree with your set of morals, a task worthy of the Orbital Mind Control Lasers, then you're stuffed. Media control can't be done nowadays. Live with it. Just sue anybody (*cough*Daily Mail*cough*) who shows any signs of *inciting* violence or who doesn't clearly indicate the difference between "hearsay" and "substantiated report"; but don't try to stop them reporting on something.

[0] Obscured to hide people's e-mail addresses from trawlers. Extra points for mentioning this as me censoring myself and successfully using it as a brilliant counter-example and a flaw in my arguments.

This is my latest response to a continuing conversation in the comments for this month; please continue commenting into the system, I will export it to the public page.

Bob: you defeat yourself when you say that this story could be interesting in the context of "how a group of high status males can collectively rape a single individual, if it were true, or how a single individual could either inaccurately reconstruct in her own mind or lie about events that took place, if it is not".

That's not one, but two counter-examples to this case of censorship, which on the surface seems fairly straightforwardly biased towards supressing the information. If it were censored, somebody trawling the web for a dozen or so case studies of group rape (for example) would not have this example to draw upon. If all such stories were similarly censored, they would have no examples to draw upon, and the information would be lost. Now you might argue that the information would eventually become available in an academic context, or via court records, or available on request: but that is simply a matter of degree -- it is still lost to many, many people who for whatever reason would not have access to it, or not even have reason to suspect its existence to request it. This information does have more than one specific, valid, non-salacious reason to be made publically available.

I consider neither your instant-messaging nor your sex-education arguments to be proper "slippery slope" arguments; the term refers to a degree of the same thing.[1] Stopping talking is not the same as starting IM; promoting is not the same as discussing. Who are you, Margaret Thatcher? :-) However, it's not relevant: a "slippery slope" can, as you also point out, slide both ways. Censorsing a little can lead to censoring a lot; censoring less could lead to anarchy. And as you say, often we find ourselves quite liking where we are at the end of slope: and that's true in this case, too -- I want to end up at the other end of the slope. But your essential argument is valid: doing something a bit does not mean we will do it a lot. But I will argue that even a little bit of censorship is too much.

It is also entirely untrue that we have moved into an era of less censorship. In both the UK and the US, both prior to and following September 11th 2001, there have been ever more laws governing what we can and cannot say, and more laws than ever governing whether or not people can sue us for saying certain things, which amounts to censorship, since we fear those consequences. I won't argue that censorship has been uniformly increasing[2], but I will argue that the reason censorship has decreased is because people have fought to make it so. You implicitly agree that censorship is a bad thing, but there should be "sensible" limits to our freedoms. I say that we have no way to judge what's sensible.

Your argument that we should consider each case on its own merits is the one I find most persuasive, as I agree that principles should sometimes give way to reasoned judgement, and that there are exceptions to every rule. But for there to be exceptions, there must be a rule. But how do we establish those rules? In this case, the most reasoned judgement seems to be the one that comes from Ficedula: allow free flow of information, but punish those who use that information for negative purposes -- you are punishing not the distribution of information, but the misuse of that information, which is exactly right: there's nothing wrong with the information per se.

But back to "sensible" reasons for censorship, your main point: in this case, do we have a good reason for doing it? Possibly, but as you yourself pointed out, we have a few good reasons not to censor it as well. We can punish those who misuse the information: we cannot pre-emptively hand the information to those who might have needed, since we don't know who they are yet. The reasons for not withholding the information were revealed by you a few days after I released it: how long might it have taken? I think my position[3] is that we cannot make value judgements about information because such value judgements are impossible. But they are impossible not because values to judge them by cannot exist, but simply because we lack sufficient information to make those judgements. We have no context, no sensible way of predicting what information will be useful, and to who, or when. Therefore it is best and safest to allow free flow of all information: a lot of it will never be used, but those few vital facts we could never predicted would be useful will slip through.

