Tetherd Cow Ahead

Acowlytes! The END IS NIGH! Run for the hills!!! TERMINATORS ARE ALMOST HERE! SkyNet has become self aware and before you can say ‘Hasta la vista baby’, we’ll all be vassals of the Machines!

Yes, this is front page news in this morning’s Melbourne Age. The above breathless gush was headlined as an op ed piece from military futurist Peter W. Singer who speculates that if computers continue to become powerful at the rate that Moore’s Law hypothesizes, by 2030 we will have military robots that carry computing power a billion times their current capabilities.

Of course, a newspaper can’t let it go at that[tippy title=”†”]Because that story is basically: Computer power expands exponentially, so everything that uses computers, including weaponry, will get more powerful. Yawn…[/tippy] Oh, no, no, no! In Newspaper Land science is boring so you have to jazz it up a bit to get the idiots readers interested – that means TERMINATORS! This is what I call ‘Brain-In-a-Jar’ science fiction – the kind of thing that, twenty years from now, will look as goofy as Flash Gordon and 50s images of robots stealing earth women look to us today.

In the article Peter Singer is critical of the Australian Defense Department’s lack of foresight in mentioning robots in a recently released ‘white paper’ outlining Australia’s military strategies for the next couple of decades. You all know how I feel about robots. If they do as well in warfare as they seem to be doing in other areas of deployment, then seriously, we’re well better off without them. Those of you whose skulls aren’t crushed under the treads of the machines in the imminent Northern Hemisphere robot wars can come live here when it’s all over.

___________________________________________________________________________

†Because that story is basically: Computer power expands exponentially, so everything that uses computers, including weaponry, will get more powerful. Yawn…

___________________________________________________________________________

Oh dear. Ohdearohdearohdearohdearohdear.

Sometimes someone turns on the Stupid tap and the washer just ruptures and Stupid starts gushing out all over the shop AND YOU CAN’T STOP IT. These last few weeks have been like that, what with Melissa Rogers and her daft ShooTag™, the resurgence of Prophet Pete, and now…

The two largest supermarket chains in Britain, Tesco and Marks & Spencer, have started advising their customers to be aware on which days of the week they choose to taste wine because it will effect the taste. This breathtaking piece of utter folly is so risible that I had to check the date of the Guardian article several times as I was reading to keep reminding myself it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

This is the skinny (although I do advise you to read the article to get a sense of the full absurdity):

Tesco and its rival Marks & Spencer, which sell about a third of all wine drunk in Britain, now invite critics to taste their ranges only at times when the biodynamic calendar suggests they will show at their best.

The calendar has been published for the last 47 years by a gardening great-grandmother called Maria Thun, who lives in rural Germany. She categorises days as “fruit”, “flower”, “leaf” or “root”, according to the moon and stars. Fruit and flower are normally best for tasting, and leaf and root worst.

To put it succinctly – two major UK retailers are consulting and recommending wine ‘horoscopes’.

Jo Aherne, winemaker for Marks & Spencer manages to make herself look like a complete twat (and the wine tasting fraternity even more filled with blarney than it already is) by claiming:

Before the tasting, I was really unconvinced, but the difference between the days was so obvious I was completely blown away.

Once again we see the that little crack of Subjectivity in the door of Reason being jimmied open by the great big club foot of Pseudoscience. Nowhere are we offered any evidence that these taste tests were blind tests, let alone the double blind trials that a scientific assessment would demand. These people are just espousing an opinion, and, worse, an opinion based on highly subjective appraisals of something that is to most people an arcane field of expertise. This is a situation busting for pseudoscientific exploitation.*

Tesco’s senior product development manager, Pierpaolo Petrassi, says of the tastings:

It may be a little step beyond what consumers can comprehend.

Oh yeah. You’re so right there Pierpaolo old chap. I’m certainly having trouble comprehending it.

Perhaps the most extraordinary part of this Guardian article, though, is slipped in almost unobtrusively:

The Guardian tested the theory this week and tasted the same wines on Tuesday evening, a leaf day, then again on Thursday evening, a fruit day. Five out of seven bottles showed a marked improvement.

[Checks date for third time. Nope, not April 1]

The Guardian, a world class newspaper, known for its usually sober news and feet-on-the-ground reporting is endorsing this piece of flimsy superstitious mumbo jumbo! Jesus H. Christ – where did I put that shifting spanner! The basement is awash and the stuff is leaking into the hallway!

