brelson.com the long-form thoughts of brendan nelson

Thought For The Day is the short religious bit on Radio 4′s Today programme. Every day a different religious figure spends five minutes imparting a mini-sermon in the hope of providing listeners with some fleeting sense of spiritual enrichment.

Like many things in life, Thought For The Day has a pattern. It goes something like this:

1. Talk about a topical event
2. Somehow link the topical event to religion
3. Talk about religion
4. Conclude by referencing the topical event once more

Not everyone follows this pattern – Anne Atkins’ stream-of-consciousness scattergun of personal anecdotes consistently buck the trend – but by and large this is what you get when you listen to Thought For The Day. Here’s a recent-ish example from Canon Dr Alan Billings that allows us to see the pattern at work:

1. Talk about a topical event:

Over the weekend I looked at the new typology of social class that the BBC has just put on its website…

This was a reference to the Great British Class Calculator which had been doing the rounds on the web at the time.

2. Link the topical event to religion:

For Christians, the question of social class was unavoidable from the start, because Christianity first emerged in a highly stratified society of rich and poor, powerful and powerless, slave and free…

We could be diplomatic here and say that the segue into religious content is clearly signposted. Or we could not, and say instead that it has the subtlety of a reindeer.

3. Talk about religion:

Converts came from each of these groups…

As you’d expect, this forms the bulk of the text and is usually the section where Thought For The Day contributors make their essential points. It’s also where I tend to tune out.

4. Conclude by referencing the topical event once more:

…a healthy society is one where people recognise that what they have in common – their need of God’s grace – is far more significant than any ordering of social class.

Notice that it concludes with two words, “social class”, that appeared in the very first sentence – a classic top-and-tail technique that encloses the argument and gives the impression that it was actually pretty coherent and well-structured even if you did doze off for a while during the part about the Romans, Corinth and St Paul.

Making it work for you

It’s easy to mock this pattern, especially for those who are lazy secularists that see Thought For The Day as a loathsome combination of religiosity and getting up early in the morning. But before we rush to judgement it’s worth recognising its value for those who are also lazy writers.

It’s a pattern that can be applied to any topic, so if you’re ever asked to write a blog post for your employer or an article for a specialist magazine, and are short on time or energy, why not try using it?

To demonstrate its effectiveness I’ve set myself the challenge of using it to combine a recent current event, Sir Alex Ferguson’s resignation and the specialist topic of Eurozone monetary policy. I apologise for taking gross liberties with the facts in the passage below; I’m deeply ignorant about both of these subjects.

Manchester United fans around the world were shocked to learn yesterday that Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager who has won their team countless trophies over the years, has resigned from the club. Many have voiced their concern that the glory days are over. Does Manchester United now face a crisis?

The same question might be asked about the eurozone. Despite coming through the Greek and Cypriot crises relatively unscathed the ECB faces stormy times ahead… [imagine another 200 words about ECB monetary policy, the general theme being that Mario Draghi is the right person to sort out all the problems]

…So as we can see there are many reasons to be optimistic. Mario Draghi may not be in the business of winning trophies, but unlike Sir Alex Ferguson we can count on him staying the course for the foreseeable future.

It’s crude but I hope that the lazy writers among you can see how it can be used to eke out a viable article from the most crude of premises, and with a minimal amount of effort. So if no other inspiration strikes you in the hours ahead, let that be your… thought, for the day.

Fast Company has a piece about a research project which redraws the map of the United States based on the movement of paper currency.

Dirk Brockmann, a theoretical physicist, is the person responsible for it. He thinks that state lines are arbitrary boundaries with no relation to how people actually live and move around, and that we should rethink our representations of how human societies arrange themselves across geographic space.

In one such effort he’s taken data from a website called Where’s George which tracks the movements of dollar bills, and used it to draw a new map of the US whose borders indicate the regions where money tends to circulate. The thicker a blue line, the less likely it is that paper currency will cross it.

Dirk Brockmann’s US map based on the movements of dollar bills

One thing that leaps out at me is the circular region with Chicago at its centre. This region’s boundary starts in the north-east and follows the Appalatians southwards for a bit, flattening out westwards when it meets the Kentucky-Tennessee border, then curving back up to the north as it crosses St Louis. If you used its borders to create a new state – let’s call it “Chicago State” it would eat up parts of nine existing states, including all of Michigan, all of Ohio, and the western half of Pennsylvania.

I like this kind of analysis as it recognises the fluidity of human societies and takes advantage of information that would have been nigh on impossible to obtain a couple of decades ago. Projects like this help us learn more about the real ‘shapes’ of the countries and areas we live in.

• A more detailed description of the research can be found on Dirk Brockmann’s website
• I originally heard about this from an article on Matt Dickenson’s blog, which you should read

Last week an article appeared on the BBC news site with the headline “How to eat healthily on £1 a day“.