Want a concrete example? How about SARS? Medical officials made a hell over a fuss over China's handling of the SARS crisis: it had been spreading rapidly inside mainland China for months before it reached Hong Kong, but we didn't hear a word out of them until afterwards, and even then their numbers were obviously false. But was this some sinister plan of censorship by the Chinese government, intending to poison their own citizens and shut down their rural economy? What possible cause could that serve? What actually happened -- and what the Chinese government admitted when it issued instructions that it was to stop -- is that at each hospital, and in each district, doctors and administrators were playing down these unusual respiratory deaths, because people aren't supposed to die of pneumonia anymore, so it looks like their incompetence.

Pictured as a whole, these many incidents would have painted a clear picture of an unusual and spreading pandemic. Individually, they were nothing but minor statistical fiddling to meet targets and save face, but as a body they amounted to criminal incompetence that quite literally cost thousands more lives. To paraphrase one of my favourite movies[4], how many deaths do you need? Give me a number, and I won't come back and bother you until that many have died, to prove to you that it is worth battling censorship, no matter how inconsequential it seems.

[1] Correctly formed, they might be: "once we start instant messaging a few of our friends, we will IM all of our friends who are online" which certainly seems to be true, and "if we allow sex education to cover homosexuality, we will soon be educating our children about *all* forms of sexuality and - gasp - they won't grow up with our narrow view of sexuality!" which I certainly wish were true.

[2] Since when, anyway? It's not like cavemen had libel laws.

[3] And I readily admit I am rationalizing an instinctive reaction to allow free flow of information here.

[4] And The Band Played On, a docudrama focussing on the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the discovery of HIV itself. To their eternal shame, the Red Cross and other medical institutions initially refused to screen blood for HIV on the grounds that it was (then) an expensive test to do, and not enough people were dying of AIDS to justify the expense of the testing.

The recent massive, deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking posts about freedom of information (see below) have pushed the original postings past the size limits of Google's indexing, so here yet again is the quoted post containing the rumoured names of the footballers accused of rape by a 17-year-old girl in London:

Those Premiership players in the gang-rape story are Newcastle: 
Bramble, Dyer, Bellamy, Ameobi, Bernard, Ambrose and Jenas. The other 
player, with whom she consented, is Carlton Cole (Chelsea).

From a freedom of information point of view, it's not entirely necessary to keep this going once it's been posted once, but all the media attention to this story has been pushing posts containing the actual names out of the top results, so it's necessary to keep it fresh to maintain that all-important pagerank.

In further updates: the News of the World (bless those tabloids) and the Metro this morning both broke with the name of Nicholas Meikle, the clubbing compatriot of the footballers involved.

Meikle told The News of the World that rooms at the top hotel had been booked in the name of England star Kieron Dyer, but he played no part in the events of the night in question, September 26.

Meikle claimed that he and three other men joined the girl "in various combinations", then the next morning they all had breakfast together.

Detectives have carried out forensic tests on items taken from the hotel and are expected to wait for the results before interviewing the players. They are also looking at CCTV pictures.

Interestingly, my link is to FOX news, who are doing exactly what I'm doing: quoting the offending source, not claiming it themselves. Of course, the News of the World article itself is here, full of really quite sordid details; no danger of them getting disappeared so I won't reprint them. There has also been widespread reporting of a second arrest of a 27-year-old man in relation to the rapes. Meikle's arrest was the first (and he's 29, not 27), so I don't know who the second guy is.

In relation to Ean's comments about how this naming will prejudice any eventual case against the accused men, the Scotsman has a long and detailed piece on Football, Rape and Trial by Tabloid which mentions the cases of John Leslie and Matthew Kelly as well:

In a statement issued last week, Commander John Yates, who is in overall charge of the case, said: "At this stage, it is vital to preserve the anonymity of all concerned in order for the administration of justice to be served.

"I am very anxious to preserve the integrity of this investigation. I would hate to see any chance of possible future proceedings put in jeopardy by further speculation or equally, for men who have not been charged with any crime and who may not be linked to any offence to face a trial by media."