As the article trails off and the loony wagon heads into the sunset, our keen correspondent throws a small bone to the wolves:

In other quarters, doubts remain. Waitrose’s† wine department has investigated the idea and cannot see a correlation. Many scientists have little time for biodynamic wine, pointing out that the movement’s guru, Rudolf Steiner, claimed to have conceived the concept after consulting telepathically with spirits beyond the realm of the material world. Among his other works are claims that the human race is as old as the Earth and descended from creatures with jelly-like bodies, and a belief that men’s passions seep into the Earth’s interior, where they trigger earthquakes and volcanoes.‡

Uh-huh. And so, Mr Booth, Guardian correspondent, you’re lending credibility to this wine horoscope idea exactly why?

So, after digesting all that, consider the following:

•Comprehensive blind taste tests conducted by the American Association of Wine Economists have revealed that, if the variables are hidden from the testers, then for the majority of people there is no correlation between the cost of a wine and its perceived enjoyment. In other words, if they don’t know what it cost, most people can’t tell what kind of ‘quality’ they’re drinking. On the other hand:

•Other blind tests show that the perceived expense of a wine, if known, positively influences perceived enjoyment. And:

•A European Commission study from 2001 determined that in excess of 50% of those interviewed considered astrology a science. A Harris Poll conducted in 2003 found that 30% of Americans thought that the position of the stars and planets affect people’s lives.

From those three pieces of data, I leave it to you to extrapolate what’s going on here. My suggestion to readers from the UK is that you should, forthwith, buy your wine from Waitrose.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Much like the field of high-end domestic audio. And unlike wine-tasting, that is a province I know very well. But as I read all the hi-jinks with this wine stuff, that same peculiar odour – a blend of of fish and bullshit – starts to fill the air. You find this problem anywhere that there is a substantial amount of subjectivity and a stratosphere of opinionated ‘experts’.

†Another, obviously smarter, UK chain.

‡Well, that last bit about the Elder Ones is totally true of course.

___________________________________________________________________________

In a product endorsement that must surely attract the status of Super Amusive, this pillow boasts a pedigree that is similar to damning with faint praise.

___________________________________________________________________________

Once again thanks go to the ever-intrepid Pil, who should surely start a blog of her own.

___________________________________________________________________________

While we’re on the subject of those with a very tenuous grasp on reality, let me introduce to you the latest invention to hit teh internets: the Magical Technical Remote Viewing Pen from from TRV University.™ Here’s what TRVU promises on their site:

Now you can convert ANY rollerball style pen to operate like a Magic Pen capable of downloading precise and accurate information about the future, the past or anything you want to know — anywhere on the planet.

Well tie me to an anthill and smear my ears with jam! Precise and accurate information at the same time! About anything I want to know, from anywhere or anywhen! Golly TRVU, how the heck does it work??!!

It’s a mind technology called Technical Remote Viewing and anyone can learn this formally top secret skill and for less than a dollar convert an ordinary pen into a magic pen worth millions.

A formally top secret skill! Well, that’s the bomb – who’d want an informal top secret skill?!* So, let me get this straight – I can convert an ordinary pen into a million dollar pen for less than a buck? Sweet! My fortune is made!

Sigh.

Digging through the trash heap that is the TRV Empire unearths several dumpster-loads of similar preposterous idiocy. On TRV ‘News’, for instance, we learn that if you fork out to attend TRV University ‘…you will be trained along with the best and brightest minds on the planet’ (a contention I find highly unlikely) to use your Magic Pen to be able to ‘accurately sketch a nuclear weapon located inside a mountain in China, thousands of miles away’ and ‘probe the mind of Osama bin Laden in real time, uncovering his current intent and next move’. Straight away one can quite clearly see that there are only two options here:

1: There are people out there with a Magic Pen who know where Osama bin Laden is and what he is thinking, but just don’t aim to tell anyone… or…

2: The pen doesn’t work.

It doesn’t require one of the brightest minds on the planet to figure out which of those alternatives is the most likely. This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of claptrap available at TRVU, though. Dane Spotts† from TRV News, a person who claims to be ‘properly trained’ in the use of the Magic Pen, sets us up for a demonstration of how effective the predictions are by choosing as a ‘target’ “The Next Catastrophic Terrorist Attack on US Soil”. But don’t hold your breath for any revelation of something that surely would benefit every single soul in the US‡ – Dane waffles on with some of the most ridiculous baloney for several pages without offering up a single whiff of a result, until, predictably he ends in a promise of ‘all will be revealed when you send us your money’.

