#UKriots: A personal timeline and call for some rationality.

The big news story at the moment, probably in some small part related to but currently eclipsing the global financial "whoops," is the little breakdown in law and order in the UK, where the world is now observing that America and Arab, African and poor countries have no monopoly on rioting and looting.

Human behaviour is never simple, and society is never a simple collection of humans. Perhaps more hopeful than the riots are depressing is the way there has been a flowering of community togetherness in the form of broom brigades and support, with twitter hashtags spawning off to help people coordinate help for the aged, disabled and infirm.

@debcha: Urban rioting existed before social media. You know what didn't? Large-scale community cleanups, organized within hours.

But inevitably there have been arguments over causes and responsibility and what the proper response is.

My own opinions here are informed by having worked with the under- and un-privileged and studying enough Psychology to be very, very cautious whenever anybody emphatically states a simple concept as an ultimate truth.

Ever since the rioting began I have been struck by how everybody has, once again, been talking at cross-purposes with broad, sweeping generalisations and, because I can't help myself, I have been getting increasingly annoyed by the lack of actual debate.

Early on Thursday evening I was inspired to spurt out this frustrated little ditty on Facebook, under the heading:

Riots: The difference between "excuse" and "explanation" is insight

Here is the the problem with the most basic, and common, reaction to rioting:

Saying "They don't have the right to smash up other people's stuff," or "Alienation is not an excuse," ignores the following:

1. People need to know they don't have the right to bash, smash or steal.
2. People need to care about that, and let it drive their behaviour.

From what I'm hearing, a lot of people feel there's an entire generation in the UK (since, oh, Margaret Thatcher was in power) who haven't been given a reason to know or care. This is a failing in society. It's not an excuse, it's not permission, it's not even a mitigating factor, but IT IS A FAILING IN SOCIETY.

It was a development of what I had said to close the previous depressing evening of being involved in the publication of depressing news:

I sometimes wonder what simple change in people's minds would produce the best, most wide-spread, positive change. Tonight I'm thinking it's the ability to understand the difference between "explanation" and "excuse", and start talking about appropriate responses to each.

Throughout the night, I keep up a running stream of tweets and FB updates as instant reactions occurred to me.

A rough timeline of my other efforts looks like this, oldest first (my apologies for not linking directly to individual tweets, mine or anyone else's: I can't work out how to get the link out of Twitter's website right now, useless pack of ----): 

1. If a society does not provide support to those who need it, it can not expect those people to support it.
2. The word "draconian" is leaping energetically and irresistibly to mind. #ABCnews24 #DavidCameron #ukriots
3. What depresses me the most about the world right now is not the economy or the riots in the UK. It's the government response to the #UKriots
4. Suddenly, I am beginning to see why Britain tends to produce dystopian SF like 1984 and V for Vendetta.
5. Someone tell David Cameron 1984 wasn't written as a manual, guide or handbook. #UKriots (retweeted four times, by complete strangers)
6. The country that produced V for Vendetta will use 1984 as a manual because it failed to realise the lessons in Lord of the Flies. #UKriots
7. It seems UK parliamentarians are proposing to respond to violence arising from extreme alienation and disenfranchisement by alienating people more and de-enfranchising them further.
8. Fuck humanity, bring on the genetically engineered apes.
9. The most effective law and order intervention I've ever heard of was an advocacy and support service, not extra laws or police. #UKriots

And among the tweets I retweeted, this:

RT @kim_harding: Norway 92 kids killed & they call for more democracy. London riots & the they call for a clamp down on human rights...

I also, flippantly but bitterly, said this:

I am disappointed I have not seen a Guy Fawkes mask on a rioter yet. Mind you, that would require an education ...

Which sparked a discussion including the point that access to education is one of the problems, wherein I clarified that:

What concerns me is problems seem to be arising long before "tertiary" education is even an issue. These people have given up hope before getting to high school.

