Easter Stocking

My wife went shopping last night & bought the last loaf of bread in Christendom.

Yes, it was the night before Good Friday, & all through the shops, everyone was busy filling their trolleys like there was an oncoming apocalypse, rather than simply a day when the supermarkets wouldn't be open.
Why do we go through this farce every year?
I ask this of myself every year, & so it's time I asked anyone who happens to read this - which is like asking myself, but without the reflective bit.

Every year, at Easter, people run off to the shops on Thursday to stock up because they won't be able to shop again until Saturday. That's just a day.
I remember when I used to shop only once a week. It wasn't on Friday. I could cope.
Am I the only person who can either plan for shopping days in advance, or else not go shopping on one particular day?

What compounds the problem is that the supermarkets will specifically understock on everything but Easter eggs. They'll make a stupendous effort to get rid of their stock of Easter eggs, & will clear shelves of food so as to promote whatever they've had stored away in warehouses since last Easter.
You can possibly understand that the perishables - bread in particular - might not proliferate on the shelves, knowing that there'd be no-one to buy stale bread the day after.
This might contribute to the rush to get the last loaf of bread on a Thursday night, but to the point where there is no bread left?
It was Thursday - late night shopping - & there were several good hours of shopping remaining when the last loaf left.

On the other side of the problem, why do we continue to close the shops on Good Friday & Sunday at all?

It's all well & good to say it's a religious celebration, but the fact remains that we don't have a state religion & there is an increasing number of people in this country who are either atheistic or practicing non-Christians.
There is no excuse for laws that impose a religious observance on the populace.
I honestly don't care who eats meat on Good Friday - that's not my problem.

There have been many arguments in the past - often from unions - that having shops open at Easter & Christmas means that staff will be expected to work & not be with their families.
I put it to you that it's time for every Muslim part-time shop assistant to put their hand up & say "I'm free!" I'll guarantee Coles & Woolies would have more than a skeleton staff on hand to cope with those who would rather shop than spend time with their family.

Obviously, this argument equally applies to penalty rates in general.
If you want people to spend time with their families, then don't encourage them to work by paying them more on weekends.

Anyway, it's Good Friday. I've had my toast for breakfast.
The shops are closed. I'm bored.
I'll go read a book until I get around to some religious observance.

Life with Blow-Hards

I play bagpipes. Please don't hold that against me.

I've been playing with bands for nearly twenty years, it occurred to me, but bands are a social group of slow change - which is probably no different to political parties, Lions clubs, Freemasons, Toastmasters, or the Budgie Fanciers Association. Due to slow change, nothing "happens".
Everyone comes up with great ideas at committee meetings, or things that "need to be done"; we discuss (argue), vote (compromise) & do nothing until the next year comes around when you discover that the person delegated to look into the topic got so fed-up with not getting support that they left the group.

Over time, you get the same unshiftable bodies doing the same whinging & achieving SFA. Sound familiar? If not, join a group, because you obviously haven't been a member of one!

The thing about bands (pipe or otherwise) is that not just any fool can join - there is also a threshold of entry: you need to be able to prove that you can play an instrument or contribute in some way to the musical output of the group. Sure, it's not an entry exam equivalent to Mensa (which you can only sit for twice), because bands will always need drummers (which is how I started).

However, some proficiency is required before you get to perform in public, in general. This is where it gets interesting. Once upon a time, when television was a wonder you watched through a shop window & pubs closed at 6pm, bands were the only kind of thing you could do to entertain yourself (with your mother watching). It was rather impressive to say that you could play an instrument & that you performed for an audience - it implied talent. Now, people who can take photos of themselves are considered talented, so pipe bands just can't compete.

In those glory days, bands required a high level of skill & mastery of a repertoire before a player would be considered for a uniform. Once they were in the band, players had to hold their position jealously from the up-&-coming youths, hungry for their chance at local fame. There were rules & regulations to conform to, so that you were always on your toes, doing your best, keeping an eye on everyone else in case they slipped up & you could claw your way to the front rank.

But times have changed. I'd be happy to find someone with the smallest glimmer of interest in learning pipes & the tiniest potential for learning a tune. Players can be rushed into a band to make up the numbers, then abandoned to their own devices thereafter to keep up with everyone else (sometimes literally, in the case of marching up the street, as it takes practice to walk in step & play a tune).

