Rainblog

Say hello to the sidebone

A friend posted a link to this picture, showing a leaf whose main vein has been deliberately damaged. The picture illustrates how smaller veins, arranged in loops rather than branching structures, ‘route around’ the damage, ensuring that nutrients continue to reach the rest of the leaf. Without this looped network of veins, local damage could starve parts of the leaf and cause them to die. (If you’re interested, Wired has a video giving more detail about a recent study of looped vs. branched networks).

The picture reminded me of another article that I had read recently. Researchers studying traffic flow through the Internet are finding that traffic increasingly flows through the edges of the network, instead of across the backbone maintained by major communications companies. Peer-to-peer connections between smaller players are starting to play a significant part in the movement of data across the Internet. The Internet has always been a looped rather than branched network to some degree, but the extent and importance of the looping may be increasing.

And as any leaf could tell you, that’s probably a good thing.

BUFAPOPO

In his strip If …, cartoonist Steve Bell once had a British police officer declare his intention to arrest someone under the BUFAPOPO law … an acronym later spelled out as “Bearing an Unsympathetic Facial Aspect in the Presence Of a Police Officer”. These days, the new police catch-all - replacing such old standards as “causing an obstruction” or “behavior liable to cause a breach of the peace” - appears to be “anti-social behavior”.

This, at least, was the justification given by the sergeant who arrested a photographer and his friend as they took photographs of Christmas decorations in the town centre. The Guardian’s coverage of the incident includes the full video shot by the photographer during his arrest.

I discovered this through a post at the Digital Photography School website. Almost as disturbing as the video of the arrest are the number of commentators who seem to feel that “The photographer was being a jerk. He deserved it.”

In fact, the photographer - and the police officers - are scrupulously polite throughout. Some of the commentators seem to think, however, that the photographer was in the wrong because he did not meekly comply when asked to identify himself. The fact that some of those arguing for unquestioning submission to authority are apparently from the United States - a country supposedly founded on the idea of individual liberty - is deeply worrying.

My own view is that if the police want to stop a law-abiding citizen from going about his business and require him to identify himself, they must provide a clearly expressed and obviously valid justification for doing so. If they cannot do so, I would argue that it is not merely your right but also your duty to decline. Mr Patefield obviously feels the same way.

The problem is that many police officers react poorly to any challenge to their authority. This incident begins, like many similar incidents, when an obviously young and inexperienced Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) - not a full-time police officer, but a part-time civilian volunteer - oversteps her authority. When the photographer politely declines to comply with her demands, she appeals to a regular police officer and the situation escalates. The officer moves quickly from the original shaky ground of ‘terrorism’ to the vaguer but more flexible charge of ‘anti-social behavior’, with the officer claiming that the ‘manner’ in which the photographer was holding his camera was ‘suspicious’. It’s clear from her own manner that she knows that the charge is bogus, but she cannot back down. Her authority has been challenged. She calls in her sergeant, and the photographer and his friend are arrested.

The really sad part is that the British police used to be so much better than this. On several occasions, I’ve seen British bobbies defuse potentially violent situations simply by a bravura display of calm and confidence. For a trivial situation like this to end in an arrest is an absolute failure of policing.

A good police officer could have ended the confrontation at any point in a way that preserved both the dignity of the police force and the rights of the photographer. The fact that it didn’t happen that way in this case makes me wonder how they’re training cops these days.

The will to believe

A little while back, I wrote a post about belief in global climate change, in which I argued that people’s willingness to believe in anthropogenic climate change was directly tied to their political - or perhaps philosophical and psychological - position. New studies from the Cultural Cognition Project seem to support that conclusion. Don Braman of the project says that “People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view”. Another member of the project says that “… the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values. If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way.”

Put another way, you can throw all the scientific studies you want at people, but if they don’t like the conclusions, they can’t hear you.

The package of ‘core beliefs’ associated with any worldview may shift slowly over time - it is no longer controversial to say that our world revolves around the sun - but if you need to orchestrate a rapid response to a pressing problem before it’s too late, you may just be out of luck.