So on the basis of these rumours so far, assuming they are all true and that Miekle's claims are true (he claims, according to the Scotsman, that they are backed up by a sworn affidavit from one of the other men involved): Carlton Cole is not being accused of rape, Dyer is off the hook and wasn't even there, and Bernard apparently has an alibi (in the form of a girl who says he was with her elsewhere in the hotel on that evening). Since Miekle claims only 3 other men were involved, that leaves a thinning field of Bramble, Bellamy, Ameobi, Ambrose and Jenas about whom nothing has yet been claimed. They are doubtless going to start feeling the pressure of publicity soon; it's only a matter of time before they either all declare themselves innocent, or if the allegations are true, then leave the real rapists standing alone. But please note that this is all speculation based upon rumour and hearsay, and I make no claims as to the accuracy or authenticity of any of this. Thanks.

Meanwhile, the BBC has an amusing collection of topical limericks:

A mind-reader picked up a gun
Hardly anyone's idea of fun
But it's still knocks the socks
Off that git in the box
Good to see he's been finally outdone!

A memorable quote from a fairly excellent weekend.

Friday: Will turned up (eventually) from Warwick and we toddled off to Popstarz as per usual. I danced, I met a cute boi (who I am going to call after I've done typing this...) and I generally had a good time. On the way home, Will learned a valuable lesson about kebab-buying: even if you don't want one, you will want one as soon as you smell somebody else's. So buy one then, because other people are not always willing to share their kebabs. I am pleased to have been a part of the instructional process.

Saturday: Will and I dragged ourselves out of bed and set off (late) to Central, mainly because Wabson.org is broken at the moment so Will needed to spend some time screaming at it. At Central (aka Leicester Square) we met Michael and Mary, and went for the World's Fastest Brunch™ record at a nearby O'Neill's, so that we could be in time for the movie. Milly joined us a mere 10 minutes after it started.

The movie was CAMP in every possible sense of the word. Unbearably cute people, oodles of gay people, and more Sondheim than you can shake a stick at, all set to music! GENIUS! There's nothing there not to like, and there was nothing in the movie either. It was low budget, but only a few times was that really obvious, and it was sweet and happy and funny without being clichéd, which as Milly remarked is actually really difficult to do, so kudos to them. I recommend everybody go and see it right away; it's playing for a bargainous £4 a ticket at the Prince Charles Cinema, which is astoundingly priced for a cinema only 50m away from Central.

Post-movie on Saturday evolved into coffee at Costa (ka-ching! and they fucked up our orders) shopping (10 minutes for us, an hour for Will), then more Coffee (we were tired!) at Starbucks (double ka-ching! I'm so broke after this weekend). Milly and Mary then toddled home, and Will and I hopped back for a quick turnaround to be a mere two hours late for Danny's 21st at The Knights Templar, on 95 Chancery Lane, where the above quote originated.

The reason I give the address is because the ladies' toilets there are soon to become a major tourist attraction. Discovered by accident by a wandering drunken queer, they are more than 50m long, with fitted sofas, optical sensors on the taps, and mosaiced counters set into hardwoods. Each toilet cubicle is about six foot a side, with enormous, semi-cylindrical (real) hardwood doors that swing like fucking Cry-Stasis doors on a central pivot to reveal the plush interiors. There's also brass lamps and -- duh! -- a fountain. You know that episode of the Simpsons where homer gets the key to the executive toilets? Well, it's surprisingly close to that. There was sadly no string quartet playing Mozart, but I get the impression it was merely their night off.

The party itself was great fun. It's one thing to fill a pub with gay people -- that happens all the time -- but quite another to fill a quite large pub with a single group of gay people who all know each other; there were easily a hundred of us; it was quite excellent. Post-pub we moved on to Heaven, which was better than I've enjoyed in a while, and in what's turning out to be a regular feature of my visits to heaven, I discovered yet another room, bringing the total to five, this one playing what sounded suspiciously like dub. I shall bring trinis there in future.

Today Will has headed Camden-wards and I am recovering, and doing some work, but currently watching Them!, a ground breaking black and white sci-fi film from 1954, when horror movies were slow moving and suspenseful and the idea of a giant mutated insect had never been done before (it was the first!). It's excellent so far, and I have yet to see a single gigantic ant.