A cynic might say that the article set out to alleviate the guilt of wealthier people about the hardships endured by the poor, and to provide an answer to the ludicrous public debate about whether someone can actually live on £53 per week. After all, if you can eat healthily on £1 a day, what could all these people who are having their benefits cut possibly be moaning about?

But wait! A detailed takedown of the article posted at Aethelread the Unread appears to support an alternative conclusion, namely that it is in fact a load of codswallop.

The big problem is that the writer, Brian Milligan, is pricing his food items in a completely unrealistic way, with individual leafs of lettuce, say, coming in at 4p. Now I can remember being at school and hearing how some of my wayward colleagues were able to buy individual cigarettes for 20p as opposed to entire packets for £2, but the last I checked this sort of thing wasn’t going on in supermarkets. Surely Milligan wasn’t able to go into a shop, hand over 4p, then walk away with a lettuce leaf? Surely he actually has to spend a lot more than that to acquire a whole lettuce? This kind of erroneous calculation appears throughout the entire piece:

A 50g can of anchovies costing 79p is factored into his budget at 16p for 10g, and the remaining 40g simply vanish. Or perhaps he feeds them to a magical cat that defecates coins to the value of the food it eats – that’s one way of explaining how he doesn’t have to account for the money he spends on food he doesn’t eat.

All in all the amount he would really have spent works out at just under £40, nearly 8 times his original budget. I recommend you go read the entire thing, it’s a brilliant expose of a misleading and insidious piece of journamalism.

I enjoyed reading Stephen Wolfram summarising his team’s analysis of Facebook data. The infographics aren’t just neat and easy on the eye, they offer up their insights without fuss or clutter. The writing is pitched well, informative without being intimidating or patronising. And among the graphs and the science you can detect something organic, something messy, something that can be faintly painful if you think about it too much.

Relationship status by age, taken from Wolfram’s analysis of Facebook data

For me, it comes out most strongly when I look at the greyish sliver that opens up towards the top-right of the above graph, which represents the proportion of people whose relationship status is “widowed”.

This isn’t the most interesting or surprising piece of information on the page, nor is it the most novel or engaging graphic, but it’s the one that most brought home to me that beneath this sea of data, and beneath the sterile light-blue facade of Facebook, there’s something else going on: real, human, life.

When Google Glass was first announced in summer 2012 most people thought the glasses would make you look like a bit of a spod, even if the technology sounded impressive.

It’s safe to assume these would look even worse on normal people who aren’t models

Fast forward to spring 2013 and the mood music has changed. Organisations like Stop the Cyborgs have generated a lot of press with their message that Google Glass would be an intrusive technology which threatened to destroy whatever shreds of privacy we have left.

This “surveillance-nightmare” theme has replaced “look-like-a-spod” as the primary anti-Glass argument. But have you noticed that they’re diametrically opposed to one another?

In the earlier phase of the anti-Glass backlash, the idea was that the glasses were so conspicuous that if you wore them in public you’d find yourself scurrying for the safety of your home with the derisive catcalls of the masses ringing in your ears. Grannies would point and laugh while teenagers would inflict wedgies and other ritual humiliations, safe in the knowledge that if you took them to court no jury would convict, because any twelve reasonable men and women would heartily agree that you had it coming.

But the current thinking is that the wearer of Google Glass, far from being a public spectacle, is a covert observer, a stealthy spy capturing and recording all our private moments for purposes we can only begin to imagine. Rather than being laughed at on the streets, they move about the city invisible to those whose privacy they’re violating.

I don’t really buy this new argument. The original thinking, that the glasses are almost laughably conspicuous, still seems sensible to me, and I don’t believe it to be compatible with the newer idea that Google Glass will turn its users into highly effective secret agents. They just stick out too much for the users to be anything but highly visible.

If anything, modern smartphones are more effective as surveillance devices than Glass is going to be. They are so ubiquitous that using one in public is not likely to draw attention. Their screens typically point at the faces of the users, and their backs give no indication of what they’re doing – no red lights come on when they’re filming, that sort of thing. They have mics, cameras, and a huge array of apps. If I was looking to carry out urban surveillance I’d start with a smartphone that no-one will notice, not with a piece of headgear that makes me a laughing stock.

People like Stop the Cyborgs do have valid concerns, which they clearly state are more about ubiquitous computing in general rather than just Google Glass. And as a society we need to understand the ethical implications of forthcoming technological developments. A book like Adam Greenfield’s Everyware is a good place to start if you’re interested in that sort of thing, and I’d also recommend reading up on the implications of drone technology, which are far scarier than anything being placed in the hands of civilians.

But simplifying these issues down to a single product, especially one that hasn’t even been released yet, is to underestimate their importance and their complexity. Hanging out in a bar that’s banned Google Glass will not keep you immune from privacy invasions – but it’s a great idea if you just want to avoid people that look like spods.