Perhaps best of all are the ‘explanatory’ videos hosted by TRV spokeswoman Joni Dourif in which Ms Dourif makes some of the most risible and possibly actionable claims I’ve ever heard.

Here are a couple of the howlers she comes up with:

‘Having the Technical Remote Viewing Certification guarantees you a certain level of credibility amongst… uh… the law enforcements, amongst science and technology – who already know about us by the way’

Uh-huh. I think I know what that ‘certain level’ of credibility is likely to be. And, oh yes, I just bet the law enforcements know about you lot…

There is just an endless variety of options available for you to use this in a career. In science and technology, for example. You don’t need to be a doctor to assist a neurosurgeon…

There are neurosurgeons who consult Remote Viewers? OMFG! Kill me before I get to the operating theatre!

The TRVU site features several videos of Ms Dourif earnestly spouting such ridiculous and worrying nonsense. They are laugh-out-loud funny in places, and in others, stick-your-head-in-the-oven depressing. I am surprised that she can keep a straight face throughout, and I wonder if the many jump-cuts and fades are due to her corpsing her lines.

So how does the Magic Pen really work? Let’s go back to Dane Spotts’ ‘terrorist attack’ demonstration that I mentioned above. After Spotty leads us through some incomprehensible gibberish involving writing down random numbers and ‘prompting the signal line’, we have spent about 45 minutes doodling over a blank stack of Reflex and:

… have produced 30 or more sheets of paper which are covered in words, phrases and drawings, that we can now summarize and create an analysis from. It’s uncanny to see it all come together like some incredible jig saw puzzle; each piece combined to create a complete picture that reveals a solution to our problem. All of this from the tip of a magic pen.

In other words, TRVU is going to show you how to draw some vague predictions out of THIRTY PAGES of random scribbling! The obvious get-out-of-jail-free card here is that the Magic Pen has given you all the right information – if you don’t end up with an accurate prediction of the future it’s not the pen’s fault, it’s that you are a crap Remote Viewer!

As I read further and further through the TRVU sites, I find it harder and harder to convince myself that it’s not all some big joke. So much of it is SO farcical that I really want to believe it’s a giant leg pull. Sadly, it appears not to be the case – TRVU is an actual money-making venture; another shameless scam aimed at lining the pockets of morally bankrupt con-artists by fleecing gullible schmucks.

And I don’t for a moment think that the proprietors of TRVU really believe this rubbish. If there was anything at all to this ‘Remote Viewing’ it seems to be it would be the simplest thing in the world to verify. In fact, here you go, TRVU (or any other Remote Viewing adept) – I offer you up a challenge. I have, sitting on a chest of drawers in my bedroom, a box. Tell me what is in that box. Now I don’t mean thirty pages of guesses – I want an exact description of the contents of the box. You can do it in one short sentence. There should be no equivocating – it’s a very simple answer. This should be a completely trivial task for a graduate of TRVU, and here, in a public forum, you can demonstrate for all the world to see how marvellous your Magic Pen really is.

If you get it right, I promise I’ll buy out your entire stock.

(I will reveal the contents of the box here on The Cow in, oh, say two month’s time…)

___________________________________________________________________________

*I figure there’s a sure-fire way to spot pseudoscience even if you don’t know your pendulum from your psychomanteum – just look for the atrocious murdering of the English language in any promotional material. Dead giveaway.

†If you think his name sounds like a joke, you really should read his writing…

‡We must assume that Dane, a self-professed accomplished user of the Pen, actually does know this information but has declined to share it with anyone, for reasons I’d really like to hear.

___________________________________________________________________________

Australia is a country that is a long way from pretty much anywhere. For instance, if you had to walk to Australia from the US, it would take you nearly four months if you walked 24 hours per day and didn’t stop for lunch. And then you’d drown because most of the way it’s ocean.

Australia is also a country that lives under the illusion that it somehow has a credible presence on the world stage. I don’t exactly know how anyone here got that idea if they’ve traveled anywhere further than Bali, but that’s what our politicians keep telling us on the television.

