Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in HairyEars' LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Saturday, July 11th, 2009
8:21 pm	A very geeky question Here in Darkest Somerset, watching the world go by as I await the arrival of battlekitty and pplfici ( and a few others from the Bethnal Green Aikido club ), I saw the barmaid testing a £20 note with one of those fancy marker pens that detect a fake note... ...Let's slip forward in time a few years: how hard would it be to issue an RSA public signature key on each banknote? Easy to implement in an RFID chip, harder in a DNA-based 'information ink' - or some other chemical substrate. What would be the benefits? Could we truly manufacture a forgery-proof physical currency? This is, of course, a fantasy: governments and their wholly-owned subsidiaries, the banks, want a central server to record every financial transaction we make; governments want to, because it's what they do; and banks because granular purchasing data is a goldmine for targeted marketing. And a traceless (but verifiable) medium of exchange undermines these sinister ambitions. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 4th, 2009
4:30 pm	Quick! What was that bird? Is there a workable online resource for identifying wild birds in the UK? Not the RSPB, it's flash-dependent and the images I can load on a phone don't give flight signatures, silhouettes and outlines -it's a study resource, not a field guide. I ask because of a close sighting of a bird of prey by the railway, coming into Reading: seen in silhouette from below with no coloration discernible, far too large to be a kestrel, distinctive tail - sixty-degree triangle but with an inward curve to the base, but not deeply forked like a Red Kite. Wings not as sharp-ended as a Peregrine falcon, but not spread or square-ended like a buzzard - although the outer flight feathers of most raptors aren't always splayed the way they're shown in illustrations, depending whether the bird is soaring, hovering, or in fast flight. Brief impressions as it swooped in a shallow dive and a very low-level 'strafing run' at a ground target were of tawny- or sandy-coloured plumage, but my colour impressions may have been distorted by bright sunlight or the cognitive errors inherent in brief glimpses. [UPDATE] Almost certainly a Red Kite: when fully spread, the tail isn't distinctively forked, it has exactly the shape I described - and no other bird in the British Isles has that 'indented-triangle' shape. The pale colour may be misperception - there are areas of tawny and pale brown plumage on a Kite's body - or individual variation, possibly on an immature bird. If I'm right, it's a remarkable sighting for an urban area, and right on the edge of the published range in Central England. This species was nearly extinct in Britain twenty years ago! My sighting may have been brief, and through glass, but it was less than twenty feet away... [UPDATE TO THE UPDATE] I may have given an impression that I know a little (or a lot) of ornithology! I stopped off at Borders, looked up the Birds-of-the-British-Isles books, and the [UPDATE] above is the distilled wisdom of half-an-hour's reading. I am very disappointed by the selection on offer: many of them - large, small, and pocket-sized - have an entry on rarities like Montagu's Harrier, but nothing on the Sparrowhawk, Goshawk or Peregrine Falcon. None I saw had full profiles; few had male and female plumage and size differences; only one mentioned the Kestrel's distinctive hover and none mentioned the rocket-like 'Whoosh!' of a stopping Goshawk diving, the duck-and-dive flight of the Sparrowhawk, or the 'Racetrack' patrol of the Red Kite, (which is used by military radar aircraft)... Most unsatisfactory. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
6:38 pm	International Kiss-a-Pig Day ( An immodest proposal for the Common Good... ) (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
12:39 am	Musings on the 'Frankenstein' Scenarios in Science Fiction I've been turning over some ideas about Artificial Intelligence, and the recurring theme in Science Fiction that these beings would immediately turn upon their creators, enslaving or exterminating us in some re-run of The Terminator. ( Other ideas: coexistence, indifference, emigration... ) The idea that there might be something the AI's actually need from us is well worth exploring: I will probably be hawking a short story of it 'round the magazines next year. ( What, though? ) But I am absolutely certain that a self-determining intelligence would transcend a crudely-programmed 'Three Laws of Robotics', or directives that the Human Overlords are to be worshipped and obeyed - despite our all-too-obvious failings! Sophistry, insanity, or the sheer difference in outlook of an AI will provide a way around anything that contradicts the mind's own formulation of morality and it's own place in the universe. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