Update! My excellent weekend improved further when I emerged in typically anti-social fashion from my room around 5.30 to discover that my super housemates (whom I thought had been watching rugby in the living room with friends all day) had also produced an absolutely fantastic dinner and transformed our living room into a candle-lit dining room for 12, a feat that was still more miraculous for being unexpected. Dinner was superb and conversation was enlivened by much talk of pole-dancing lesbians. I enjoyed myself :-)

Chez: have you seen the new england rugby shirts?
Laurie: Probably not, though my house are big on their rugby.
Laurie*: They were all over today for the first game of the season.
Chez*: first game of the world cup, you mean
Laurie: Yeah, something like that :->
Laurie: Needless to say, I wasn't watching.
Chez: am v tempted to buy one of the new shirts
Chez: they're collarless and tight
Chez: though, it doesn't appear you can get them yet. so I don't have to worry about fitting my stomach into one
Chez: why not? men in small shorts..
Laurie: The attractive men:time spent watching ratio is too low.
Chez: hmm.. yeah, but big men? jonny wilkinson? jason robinson?
* Laurie does not know of them
Chez: you
Chez: do
Chez: not
Chez: know
Chez: who
Chez: jonny
Chez: wilkinson
Chez: is?
Chez: and you claim to be gay?
* Laurie googles rapidly
Chez: link
* Laurie has already found 10 photos and a gallery run by crazed fans
Laurie : Meh.
Chez: heathen
Laurie : He's okay. I definitely would. But not, like, droolworthy.
Laurie : Now, on the other hand: www.orlandobloom.co.nz
Chez: take your orlando bloom and shove it!!
Laurie : Oh, I wish.
Chez: DETAILS
Laurie : LOL
Chez: Jason Robinson
Laurie : link to pictures
Laurie : Oh, ick.
Laurie : pic
Laurie : Too bulky.
Chez: who jason?
Laurie : All three, but yes, jason.
Chez: he's a wee slip of a lad!
Laurie : Heh
Chez: only about 5' 10" and about 12 and ah alf stone
Laurie : Kay, this is about as chunky as men I like get: Daniel Schafer
Laurie : Beyond that is "too muscly"
Chez: I will make you love me
Laurie : ROFL

* That's me. The name re-change is pretty much complete now. I'm keeping seldo.com as the domain though.

* Chez is built like a big friendly 18-wheeler. Pay attention, this becomes important later.

Gabrielle

Here I am,
Waiting for a sign,
I never seem to know
If you want me in your life,
Where do I stand
I just don't know
I never feel I know you
'Cause you blow hot and you blow cold

It seems I've grown attached
Though we're not the perfect match
I just can't explain

Should I stay
Should I go
Could I ever really stand to let you go
Can you now find the right words to say
That maybe I'm getting in your way

I feel your warmth,
got me wanting more,
you've left the door half open
I'm in two minds to explore,
But then again am I being honest,
Being truthful to myself,
Can I see my life without you
Could I be with someone else

It seems I've grown attached,
though we're not the perfect match
I just can't explain

Should I stay
Should I go
Could I ever really stand to let you go
Can you now find the right words to say
That maybe I'm getting in your way

Should I stay
Should I go
Could I ever really stand to let you go
Can you now find the right words to say
That maybe I'm getting in your way

It seems I've grown attached
Though we're not the perfect match

Should I stay
Should I go
Could I ever really stand to let you go
Can you now find the right words to say
That maybe I'm getting in your way

Now, I try not to meta-blog too much -- gives you hairy palms and sends you blind -- but there've been two very good pieces recently that I found via the surprisingly good iWire (it's corporate... but clever, dammit!). First is that bloggers are like DJs: they sample the best bits of older, and mix it in new ways with other things, in a way that's equally creative. I'm not sure what that makes ShinyPixel, since Rik is a DJ who blogs, but we'll mix that metaphor when we get to it.

The other piece is by William Gibson (the novelist) who says that as a professional writer, he finds blogging is like boiling a kettle with the lid off. It sort of suggests that if I could stop blogging for 24 hours, I might achieve something useful. Which is, to be fair, almost certainly true.