The old guard - those who fought for the right to play in the front rank - shake their heads & scowl & talk of "the youth of today" (those under fifty) not being as spirited as "in their day". They point at the rules written thirty year ago as the standards to live by, & how it's so hard to find talented youngsters interested in carrying on the traditions of bands. They complain as they struggle to play one more tune or walk up one more hill. They will continue to do so until the day their pipes are ripped from hands stiffened with rigor mortis.

The real question is whether I'll be the one lovingly resting the pipes in their coffin as it glides into the furnace (crematorium, not necessarily hell), or whether I'll have joined the Budgie Fanciers by then.
I wonder if you need to have your own budgie ...

Robot Moves

When you say that someone is moving like a robot, you are trying to insult them - but you're also insulting robots. If you've never had the chance to build & program a robot (& I'll assume that's most people), you probably think of a robot as a "simple" thing - a machine that you just switch on so that it will perform its task.

Let's get realistic here - a robot is not a simple thing. It's a complex machine. For that matter, when we think of "simple" machines, how much do you know about how they work, or how to work them? Let's look at a few old classics - a spinning wheel & a steam engine.
These are both "simple" in their concept. I could get you to draw them, but not to draw one well enough for a Martian to build one.
For a spinning wheel, you pump your foot up & down & hold some wool while the wheel pulls it out into yarn ... simple! Have you tried to do it? Could you build one yourself?
What about a steam engine - it's just a matter of heating up water to create steam to make a piston rise & fall, right? How hard is that? Really?

It's usually not even the design of the machine that makes for efficient outcomes - a good yarn spinner is like an artist, creating perfectly usable balls of wool at break-neck speed. A good engine driver knows exactly what pressures are needed to run their engine smoothly - what temperatures, type of fuel, etc.

Yet we take such simple machines for granted & say that we, sophisticated humans that we are. can do amazing things with machine. No, WE don't - we know people who can do such things.

Robots are the same - just with more complexity. They have more moving parts, more capability, possibly a wider range of application. If I give you a robot, it's an oversized paperweight, because you don't have a clue how to even get it switched on. Forget SciFi movies, because the people who write scripts know as much as you do.

So, if a robot actually takes a lot of effort to get to do something useful - & can only do something if you put in a lot of effort, then calling someone a robot means that they must be putting in a lot of effort to achieve a task. It must mean that they are doing things very precisely - following a plan that has been critically designed to achieve a very specific goal (which is measurable), most likely with feedback to ensure that environmanetal impacts on the plan are dealt with in real time, or at least recognised.

Anything less than this is not a robot - it's nothing more than letting a child loose with a spinning wheel & expecting that they won't simply put their kingdom to sleep for a hundred years.

I think that if people really moved like robots - thoughtfully following a plan, with feedback loops to cope with micro-variations on their projected path to a desired & measurable outcome - then the world would probably be a better place.

It may take all of the random fun out of life, but at least you wouldn't have to keep dodging people who are staring at their mobile phones apparently with no idea of where they are or where they're going.

Locate & Annoy

I was about to google something this morning when I noticed at the bottom of the page "<Nearby suburb> NSW - From your phone (Location History)" & it made me angry. Forget about the fact that I was using my desktop computer at home, but my phone history was being used to locate me. What really annoyed me was that <Nearby suburb> is not where I live - in fact, it's over the ridge in a much less salubrious part of town.

I have been demographically downgraded by google.

They're not the only ones - the weather app on my phone thinks I'm in <Other nearby suburb> & keeps giving me their weather.

For years, I have laughed at people in certain inner-city suburbs where boundaries divide streets & people "lie" about which side they're on. The post office has been dealing with these problems for years. Then there's the vanity suburbs, the ones that only exist in the minds of residents, that councils & governments just think of as pseudonyms for the "real" suburb.

But here I am, living in a real suburb with quite distinct boundaries - sure, we don't have a post office or church or school, but we're definitely not a part of <Nearby suburb>. In fact, it's an entirely different scenario - <My suburb> is obviously a better suburb if you look around the area. Everyone I know (not just the neighbours) agree that <My suburb> stands out as a distinctly better place. People pay good money to move to <My suburb>.

