Friday Shorts

October 28, 2010


The deadline for RICAing[1] SIM cards is almost here. What a waste of time and resources! If you were a criminal mastermind would you meekly register the SIMs in your own name and with your own address that you intend using to further your nefarious ends? Of course not. You would use one of the false identities you either stole or obtained from any one of the hundreds of corrupt officials who infest the Department of Home Affairs. I’m making a note in my diary to ask the relevant minister in a year’s time exactly how many criminals have been caught through the use of a RICAed cellphone. My bet is that the answer (in the unlikely event that it is given) will be a large round zero.

[1] Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (RICA). Shouldn’t this be RICPCRIA? Yes, but politicians are too thick to spell it. Errr, Rick prick what?
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An almost perfect description of warfare:

Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
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It is there some movement in South Africa that I can join to do away with the really, really silly public holiday system? Here’s what I think should happen: everyone should be given four ‘floating’ holidays which they can use whenever they like. These are to replace the current Easter and Christmas religious holidays, so Jews could take Passover or Hanukkah or whatever, Muslims could have their break over Eid, Hindus could be off for Divali, devotees of the Flying Spaghetti Monster could take noodle days and so on. All other holidays should be moved to the Friday or Monday closest to the date on which they occur, doing away totally with these ridiculous midweek holidays which just waste everyone’s time.
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And why can we not implement daylight saving time in South Africa? Or have two time zones, one for the East of the country and one for the West. Our time zone (UTC +2) is based on Pietermaritzburg, which is fine if you happen to live in Pietermaritzburg, but daft if you live (as I do) in Cape Town. In winter we have to get up and travel to work in the dark because the Sun only rises just before 0800. I suspect we don’t have it because our politicians are too dim to understand it.
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Euthanasia

October 12, 2010

Put yourself in the shoes of Dr Sean Davison. His 85 year-old mother, Patricia, was dying in agony from cancer. She was so desperate to put an end to her suffering that she had attempted suicide by means of starvation. Her son allegedly gave her a solution of crushed morphine tablets, telling her that if she drank it it would end her life. She drank and died, and now Sean Davison faces a charge of attempted murder for doing what most loving sons would do in similar circumstances.

Dr Sean Davison


I find it puzzling that the charge should be attempted murder rather than murder—his mother did, after all, die. But that isn’t really the point. The point is whether or not the state should intervene at all in cases such as this one.

There are two aspects that need to be considered: legal and moral. The state has a duty of protection towards its citizens, most especially the poor or the weak who are not able adequately to protect themselves, so the law cannot just shrug its shoulders and say, OK, then, your Mum’s got a tummy ache so feel free to blow her head off. But that isn’t what happened here. His mother took the morphine herself, voluntarily, after having had it pointed out to her explicitly that it would cause her death. (It should be stated at this juncture that Patricia Davison was herself a medical doctor.) A distinction is made between active and passive euthanasia; passive euthanasia being the withholding of treatment in the knowledge that that might result in death, and active euthanasia being a deliberate act, such as the administration of a poison, that results in death. In my view this case was neither because Sean Davison did not administer the morphine, he merely provided it.

I don’t think any sane person would argue that it is moral to force a person to endure suffering unnecessarily; there aren’t any rational reasons for taking that position. Before you cry that religious leaders take precisely that position, I urge you to reread the preceding sentence. I said sane and rational; priests, rabbis, imams and the other assorted riff-raff of the mystical realms are neither sane nor rational, and they know nothing of morality; they slavishly follow the dogma set out centuries ago by uneducated peasants even more ignorant than they are themselves. Indeed, if a pet animal contracts a dread disease we say it is “humane” to put an end to its suffering, but a human is supposed to linger for as long as possible and die in agony without any dignity whatsoever. The reason underlying the religious opposition to euthanasia is that they believe that people do not own their own lives; they are the property of some supernatural slave-master in the sky.

I take the opposite view, that we are each the ultimate arbiters of what is best for us, and we may do with our lives whatever we wish, and that includes choosing to end our lives if they become unbearable. The right to life is topmost in the hierarchy of rights enshrined in the constitutions of all enlightened states, which means the state should go to extraordinary lengths to prevent a person’s life being taken against their will (murder), but the other side of that coin is that a person’s right to take his own life should be as defended with equal vigour.