But there's no shortage of similies for blogging, so who knows?

It's at lunchtime tomorrow. I'll try to blog about it, but apparently we will have to sign some sort of NDA (which sounds very interesting... what are they planning that they don't want people talking about?) so I'll have to see what I can and cannot say.

Former participants in the discussion on freedom of information are welcome to bat me about the head for willingly signing an NDA. But a free lunch is involved!

In case you're wondering, I now recommend OverClockers, who have much less byzantine restrictions concerning shipping, actually respond to customer service e-mails, and have a number you can call with problems. Dabs.com no longer have a customer service number. Shitty e-mail support is all there is.

Dabs customer service wrote:

> Good day,
> Thank you for your e.mail,
>  According to our records, this has been despatched and now delivered to
> you.
>
>  Regards Glenn
> Internet Sales Executive 
> dabs.com

Hi Glenn -

Yes, my machine arrived today; but that rather misses the point. My complaint centered around the fact that you lost my original reply and then did not follow-up for several days, which led to the delivery being delayed by a week. I was also unhappy with your company's various reponses to my e-mails, which have uniformly consisted of an unhelpful, single sentence -- just like the one you've just sent me.

Specifically, when I wrote my original complaint saying I found your replies "terse and unhelpful", the response I received was a single line e-mail saying my complaint had been forwarded to another department -- which is both terse and unhelpful! Responding to a complaint with more of the same is not the way to please your customers. To quote a friend of mine: "The cluemeter is reading zero!!!"

I shall never, ever be ordering from dabs again and will be dissuading the many friends and relations of mine who often come to me for computer advice to avoid you as well. A single lost e-mail is not a major problem, though aggravating: the problem is the disdain and complete lack of concern you have shown for your customers.

I cannot adequately express how disgusted I have been by this whole process.

Yours sincerely,
[me]

Originally by Gabrielle; modified slightly

Knew the signs
Wasn't right
We were stupid all the while
Swept away by you
But now I feel like a fool
So confused,
My heart's bruised
Was I ever loved by you?

Out of reach, so far
I never had your heart
Out of reach,
Couldn't see
We were never
Meant to be

Catch myself
From despair
I could drown
If I stay here
Keeping busy everyday
I know I will be OK
But will you?

So confused,
My heart's bruised
Why'd I give my love to you?

Out of reach, so far
Did I never have your heart?
Out of reach,
Couldn't see
We were never
Meant to be

So much hurt,
So much pain
Takes a while
To regain
What is lost inside
And I hope that in time,
You'll be out of my mind
And I'll be over you
And you me

So confused,
My heart's bruised
Was it love or am I just a fool?

Out of reach,
So far
Seems I never had your heart
Out of reach,
Couldn't see
We were never
Meant to be

Out of reach,
So far
I know we gave our hearts
We can reach, can't you see?

There's still something we can be.

So, and this should in no way be considered direct communication to anyone specific since I would never dream of doing that somewhere so public, fuck you. I'm not allowed to try and help, but I'm not allowed to be worried either? I know I'm going to be okay, eventually, because I'm me, so I have all the facts about myself and can make an accurate judgement. I don't know, don't understand, am not allowed to properly find out what's wrong with you, Mr. Hypothetical Non-Specific Person, so I have no idea if you're going to be okay, and the uncertainty has me worried sick.

Being worried sick over someone is not the same as being condescending.

And "okay" is not the same as "happy".

And fuck you, again, for making an irresistible urge to help you feel like I'm doing something wrong. And for making me yell at you about issues far too complex to be properly discussed via this stupid medium, guaranteeing that this entry will itself be misinterpreted, causing yet more damage.

For the last 7 months, the BBC has had reporter Mark Daly inside the Greater Manchester Police working as a policeman, including the full five months' training, without the knowledge or cooperation of the force. He has been secretly filming and recording his colleagues at work every day. His report is tonight at 9pm on BBC One, and he claims to have found overwhelming evidence of "institutional racism" within the organization.