Also:

Maybe if these youth had been given more youth workers and programs they might have produced the next batch of Alan Moores, Sex Pistols and Monty Pythons instead of several billion dollars of insurance bills and a clogged criminal justice system where courts are working 24 hours to clear the backlog.

No matter how critical is personal responsibility, and not matter how inexcusable it is to bash other people, rob them, damage and loot stores, any discussion needs to come back to: Why are people doing this? Why are they not stopping themselves? What bit of their brain is not stepping in to say "Hang on, that's not on"? What's the difference between the looters and the broom brigaders?

On Wednesday night on Lateline, lifelong Tottenham resident and youth worker Clasford Stirling (isn't that a great name?) said:

You know, and this tension has been going on for a very long time. So, to see the youths acting in that way was not a surprise to myself and some of the workers that work with young people.

And in the last eight months - a year to eight months, there's been this added pressure of services being cut, families - people in families losing their jobs, and just the whole pressure of society.

And I think it's all come to a head now, because the unemployment, especially in Tottenham, is absolutely horrendous for young people. And if you're a young person who has, for whatever reason, got yourself in trouble, you are not going to get a job.

...

Well, I'm glad [UK prime minister David Cameron] said that: that they think the world owes them something. Well, I'm telling you, David Cameron, that the world does owe them something.

These are young people. They want to work, they want to be educated - all these things that we have to do to make them better citizens. These things are being taken away bit by bit.

Please note, before accusing him of defending the indefensible, he also said:

I'm not for one saying that myself or anybody condones what a lot of them have done as regards to burning people's property and looting. And I think the people that I've spoken to in my community have echoed the words that I hope they're dealt with severely.

...

I think, yes, we do have to get tough with them. I don't agree with now that people like myself and other people's got to pay for all this damage. I think come down heavy on those looters that are caught, and even if it takes their whole life to pay back some of the money, that's what the Government should be looking at. Yes, come down tough.

Two ends of the issue: Give people an opportunity to become a "productive member of society", then be strict if they reject it. But who's going to be surprised if, not given an opportunity to do good, they do bad?

Then, a different perspective, from sociologist Professor Ellis Cashmore on Lateline Thursday night:

I would actually call it cannibalism more than [rioting] ...

...

I really do think that this is commodity-driven kind of phenomenon at the moment. I stress again: it is not rioting. It's young people eating up their own neighbourhoods.

It disappointed me, I have to say, that Lateline host Tony Jones didn't ask a sociologist why social behaviour was breaking down, what was enabling this - particularly as Tony had interviewed Clasford Stirling just the night before.

However these two perspectives really do highlight what for me, as you may have gathered if you've actually been reading all the way down, is the issue:

People are cannibalising their own neighbourhoods, beating their neighbours, and even telling people "This is my banker's bonus!"

Why are they not not doing this? Anything can spark a demonstration, particularly among the bored and the angry, but what sort of absence of moral opinion or presence of huge resentment has lead to this? 

Let me be very clear: I have worked with the unprivileged and the angry, the mental health patients with nothing and the drug addicts with self-induced mental health conditions, and we saw negative behaviours and we tolerated none of it. We understood, we identified the sources of their frustrations and, from outside unable to help, shared many of them, but we tolerated none of it on our neutral territory.

If I come across as ignoring the criminality in the search for an explanation, it's because I was feeling overwhelmed by the anger and by kneejerk reactions. The behaviour I have seen sickens me and my first reaction is to lock the lot of them up. I just don't think it would do anyone any good at all - not the looters, not the UK taxpayers, not UK society.

So don't go shouting you can't excuse this behaviour by looking for any explanation beyond David Cameron's crashingly bone-headed "pure criminality": We're not trying to.

Clasford Stirling, not the best public speaker, not the most coherent or the most considered, talked about a struggle to provide young people with any sense of hope and future at all. Professor Cashmore waved away suggestions of real poverty by talking about the welfare state, but try telling that to someone who find themselves unemployable and needs food stamps to survive while all around billboards advertise nice cars driven by the well-dressed to the Michelin-starred restaurants.