These events took place in New Zealand which is rumoured to be fairly civilized, the barbaric antics of its rugby players notwithstanding. (I don’t actually believe it exists, I’ve thought of it as a place like Lilliput: misty, charming, but wholly imagined.) The judge in this case should take into account the defendant’s motive in providing the poison to his mother. If he decides that it was to put an end to unbearable suffering, and was done in accordance with the wishes of the deceased, then he must acquit Davison because a moral act should not be punished even if it is against the law; instead the law should be amended to bring it into line with morality.

In that case Sean Davison should be released to return to his family as soon as possible.

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Papal Bull

September 23, 2010

The pope arriving at Heathrow, a somewhat stoned looking Boris Johnson in attendance

I was going to write about Cardinal Walter Kaspar today. He’s the one, if you recall, who said,

“When you land at Heathrow you think at times that you have landed in a third world country.”

Well, perhaps he does think that. So what? I don’t care what he thinks, do you? This is a man who believes in virgin births, talking snakes, transubstantiation and flying zombies; as a general principle I don’t value the opinions of a broken brain as highly as those emanating from a sane one. He also stated that British Airways discriminated against him because he was wearing a cross. Who would notice a cross around the neck of an elderly man wearing a maroon satin dress and a silly hat? I don’t buy any of it, but the kookie cardinal pulled out of the pope’s visit to the UK on account of an attack of gout. In vaticanspeak gout is a disease contracted from going around with your foot in your mouth.

But his boss, the pope, puts him to shame when it comes to moronic utterances. Try this for size: he compares atheism to naziism. Huh? How does the cretinous cleric square that circle? As a former member of the Hitler Youth he should know better than most that Hitler was himself a Catholic and justified his genocidal slaughter of the Jews by blaming them for the death of Christ. (Hitler seemed not to know that Christ himself was a Jew.) The Catholic churches’ shameful record in that horrifying chapter of history is well documented, so I won’t go into it here.

When did you last hear of mobs of atheists torching homes, setting off suicide bombs in public places or flying aeroplanes into skyscrapers? Or marching in jackboots and starting world wars? What? Never? Me neither, so what the hell is this imbecilic priest talking about?

Here’s another little gem:

“Secularism is a dictatorship of relativism which threatens to obscure the unchanging truth about man’s nature, his destiny and his ultimate good.”

These are words, and I recognize them as English words, and they are arranged in a fashion which seems to indicate that they are supposed to form a sentence, but an essential ingredient of an English sentence is lacking: meaning. These words mean absolutely nothing at all. It’s postmodernist drivel signifying nothing. Do none of the people who flock to hear this rubbish recognize it for what it is: rubbish? There is some light at the end of the tunnel, it seems. There were thousands of tickets to the papal mass in Glasgow unsold.

I don’t want to harp on the Catholic clergy’s hobby of buggering choirboys at every opportunity, but the pope said something rather revealing when he alluded to the subject. He said he was “shocked and saddened by the sex abuse scandal.” He was shocked and saddened by the scandal, not by the abuse itself. To him, raping children is OK as long no one finds out about it.

It’s time to define a term I’m going to use. When I say evil I don’t mean it in the sense meant by religionists: something bad emanating from a malign supernatural being, but in a secular sense of something that greatly increases the amount of suffering and unhappiness in the world. The Catholic clergy’s systematic rape of children is evil, and the pope’s milksop condemnation of it is evil. There isn’t another word that fits the enormity of their actions.

The pope’s dogmatic insistence that wearing condoms is contrary to the wishes of his god has been the direct cause of millions of deaths from AIDS in Africa and elsewhere. I find it very hard to believe that the pope cannot foresee the consequences of his actions, and that therefore he should be held responsible for them. So why is he walking about in freedom instead of looking upon the world through the bars of his prison (or lunatic asylum) cell?

You Muslims, Protestants, Jews and members of other cults should not sit there looking smug because you aren’t Catholics. Your brand of nonsense is just as conducive to evil as is the nonsense of the Catholics. The only way we are able to live lives untainted by evil is to live rationally, making moral decisions based on objective criteria. If we abdicate our reason in favour of some imaginary supernatural lawgiver we can rationalise any act, no matter how heinous. That’s why aeroplanes are flown into buildings, children raped and dance halls blown up.

Isn’t that a dictatorship of relativism?

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Book Burning

September 13, 2010


Why do we feel such an instinctive abhorrence for the act of burning a book? Last week the Reverend Jones, a fundamentalist preacher in Florida, USA, declared that he was going to burn copies of the Koran, allegedly in protest against “fundamentalist Islam.” (As though that is in some ways worse than fundamentalist Christianity.)