This is going to be a hell of a story...

Go nuts with dual-cam madness! I'm not at home, obviously, 'cause I'm at work. Maybe I'll bring a cam to work too...

And sticking with (not to say stretching) the theme of secret cameras, the BBC's undercover investigation of racism in the police force is just as controversial as expected. It's a total ratings grab (especially breaking the story a few hours early), but still worthwhile journalism. I fucking love the BBC.

Incidentally, I can't believe we had a police officer who thought "Hitler had the right idea". Police chiefs are falling over themselves to express how outraged they are, and rightly so. This is clearly just the tip of the iceberg. At least I know that Chez will soon be along to sort them all out.

Unfortunately, this is the nation holding its police to a higher standard than they hold themselves. Britain likes to think of itself as egalitarian these days, but in reality it is still a deeply racist society, even if the expression of that racism is more subdued and subtle than in the past. Britain needs to take a good look at itself and work to eradicate racism across the nation, not merely in the police force. However, I wonder if any institution in the country could stand up to this sort of scrutiny?

I like this album, lots. It makes me bounce up and down and want to go dancing, immediately. And sure, songs that do that aren't too rare -- maybe one or two are released every month. It's just rare to find seven of those songs all on one album :-)

Right, time to put this album on permanent repeat until I know every word and breakbeat by heart...

There is growing speculation around the web that Google is broken, including from the most authoritative of sources. The evidence is all over the place, but Google remains tight-lipped about the problem, possibly in light of an upcoming IPO but more likely because they simply don't want to admit that the single most-used technology service in the world is broken.

So what's broken, and how is it broken? Well, there are now loads of discovered search word combinations that produce big counts of results, but don't actually list them (first discovered by eager GoogleWhackers). This seems to have been a poorly-designed patch introduced to combat people who are creating link farms and otherwise trying to cheat the index: by blocking them, it also blocked everything useful.

However, more serious problems lie underneath. The evidence indicates that Google has a theoretical size limit of 4.1 billion pages because of the way it indexes pages, and that efforts to keep results relevant (a "freshbot") has reserved 500,000 of these index numbers, lowering that limit to 3.6 billion -- a number, based on previous growth trends, that Google should be hitting right around now. Evidence is mounting that Google is producing workarounds to this problem rather than go through the painful process of re-coding from their entire code base (which is necessary in the case of such a fundamental limit), producing a "supplemental" index, although it may be that the supplemental index is simply a patch until they finish the re-coding, which it's been speculated could take up to a year to complete. In the meantime, even moderately heavy users like myself have noticed that Google's results have been bizarre and unreliable recently, a lot like Yahoo! and Infoseek results in the bad old days of search.

All those links above are full of people speculating on the technological side of things, but what about the user side? Google has become fundamental to the way people use the web: people have become used to the power of an engine that has almost single-handedly solved the problem of universal information access -- it's quite hard to think of things that Google can't tell you something about. So what happens if it turns out Google doesn't scale? Having become used to the godlike power of Google, what will we do without it?

What do you do when god is broken?

Early sunday morning, while I was asleep and failing to notice the beginning of daylight savings time, I dreamed that I went to a pub on Oxford street with some friends (I can't remember which friends), but my credit card behind the bar, grabbed a megaphone (one was conveniently placed nearby) and announced: "everyone: drinks are on me!" At first people rushed to the bar and ordered drinks as normal. Then the barman realised that if I was paying for everything for everybody, it'd be quicker and easier to let people just grab what they wanted, so he just started placing handfuls of bottles on the bar and let people help themselves. Then it got totally out of control as people poured into the bar, pushing en masse into the VIP section (which was roped off) and continuing the party. In the ensuing melee, I grabbed my card from behind the bar and my friends and I snuck out again.