It's all very well pointing out the inanely obvious "They have to help themselves up!" but they need, at the very least, a fucking ladder.

A brief rant on evidence and debate quality - wind turbine edition

The ABC's 4 Corners has just broadcast an episode on wind farms and the people who claim they're hazardous to human health.

I knew it was going to annoy me and it did.

Even ignoring the people who say inane tripe like "What if a piece the size of a Commodore broke off?" (gee, what if a Commodore ran into someone? Or they, you know, like, built it properly?), the entire debate is, no real surprise, emotional and really, really poorly informed and generally lacking in any sort of science or, sadly, journalistic investigative rigour.

Here's the thing:

Lots of people are claiming they have health problems caused by wind turbines.

Nobody with any sense is claiming there are *no* health problems..

However, the central issue here is: Why? What is the causative factor? Is there any evidence?

Consider this:

1. There is no solid evidence health problems are caused by wind turbines.
2. There is some evidence wind turbines don't cause health problems.
3. There is some evidence that earning rent from wind turbines is correlated with no health problems, which is an entertaining result.
4. There are three health/causal possibilities:
1. Health problems are caused by wind turbines (direct physiology - pressure waves, sound, infrasound, something like that)
2. Health problems are caused by stressing about health problems that may be caused by wind turbines (psychotropic/psychogenic/psychosomatic - stress, most commonly).
3. You have menopause, or an infection, or a pulled nerve, or something else completely unrelated to the wind turbines but the turbines get blamed anyway (probably a case of confirmation bias).

Now:

1. If you are not interested in considering possibilities 4.2. and 4.3., you have nothing to contribute to this debate. However:
2. If you are not interested in considering possibility 4.1, you have nothing to contribute to this debate.
3. If you think "psychogenic" is an insulting term indicating weakness, go and say that to someone with severe PTSD. Preferably a former special forces soldier living on a disability pension.
4. If you think "psychogenic" is impossible, go and say that to someone with severe PTSD. Preferably a former special forces soldier living on a disability pension.
5. If you are just going to shout at me, piss off. You have nothing to contribute to this debate.

You may now enter the debate.

Arguing from ignorance only makes you look ignorant

God, is this thing still here?

Over the past six months or, to be perfectly honest, year, my rant/discuss energy has been diluted by twitter, which makes it too easy to make simple statements of opinion or belief without developing the argument, and Facebook, which does something similar.

Which is of course the trouble with most social media - it makes it far too easy to comment, argue and insult from a position of ignorance.

Stop being sarcastic, I know that's not news. However, no matter how obvious that fact is it is enabling an incredibly low standard of debate across even more fora.

Last night I saw a long string of comments on a FB post, all arguing about an event which was thoroughly explained in the media at the time, without one person providing the missing, documented, information. Instead there were quite offensive allegations and wild, wildly inaccurate, suppositions.

Here's the first tip towards being a more informed, less confused member of society, consumer, voter and debater: don't wonder, find out.

Don't, as an anti-vaxer tried with me when I kept answering his questions with documented answers, say "I just wonder ...": find out.

Chances are there will be answers, sometimes astonishingly easy to find.

Every field of contentious science has common denier tropes, and they all make you look ignorant:

Anti-vaccination: Rates of autism soared after vaccines were introduced (no, definitions changed and awareness increased).

Evolution: If we descended from apes, why are there still apes? (Not descended from, there was a common ancestor we are both descended from).

Climate change: it has been warmer in the past (only in small areas, the issue is world-wide warming. Oh, and basic physics).

The thing is: if all you say is "follow the money" and "the government line" and "sheeple", all you are doing is demonstrating your inability or unwillingness to do your background research, test your assumptions and develop your arguments: in other words, to "debate".

