Checksums

In computing, a checksum is like a canary in a mine. It’s a number used to confirm that a much larger group of numbers is consistent and has not been been changed in some way. A tiny little indicator which does nothing by itself, and only serves to confirm the whole.

My favourite example of a checksum in the real world is the Van Halen Brown M&M story. It seems that Van Halen’s tour contract was long and detailed. When you are going from city to city with a big rock band, complete with light show and complicated electrical requirements, you need everything done right the first time. After all, people have died from microphones which were incorrectly earthed. The band and their crew got sick and tired of finding that their requirements were not met, and having to double check everything. So, hidden deep in their contract, they inserted a demand that the band have a bowl of M&Ms backstage, from which all the brown ones had been removed.

This story ended up being misunderstood and conveying the impression that the band were difficult and demanding. In fact, it saved a lot of time for everyone. No M&Ms? Assume nothing has been done. Flip out. M&Ms there, but brown ones still present? Assume sloppy mistakes have been made. Check everything. M&Ms present, brown ones removed? Relax. I have no idea whether they ever ate the M&Ms. They didn’t matter. They were a symbol of the competence of the whole organisation.

I used to work at a magazine publishers, and when I had the authority, I used to come down hard on small formatting errors in magazine articles. People used to put this down to pettiness on my part, but I knew that the authority of an article was often fatally damaged by the tiny details. It seems silly, but if you put a space between the last letter of a sentence and the full stop, you are sending the readers a set of messages:

1. It says you don’t care very much about getting things right. You don’t check stuff and you don’t expect your readers to care or notice.

2. It puts a seed of doubt into the mind of the reader that you might have been equally sloppy about the main thrust of the article as you are with the punctuation. Since the article might be instructions on how to build an expensive engine, for example, that seed might be enough to put you off attempting making it. Be honest: if you had to choose a medication to save your life, wouldn’t you prefer it if the bottle did not show a glaring spelling mistake?

I am no grammar nazi. I tolerate all kinds of syntactic nonconformity in the interests of clarity, humour, originality, or tiredness. Sloppy spelling in emails from friends is actually kind of friendly, as it demonstrates that the sender had let his or her guard down, and is not standing on ceremony.

The checksum I find most troubling however, is when I catch a technology story in the mainstream media. When a journalist tries to tackle an area that I know something about, they get it wrong. Not just in subtle ways, ways that can be excused as part of an attempt to simplify a complex subject, but in big, scary ways. I remember when I heard a BBC journalist in the Nineties, trying to explain the browser wars, whilst earnestly confusing the function of an operating system and a browser. Repeatedly and insistently.

Every technology report that I know something about seems to contain at least one howler. I sometimes wonder if the BBC apply the same standards to all of the news – even the important stuff. What if all the reports coming out of Iraq were as inaccurate as this nonsense? Maybe they are, because I started noticing it whenever I had a tiny bit of inside information, or personal experience. They always got vital facts wrong.

Which, if my checksum theory is correct, ought to suggest that we can’t trust very much of what we read or hear.

The Media and Storytelling

I read an article yesterday (here) which purports to be a professional footballer (soccer player, for US readers) moaning about the poor standards of commentary produced by former professional footballers. Now, I am not a football fan, so bear with me. His main point seems to be that even though these former players know the enormous amount of strategic thought and regimentation that goes into the preparation for a game, they prefer to report it as if little of this goes on, as if each player is far more responsible for his choices than he really is.

What are the reasons for this? Have these former players forgotten their training? Are they too lazy to try and convey it? I doubt it. I thought the reason might be more complicated, but more interesting.

I think British sports fans like to see their players as individual geniuses, not chess pieces on a giant green chess board. In the same way, we seem to prefer to think of scientists having individual blinding moments of inspiration, rather than making gradual discoveries, eked out after years of intense study, collaboratively building on the work of others.

And, of course, the media being what it is, we are served up exactly what we want to see or read. The news industry shapes events to suit our prejudices.

As humans, we seem to have an instinct to make a story out of everything. We need a villain, a hero, a victim, and a crisis. We have little patterns – shortcuts – which help us understand our complicated world. These patterns go from tiny – have you ever heard anyone described as a ‘devout protestant’? – to vast. For example, I very often hear Africa described as if every one of the residents of that enormous and varied continent are permanently on the brink of starvation.

Good causes can compound the problem by using these patterns ‘for the right reasons’, to help them raise money. It helps for victims to be passive, grateful and virtuous – the embodiment of the Victorian ‘deserving poor’ – untouched by the frailties we see in all other human beings.

It is easy to blame the media for all this, of course, but perhaps the world is too complicated to understand any other way. Ultimately, we get the press we want and the government we deserve.

Murdoch’s Paywall

I want to quickly put an unpopular opinion on record. I have a strong suspicion that Murdoch’s decision to charge for access to The Times Online will not fail.

Clay Shirky, says the opposite here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/05/clay-shirky-internet-television-newspapers I have read a lot in the last few months which takes it for granted that the paywall experiment will fail. The blogosphere has decreed that Murdoch does not ‘get’ the internet.

I am not so sure. My reasons are as follows:

1. Murdoch is very rich. Clay Shirky is not. Clay Shirky claims to have done the maths, and found that the numbers do not add up. I hope I can be forgiven for trusting the maths of a billionaire, especially when counting money.

2. Murdoch has done this before, with great success. In 1993, Murdoch brought Sky TV to Britain. Satellite television was quickly established as a national joke. The quality was poor, the monthly costs were high, and the papers gleefully reported years of huge losses. Why would people start paying for something – television – they could get (without paying extra) from the BBC, widely considered one of the best broadcasting organisations in the world?