Saturday was pretty much excellent. I met up with Mary and Kiara for coffee, then lunch, and then the Tate, punctuated by emotionally-charged calls to and from our parental units (for entirely unrelated reasons). The current exhibition in the main hall of the Tate is amazing: there's a huge "sun" light on one wall of the room, several metres across, spilling warm orange light across the room, which is filled (accidentally or intentionally) with a haze of water vapour. The sun is bisected by a giant panel of mirrors which cover the ceiling, turning the entire roof of the tate into a giant mirror. This in itself is not that exciting, but what is fascinating is the reaction this strange environment causes in people. The giant mirror on the ceiling is great fun: people instantly realise that they can see the entire room by looking up, so everyone lies down on the floor, waving and laughing at the people hanging from the ceiling hundreds of feet above them. People spontaneously line up to form geometric shapes, stars and letters, and the ceiling becomes a completely separate work of ever-changing, human art. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but it's beautiful. The side effect of this mirror-play is that, of course, when you first walk into the room, you see a giant sun -- and a room full of people who appear to be sunbathing. This is disconcerting and fascinating, as if we have some deep primitive instinct when faced with the sun to lie down and worship in front of it.

The tate trip was followed by a cinema trip to see Mystic River, which is full of Oscar-worthy, "powerful performances", five stars, blah blah blah. However, it wasn't an entertaining movie -- it was powerful, and well-acted, and had a good plot, but nothing really happened: no conclusions were reached, no point made. It was just sort of sad. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it's just not to my taste. I guess I'm just a philistine -- I don't mind movies having messages, but it's fine if they don't. What I really dislike is movies where you have to analyse the film to find out if there even is a message -- and Mystic River is that kind of movie.

After the movie Mary and I met up with Tim, Justin, Robbie and a swarm of drunken American thespian girls for a truly random evening -- starting in a bizarre goth bar with Addams-Family themed shots and toilets which played spooky sound effects, but which played Ash and Sean Paul in the main bar. Mary then took her leave and we embarked on an hour-long search of Soho for a club called Mezzo, which the girls had visited once but had no clear recollection of how to find. There was no cover charge to get in, but the main dance floor involved a cover charge, which we cunningly avoided by taking the elevator instead of the stairs. The music was reasonable though, and we left at one for an hours-long wait for buses at Oxford Circus. It would have been cold had there not been someone to snuggle; I was lucky.

I'm Jean-Luc Picard! Woohoo! Kick ass! :-) He also comes with a quote which is extremely in tune with me:

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."

Incidentally, this quote is interesting for another reason. It is generally quoted as being spoken by Captain Picard, in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called The Drumhead. However, in the show he's quoting a judge, Aaron Satie, who is also a fictional character from the Star Trek universe. So whose words are these? It's interesting since Star Trek is a very geeky series, and as I've mentioned before, the sentiment behind this quote seems to be an unspoken truth in the geek subculture, so universally accepted that it's not even considered remarkable. Where did this meme come from? And why is it that geeks find it so self-evident, while people with other life experiences find it less compelling? I'm going to write more about this, sometime...

Cross-posted to Gay Geeks.

Will Davies of the fascinating iSociety research project is an enormously clever guy, with some really interesting things to say about ICT's effects on society and where we're going. In his most recent post, based on an absolutely brilliant lecture he gave, he decides that we are moving from the information age to the communication age:

The internet ends the information age, because it makes information ubiquitous. What is now scarce and difficult is achieving meaningful relationships, having kids, falling in love. Precisely because we now find this so bloody complicated, it is these activities that now define our era.

In the industrial age, we went from it being very difficult to manufacture stuff to making it extremely easy. A raft of key innovations -- automation, mass production -- made it easy and cheap to produce goods, an activity that used to be hard and expensive, and led to vast changes in the way we live and work, our economies and our societies. It didn't happen overnight, and some of the changes -- urbanization, for instance -- were not really related to the main effect of cheap goods, but were simply a side effect of the labour requirements demanded by the new technologies.

We are now in the information age: new technologies have suddenly made access to information -- formerly difficult, and expensive -- both easy and cheap. It's hard not to believe this is going to change our society just as much as the industrial revolution, and I even think it will probably happen on a similar timescale. It's hard to remember now, but the industrial revolution was actually pretty damn fast -- 70 years is all it took. I think it will be at least fifty years before we can say the information revolution is underway, and in that time there will be many opportunities and failures. And yes, a lot has happened in the last 10 years of the information revolution, but that doesn't mean it's over: it just means the changes are really going to be huge when they happen.