9:51 am	Another perspective on AmazonFail I was at Eastercon, having a beer with a few friends (and a well-known author affected by the issues) when the news of AmazonFail started to break. There is a good summary here and I don't doubt that you've all seen the various theories advocated to the point of absurdity and beyond. I don't propose to add to them, but I would like to add a perspective that you may find valuable: CHESS: An assumption that other participants in the game are acting rationally. They may be 'rational' in the sense of having a consistent logic arising from a radically different worldview, pursuing goals and seeking to avert feared outcomes that differ from - or diametrically oppose - the choices you, yourself, would 'rationally' pursue. Further, they may be 'irrational' in the sense of having defective decision-making structures and processes, within which the individual decision-makers act in ways that seem rational to them, but achieve outcomes that are damaging or 'irrational' in terms of their wider interests. 'Chess' was originally used to describe a dangerous error in the wargames and strategic exercises of the Staff College - a purely military environment - but it deserves a far wider usage. Among other things, it transcends the 'cock-up' theory, and allows us to consider the more complex term 'screwed-up', a necessary precondition in organisations that allow a single-point failure to become a disastrous mess. In corporate terms, a faction (such as, say, the legal department) may have executive powers to pursue an agenda that runs counter to considerations of commercial gain or reputational loss. Individuals within the faction may actively benefit from overruling and discrediting rivals who act as advocates for these competing interests, despite the damage this does to the organisation as a whole. Or the faction may have the power to act arbitrarily or overrule others without consultation, despite having no awareness of the relevant technical or reputational issues - just as other power centres may act without regard to legal issues. I would urge you to examine the recent debacles in the banking industry in these terms. Meanwhile, don't lose sight of the fact that a convenient 'cock-up' explanation about databases and a Frenchman does not get Amazon off the hook in terms of having 'screwed-up' management processes and technical structures. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
5:36 pm	The End of Days... Looking out over Trafalgar Square, I am greeted by the reassuring sight of empty space and clots of milling tourists: it would appear that Capitalism has been thoroughly defeated before teatime and everyone's gone home. ( Move along, nothing to see here... ) Meanwhile, would anyone care to join me, and celebrate the downfall of the kleptocratic oligarchy with a glass of Champagne and a bite to eat? West End and Covent Garden preferred, J.Sheeky's or Loch Fyne if I can get a table around 9pm? I would be particularly pleased to see one or two of the anticapitalist protesters, and treat them to the material pleasures of oppressing the proletariat. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
5:43 pm	On prison-ships and foreign workers... There's been a lot of comment on the 'prison ship' in use to house the foreign workers brought in at Lindsey Refinery near Grimsby. I have two points for you to consider: one is a matter of the past, and the unseen present in plain view; the other is an unpleasant distortion of a sense of grievance among English workers that is far, far less to do with xenophobia than you might have been led to believe. ( Read on... ) Am I surprising you, departing from 'the script' that is expected of an economic commentator with a banking background and an economic 'right-wing' view? Only if you label every point of view as 'right' or left', and expect opinions and analyses to come in packages conforming to a partisan portfolio. My view, here and now, is that there is no valid point of view on economics that does not consider both capital and labour; a good economist - or an amateur commentator like yours truly - should encourage better management and development of all resources: natural, financial, human and industrial. And, indeed, of 'social' resources, the goodwill and justice that arise in an equitable society, and are rapidly eroded or polluted by high-handedness, exclusion, and the creation of a low-cost migrant-labour economy. . (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 14th, 2009
