Fearmongering and word games

The media has been all a-twitter about a new report entitled Extensive usage of ‘Web 2.0’ sites opens new business data leakage risks. My first thought was “WTF does this have to do with Web 2.0?” (And of course my second thought was “Oh no, here with go with that stupid Web 2.0 meme again…”) Fortunately Alec has fisked this comprehensively, by playing the word substitution game. As The Who might have put it, “Meet the new vulnerability/Same as the the old vulnerability.” Or perhaps not. Anyway….

The opiate of the masses….

Matthew Parris shares my indignation:

A nun has apparently been cured of Parkinson’s disease through writing the name of John Paul II on a piece of paper.
[…]
Where are you, intelligent Christians? Where is your voice, your righteous anger? Where is your honest contempt for this nonsense? Take that claimed recent miracle, for instance. I know lots of nice, clever Catholics — friends, thoughtful men and women, people of depth and subtlety, people of some delicacy, people who would surely cringe at the excesses of Lourdes. Do they believe that John Paul II may have cured this nun from beyond the grave? […] I have a theory about their reticence. I think they know this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter. And they may be right. But what a melancholy conclusion: that the thinking parts of a religion should be almost extraneous to what moves it; far from the core; just a little fastidious shudder; a wink exchanged between the occupants of the reserved pews.

Of course it is these “occupants of the reserved pews”, these representatives of “the thinking parts of a religion”, who excoriate Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris for the “crude” conception of God which they attack. “Dawkins is merely betraying his ignorance of the sophisticated aspects of theology,” they sneer. “If he is going to criticize religion, he should engage the best arguments, and not these crude populist forms.” But their silence in the face of arrant superstition exposes their hypocrisy. Either they disbelieve this nonsense, in which case they should join the secular world in calling it by its proper name, or they actually believe it, in which case their criticisms of Dawkins are inexcusable. Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

At Ignite

Excellent scene. The paper aeroplane contest was fiendishly difficult… More anon.
[Later, back home.]
The format was excellent – two series of “Ask Later” talks, each 5 minutes long with the slides set to auto-advance whether or not the speaker was ready! The topics ranged from teaching CS in prisons to IT ops with the US Marines in Al-Anbar Province, by way of such things as running your life on Outlook(!), social network tagging, bee-keeping, choosing business names, naturopathic “health hacks”, surviving Lyme disease, getting skeptical about security, hanging with the Touareg, and optimising the fuel efficiency of aero engines! The full list is here. I guess that there were about 200-250 people there: a nice crowd, all ages and quite heterogeneous.
Two things struck me. First, a lot of my friends at Amazon would enjoy this. Next time, let’s mob it. And second, if I were told that I had to do one of these talks, what subject would I choose? That’s an intriguing question….
Here’s a phone-cam picture of the paper airplane contest in full swing. The woman holding the target got hit quite a few times….
UPDATE: The crowd was larger than I thought: 351, according to the Ignite blog.. Excellent!

Snooker to go

One of the British institutions that I miss by living in the States is snooker. Nobody over here knows anything about it; at least Americans have usually heard of cricket. So… no Pot Black on TV, no epic breaks played out while the opponent sits helplessly in the corner, and no snooker videogames. What’s an expat to do? So on my last trip to England, I visited a videogame store to examine the possibilities. They had a pre-owned copy of Sega’s World Snooker Challenge 2005 for the Sony PSP, which looked promising – the reviews at Amazon.co.uk are excellent. The only problem was that the back of the box had a “DVD Region 2” icon. Would it play in my US PSP? I decided to take the chance that it would, and bought the game. It turned out that it does work, and I’m rapidly finding that I have a personal time management problem with it….
😉
As I subsequently discovered, the PSP only enforces regional lockout for UMD movies, not for games. Printing a region code on the box was purely a scare tactic. I didn’t even bother to look at snooker games for the PlayStation, because I assumed that it would enforce lockout – but maybe that, too, is just an empty threat. Anyway, I’m hoping to replace my PS2 as soon as Outtastock.com shows that Nintendo Wiis are available!

Moving up the hill

After about 8 months here at Amazon.com, I’m shifting groups, and offices, and buildings. Up until now I’m been working in the Distributed Systems Engineering team, focussing on scalable middleware technologies. I’ve now moved over the the Website Platform group; hopefully the name is self-explanatory.
PacMed building, Seattle
In order to be close to my new team, I’ve moved from the US1 building (next to King Street Station and the Qwest Stadium) to the PacMed building, a converted 1930s hospital with a commanding view of the city. This means an end to my ridiculously short commute:

  • US1: Walk out of the Uwajimaya, cross the street, walk into US1.
  • PacMed: Walk out of the Uwajimaya, cross the street, get on a shuttle bus, take a 3-5 minute ride up the hill, get off the bus, walk into PacMed.

I think I’ll survive 😉
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I pinched the photo from a hit on Google Images; I’m not sure if the luxuriant vegetation is authentic or “enhanced”. I’ll add some of my own pictures soon.
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UPDATE: The view from my window, 3rd floor, looking south.

Distorting history because of religion

You hear a lot about “angry atheists” these days. Speaking personally, I see many more outrageous things being done in the name of religion today than there were 10 or 20 years ago. Take this story from the UK: Schools ‘avoid Holocaust lessons’

The Historical Association report claimed: “Teachers and schools avoid emotive and controversial history for a variety of reasons, some of which are well-intentioned.
“Staff may wish to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes.
“In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.”
The report gave the example of a history department in a northern city which decided not to teach the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework.
It cited another school which taught the Holocaust, but then avoided teaching the Crusades because “balanced treatment” of the topic would have challenged what some local mosques were teaching.

Sounds familiar? Change “history” and “Holocaust” to “biology” and “evolution”. Reasons to be angry? You bet.
UPDATE: The full study can be found here. Ed Braytron has also been discussing this over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and getting some interesting comments.

More on the Kathy Sierra blogstorm

Kathy Sierra, the writer who spoke out after a series of attacks and threats, and Chris Locke, the owner of the websites where the attacks were posted, have been talking, and have issued what they call Coordinated Statements. If you’ve been following this affair, it’s worth reading them. A couple of quotes – first from Kathy:

That my one post touched a nerve for tens of thousands of people shows just how wide and deep this problem is. People are outraged not just because of my story, but because it’s been a growing problem that’s hurt the lives of so many others online. But Chris and I felt that if we — of all people — could demonstrate that we could see past the anger, connect with each other, and learn something together, maybe we could help encourage others to have a more calm, rational productive discussion.

And from Chris:

Misogyny is real — and vile. Violence against women is wrong. It must not be tolerated. This issue should be explored and discussed, not swept under the rug, not rationalized away. At the same time, we need to look closely and carefully at the implications for free speech. […] Crucial as is the current debate about hate speech directed at women, it would be tragic if this incident were used as a weapon by those who would limit free and open exchange.

[Hat tip to Rick.]
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UPDATE: Tim O’Reilly has called for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct. As Tim Bray points out, this can really be boiled down to one simple rule: You’re accountable for what appears on your Web site. This feels right to me. A blog owner isn’t a “common carrier” or ISP, or anything like that.