So Google is shutting down Google Reader as of July 1st 2013.

We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.

As someone who uses Google Reader pretty heavily (54,770 items read since April 17th 2006) this isn’t great news. But it’s not as bad as it could be: this post from Feedly was exactly what I, and I guess many other Readers users, needed to hear earlier on today:

Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting for some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API… When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end.

With people like Feedly preparing to step up when Google steps down, it looks like the asteroid hurtling towards Planet RSS will be obliterated or diverted and cast off harmlessly into space. So we can all breathe a sigh of relief about that.

Given that this is the internet and everyone has to have an opinion about Google Reader shutting down, here’s mine.

I think Google has a right to do what it wants with its products, so if they want to shut it down then fair enough. As a user of Google Reader however I have a right to be annoyed that it’s closing down. In my line of work the phrase “put the user first” is something of a mantra, so while I’m tempted to stroke my chin and consider this from Google’s perspective as a question of strategic resource deployment or whatever I’m going to approach it instead from the user’s perspective – my perspective – and give Google a thumbs down on this one. Bring back Google Reader you scoundrels! And so on.

I bet Larry Page is quaking in his boots.

You and a group of colleagues or friends arrive at a restaurant and are shown to your table. You now have a split second to make a decision that could make or break your evening: which seat position do you grab?

Thankfully Alex Cornell has written a handy visual guide to help you make the right choice, thereby avoiding the need to spend the whole meal sat next to the dullest conversationalist or in a place where you can barely hear what your fellow diners are discussing.

Here’s an excerpt:

6 Person Circle: How loud the restaurant is determines how important it is that you claim a middle seat. A quiet space allows for cross-table diagnoal talking, and generally one conversation. A loud space however forces multiple conversations and less diagonal.

Now go over to Alex’s site and read the whole thing.

I love this idea for a clock that displays the time as QR codes, proudly described by its inventor as “deliciously impractical” and which I’d nominate as the most useless clock ever invented.

It reminds me of an old idea of mine for a similarly pointless timekeeping tool – the Texting Clock.

The Texting Clock would have been a successor device to the Speaking Clock. But instead of calling a number to hear a robot tell you the time, you would text a number and have a robot text you back. Something like this:

• I send a text to 84298 or some other number saying “what’s the time?”
• This service sends you a text back saying “INCORRECT SYNTAX” or something bothersome
• After a terse exchange with the Texting Clock you eventually get the syntax of your request right
• You then get a text back saying “THE TIME IS 12:05:33 GMT”

Of course, the user would in most cases be texting the Texting Clock from a device that already had a clock on it, making it not only infuriating but utterly redundant.

The Texting Clock is something I’ve had in my mind for years: an idea whose very uselessness seems to contain a lesson, like a Zen koan contained within a daft product concept. During my meditations I’d often wonder if anyone ever seriously proposed the Texting Clock. Maybe there was a meeting in the mid or late 1990s where some BT engineers, looking for ways to jump on the SMS bandwagon, came up with this concept. Or perhaps the team of the Speaking Clock, desperate to stay relevant in a “text-speak” era, thought their basic product would work just as well without the voice. I imagine the pitches: “it would work even in a really loud place where the Speaking Clock wouldn’t be heard”; “sure people have the time on their phones, but they’d know without a doubt that this was the real time.

Seeing this project though, I feel like I don’t have to wonder any more – it exists! OK, SMS has been replaced with a 21st-century equivalent, but the principles of the Texting Clock are all there: the painfulness, the redundancy, the amount of time added to a task that should take very little time at all. It’s making me wonder if I should just go ahead and make the Texting Clock happen myself.

“This site may be compromised”…

Thanks Google, I would never have guessed!

Japanese Twitter user @Kya7y has shared a highly intricate maze that her dad spent 7 years drawing. To read about it in English head over to Spoon & Tamago:

Some people have hobbies. Other people are obsessive… @Kya7y recently unearthed an incredibly detailed maze that her father created almost 30 years ago. When pressed for details, the father explained that he spent 7 years creating the map on A1 size paper, which is about 33 x 23 inches.

Here’s just one picture of the maze – read the full article for more.

Photo of maze, from Spoon & Tamago

From a distance it looks like the street plan of a city located on a comically overpopulated alien planet, but as you descend from its upper atmosphere and approach street level a different feel emerges: organic, messy, neural, brainlike, obviously human. A feel it wouldn’t have if it had been made on a computer. You can’t help but be impressed at the level of detail, the dedication and the craftsmanship that went into creating it.

The sensation it leaves me with is a bit like looking into another person’s mind as they drift off to sleep and dream-thoughts start warping the linear flow of waking consciousness. So I’m left wondering. Is it best understood as a maze, or as a streetmap of its creator’s mind?