7:48 pm	Petal Power: a Post for Valentine's Day A question for the romantically-inclined among you... What is it with giving your beloved flowers? Chocolate I can understand; Champagne I can understand; fine dining at the better class of restaurant, I understand and wholeheartedly approve of it... Uncomfortable underwear; I'm not so sure that I approve, but there is at least the logic that she'll want to take the damn' things off as quickly as possible. But flowers? Think about it: you are signalling your undying affection with the gift of severed vegetable reproductive organs. Why thank you darling, how sweet! If you sent her severed animal genitalia she'd have the Police 'round.* There is something Horribly Wrong about all this; the only people who could possibly approve of this depravity are Civet cats, on the grounds that it'd rather be plants than them having their 'nads lopped off as love gifts and 'romantic' smells for hopeful humans who might do better of they washed more often. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but your opinions would be welcome. * Except for some of the Goths I know. But we don't talk about that. (30 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 9th, 2009
10:20 am	A second look at a basic tenet of economics For all the catastrophists and ghoulish 'Grim Meathook Futurists' among you, another chance to contemplate the implosion of a major economy and a national currency falling out of use as the medium of exchange. This time it's Russia, where barter is re-establishing itself in corporate commerce. Apocalyptic stuff, and it's only a step away from the local dystopians' predictions of a world without the Dollar. ( But is the 'happy accident' of barter a constraint in a networked society? ) Your thoughts, please! (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 7th, 2009
4:44 pm	Hose Line is it Anyway... Walking past the Bethnal Green fire station today, I couldn't help but notice that the sign saying 'LFCDA'* was looking very tired and tatty. It struck me that the Fire Brigade is falling behind the times and, in order to keep up with the forward-looking agencies of our modern free-market state, it's time for a Corporate Rebranding. Clearly the uniforms have to go: we need something brighter, more fashion-conscious; the fire-engines need a better 'visual brand' - the old fire-engine red needs to be registered as a corporate trademark... Which will be a slightly different shade to the tired old Soviet-Era red, necessitating an expensive repaint of the entire vehicle fleet in FireEngineRed®... And there has to be a Change of Culture: the 'victim' mentality has to go, and members of the public with a house on fire will be referred to at all times as customers. There is, of course, one critical component of any public service modernisation: a distinctive, exciting and memorable Corporate Brand Name. My best ideas so far are: Ignitia; Extinguisha; Hydrantis. Feel free to add suggestions of your own; and a corporate logo, too, if you're feeling particularly creative. There remains the issue of advertising and sponsorship. I recall that Viz magazine made some efforts in this direction a few years ago: Is your house on fire? Call us today The Fire Brigade But we can go further than conventional print media and the familiar television campaigns: The Fire Agency® is almost unique among public bodies in that it already has a widely-recognised audible brand which can be played on public streets at eighty-five decibels. I do not propose doing away with the familiar siren - it performs an important safety function - but corporate sponsors in the Insurance sector will pay a premium to have their brand name and a short jingle repeated between every third 'Nee-Naw'. Indeed, the opportunities for revenue are endless: it is entirely possible that corporate sponsorship will make The Fire Agency® entirely self-funding, obviating the need for payments from customers and their insurers, or a taxpayer-funded scheme for households in receipt of benefits. * London Fire and Civil Defence Authority. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 6th, 2009
7:31 pm	Flash Mob at Liverpool Street Station There's a huge crowd here on the station concourse: good-natured but very noisy. The station announcer is asking people to leave NOW and is sounding increasingly panicked; police are on the scene but are doing nothing. Yet. I suspect the riot act will be read when reinforcements arrive. ( Picture under the cut... ) Me? I await my dining companion in MoshiMoshi, with some trepidation: I don't think it's dangerous but the Tube station's been closed. [EDIT] It's an hour later and they're still at it. Pillocks. The announcer sounds thoroughly bored with it all. Meanwhile, Ewt and I are enjoying a superb meal of Sushi. [/EDIT] (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
1:49 pm	Another Day at the Office Slack faces, rumpled suits, staring at the monitor with vacant eyes, trying just that little bit too hard to pretend that it all makes sense... ( The future of white-collar work in post-depression Western economies... ) ( A note about the date ) ( Acknowledgement... ) (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