Through the Uncanny Valley with gun and camera

Yesterday, my fun-loving employers took us all out to see James Cameron’s “Avatar”. Afterwards, opinion was sharply divided: some of my colleagues adored it, others felt it was “just awful”.

Criticism mainly centered on the story. I can’t decide if that’s a fair criticism or not. If you go to see an adventure film, you can pretty much expect that the hero will refuse the Faustian bargain, get the (giant, blue-skinned) girl, and overthrow the tyrants. (I hope I haven’t just spoiled the movie for you, but if you’ve actually been to more than two films in the past twenty years, you should have been able to predict all that for yourself). This is the basic plot of every action movie you’ve ever seen. More than that, it’s the basic plot of the Hero’s Quest, which is a tale much older than Hollywood. It’s Joseph Campbell 101. Yes, it’s predictable, but it’s also satisfying. We like to believe that people will do the right thing and win, when so much of our experience constantly tells us the opposite.

Given that basic vehicle, Cameron makes it move right along. The story may be built off-the-shelf from the same stock components used in every other big-budget action movie, but he rolls them out fairly fluidly. If you ever have to tell that particular story, you could take a tip or two from the efficiency with which Cameron gets through the necessary exposition, drops in the required number of interim victories and reversals, and roughs-out the standard characters. The plotline or the dialog aren’t going to win any prizes for style or originality, but at least it’s not the kind of jarringly preposterous bullshit you get from, say, George Lucas. It does what it needs to do.

It’s fair to say that he passes up plenty of opportunities to do something more interesting. The ‘resource conflict’ plot is a lazy man’s excuse for a story, and as science-fiction “Avatar” is not especially inspired. The alien Na’vi are not merely humanoid, but mammalian enough that the alien princess is straight-up sexy by anyone’s standards (I’d like to think that they considered “Planet of the Giant Blue Supermodels” as a working title for at least a little while before going for “Avatar”). And while the alien ecosphere is lush and lovely to look at, it’s pretty much just terrestrial rainforest turned up to 11.

You can wade through the psychological and moral depths of the movie without even getting the tops of your feet wet. The hero’s ethical dilemma - side with the humans and get rewarded, or do what he knows to be right at the cost of betraying his own race and condemning himself to exile - could have been the basis for a story with real depth and Sam Worthington does a creditable job of trying to convey Jake’s inner struggle as far as the director lets him. Ultimately, though, the choice is too clear-cut. The Na’vi, prototypical noble savages out of Rousseau via central casting, are too good and virtuous (not to mention hot), the humans too cynical and greedy. There’s no real question which side we’re supposed to be on.

Cameron can do subtlety. A fleeting shot of an unnamed soldier weeping as she watches the destruction her comrades have wrought is more powerful and telling than the stock antics of the film’s designated heroes and villains. The first encounter between the hero and heroine has a nice ‘everything you know is wrong’ flavor to it. But in general, he is unwilling to risk confusing the metroplex audience with any gray areas, and the story gets dumbed-down across the board. Even the film’s ecological message is driven home so relentlessly that it ends up by feeling merely formal.

Despite all this, and despite the fact that I’m usually the first to be contemptuous of lazy story-telling, I enjoyed the film. I enjoyed it largely for one simple reason, which is that the computer-generated visuals are nearly flawless. They are, quite simply, jaw-droppingly good. They are better than anything you’ve ever seen before in the theatre. I have trouble watching computer-animated films because I find that it only takes a momentary awkwardness, a movement that isn’t quite right or a texture that didn’t quite fit, to break the suspension of disbelief. “Avatar” kept my disbelief suspended for close to three hours.

It’s difficult to overstate what a technical achievement this is. “Avatar” doesn’t ever take the easy way out. It is massively, absurdly ambitious. Anyone can animate a space battle, where all the objects are rigid and sharply-defined. “Avatar” seeks to render a lush living world, where plants bend and water flows or falls and animals run and fly and scurry and climb. The sheer complexity of every scene in the film is stunning. If there was an Oscar for Attention to Detail, no other film would even need to be nominated.