He joins the ranks of other noted book-burners down the ages: fine, upstanding folk like Adolf Hitler, Uncle Joe Stalin, and of course we can’t forget Mao Tse Tung and his “cultural revolution” which attempted to destroy Chinese culture in its entirety. Burning books goes back to the third century BC when books were burned by the Qin dynasty in China, and scholars buried alive for dissent. The practice is a long standing Christian tradition—the Spanish Inquisition burned the Koran wherever it was found.

Many people have commented on the Rev. Jones’s planned idiocy, but I haven’t read or heard anyone who actually gets the point. It is generally agreed that whilst burning the Koran is legal, it isn’t desirable for a host of reasons, such as: it will inflame Muslims and increase radicalism; it will be a recruitment wet dream for Islamic terrorist organisations; it will trigger retaliatory action by even moderate Muslims, and so on.

What they miss is the fundamental stupidity of the notion that you can destroy an idea by burning a book that contains it.

I think that what Messrs Hitler, Stalin et al had in common was a shared delusion that by burning a book they could make the ideas contained therein somehow vanish. This, of course, is not what happens. The physical book may be destroyed, but the burning (or banning) draws attention to the ideas rather than destroying them, and those ideas often go on to destroy the book-burners (which is what they were afraid of in the first place.)

The way to destroy an idea is to show that it is not true in matters of fact and its arguments are not logically valid. This is extremely difficult in the case of religious works because they are supposed to be the word of an infallible supernatural being. Pointing out that some of the “facts” revealed by the deity are provably wrong doesn’t phase the faithful in the slightest. They merely move the goalposts and assert that the questioned passages are allegorical and not to be taken literally, and logical inconsistency is an artifact of our poor human brains that are not able to understand the grandeur of God’s plan.

The only way to combat this sort of psychosis is to repeat the obvious to the faithful calmly and often. Perhaps, once in a thousand times, the seed of doubt will sprout and you can convert someone to sanity. I know this works because I was once a devout Christian (at about the age of 13) and now am not. Faith was defeated by critical thinking.

Perhaps we should inundate the moron Jones with emails explaining that snakes can’t talk, the dead can’t walk, and water cannot be turned into wine without the added ingredients of sunshine and a grapevine.

“Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” – Heinrich Heine

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Restless Nights

June 28, 2010

There has been a lot said and written about how to deal with a bedmate who snores, almost all of which is pure hornswaggle, hogwash, tosh, piffle and poppycock. “Sew a cotton reel into the back of his pyjamas,” say the grannies, to which everyone who isn’t a granny will reply, “What the hell are pyjamas?” Perhaps in some forgotten corner of the globe there is a sweatshop in which innocent polyesters are slaughtered and their remains converted into these useless garments, but I certainly haven’t seen any offered for sale for a long time. When I was a small boy at boarding school we had to wear these things, but as soon as the lights were out, I would remove mine and sleep naked as nature intended. “If he sleeps on his back, close off his nose and cover his mouth so he can’t breathe, then he’ll turn onto his side and stop snoring.” Or die of asphyxiation. Can you do all that and stay asleep, in any case? The whole point of a solution to this problem is that the non-snoring partner must be able to stay asleep while the solution is put into effect, thereby getting a refreshing night’s rest.

Scallywag, the light in my darkness and the balm of my soul, swam shnoz first into the side of a swimming pool when she was a little girl. A botched nose-straightening operation means that today she breathes through her mouth and the sounds she makes in the night closely resemble the sounds a C130 Hercules makes at full take-off power. I suffered many nights of tattered and torn sleep; nights spent in the spare room in a last-ditch attempt to stave off total exhaustion before I hit upon the solution.

I realised I had been looking at the problem from entirely the wrong angle. The snorer will snore regardless of what is done to her, short of murder. The solution lies in taking steps such that the non-snorer won’t care that the snorer snores, and there are two routes that may be chosen. The first is drugs—a narcotic of strength sufficient to render the taker insensible to the ambient uproar, or a mechanical barrier that will mute any sounds falling on the ear of the non-snorer. The first solution has obvious drawbacks in that it may cause permanent addiction, and may adversely effect performance on the following day. So I chose the second solution.