It's not just that they don't build houses like this in other suburbs in the area, & it's not that the block sizes are generous compared to the new estates. There is a distinct feel of better-ness throughout, with people putting in a genuine effort to differentiate themselves from those in <Nearby suburb>.

Don't get me wrong, we don't look down on them ... well, from the top of the ridge, we do. What I mean is, we accept that there is a place for people like us in <My suburb> & a place where people like them can live their lives in <Nearby suburb> & we get along peacefully. We mind our own business. We see each other at the shopping centre - admittedly from the distance of different shops. We watch the same New Year's Eve fireworks - although I can see them from upstairs. We all have barbecues, just with a different cut of meat.

We are a community across the area.

So, why can't Google understand this simple distinction? How can I be branded as living in <Nearby suburb> from the comfort of my own home? This is not an issue of privacy, it's an issue of publicity.

Don't Leave Home

I moved into this area just on four year ago. It doesn't matter where "this area" is, except that it was an almost spur-of-the-moment fall-back position on the other side of the city relative to where I'd always felt "at home". In doing so, I (we, in fact - the whole family) tried to make this area home.

I don't mean in the traditional sense of being so close to your neighbours that you walk in through their back door, although we're on friendly enough terms, but other things like looking for activities in the local area, rather than going a long way to a slightly better park, for example. We always think about hiring a local hall for big events.
We encouraged friends who were thinking of moving to come out our way, & the network that we've built has meant that over that time four of us have moved house (again) & not left the area, while more move in.

It's still the case that I don't work anywhere near here - that's unlikely to change, but home is not just the place to come back to after work. It's where I live.

I've become more involved in the local parish. I've never really had a sense of belonging associated with a church that hasn't been as a direct result of my family before. When we moved house two year ago, it was obvious that we wouldn't change to the slightly closer parish church. We thought about it, but didn't act on it. It's not that we've got a lot of friends who attend the same service, even, but we have a sense of belonging where we'll see people in the local shopping mall & will recognise them - have no idea who they are & have never spoken to them - but feel that they are a part of our community.
We do like the priests, no question, but it's the belonging to the place, rather than any loyalty to people, that makes us a part of that community,

Also, there's the band, for me. I feel a commitment to my band, even though it's going through some turbulent times. I don't feel as though I owe the other members to hang around. I just feel as if it's "my band" now. It plays in "my area". As long as I'm still enjoying it, there's no reason to even contemplate another band.

When we moved two year ago, we had a five-year plan in our heads - mostly around what to do when our daughter reaches school age. We already have our fall-back position - the parish school. As time passes, there is less of a "need" to move, to change what we have. We have come to that point of belonging - not through a long association with the area, but simply with being here & being aware of our relationship with the place.

This sense of community is what I believe most people lack in modern society. It's not just about knowing your neighbours, it's about knowing your area, the wider community. You don't have to force your kids to play with the neighbours' kids, but just knowing their name, waving to them (especially the ones along the street as you drive past), realising that you share an address, makes for strong ties.
Once you have formed that relationship, then you've got a lot more to lose when you think about moving. You ask yourself deeper questions about what you gain by crossing the city. You have to think about building new relationships. If people move too often or too far, then they either don't bother going through that relationship building, or don't try hard. That's where we're losing out.

Being a community is not about knowing the individuals around you & being sad to see friends move on, but it's about loving the area that you live in, & sharing that with everyone who comes along after.

He Made Her Duck

A friend of mine with an interest in linguistics used to teach an intro to natural language processing to undergraduate IT students. Her first example was the difficulty of understanding the sentence made up of the four words in the title of this blog entry. When she first spoke the sentence, the room broke up with laughter - she'd just discovered another sense she hadn't considered: its absurdity.

I don't want to go through all of the possibilities of context, reference, emphasis, tone, & non-verbal cues, but suffice to say that those four words can probably produce twenty meanings.

Just a simple comparison of similar scenes ...
A group of mixed gender ("he" & "she" are present with witnesses). Someone, I shall call them "the accused" mutters "HE made her duck", referring to a co-accused, say.
Same group, but this time the accused points a finger at one of the others & utters those fateful words "HE made her duck!" In this latter scenario, the speaker is not as likely to be the accused.

Same words, same intent, different tone & context, & very different results.

In these two examples, I have used capitals to provide for emphasis - trying to indicate to my audience that the word "he" is important in the speech (spoken as if stressed), or rather important in the sentence produced by the speaker (as important to the speaker).