On ABC1's Lateline on Wednesday June 22, Australia's new chief scientist, Professor Ian Chubb, said "If he wants to address the substance of the issue, he can. He's entitled to. He can argue his case and he can put his own arguments and his own evidence that he's - or the evidence - the conclusions that he's drawn from the evidence that he has on the table and have them properly debated"

The key point being: you need to have evidence, or arguments, in order to play. Otherwise you are just part of the noise, not the signal.

When I was the information officer for a disability support agency, it was obviously simple professionalism that saw me investigate new health claims and new or old treatments before saying anything to clients or colleagues, regardless of how much or little background I had in that area.

It was the experience that restarted my research and critical skills, atrophying since I finished my first degree, and got me keenly interested in science again.

When I kept being confronted by the (sadly ongoing) big-shouty health issue of the day, the alleged link between vaccines and autism, I found out the mercury link was fundamentally unlikely, large studies had found no correlation between vaccination and autism, studies of unvaccinated populations had found the same rates of autism as in vaccinated populations, and the side-effect rates of vaccination pale into insignificance compared to, say, the health effects of measles. Check out Science Based Medicine for an overview.

I read as much as I could about evolution and found that evolution has been witnessed in action and yes, we have transition fossils.

Then, when I was comfortable with those, the issue of climate change got raised (around a bonfire, while drunk) and I had to take a deep breath and dive back into research again.

The idea of climate change being a conspiracy appears at face value to be laughably paranoid. It would need more collusion than, frankly, we've ever demonstrated ourselves capable of. So yes, I went in sceptical of the sceptics, expecting to find more explanations than cover-ups.

I found out about the difference between climate and weather, and why local weather patterns over the short term are irrelevant. I found out the century-old knowledge that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and how we know that human activity is increasing levels in the atmosphere and why the claim "it's irrelevant because there's so little of it" is not just wrong, it's completely idiotic (hint: it takes a lower concentration of arsenic in your blood to kill you.

And so on, and so on and so forth. There really is an enormous amount of evidence.

And, at no point, although I have said extremely unpleasant things about particular people to select friends, at no point have I sent abusive or threatening emails to people, no matter how much ... Actually, no, I shall avoid the provocation to link to anyone, no matter how much they have abdicated the right to avoid insult by denying it to others.

The point is: I shut up until I felt I had as much of a handle on the evidence as I could given my background, time and willingness to learn ("I am not a scientist, but ..." in my case: But I listened to those who were).

In this age of the internet, when so much is available, good quality and bad, diving in without having done the basic background research may be easier than ever before, but has never been less excusable.

Shut up until you've done your homework. Then we can talk.

How (not) to manage a trial version of software

There are essentially five models to selling software over the internet:

1. Don't, it's free
2. Allow download only after purchase
3. Give away a limited free trial
4. Give away an "ad-supported" version that uses up your bandwidth and screen real-estate and, sometimes, time, by displaying ads but is otherwise fully functional.
5. The "freemium" model: A limited free version missing functions that are activated after payment, but which is otherwise fully functional and time-unlimited.

Having a limited trial can take one of several models. One of the world's best twitter clients, Gravity, has a 10-day trial during which absolutely everything works, then it refuses to work at all until you activate it. You don't have to reinstall anything, it just checks on start-up if it's registered or not and stops working until you register your phone during check-out after payment.

For networked applications like the Twitter (and Facebook and FourSquare and ReadItLater and Google Reader and Flickr) client Gravity that's not a problem, but unfortunately some applications that don't otherwise need networking at all will be ad-supported or go away and talk to their home server anyway, which is a nuisance and potentially expensive.

Another popular model is to allow the software to run indefinitely, but not to save anything. I've seen this model used in 3D modelers that can load or edit anything, but can't save any changes.

Or, sometimes, the "limit" is that starting up takes longer and gives you an annoying note, every time, that this wouldn't be happening if you manned up and shelled out for the licence fee.

All of these are, I have no doubt, legitimate. The freemium model is gambling on enough people wanting the extra features, the time-limited feature-full trial offers potential buyers a vital chance to make a complete evaluation, and the pop-up warning and ad-supported models pit the non-buyer's patience against their frugality.