And here it is. Two small words that can save a marriage: ear plugs. These come in three types: mouldable wax, soft foam and flexible rubber. I tried the wax ones for a while, and although they have excellent sound-dampening properties, they aren’t very comfortable. Eventually I settled on the foam variety, which are so comfortable you don’t even know you’re wearing them until someone speaks to you and they look like a fish in an aquarium, mouth opening and closing, but no sound emerging therefrom. These can be quite expensive if you buy them in your local pharmacy or chemist or drugstore, but they can be ordered in bulk online for a very reasonable price. Two hundred pairs lasts me about three years because they can be used several times before they lose their elasticity and hence their effectiveness.

Scallywag is deaf, which is quite a major drawback because when we retire for the night she takes out her hearing aid and I put my ear plugs in, which means neither of us can hear very much. Robbers could break in and make off with all our treasured possessions without either of us hearing a thing. But that is a risk I am prepared to take if the alternative is a shattered relationship or being fired for sleeping at the office.

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ABC of Netese

June 20, 2010

A is for AFAIK: As Far As I Know. What follows is invariably false.

B is for BSOD: Blue Screen Of Death. Common on Windows systems. Those who have “upgraded” to Windows 7 may now enjoy a Beige Screen of Death. I understand that Microsoft have trademarked “Burgundy Screen of Death”, “Buff Screen of Death” and “Brown Screen of Death” to cater for future releases.

C is for Crapplet: A badly-written, buggy computer application, like MS Office.

OMG


D is for DFTT: Don’t Feed The Trolls. A “troll” is anyone who disagrees with you in any internet forum; if you can’t think of a logical response to an argument, you just label the other person a “troll”.

E is for EOL: End Of Life. In non-Netese this condition is known as “death”.

F is for FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. This refers to the deliberate spread of misinformation with a view to achieving some nefarious purpose. An example is Microsoft making vague threats of impending patent litigation against Linux businesses with the aim of dissuading people from using open source software. Uncertainty and doubt are tautological—one of them is redundant.

G is for Godwin’s Law: States that eventually, in any online discussion, someone will compare whatever is being discussed to Hitler or the Nazis. Once that happens the discussion is effectively at an end—no further useful contributions will be made.

H is for HAND: Have A Nice Day. Just as banal and meaningless on the internet as it is in real life.

I is for IANAL: This does not indicate a preference for some perverse sexual activity, it means I Am Not A Lawyer. Always followed by legal advice that is totally wrong and in some cases dangerous, such as: “IANAL but AFAIK(cf) if you plead guilty they can’t give you the death penalty.” Variations exist such as IANAD (I am not a doctor), IANACP (I am not a concert pianist) and so on.

J is for JAHOYFT: Just Ask Her Out, You Fucking Tool. What could possibly go wrong?

K is for KOTL: Kiss On The Lips. What it says, sometimes enlivened as KOTL(WT) (Kiss On The Lips (With Tongue)).

L is for LOL: Laugh Out Loud. Used by bores who enjoy laughing at their own jokes, or wish to inform their readers that their sense of humour is so deficient that they find something that is profoundly unfunny funny. Variations include ROTFLMAO (rolling on the floor laughing my arse off) and suchlike. Do not put LOL at the end of a tender epistle under the misapprehension that it means Lots Of Love—you will surely ruin the mood.

M is for MUSH: Multi-User Shared Hallucination. Netese for the phenomenon known for thousands of years as religion.

N is for NSFW: Not Safe for Work. Usually accompanies email attachments that are pornographic or otherwise iffy and that you would not want your boss to see. Or, to be more accurate, you wouldn’t want your boss to see you seeing.

O is for OMG: Oh My God. Used by those experiencing MUSH (cf).

P is for PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. A way of saying a problem is caused by user error without causing offense to the user. It assumes the user is too ignorant to know what the acronym means, which really causes offence if he does.

Q is for QFA: Quoted for Accuracy. Why?

R is for RTFM: Read the Fucking Manual. Aimed at those annoying individuals who are too lazy to figure anything out for themselves, but will expect others to go out of their way to give assistance. Yes, I’m talking about you; you know who you are.

S is for SWIM: Someone Who Isn’t Me. A short, snappy way of saying someone else.

T is for TANSTAAFL: There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There is, you know. You just have to know where to look and hone those mooching skills.

U is for UTFSE: Use The Fucking Search Engine. This comes into its own when you have told someone to RTFM (cf) and they tell you that the answer they want isn’t in TFM, then you tell them to UTFSE, Which is when they bleat that how to use the search engine was their original question, at which point you pack your bags and leave town.