The awe-inspiring thing about “Avatar” is that it pulls it off, not once or twice, but almost continuously. At times, you feel as if you’re watching a nature documentary. Moreover, it’s not only the scenery that works. The bulk of the action involves computer-animated figures (using motion-capture acting from human actors). Maybe using alien faces helped Cameron’s team to skirt the uncanny valley, but it’s still an amazing accomplishment. Three hours of watching poorly animated characters is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. The Na’vi feel real. Their movements are fluid and natural, their facial expressions are minutely detailed and convincing. You have to keep reminding yourself that you aren’t watching large blue actors, but digital creatures, born entirely inside a computer.

With so many years to work on the project, maybe Cameron could also have spent a little time coming up with a better story. But if your frustration with the conventional story keeps you from seeing what a truly amazing visual achievement “Avatar” is, you’ve missed part of the point. Cameron has broken new ground: when someone comes along who has a really good story to tell, they’re going to have a kick-ass set of tools with which to do it.

Peter Watts beaten, arrested

In a scene that could have come from one of his novels, the Canadian author Peter Watts has been arrested by US border guards and faces charges of assaulting a federal officer. Watts and his companion both deny that Watts assaulted anyone, but ‘assaulting an officer’ is the kind of charge that’s very easy to make and very difficult to fight. In such situations, even touching an officer can be labeled ‘assault’ and once the charge has been made, law enforcement agencies will usually do everything they can to ensure a conviction.

Watts is, in my view, one of the better SF writers writing today, and one who has yet to have the recognition that he deserves. While that doesn’t have any bearing on the question of whether he’s innocent or guilty of the charge, it does mean that my sympathies are with him and that I hope he wins his case.

Update: Peter Watts has posted his account of the incident.

Bigger than politics

The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia has been in the news lately, after a hacker broke into the Unit’s computers, downloaded some files and posted them to a website. The files included email archives, which were immediately picked over by right-of-center blogs in search of ‘proof’ that the Unit’s scientists were engaged in a conspiracy to falsify evidence for global warming. Email fragments that appeared to confirm this were quickly posted and recirculated.

RealClimate has already covered this better than I can. My own impression is that this doesn’t actually amount to a hill of beans. Rather than a ‘smoking gun’, what it shows can at worst be described as ‘scientists behaving badly’ (but very humanly). There’s a certain amount of bitching and fuming about their antagonists, some talk about how to present the data most convincingly, and some discussion of how seemingly contradictory results can be reconciled with the theory. This is reasonable enough: contrary to what some non-scientists seem to believe, scientists don’t actually throw out entire theories at the first whiff of apparently contradictory data. They reexamine the model and see if the new data can be reconciled with it. If it can, they refine the model and move on. If diligent study leads them to conclude that the data poses an overwhelming objection to the theory, that’s when they throw out the theory and come up with something new.

The shriller blogs have also made much hay of the fact that some of the scientists appear to have ‘doubts’ about global warming. I should damn well hope so. If you can’t entertain doubts about something, what you’re doing isn’t science. It’s faith.

What I wanted to write about, however, isn’t the CRU hack itself but the whole question of the environment as a political issue. My own feeling is that discussion of the environment ought to be beyond politics, but that’s absolutely not the way it is. There are few topics that are so politically polarized. Some conservatives and liberals might be willing to break ranks on, say, homosexuality or abortion or a few other topics. On the environment, they solidly vote the party line.

The party line for the conservatives is that environmental issues are largely not worthy of consideration. Anthropogenic global warming is either a trivial problem that can be ignored or actually non-existent. There is no such thing as global warming, runs the extreme (but common) view. It’s all lies, invented by the liberals and perpetuated by a monstrous conspiracy bent on using it as the fulcrum for a socialist power-grab. (That kind of thinking is commonly termed ‘paranoid’, but let’s not get into that).