But Murdoch is patient, and has deep pockets.

Now, Sky TV is massively profitable, and, relying less on advertising revenue, has come out of the recession stronger than ever.

Also in Murdoch’s favour is the recent arrival of a very conservative Conservative government, many members of which are openly hostile to the BBC.

I hope I am wrong, and the Mr Shirky is right. But despite what everyone is saying, Murdoch is not stupid.

Desktop Publishing: The Web’s Beta Trial

When Steve Jobs saw the first LaserWriter, in 1982, he seems to have had one of his great moments of insight. He knew that this was going to change the world. In fact, he immediately tried to buy the company, Adobe, who had invented it, but they turned him down. Undeterred, he got Apple to invest in the new company, and was the first licenser of Postscript for the Apple LaserWriter.

His enthusiasm was not shared by his colleagues. When he was fired from Apple, the LaserWriter seemed to be prime example of where his excesses had led the company astray. In a world quite satisfied with dot matrix, the LaserWriter seemed slow, and it cost twice as much as the computer it connected to. In fact, it had a faster processor than the top Macs at the time, and required the invention of a networking system so that several computers could use it at once. Initially, sales were slow, and no-one seemed to understand why anyone would want one.

Some time later, I was working as a typesetter on a beta test site for the Linotype Series 2000, a code based typesetting system. It used PostScript too, but in order to see how a page was coming on, I had to press the preview button, and see the result rendering ponderously on a separate monitor. This was the cutting edge.

We were reporting back to Linotype about the system, and someone started talking about Aldus PageMaker, which I had never heard of. One of my colleagues had been told about how easy it was to use. The guys from Linotype were emphatic: the quality was poor, it was a long way from being a professional system. At some point, they felt a demonstration was required, and went to a PC and started up PageMaker.

It was an amazing moment. I can honestly say that I fell in love. I was amazed by how intuitive it was, and how you immediately got to see the results of your actions. I turned to see the ecstatic faces of my colleagues, and then the faces of the Linotype engineers, who had realised their tactical error, and hurried to shut it down. They suddenly looked like old men. They were finished, and they knew it.

The Series 2000 went, and we got some Macs running PageMaker, and a LaserWriter.

Before the arrival of the LaserWriter, typesetting and laying out pages was a specialised job, which often involved years of apprenticeship, and membership of a union which had an unbroken line going back to the mediaeval guilds. In fact, until the Eighties, just about every worker in Gutenberg’s workshop would have had a direct counterpart in the modern print room.

Desktop Publishing changed all that. It democratised the process. Early users of PagerMaker produced some truly awful looking design, some of whom seemed to be in a competition to put as many different fonts on the page as they could. It hardly seemed to matter: everyone bleating about the loss of quality in printing was drowned out by the delight of people able to produce magazines or books from an ordinary home PC.

So, the current crisis that the newspaper industry finds itself in has clear parallels. Twenty-five years ago, it was the skilled typesetters and page layout artists who were being discarded. Now it is the journalists, who seem to feel that they are irreplaceable, and that democratisation will have a detrimental effect on democracy.

As a typesetter, however, I have to say that the effect of democratisation on typography has been energising and liberating. There are more people with more knowledge of the complexities of print production that ever before, and the web is alive with people arguing over fonts with real passion.

I suspect that journalism will go the same way.

(Another) reason newspapers are doomed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/10/audiobooks-listeners-travel

The above link leads to a Guardian piece by Mark Lawson, where he argues – sorry, let me rephrase that – he states that audiobooks infantilise the reader. Novels should be read in silence. Note the use of ‘should’, like a prissy TV chef insisting on the use of only the finest olive oil. Many commenters seem to think the piece is pompous elitist rubbish, and I agree. The pick of the comments – I felt – was this:

The cultural attitude which underlies this post demeans the experience of literature almost as much as a refusal to read at all. Art is not an obligation or a test – it is a bounty, it’s an enrichment of life. It’s not about proving who you are to other people. The middle class British attitude that the consumption of literature is a social status performance is destructive and philistine. It kills Art.
(alisonp)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/10/audiobooks-listeners-travel?commentid=a7084408-0c5b-4850-9106-596399fc57f8

It reminded me of earlier pieces in the Guardian which bemoaned the perceived decline of appreciation of classical music in the young (can’t we trust kids to find the music they want to listen to?), and another which spoke warmly of a project designed to get young people ‘off the streets’ (ghastly phrase) and teach them to play the cello. I wondered if such praise would be showered on a project which taught kids to play the guitar.

But this snobbery is just a symptom of the wider disease in national newspapers. Twenty years ago such pieces would not have provoked such fury in me.

Wikipedia has changed everything. This is an enormously useful site which is based on the idea that you cannot trust a word it says. This is the whole point, although some consider it to be its biggest flaw. The thing is – we should never trust anything we read or hear. I was brought up in a country where the teachers told me that black people were not designed by God to rule, and where the history textbooks – years later – were revealed to be a collection of self-serving lies. So I caught on pretty early that a lot of what important looking people say can be total nonsense. Remember that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens because he was the only one who knew he knew nothing.

What Wikipedia and other collaborative online projects teach us is that there is no one authority who decides on the truth. The best we can do is muddle towards a consensus. And newspaper columnists don’t seem to have noticed that they are wearing the Emperor’s new clothes – we no longer look to them to be the arbiters of taste or truth. We are beginning to have the self confidence to enjoy what we enjoy – and hopefully respect the fact that some people enjoy other things – without that making us in some way superior.