V is for VEG: Very Evil Grin. Stay away from people who perpetrate this.

W is for WUBU2: What Have You Been Up To. Almost invariably used in conjunction with a VEG (cf). The correct response to this piece of impertinence is STFU & MYOB.

X is for XIT: Exit, used by people too lazy to type the letter “E”.

Y is for YTMND: You’re The Man Now, Dog. What you say to your dog when you want him to start paying the mortgage, mowing the lawn and so on. His response is invariably to ROTFLHAO.

Z is for ZOMG: An extreme form of OMG (cf) used by Moonies, Scientologists, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews and other assorted nutcases.

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English Patient

June 14, 2010

I think that what I think is worth sharing. In order to share my thoughts I must express them with as much precision and as clearly as possible, which means I must care about the language I use. I must think about things like spelling and punctuation, and how to set out the words in a way that will make the ideas they express easily accessible to the person reading them. I am not a natural stylist like Anthony Burgess or Bernard Levin, but I work hard to make things easy for my readers.

William Shakespeare


Alas, it seems I am a member of a fast-disappearing minority. Almost no one cares about how they present themselves on paper (or, and this may be part of the problem, electronically). I read emails, blogs, cell phone text messages, online forums and even professionally produced writing in newspapers and online that show that the writer has scant regard for the language which is his medium of communication. Here are some of the things that annoy me most.

Capitalization. This isn’t hard to do. Just press the shift key at the same time as an alphabetic character and it comes out as a capital letter. It is conventional to start a sentence with a capital letter, because the full stop that ends the preceding sentence is very small, and is easily missed. The capital letter provides a visual marker to the beginning of a sentence; reading text that omits capitals is harder to do. If you are too lazy to use the shift key on your keyboard, I’m too lazy to bother to read what you have written—it’s far easier for me to hit the “delete” key.

Apostrophes. Whence comes the insane compulsion to put apostrophes almost anywhere where they aren’t required? A beautifully framed sign in the ablution facilities of a former employer of mine reads: “Please remember to wash you’re hands.” A sign expensively printed and presumably displayed in all News Café franchises tells of festivities in which women will be dressed in bikini’s. The Compass group have a world cup competition in which contestants can win flat screen TV’s. Could these organizations not have had their copy proofread by someone literate before going to the expense of having them printed? Plurals seem to be where these horrible apostrophes show up most. Apart from the examples above, in the last week I’ve seen trolley’s for trolleys, Tory’s for Tories, even kitchen’s for kitchens. One candidate’s C.V. informed me that she had passed matric math’s. Needless to say, she wasn’t invited for an interview. Please, please, stop it.

Punctuation. Do not use multiple punctuation marks!!! Unless you really want your readers to think you are a moron??? This is the sort of thing perpetrated by adolescent schoolgirls and should be done by no one else. My email spam filter is set up to scan for this sort of nonsense and delete any mail that transgresses without my even seeing it. (By the way, those stupid animated bunnies, pussies and smileys you put in your mail aren’t seen by me either—I automatically convert all emails to UTF-encoded text only.)

Spelling. Deliberate misspelling is one of the most irritating abuses of language, and is becoming extremely common. I boycott such businesses as SellFone Warehouse, Cameraz, Shatterprufe, Shoprite and so on just because they annoy me and I hope that by taking my business elsewhere they will disappear. Spelling mistakes should not occur where a spell checker is available. Not checking text for spelling mistakes is laziness, and should be rewarded with the “delete” key. That said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that any piece of writing that contains a complaint about spelling mistakes will itself contain at least one spelling mistake. To forestall any triumphalist crowing occasioned by the mistake’s discovery, I must tell you that I have deliberately introduced a certain number of mistakes into this post. There are no prizes for finding it or them.

Fad words, jargon and clichés. A problem is never a problem down at my office, it is an “issue”. Anything large must be described as “massive”, even if it is a lighter-than-air hot air balloon or a massless strike action. All dimensions must be given in units of tennis courts or football fields. A long time ago is always “time immemorial” and there was always a “primordial soup”. I hate the ugly word “functionality” to describe what a computer program does. What’s wrong with “features”?

Abbreviations. Don’t use them if at all possible. Acronyms and biological generic names should be spelled out when they are used the first time—never assume that your readers already know what they mean. Mr, Mrs and Dr are not followed by full stops in English, Prof. is. The rule is that if the first and last letters of the abbreviation are the same as the first and last letters of the abbreviated word, then no full stop is used. Americans use a full stop always.