For the liberals, of course, it’s axiomatic that anthropogenic global warming exists and demands our immediate attention. ‘Immediate attention’ probably means some kind of state intervention, accompanied by a lot of ‘Thou shalt not’ and the imposition of some hair-shirted austerity measures.

Why these positions? Why are conservatives so opposed to the mere idea, and why are liberals so ready to accept it?

My own belief is that it comes down to this: in broad terms, there is no free market solution to environmental problems. If we really are destroying our environment, the free market is not going to fix it for us. By the time the market responds, the damage is done. Even if the damage isn’t irreparable, environmental problems take vastly longer to fix than they take to create.

The existence of a problem that ‘laissez-faire’ and the free market cannot solve is anathema to conservatives and libertarians. It’s axiomatic for them that the best solution for any problem can be found in the market and that the proper response is for government to keep its hands off and let the market take care of it. Faced with a problem that apparently can’t be handled in this way, their only recourse is to deny that the problem exists. (At this point, you may want to re-read what I wrote earlier about how scientists handle data that contradicts their theories). If the problem of global warming exists, it calls into question one of the fundamental axioms of conservatism. Naturally, conservatives react by denying its very existence.

But could there be a free market solution? The classic free market response would be that if demand exists for a healthier environment, the market will meet the demand. If people want a world without pollution, without global climate changes and sea level rises, without ecosystem collapses and desertification, they will ask for it and the market will provide.

It simply doesn’t work that way. People are short-sighted and self-interested. If they can choose between two products, one of which is made by a company that is environmentally sound and the other of which is made by a company that rapes baby whales and dumps mercury in the rivers, they will buy the one that costs $10 less. Every time. Moreover, they will continue to do so until all the baby whales have been raped and all the rivers are full of quicksilver, at which point demand will cause the market to swing belatedly into action and offer up companies selling water filters and whale rape protection kits. The few people who do make the decision to consume ethically and choose the environmentally sound option - thus letting the market do its work - are derided by conservatives as ‘hippies’ and ‘treehuggers’. So much for the market solution.

Even if consumers did take a long-term view and chose to vote with their wallets for the greater good, they’d need to know where to put their money. The fact is that we have no clear idea about the environmental impact of our buying decisions and corporations have a vested interest in making sure that we remain ignorant. If you want, by the way, a documented instance of powerful interests conspiring to influence people’s perceptions and scientific knowledge about global warming, it isn’t the proponents of the theory that you should be looking at. It’s the large corporations that have paid out millions to friendly think-tanks and selected scientists to help them publish papers questioning the existence of the problem. Conservative outrage at this abuse of power has, so far, been muted.

Conservatives deny the idea of global warming because they have to. Why do liberals embrace it so enthusiastically?

I think the answer is that they do so essentially for the same reason. I don’t actually believe - as some conservatives do - that most liberals wake up each morning and ask themselves “What aspect of human existence can I bring under state control today?” But it’s certainly true that liberals are much more comfortable with the idea that a problem demands a collective or state solution. The idea of a problem that can’t be fixed in the marketplace comforts rather than horrifies them. When a conservative or a libertarian hears someone say “We need the government to fix this”, he falls on the floor, frothing at the mouth. When a liberal hears the same words, he says “Sure. No problem.”

Environmental issues support the belief that there are some problems that must be solved collectively and that may even require the nanny state to tell people “No, you can’t have a pony.” They validate the axioms of liberalism, so liberals embrace them. Conversely, they bring into question the belief that all problems can be solved by the market and that only the individual matters, that there is no larger whole to whom we are bound or responsible. They challenge the axioms of conservatism, so conservatives respond by denying them.

It could be argued that seeing an issue that appears to validate their beliefs has made liberals too credulous. They accept global warming uncritically because it tells them the story they want to hear, just as conservatives reject it because its conclusions are unpalatable to them. But that really illustrates the point that I’m trying to make here. The environment should be above politics. Conservatives and liberals alike should be able to do the intellectually honest thing and say “Never mind what my philosophy tells me should be true. What are the facts?”