This is a clumsy way of portraying the spoken word, you have to agree. Especially so if there are other non-verbal cues that come together to give the full meaning, or there are a variety of cues to give different meaning in the same sentence.

An example of this is identity. In a mixed group of people, our favourite sentence includes one female (she who has been ducked) & one male (he who did the ducking - whatever that may be). The question arises as to how to explain, say, the difference between getting one of the protagonists wrong & both.

In the former case, "HE made her duck" might be construed as meaning "you have the wrong ducker", but "HE made HER duck" might well mean that you have the wrong pair of people entirely, or that there was another pair of ducker/duckee involved somewhere in which there is general confusion.

My point is that the written language completely fails to provide enough cues to give an understanding of what the intention of the writer is.

We need such a mechanism, & I don't know how the written language has survived for so long without it. There have been some attempts to use capitalisation within words to show stress, but this doesn't work in general use. Similarly, capitalisation of the first letter of a word, which used to denote a noun, has dwindled to only the proper noun, so that doesn't seem to be favoured.

In literal writing, underlining works, but it fell out of favour when typewriters were replaced with simple text or messages, where underlining is painful. On that theme, however, the use of the underscore to mark a word or phrase as emphasised _like this_ just might be enough as the first step to standardising non-verbal cues in writing.

Then, once we know who made whose duck (or who made whom duck), we can get to tossing out the calligraphy that emojis have become & concentrate on the simple emoticons. *<8*)

Stop Writing Bibles!

Man's quest for answers for that ultimate question ("Why?") has led to many attempts to, essentially, write a Bible. I use that capitalisation with intent. Simply put, "bible" just means "book", but the word is so loaded in European culture (& elsewhere) that saying "bible" usually gets interpreted as "Bible" - a definitive book, the one & only, in a given genre.

What we're saying by applying the word "bible" to a particular book is that the book is the only one you need, in the way that Christians think of the Bible as the only religious text they need. However, too often, a book that is referred to as a bible is the work of one person or a small group, & they have worked over a relatively short period of time to produce the book - years, sometimes decades if there are collected works involved. Usually, the editor (of a collection) even shares the epoch of the works collected.

How can this be comparable to the Christian Bible? Unlike, say, the Koran, the Bible is a collection of works from many different sources over hundreds of years (from the time of St Paul's writings to the first collections of the Bishop of Alexandria & the Council of Rome) - & that's just the New Testament. The Old Testament had been mostly written from the fifth to third centuries BC.

That's a lot of collective wisdom, rewrites, rethinking, changing of basic ideas. Today, we still have a lot of trouble determining what chapters of the New Testament can be attributed to the traditional authors, & what verses have undergone changes when. This doesn't even take into consideration the various translations & copying problems that could occur over time.

When I learned to program in 'C', there was a book referred to as the "White Bible". It was a more-or-less definitive work because it was written by the originators of that programming language. There are usually definitive works for many such programming languages, but none of them hold the corpus of thought around how software is developed, or even where that language is best used. Each such book is merely the words of the language's creators, & nothing more. Hardly a "Bible". Barely a useful "bible", some thirty-seven years later.

Still, academic authors keep trying to write the definitive work in a field, & their readership expects nothing less than the definitive work to add to their personal library. Whether that's through hype on the part of publishers, or else laziness on the part of the market, what it means is that people's expectations for any given book are blown out of proportion & usually followed by some level of disappointment - or else myopia.

A book (or paper, or even a blog) should simply be seen as adding to the sum of human knowledge, not wiping out all that has gone before or else summarising the past. If an author has to criticise their predecessors to attract attention or else be controversial, then that denigrates the art of writing more than it affects the authors under attack.

If a writer contributes to society, rather than trying to dominate it or coerce it, then there's more than enough room for academic heretics to debate (not argue) multiple opposing theories on evolution, continental drift, psychiatry, the beginnings of the universe, quantum physics, the historicity of Troy or Atlantis, or even religion.

I don't feel threatened when I read a book full of ideas that don't align with mine - unless the book is badly written or sets out to attack someone else or their ideas simply for the sake of doing so. I like to read books that set out ideas that may be true, not that "have" to be.

Let me be an intelligent & discerning audience, not a a potential acolyte.