a convenient truth

A [remarkable video](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1246174515665636969&sourceid=docidfeed&hl=undefined) of artist [Janez Jevnikar](http://www.sprej.com) at work in Slovenia, using spray paints to do sci-fi scenes. I’ve never seen painting quite like it.

Attack on the death star [acted out with hands](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IbV7ad2xgY).

A scary [YouTube](http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yco1deXOzN8) of driving a Humvee in heavy traffic. Lucky there’s no Iraqi police eh?

I posted this mostly for Andy, since he has turned his judgemental eye on [Second Life](http://secondlife.com/) and declared it substandard. I don’t disagree with any of his points (which mostly revolve around 1. lag and 2. wtf do you do once you are there?), but I suspect the genre, as it were, has quite a long way to go and it’s kind of interesting to watch while it goes on.

Anyhow since I seem to be Google obsessed as it is, here’s [Arrington's interesting take](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/24/googles-metaverse/) on a Google Earth/Checkout/Stuff mashup, and how Google might be the ones to build a real virtual environment. They’ve certainly got the bits if they care to join them together. Maybe this is why they are buying hosting centres all over the globe?

This [article](http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/01/how_to_isolate.html) is NOT for the squeamish. It is from the fantastic Make magazine, and shows how to extract stem cells from a placenta, so you can freeze them for future use. Since stem cells are strangely sacred, particularly to republicans, it does seem quite a good idea to stash some away for your family’s future.

This just goes to show how dumb making laws about research is, of course. Within another ten years or so you are going to be able to make your own mutant human beings in your own shed. If you outlaw such things then only outlaws will have access to the technology. Is that really sensible?

A marvellous [article about Andre the Giant](http://www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/issues/10_06/10_06_andre_giant.html) in [Modern Drunkard Magazine](http://www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/index.html). Truly heroic behaviour, and I have known some heroic drunks in my time. Just check this out:

> Sixteen bottles of wine in four hours is a considerable feat, but it gets better. Andre proceeded straight to the ring and wrestled three matches, including a twenty-man battle royal. The 16 bottles of plum wine had no discernible effect on Andre’s in-ring ability. By the end of the evening, Andre had sweated off the wine and found himself growing cranky. He dispatched Hogan for a few cases of beer. Hogan hurried to do as Andre asked, knowing from painful experience that a drunken Giant was a happy Giant, and a happy Giant was less likely to fracture some vital part of an opponent’s anatomy in a fit of grumpiness.

This man was such a hero he had Hulk Hogan around *just to go buy him booze*.

I stumbled across this [book review](http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/060410crbo_books) at [kottke.org](http://www.kottke.org/07/01/the-best-links-2006), and it makes fascinating reading. It discusses the different types of explanation that you can give: conventions, stories, codes and technical accounts. It’s a much more interesting and relevant idea than it sounds, and it’s an excellent article.

It occurred to me that somewhere you see these differences daily is in newspapers — the real difference between tabloids and broadsheets is not their politics, or the stories they cover (although these do vary) but in the types of explanation they favour. Tabloids like stories and conventions, whereas broadsheets like technical accounts and codes. According to Charles Tilly this would show a difference in the relationship the newspaper has with it’s readers, rather than anything innate to the newspaper itself. There is probably more than a grain of truth in this, and I imagine it applies to other media too, particularly television.

I’ve been blog tagged by [Andy](http://www.offmessage.com), so here’s five things you don’t know about me:

The Blues Brothers

I’ve seen [The Blues Brothers](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080455/) 53 times.

You’ve Been Framed

While at University, and very skint, myself, Kevin Tansley and Tim Hughes decided to try and get a video on [You've Been Framed](http://www.itv.com/page.asp?partid=2799). We spent the best part of a week coming up with ideas for things to send in, and we discovered that staging accidents is actually really difficult. For some reason, Kev was the fall guy and he spent the week being run over, falling off things and being amusingly hit in the testicles.

We finally tried a scene where Kev leans out of a first floor window to catch something being thrown up to him, and falls out to land on the small flat roof just below the window. Ha ha. However, when we did it, he fell on the flat roof, rolled off it and fell another 14ft onto concrete, breaking his arm. We won the £250, and gave it all to Kev, whose sense of humour had been sorely tested.

Nightmare

My wife is a Chelsea fan, and we happened to watch a [documentary](http://macintyre.com/content/view/62/105/) on the [Chelsea Headhunters](http://nominated.homestead.com/MAIN.html), a bunch of particularly pernicious football hooligans. It was an undercover documentary, so the actual hoolies got quite a lot of coverage. One of them had the nickname “Nightmare”, and he was a really nasty piece of work. He was very violent, but clearly a cut above the rest as well. He was intelligent and led a whole bunch of these guys, choosing when they would fight and with whom. Quite a scary man. You can see a photo of him on the [headhunters website](http://nominated.homestead.com/FANSFUNNIES.html).

A month or so later I was back in Reading for Christmas, and I went out with some old mates from school, and who did I see in the boozer but Nightmare himself. Since I was utterly bladdered, I went up and had a long conversation with him about Chelsea, just so I could tell my wife that I’d met Nightmare. She didn’t believe me. Bah.