Now for a very long time, Australia’s geographical disenchantment has been the source of hefty disadvantage when it comes to its interface with the rest of the globe. These difficulties affect political interaction, commerce, the arts and cultural discourse. This problem has come to be referred to as the Tyranny of Distance (from the title of a book and philosophies of a very famous Australian historian). For many decades, this looked like an insurmountable (or at the very least, hideously expensive) handicap for our isolated outpost.*

“If only,” people thought, “there was a way to communicate instantly with people in foreign lands! If only you could send them movies and music and pictures, collaborate on their projects, talk to them face to face and generally conduct business and social interactions as if you were just a couple of blocks away! If only they could pay you in their foreign money to do all those things via, oh, I dunno, some kind of secure money exchange that happened in real time! If only, instead of you having to sell your shiny gew-gaws to a sparse few customers in your neighbourhood, you could hawk them to a vast population of potential buyers from here to Timbuktu, all from the comfort of your own kangaroo populated home! Wouldn’t all that be just SUPER!??? Wouldn’t that almost instantly solve the difficulty of the Tyranny of Distance? Wouldn’t the democratically elected government of the Great Southern Land break open the bottles of locally-produced superior sparkling wines† and bend over backwards to see that such a magical solution was given every opportunity to work for the benefit of its citizens, its economy and its image as a forward-thinking and innovative political force of the 21st Century?”

Well, Acowlytes, that may very well have happened in some alternate reality where unicorns feast on sugar berries and rainbows grace every dew-frosted morning, but it’s not so, evidently, in the reality which we currently inhabit.

Some of you may have noticed that I’m sporting a new badge in the side bar over there to the right. This is because I’m really pissed-off that our government, notably their mouthpiece, the poorly informed Senator Stephen Conroy, is now trying to institute a level of censorship on the internet in Australia that is equalled in its draconian scope only by the restrictions on the personal freedoms imposed on the citizens of China and North Korea by their respective governments. And why? Solely because Senator Conroy (presumably goaded by a similarly unsophisticated lobby group) is apparently convinced that internet porn is going to flood into Australia and corrupt the minds of our youngsters, turning them into sex-obsessed Satan-worshipping crack-heads, and somehow usher in The End of Days. Or something.‡

I won’t explain the whole thing here – the proposal that has been advanced is so monumentally daft that a schoolkid can see the problems with it (and undoubtedly circumvent it faster than Senator Conroy can tie his shoelaces) – but if you are interested in further reading, the Electronic Frontiers Australia has a comprehensive and rational deconstruction of it on their ‘No Clean Feed’ site. (If you’re an Australian blogger, please go read it, and take some time to mount a protest in any of the manners suggested by EFA. This will affect you).

Briefly, the scheme that Conroy’s office has concocted, spearheaded by people who evidently think that the internet is some form of television, calls for censored content filtering to be imposed at ISP level on everything that comes into the country. It is entirely boggling to the mind that they believe this is even feasible, let alone that it will work. I can’t begin to imagine what kind of intellectual cripples are advising the government on the strategies they are suggesting should be implemented.** One thing is certain, any type of filtering on the scale called for by the so-called ‘Clean Feed’ proposal will bog down the net in Australia to a crawl and make standard commerce a chore beyond measure. Hear me Mr Conroy: these things are already becoming a problem, even before your dumb scheme kicks in.††

The image that leaps repeatedly to mind is that of a bunch of vigilantes from a medieval city deciding to burn all the bridges that lead into town in an attempt to keep out snakes.

For those of us who rely on the net as part of our business, particularly if we engage in significant international communication and data exchange on a regular basis, Senator Conroy’s idiotic concept is lunacy on an unparalleled scale. Our internet system is already over-priced and inadequate, a situation that our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd has pledged to rectify with extravagant overhauls of the current infrastructure. That was all looking like a promising move forward until Stephen Conroy’s torch-bearing villagers arrived on the scene.

And if Senator Conroy’s department being completely wrong isn’t bad enough, they don’t want to be told they’re wrong either. Mark Newton, a network engineer with an Australian ISP, Internode, who wrote an incisive and highly critical appraisal of the Clean Feed proposal (as is his right as an Australian citizen) has been the target of attempted bullying by Senator Conroy’s office in an effort to silence his dissent.

In his letter, Newton completely discredits Government assertions that trials have shown that a filtering scheme is viable. Confronted with Newton’s devastating demolition of their cunning plan, the Government’s response (in what can only be described as a typical last resort of desperate politics), was to promptly distance itself from the whole affair by laying the responsibility for the trials at the feet of the previous Government. So much for informed debate.

So, dear Potential Foreign Business Partner: if you’re thinking of taking your business to China or North Korea because they’re giving you a better deal, remember that, until global warming sets in, we still have better beaches. And Kangaroos. And the flights here are only going to get cheaper, right?

UPDATE: Even though opposition to the Clean Feed is growing (thank Spagmonster someone’s noticed…) Stephen Conroy continues to fail to understand the problem. In this morning’s Melbourne Age he is quoted as saying:

I will accept some debate around what should and should not be on the internet — I am not a wowser. I am not looking to blanket-ban some of the material that it is being claimed I want to blanket-ban, but some material online, such as child pornography, is illegal.