Plurals. Apart from the apostrophe problem mentioned above, I have noticed that often mistakes are made with words of Latin and Greek provenance. The plural of virus is viruses, not virii. Also octopuses, platypuses and so on. On technical forums a lot of people refer to the plural of box as boxen. I have no idea why except that it sounds vaguely German. I have made myself quite unpopular for pointing out that in English the plural is boxes.

Netisms. Space does not permit me to treat of this here; it can be the subject of a future post. A good rule of thumb if you are thinking of including a netism in general communication is to think of what the Bible has to say on the subject of having sex with your sister: don’t.

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Tummy Ache

May 31, 2010

Spam is usually a nuisance, but sometimes it can be quite informative and even entertaining. Take this example received from one of my favourite spammers, Antoinette Pombo. She specializes in hawking dubious health products on behalf of an organization called Fleet Street Publications. It was Antoinette—by the way may I call you Toni? Antoinette is a fistful too far for my typing; in return you may call me Grumps—who provided me with first intelligence of the Q-link and the low-down on testicular cancer. Here is the start of her latest dithyramb, this time in praise of an individual called Jonathan V. Wright. I’ll try to preserve her HTML if possible to give you the taste and aroma of the sheer idiocy of her outpourings.

Shattering discovery



Your
body’s worst enemy is…



Your

STOMACH


Suffering from Asthma?


It’s your
stomach…



Are
you losing your memory?


It’s your
stomach…



Are your arteries
diseased?


It’s your
stomach…



Or maybe you have
macular degeneration? Osteoporosis? Chronic Hives? Gallbladder disease?
Angina? Arthritis? Cockrot? Ingrowing Toenails?

It’s
all your stomach…


Here’s one simple
trick to tame your stomach and live healthier than ever


It goes on in much the same vein for another 2,000 words, so I won’t reproduce the whole thing here, but will share with you some of the more amusing quotes. I must state at this point that I had hitherto not heard of the good (or perhaps not) Dr Wright. In the course of my researches I discovered that he is the hero and blue-eyed boy of the arch-crackpot Suzanne Somers, which is not the right foot on which to be starting off. I am not qualified to know whether or not Dr Wright is a quack; I’ll merely point out that he is listed on Quackwatch with a red asterisk, indicating that he may very well be.

Toni begins by offering a series of anecdotes in which the hero, who is at death’s door, goes to see Dr Wright and within a few short weeks is totally cured. Take Hernando, whose legs were so knackered his doctors wanted to amputate. After seeing Dr Wright he was leaping like a hart (whatever that may be). Or John who had angina, or Sam who had macular degeneration, or…

All these people were allegedly suffering from hypochlorydria—too little stomach acid, which Dr Wright apparently knows how to cure.

After the “case studies”, Toni gives a truly boot-licking, sycophantic resume of Dr Wright’s career and qualifications:

“No other doctor of our time has crusaded harder or sacrificed more to bring the healing power of nutrition to ordinary people like you and me than Dr Wright.”

This is one impressive guy: he was awarded “the highest medical honour ever” which I must assume is an honour higher even than the Nobel prize. Well, Toni says it is, so who am I to argue? She is referring to the Linus Pauling Lifetime Achievement Award (LPLAA), of which I have never heard. I have, however, heard of Linus Pauling who is one of only two scientists to win two Nobel prizes, one for physics and the other for chemistry. (There is some speculation that he was in line for the Peace prize as well, but he was passed over.) In the latter part of his life he descended into crackpothood, though, advocating the consumption of staggering quantities of vitamin C.

A search of the internet reveals that the LPLAA is perhaps not what it’s cracked up to be: a google search for “Linus Pauling Lifetime Achievement Award” yields only three results, all of which are about Dr Wright. It seems no one else has ever been the recipient of this mysterious award, or indeed knows anything about it.

Then we are treated to the usual rants against “mafia-style pharmaceutical companies” and “the capitalist institutions that have a death-grip on our health and quality of life”, which Toni always inserts into her pieces. I’m sure she even sticks this stuff into her christmas cards.

And, at last, we get to the punchline. We too can be cured of just about everything if we subscribe to Dr Wright’s publication Nutrition & Healing which will cost a mere R57 per month. As is customary for quack remedies, Dr Wright’s snake oil is marketed as a substitute for not supplemental to science-based treatments, which means people will inevitably be harmed by falling for Toni’s nonsense. It doesn’t really matter though; if you’re dumb enough to buy this tripe, then you deserve your fate.