The Finance Minister of Burundi

I met the Finance Minister of Burundi, who came to our office on some sort of jolly. I was one of the programmers for their national lottery, which is why he was there. He wore an azure blue fez, which I have to say he carried off rather well.

Cyclone Tracy

Our house, at least the one we were living in at the time, was destroyed by [Cyclone Tracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_tracy) on Christmas day 1974, when I was nearly two. The cyclone totalled Darwin, destroying everything. We were out of Darwin for Christmas, so we never experienced the cyclone itself. We had to up sticks and settle elsewhere. My dad went back to find what he could of our possessions, which wasn’t much, but he did find our car, which had been blown more than two miles from where he’d parked it.

Now I get to tag other people. Unfortunately almost everyone I know has been tagged, but I’ll try with [Mark](http://www.monoman.com/), [Julian](http://limeandpink.blogspot.com/index.html), [Richard](http://davidsonhouston.spaces.live.com/), [Rowan](http://www.akester.net/index.html) and [Chris](http://deceptivelystupid.blogspot.com/index.html). If you’ve been tagged already and I forgot or didn’t notice, then I apologise

As I [said recently](http://adju.st/2007/01/love_the_linux_weenies.html), I think Microsoft’s maneuverings in Vista are targeted largely at a future where you get all of your media, most importantly television, via a computer.

Cringely has come to a [similar conclusion regarding Google](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070119_001510.html). It’s got some interesting numbers:

>Of course this doesn’t answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don’t. I’ll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That’s perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?

> The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.

Out of Microsoft and Google one is following a strategy of breathtaking depth and real vision. The other is trying to rob it’s customers blind with a bean counters miserable pennypinching. Guess which one I reckon is going to win?

Probably the largest problem with technology is not in the technology itself, but in people’s failure to understand it. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the world of politics, where decisions are made on the hoof, often in response to emotive issues, and rational policymaking has to follow slowly behind like a poor cousin.

One particular piece of misunderstanding keeps cropping up, and I suspect it’s going to become more and more harmful as technology improves. This concerns the statistics of miscreant detection. I first came across this with the implementation (alledgedly) of facial recognition systems in airports to spot suspected terrorists, which were all the rage a few years back. I came across it again recently, with a proposal from the UK government to imprison anyone who seems to have a dangerous personality disorder, whether they have committed a crime or not.

On the face of it, these sorts of proposals seem very tempting — the world is brimming with bad guys intent on murder and mayhem, so lets spot them early (preferably with cunning machines) and then bang them up. It certainly plays well to the gallery too.

Politicians are concerned only with the *false negatives* — people who fail to be detected in time, and go on to commit dreadful acts. They are right to be concerned about these people of course. I do not disagree with the idea of stopping people from committing murder, my concern is a pragmatic one.

The problem is one of statistics, and concerns *false positives*. A false positive is someone you detect as a terrorist, madman or whatever when in fact they are not. Whenever you apply a test you are going to get some false negatives and some false positives. The number of them you get depends on the accuracy of the test, the overall population size and the number of real miscreants in the population. As you will see, it is no accident that our criminal justice system relies on a level of proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.

In all of these cases, the same criteria applies — there is a very large population to test, with a small population of miscreants. For example, in one year ten million people may go through an airport but only 5 terrorists. Psychiatrists may examine 100,000 people with personality disorders in a year, but only one of them will go on to murder a passer-by with a samurai sword.

So, lets apply some very simple maths. Assume you have a test that is 90% effective — which is far better than any of the tests we have available for any of these cases. This means it is wrong 10% of the time, in either direction.

For the airport facial recognition system you have 10,000,000 people to test, and 5 terrorists to catch. So, 90% looks pretty good on the catching front — 5 terrorists, and you miss 10% of them, or 1/2 a terrorist. In a good year you catch the lot. Marvellous. Lets try it the other way around though. Of the 9,999,995 innocents you wrongly identify 999,999 as terrorists. This means in total you have 1,000,004 suspects to do further checks on every year. That’s 2739 per day to check. From my experience of operations rooms, an alarm that goes off 2739 times a day, and is almost always wrong, will be ignored. Even if it isn’t, that’s thousands of innocents held up for further checks, and hundreds of staff who could better be employed in other ways of making planes safer.

So, lets try catching some madmen. Cunning psychiatrists examine 100,000 people to find the one bad apple. Their test also is 90% effective. So, huzzah, we catch our dangerous nutcase. A secure hospital awaits. However, of the 99,999 crazy-but-harmless remainder we also think 9,999 are potentially dangerous, so we’d better lock them up forever too. That’s a lot of secure hospitals. Perhaps a small island would be more suitable.

The results are not particularly affected by the accuracy of the tests. If you make your test 99% effective, something which is frankly inconceivable, you are still locking up 900 innocents for every correctly identified potential murderer. However, the accuracy of the tests is what gains political focus — the criticism of psychiatrists was that because they hang around with the mad all day, perhaps they got used to them and didn’t spot the potential murderers.

An insulting claim such as that, engendered merely by poor mathematics, is bad — much worse would be the implementation of such policies to solve the problem.