Senator Conroy, you really don’t get it, do you? We all agree that the internet allows some people to gain access to some material that is not desirable by our consensual moral standards. That’s not an argument that anyone has mounted. And there is a LOT of material online that is illegal. That’s not in dispute either. It is magnanimous of you to suggest that you will deign to ‘accept some debate’ about it, but that is entirely beside the point. What you think ‘should and should not be on the internet’ is as irrelevant as what you think should or should not be in people’s heads. You cannot do anything about that. And trying to make the internet into what you think it should be by using your silly filtering system is entirely impractical. It won’t work. It is a DUMB IDEA and it is not the way to tackle the problem.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Fortunately we had a lot of things we could dig out of the ground that other people were prepared to pay lots of money for us to send to them, so our fate as a permanent continent-sized penal colony was averted.

†Not Champagne, of course.

‡This certainly has to be along the lines of how these people think. You really have to wonder about the magnitude of their obsession. No-one’s going to argue that there is a level of undesirable material out there on the net, just like there is in the real world, but speaking as a person who spends a good portion of every day online, it’s not something that ever has an impact on my usual daily life. You can close your eyes and hide under the covers and pretend it’s not there Senator Conroy, but that don’t change a thing. Why not handle it productively and, oh, educate people better. Oops. Silly me. WAY too hard an option.

**One can only speculate that anyone with any expertise in such matters is cynically accepting Government money in the full knowledge that any system they may be attempting to set up will comprehensively fail. Either that or they’re idiots.

††And aside from that, do you have any idea how much this makes us look like utter inbred hillbillies to the rest of the world?

___________________________________________________________________________

The Reverend’s Adventures in Advertising, Episode 2.

The advertising world has many peculiar little niches and enclaves, and one of these is the realm of the Car Commercial. Cars are to advertising agencies as cows are to Hindus – sacred beings that are talked about in hushed tones and showered with rose petals.

I’ve done the music and sound for a number of car ads and I don’t think any one product ever gets as minutely scrutinized and picked over as the automobile. And almost invariably, after the ad agency creative directors have finished conjuring up hyperbolic pitches full of unbelievable superlatives and interminable drivel, the majority of car advertisements end up being nothing more than pretty pictures of the car in question driving around winding country roads. All the client ever cares about is seeing pictures of the car. Car car car. They can’t get enough of their car. No matter how clever the copy, or how novel the conceptualization, all they want to see on that screen is pictures of the car. What’s more, they fool themselves into thinking that everybody else thinks their car is as fascinating as they do too, and in this they are, for the most part, completely wrong.

One particular car ad that came my way was no exception. As usual, it began with a phone call from the ad producer:

Producer: Hi. We’ve got this great spot that we’d love you to look at. It’s got your name written all over it!*

Me: Uh huh. What’s the skinny?

Producer: W-e-e-e-l-l-l, I can’t tell you too much about it over the phone. The concept behind this one is ultra top secret.

Me: Right. Well, I’d like to know something about it before I commit to it…

Producer: OK, I have some storyboards that I can send you, but it’s super confidential.

Me: No problem. Mum’s the word.

Producer: So if I fax them over now, can you make sure you stand next to the machine. Don’t let anybody see them.

Me: O-k-a-a-y.

Producer: Promise that you’ll stand next to the machine and take them off straight away.

Me: I promise.

Producer: Because this is really Top Secret. It’s all very hush-hush. We don’t want news of this idea getting out before we have it ready to go.

Me: Sure. I understand. Super Ultra Spy-Level Top Secret. I’ll read the boards and then eat them.

Producer: I’m sending them right now. Stand by. [Hangs up]

I wait expectantly by the fax machine. The pages of the storyboard slowly peel out. First frame: a car drives down a country road. Second frame: a car drives over a hill. Third frame: a car drives through a tunnel. Fourth frame: a car drives over another hill. Fifth frame: Closeup – a car taking a bend. And so on.

I think of a possible way I could leak this to the media: “You’re never going to believe this – their car can turn corners! And it’s got wheels. Yup, that’s right, FOUR of the danged things. Underneath. Yessiree. I swear on a stack of bibles – I’ve seen the badly-drawn pictures.”

I didn’t do the ad. I think they saw me as a security risk.

___________________________________________________________________________

*This line is usually followed by “We don’t have a lot of money for this one…” In this case it wasn’t.

___________________________________________________________________________