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Cyber Jiggery-Pokery

May 25, 2010

Sometimes we get ripped off in subtle ways. An example of this is the thumb drive for my computer which I recently bought. It purports to have a capacity of 8GB, but it really doesn’t, for two reasons.

Because the internal architecture of computers depends on switches which can be in one of two states, computer storage comes in exponents of 2. A bit is one such switch and a byte is an array of eight, or 2 cubed. Unfortunately, when computer science was in its infancy, it was decided to hijack terminology from the decimal world to describe binary quantities. Kilo in decimal-speak means 1000 (10 to the power of 3), but in the binary world it is taken to mean 2 to the power of 10, which is 1024.

Similarly, Giga in decimal is the prefix which means 10 to the power of 9 (1,000,000,000), but in binary it means 2 to the power of 30, or 1,073,741,824. In my view it is reasonable when purchasing a computer storage device to assume that the quantity quoted is a binary quantity, not a decimal one, but this is not what actually happens. My so-called 8 Gigabyte drive, which should store 2 to the power of 33 bytes (8,589,934,592) actually only stores the decimal quantity (8,000,000,000 bytes), so I have been short-changed by nearly 600MB, enough to store a full length feature film.

To be completely fair, this is partly the fault of the computer scientists who should have come up with their own terminology from the beginning; the other (larger) part of the fault comes from the hardware marketers who cynically exploit the ambiguity to gain a competitive edge in a cut-throat market.

We also get ripped off in blatant, unsubtle ways. This same drive contains files which are allegedly essential for the correct operation of the device, and are not removable. These files are not stored in an area in addition to the 8 GB which I am supposed to have; they are part of the 8GB, so they eat further into the amount of storage I thought I was buying and would have available for my use.

These files are Windows executable files which are of no use to me whatsoever because I don’t run Windows on my computer—the files don’t do anything at all, but take up a few hundred MB of space which I thought I was buying for my own use. Because it isn’t worth the manufacturer’s while to produce different versions of their product for different operating platforms, we all have to suffer because of poor Windows design, even if we don’t use Windows.

What can we do about it? Not a lot, unfortunately. I suppose we could approach the advertising standards authority and tell them that this thing we have bought isn’t what it says on the tin, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope from that quarter, or from other related agencies or consumer protection organizations. We just have to put up with it if we want to buy these things, and be aware that we aren’t going to get what we should be getting.

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Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.

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Fuel Follies

May 13, 2010

A few times a year I receive in my email inbox idiotic chain letters sent to me by people who, I think, hit the “forward” button without bothering to read what they are sending out. Here’s one that I received yesterday:

 

RAND MERCHANT BANK:
This is about petrol prices and an invitation to join the resistance. By the end of this month petrol prices are set to soar even higher.

If we want the petrol price to come down, we all need to take some intelligent, united action.

Last year there was a “don’t buy petrol day”-but the oil companies just laughed at that because they knew that we would “hurt” ourselves by refusing to buy petrol.

It was more of an inconvenience to us than a problem to them.
But, whoever thought of the ideas, has come up with a plan that can really work.
 
READ ON AND JOIN THE ACTION!!

By now you probably thinking petrol priced at about R7.00 is cheap. It is currently at +- R8.00 for regular and unleaded.

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations (the bullies like US and Britain) have conditioned us to think that the cost of a liter is cheap at
R 7.00 ,
we need to take aggressive action to teach them that buyers control the marketplace……… not the sellers.

With the price of petrol going up each day, we consumers need to take action.

The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their petrol.

And we can do that without hurting ourselves.

How?

Since we rely on our cars, we just cannot stop buying petrol.

But we can have an impact on petrol prices if we all act together to force a price war.
Here’s the idea:
For the rest of the year, don’t purchase any petrol from the two biggest overseas oil companies (which are now one), SHELL and BP…
(Local is Lekka – So buy Sasol / Engen / Excel)
If the overseas companies are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices.

If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of petrol buyers.

It is really simple to do!

Now, don’t wimp out at this point…keep reading, and all will be revealed as to how simple it is to reach millions of people.

I am sending this message to 30 people. If each in turn sends it to another 10 people (30 x 10 = 300)…and those 300 send it to at least 10 people 300 x 10 = 3000)
And so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people; we will have reached over 3 million consumers!