Because if anthropogenic climate change is real - as the overwhelming majority of climate scientists seem to believe - then if we don’t put aside our political differences and do something now, we are all screwed, conservative and liberal alike.

When in Chrome …

I’ve just been looking at some of the coverage of Google’s ChromeOS, and it leaves me slightly bewildered.

The first thing that I looked at was a video demo by the Chrome project manager. In it, he stresses is that “all your data is in the cloud”. Does that mean that your ChromeOS netbook will be essentially unusable if you don’t have a net connection? If so, that’s a dealbreaker right there. Internet access is by no means as ubiquitous as Google might like to pretend, even within the United States. You could pay for an EVDO card, of course, but with plans starting at $40/month, the price of your handy-dandy netbook just doubled. Moreover, as anyone who owns a mobile phone knows, even paying $40/month doesn’t guarantee you a signal. How happy would you be with your present computer if the hard disk was simply inaccessible from time to time?

If using ChromeOS means that from time to time your netbook will become a lightweight, highly-portable brick, they aren’t going to have a lot of takers.

While I’m nitpicking, let’s take a shot at the aesthetics. ChromeOS looks like the Chrome browser, which is to say it looks like ass. I actually used the Chrome browser for a while as my main browser but I never loved the way it looked. They’ve gone in for the kind of pointless reinvented look-and-feel that you get when people who don’t normally write software have to roll their own. If you’ve ever used the bundled software that ships with a piece of hardware - a hard drive, for example, or a digital camera - you’ll know what I mean. Google has time to fix that, of course, but I wonder if they will.

A more serious objection has to do with the fact that the UI is essentially modeled on a web browser (for the very good reason that that’s what it is). Unfortunately, anyone who has tried to use a web browser to do real work for any length of time will have noticed that as user experiences go, it’s definitely second-rate. There’s a reason why modern GUI’s don’t look and behave like web browsers. Extending the web browser metaphor to the entire UI is a recipe for suck.

One thing that did intrigue me was a throwaway remark in the ChromeOS GUI concept video. The developer says that “when you log in to any ChromeOS device, you resume your previous session”. What’s not clear from the demo is whether the session is stored in the cloud, or on the local device. If it’s the former - and it might as well be, given that the whole OS has a cloud-dependency built-in - that could go some way to reconciling me to the cloud-centric nature of the OS. The idea of having a ‘virtual workspace’ that you can access from any machine actually has some appeal. (When I worked at Sony, I did some proof-of-concept work on an agent-based virtual desktop as a kind of personal skunkworks project: I still think it’s an idea whose time might yet come). I travel from time to time; I like the idea that I could sit down in a cybercafe, log in and have my private environment instantly there, just the way I left it. Currently, of course, that’s not such a great idea. Developing-world cybercafes all run Windows, which means that their machines tend to be a soup of viruses and spyware. Ten seconds after you logged in, the keyloggers would own your workspace. But one of the pitch points for ChromeOS is supposedly security. If Google could deliver on that, a ChromeOS-equipped cybercafe might actually be a place where you wouldn’t fear to log in.

One final cause for concern is that Google’s ChromeOS may be aimed at tying you ever more closely to the mothership: your ‘applications’ are, of course, GMail, and Google Docs, and whatever else Google comes up with between now and then. That’s an approach that has never made me comfortable, and not just for the reasons hinted at in this cartoon. I don’t like the increasing trend towards engineered-in dependencies on a particular corporation (Apple, I’m looking at you too). I want a computer to be a tool that I use, not a way for a large company to sneak a mini-mall into my home.

There’s an opportunity here for open-source. If ChromeOS does prove to be tied uncomfortably closely to Google, how hard would it be to build a similar lightweight web-OS based on a Linux kernel and WebKit? Make it truly open, so that the user would have free choice of which web applications they use. Some users would want to use it with open-source web-apps running on their own server, just to make sure that they really own their own data. Others might be satisfied with something run on a third-party service or even on Google. It doesn’t matter. But if we have to have web-based OS’s, let’s make them open the same way that the web is open, rather than having them tied to a single huge and increasingly pervasive provider.