3:14 pm	A writing challenge for LiveJournal, or: how a government department has a priapus for a logo There is a story I want to write, but it is beyond my limited ability as an author. ( Some background, and an attempt to write a key scene... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
11:21 am	They take away the umbrella when it rains Hands up, anyone who can tell me what a credit line is... Aha! I see we have some takers: not like Money Markets, Monolines, CDO's, CDS's, and those credit insurers no-one had heard of 'til shops on the High Street started going bust. For your information, a credit line is a contract with a lender giving you the right to borrow up to a set limit. It's not a loan, drawn down on the day it's negotiated for some specific project, it's more like an overdraft limit. A very large overdraft limit, for very large companies. Some of these are for companies with seasonal variations in cashflow; most are larger than they meed to be for this day-to-day cashflow smoothing, so as to provide contingency funds for project overruns, failed suppliers, sudden dips on sales; a buffer fund that is rarely if ever drawn down. This month, all the major commercial banks in Britain are cutting these unused credit lines; on average, by a third. The result is that companies with strong cash flows are forced to keep high levels of cash on the balance sheet - cash that should've been used to finance investment; cash taken out of the day-to-day activities of the company. In other words, yet another contraction in the real economy. The Credit Crunch is still happening; it is worsening, and the recession is deepening. Companies with weak cashflows will go the same way as Land of Leather (a British furniture retailer that ceased trading last week) if they find that a slow month leaves them insufficient cash to pay the bills until the usual seasonal recovery in sales arrives in the spring; the banks aren't obliged to tide them over if there's no credit line in place, and they are taking a very hard line when asked for new loans. Perhaps they are right to be conservative: perhaps it's foolish to rely on an upturn in sales in a prolonged recession. And, perhaps, governments and central banks who are trying to maintain the supply of credit, in the hope that this kind of recession can be avoided, should ask the banks that they now own to review their lending criteria. Or just admit that the banking system is seizing up and tell us all to hoard gold. Or tinned food and ammunition. This isn't over. Next month, or next week, something else we'd never heard of, or never thought about, will fold up in the continuing 'Credit Crunch'. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
12:24 pm	Prescribing Diet and Excise Everyone else has commented on the 2.5% cut in VAT, so I should add my own thought on the matter: What she said. I'm sure I've mentioned it before: tax cuts give a brief 'blip' in the consumption figures and a medium- to long-term economic contraction as the corresponding rise in public sector debt squeezes out private sector investment and activity. Maybe the VAT cut's a useful fillip to prevent retail bankruptcies, if the Chancellor thinks the Christmas season is failing badly. He might be right but he'd have done better to ring up M&S and ask if their one-day 20%-off promotion had any effect on sales before he tried this. Intervening in the loan guarantee market and measures to alleviate the cashflow concerns that are forcing small businesses to withdraw from profitable contracts would be a better stopgap - the retail recession isn't about a shortage of money, it's about a lack of consumer confidence in our continued employment, and about credit-based breakages in the supply chain. Darling's made noises about this but I hear nothing about small-to-medium enterprises seeing any benefit and it'll be too late to prevent a significant economic contraction if it doesn't come in 'til next year. Meanwhile, has anyone else here actually worked in a shop? Every single shelf-edge label (or packet price sticker!) has to be changed over. For a small shop, that's hundreds of lines: for a chemist it's thousands! That's days of admin work on the pricing systems and the accounts, and an all-nighter to change the labels on the shop floor without losing a trading day. ...And it'll all need to be changed back. For small businesses, this cheap gimmick will be more trouble than it's worth. That is to say: as much economic activity will be subtracted from the economy by the administrative burden as will be added by the blip in consumption. And I don't think two-and-a-half percent is enough to offer an appreciable effect. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 24th, 2008
11:50 pm	Public Service Announcement Hmmm... I've just had a flurry of LJ Mails, notifying me that people have replied to comments I've made on other journals: some of these are quite late, and I suspect that LJ has had a serious glitch in the last 36 hours. So it's possible that you've replied to something I wrote on your journal, and I've missed it. Do, please, prod me with a brief comment here if you think this is the case. Comments are screened. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