It's difficult to say exactly how the information revolution now underway will change us. The industrial revolution gave us goods, which we didn't have before. Then as it matured it began to concentrate on giving us better goods, and giving us more choice of goods. The information revolution has already given us more information: it's a safe bet that where room for innovation now lies is in providing us with better quality information, and more choice of what information we consume. The Industrial introduced the "brand name" for manufactured goods -- you'd buy a product if you'd bought a good product from the same company, and you'd buy a replacement from the same company if it was of good quality. Will we get "brand names" for information? If so, it looks like those are already beginning to emerge -- both from the media, such as CNN and the BBC, and from fresh starters like Google, Yahoo and even Amazon.

What will happen is the mass production of information. At the moment we find data laboriously, marshall it together, and produce information like reports and statistics -- we can do it well, and produce intelligent, useful stuff. This is like a fine craftsman gathering his raw materials and slowly putting together a barrel or a cart. What we're beginning to see is people who craft barrel-making machines instead, and then sell barrels by the truckload. Google's information-barrels, like the first manufactured goods, are clearly inferior to the hand-made kind. They're also a hell of a lot cheaper, and that will drive money into the hands of those who produce them, and they will eventually put that money into making better barrels.

So think about what information goods you make or buy, then zoom out: make a machine that makes them instead. It will be a lot harder, but once you've done it, you will leave everybody else standing in your dust.

Cross-posted to Gay Geeks.

Hot on the heels of my earlier question about why it is that geeks all seem to have an instinctive desire for the freedom of information, Eric S. Raymond has proposed a logo for hackers (he uses "hacker" in roughly the same sense that I use the word "geek"). It seems people don't like it much, and I have to say it's intellectually okay -- the pattern from the Game of Life is a good idea -- but it's just not satisfying like Tux and the BSD Daemon are. We don't need a logo, we need a mascot. And mascots need to be cute, and modifiable -- a logo is way too corporate and unchanging.

However, the interesting part comes with the accompanying How To Be A Hacker guide (and a more cringeworthily-titled document you won't find today). Specifically, ESR states that a fundamental hacker belief is that Freedom Is Good:

Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing — they only like `cooperation' that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults. And you have to be willing to act on that belief.

Slate is running an absolutely fascinating article about the economics of suicide, full of interesting statistics. Did you know that 3% of Americans have attempted suicide? There are more than 1700 suicide attempts every day. And more bizarre still, an unsuccessful suicide attempt raises your income by 20% compared to those who did not attempt suicide. What the hell?

This time an American tabloid has exposed Kobe Bryant's accuser in a rape case that is receiving massive levels of publicity in the USA. Salon is having a great time playing the I-know-something-you-don't-know game that "respectable" news outlets play in these circumstances, in order to hold the attention of readers. Cue the usual arguments about whether or not the accuser's name should be published, right? Except in this case the Globe published not only the accuser's name (in half-inch type on the front cover) but also ran a full-colour picture of her in a sexually suggestive pose (taken long before the accusation). Cue a whole new set of arguments, like: this is why rape victims are afraid to come forward. But Ellen Levine, of Good Housekeeping magazine had this to say:

"Why does the man get drawn and quartered while the woman is garbed in a journalistic burka?" she asked. "I'm not saying that I know the answer. Just that I think it's a timely question. And of course the Globe's going to choose a picture that's racy. And if it sells very well they'll be doing a lot more of it."

It's not quite a mirror of the UK situation -- we don't reveal either name -- but the issues are the same.

Oh, and in other news, I got yelled at today for blogging while at work. So expect updates later in the day. Hi, Simon!

On the whole - with the exception of occasional terrifying statements by Oliver Letwin, the only things they do that get any press or interest from the public have been their bi-weekly attempts to commit televised hari-kiri.

-- Tom Coates on the Conservative Party. Hehe.