If those 3 million people get exited and pass this on to 10 friends each then 30 million consumers will have been reached. If it goes one level further, you guessed it three hundred million people!

Again, all you have to do is to send this to 10 people. That’s all.

How long will all that take? If each of us sends this e-mail out to 10 people within one day of receipt, all 300 million people could conceivably
be contacted within the next 8 days! Acting together we can make a difference.
If you’re fed up paying too much for petrol, please pass this message on.
COMMENCING  NOW  DON’T BUY BP /SHELL, go and support SA Brand SASOL,
our currency and economy will be strengthen by 65% in 18 months the capital will stay in SA.
Africa must stop feeding the world giants it must feed itself.

I cannot do justice here to the garish, primary colours and huge, teletubbies font sported by the original document, but we can try to deconstruct the meaning of the text.

The first line (and the title of the attachment) is Rand Merchant Bank. Did the author of this crap really think any reader would be stupid enough to think that this is an official communication from that organization? Why else put it in?

Then comes an invitation to join “the resistance”. Doesn’t that bring to mind an image of courageous heroes squatting in the night with sten guns at the ready, waiting to do battle with the dark forces of evil? And who are the forces of evil? Shell and BP, apparently. Why those two? Your guess is as good as mine.

We are told that oil prices are set to soar “even higher” at the end of this month. How does the author know? The oil price depends on the international spot oil price and on the relative value of the rand to the dollar. If the author of this drivel knows either of those two things with certainty, he or she could make a fortune and be able to afford as much petrol as he or she wants. The petrol price that we pay at the pump is not set by the oil companies, but is a regulated price set by the government (that presumably this moron voted for) and is a combination of the basic crude oil price, the cost of refining petrol from the crude oil, the total cost of transportation, the cost of the distribution infrastructure, profit for each company in the chain and various government taxes. And we can consider ourselves fortunate that it isn’t higher than it is—in the UK the price for unleaded petrol is £1.21 per litre, or about R17 per litre, more that double the price we pay.

The next paragraph exhorts us to take “intelligent action”. With absolutely no respect whatsoever, I must state that the author would not recognise intelligence if it bit him.

Any communication that contains multiple punctuation marks, as in “JOIN THE ACTION!!” should be treated with the contempt it deserves; it will certainly not contain anything worth knowing.

“Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations (the bullies like US and Britain)…”. The US and Britain are not members of OPEC. This cretin’s ignorance is really starting to get to me now.

“…we need to take aggressive action to teach them that buyers control the marketplace…….not the sellers.” How is it possible to walk on your hind legs and breathe unassisted and yet be so ignorant of basic economic facts? Markets are controlled by BOTH buyers and sellers, who come to an agreement on price. That’s what a “market” is. If a buyer feels the price of a particular commodity is too high he is at liberty not to buy it; if a seller thinks the price is too low, he is at liberty not to sell it. Some oil producing nations, mindful of the fact that oil is their only source of wealth, and that once the oil runs out they will (thanks to a disfunctional education system dictated by their idiotic religion) have to revert to their previous existence as camel-herders, try to make their oil reserves last as long as possible while realising the highest possible price for their product. To this end they agree amongst themselves to cut down production thereby causing an artificial supply deficit which means they can get higher prices. This practice is of limited effect because there are oil producing countries who are not part of the cartels and who are happy to increase their output to make up for the shortfall.

We are then exhorted to hit the oil companies in the pocket by not buying their product. Here is a factoid that may shed some light on the idiocy of this point of view: South Africa accounts for less than 1% of global oil consumption. If everyone stopped buying petrol in South Africa today and went back to walking and transporting goods by donkey-cart, the oil companies would hardly notice; prices would not be affected at all.

The author of this nonsense suggests that we are to boycott Shell and BP products in favour of those from Sasol and Engen, because they are local. Well, actually, they aren’t: they are merely distributers of fuel obtained from overseas suppliers including, you guessed it, Shell and BP. Some of Sasol’s petrol comes from their oil-from-coal plants, but this is a small percentage of sales.

Then comes the usual crap about how many people can be reached if everyone is stupid enough to forward chain letters to everyone in their contact list. The truth of the matter is that the author of this bullshit is too dumb to write a computer virus, but this is the next best thing. If you receive bullshit like this in your inbox, please resist the urge to forward it—the internet is already so clogged up with crap there’s hardly any room left for honest porn.

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Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.

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