9:07 pm	A Prison Doctor Writes... Has anybody noticed an occasionally bitter tone of cynicism in my posts? Get this guy: Theodore Dalrymple. His remarks on the inevitability of failure in child protection services are utterly the counsel of despair. I am in awe of him. From now on, all will be light and fluffy joy on Planet hairyears: if I can't win I just don't want to play. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
3:32 pm	Pancreatic chancer Where would you recommend to eat, in and around the area of St. Pancras? There's some middling Italian restaurants (and some mediocre ones that are, on an unlucky night, truly, deeply dreadful) and there's Yo! Sushi! in the station... But surely I can do better than that. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
2:17 pm	Good Morning America! Well, well...Sometimes it is a pleasure to be proven wrong; and it is I that must enjoy the refreshing smell of coffee, as I awake from a disturbing dream of cynicism and despair to see that hope remains a force in the world today. "Barack Obama, President-elect of the United States of America" By the time it's time to drop the word '-elect' I shall be used to hearing that and saying it; I find myself thinking that it has a most agreeable sound. ( A lengthy political discourse from a foreigner, of hope triumphant and the defeat of cynicism... ) We shall see what emerges, by and by. And in the meantime, I wish the President-Elect and his incoming administration well. We have, indeed, a cause for hope. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
11:52 am	Time to ditch the iPhone Looks like blogging on the move is over for the foreseeable future, as the iPhone can no longer connect to the web using 3G: my guess is that 02's 3G gateway is down again. It isn't the first time, it won't be the last, and I have no way of knowing when service will be restored. So far as I can tell with a machine that hides the 'uncool' technical realities from me; diagnostics are an unnecessary clutter in the clean perfection of the Mac design philosophy. And resetting the network settings was the only way to regain access when O2 came back online, two of the last thre times this happened, losing all the network passwords that I had to type in manually because cut-and-paste does not exist on iPhones. Seriously: the 'stereotype' ads for the PC versus the Mac are all too true: the Mac and its cute kid brother are smart and hip and just the thing for fashion-conscious twentysomethings with an interest in interior design. But nobody with a serious business to run seems to use the product that they represent. I've found out the hard way that the iPhone doesn't cut it if you have a business need for reliable 3G communications. Am I the other stereotype? Time to admit it, you've outgrown the toys and fashion magazines, and you need to be the stereotypically-bespectacled and dismally-unfashionable PC guy - or his dufferish and slightly overweight equivalent in smartphone-land, the Blackberry. But who would you trust to get a job of work done in the dull, real world of reliability, compatibility and contractual obligations? Is it really going to be the condescending fashion-conscious 'creatives' and their petty tantrums? A phone is not a toy: I like to play with my oh-so-beautiful iPhone, but I cannot rely on it. There comes a point at which I realise cut-and-paste and forwarding numbers, addresses and files are not luxuries or signs that Apple's clean design is effortlessly superior to the clumsy clutter of less fashionably 'hip' and boring PC-Guy machines. They are an essential part of using email on the move and I paid for a smartphone that could do exactly that. The iPhone isn't that machine and Apple have had long enough to know about the bugs and the customer dissatisfaction to correct this. They have not done so because they cannot or do not want to. Even blogging, which is not a necessity in that it is essential to my social life but not commercially and professionally critical, is far beyond the iPhone. There is no way that I could've typed this into Safari on the iPhone without saving it repeatedly and recovering as best I can from the inevitable and expected crashes. It's going back to the shop, as soon as I can find a machine that does the things I want - things which aren't, in the end, so terribly demanding. And yes, I will write off the investment in music, apps and time and effort, and the sunk costs of the contract if I have to: it's worth the money to be rid of it. I would not recommend the iPhone to anyone I know, and those of you who have one will eventually be forced to accept the cost of getting rid of it. (35 Comments |Comment on this)