The feature-limited trial can be highly annoying and limit your ability to truly evaluate the functionality, but hey, it's an option.

The only model I really don't like is the "buy it or nothing" option, where you have to take it on faith you will like it and even be able to get along with it.

However, there are a right way and a wrong way to approach each of these models.

The first right way is to put comprehensive and clear screenshots on your web site, regardless of what you're doing with the software. The second right way is to clearly announce what you are doing.

I have just found a piece of software that violates that second principle, and almost as a matter of principle I won't be buying. 

It's not from a company and there are better ways to provide feedback, so I'm not going to name and shame here.

I'll just make it really obvious and say I was looking for a small application to track expenses on my N900. 

I found three - one free, one freemium and ... another one.

Its website has a huge list of features, mentions it's cross-platform, has screenshots and a video, and it's only when you get to the Download page that you are told, in fairly poor English, that it is fully functional except it won't save data between sessions until you enter a registration key you can get after donating via PayPal.

No price, just making a donation at all.

Now, that right there annoys me just a little. Either decide what it's worth, or ask for donations but don't require them, or just give it away. What, you want the processing fees on a 1c donation? That's what I'm tempted to do, here.

What's worse, however, is that the application is available in the repositories for the N900, so it's possible to find it and install it via the on-device application manager before finding out this limitation. In fact, it's possible to install it, run it, enter lots of data, close it down and then, next time you start it up, find all your data missing, think it's horribly buggy and abandon it in disgust.

The first version I installed was from the extras-testing software repository and it was not, to put it mildly, too advanced. I then updated the entire device (I love a system that lets you do that. As opposed to Nokia's other smartphone OS, that doesn't) and got a new version, with extra features, from extras-devel which, explicitly, is not expected to be safe for regular usage because it's cutting-edge.

So the version that looks complete and usable isn't available to sensible people.

I also noticed a brief notification saying I hadn't registered it, and another one saying it wouldn't work fully until I did. 

First of all, I don't remember that second, fairly important, notification from the earlier one, which had the same limitation. Secondly, those notifications fade and disappear fairly quickly. So if you're not looking at the screen, you don't notice it.

It's really, really poorly done.

I shall keep my opinion of the icons to myself.

If you are looking for an expenses tracker for Maemo 5 on the N900, I recommend Toshl. It's freemium, cleanly and attractively designed, easy to use and to comprehend and has full backup onto the web site, where the premium version gives you extra features. It's also available on all the major platforms except WebOS and Windows Phone, although there is a non-functioning button for that so it'll probably be soon.

Do we make them justify anything?

In case you haven't worked this out already: I really, really don't think much of the road safety discussion currently being played out in the state and national media.

It's important but it's crude, simplistic, over-wrought and driven far too much by government and police sound bites, and I don't even mean the almost exclusive focus on deaths to the exclusion of permanent trauma causing lifelong disabilities at a tremendous emotional, physical and financial cost to individuals and their families.

And most of the discussion orbits the topic of speed cameras.

In order to justify the use of speed cameras as a road safety initiative, not merely a fundraising initiative, there needs to be a direct and confirmed causal link between the usage of cameras and an overall reduction in the rate and severity of accidents. Not just a correlation - a causal link. There are too many possible factors impacting driving behaviour for us to jump to a simplistic conclusion if there's a dip in the death rate.

Then, if we've done that, we need to be sure that there are more effective, more cost-effective ways of addressing the road toll. Maybe speed cameras work, but not as well as some of the alternatives.

Maybe the road and traffic authorities know what they're doing. But it's really hard to be sure of that, because they're not talking as if they do.

Let's start with More speed cameras deployed to cut road deaths from the ABC (December 15).

It tells us: Police are trying to cut road deaths; they are putting camera vans in 40 and 50 kilometre per hour zones; there are more camera vans in service (12, now); in two years 57 people have died in 40 and 50 zones; the road toll is lower than it was last year, and; putting camera vans in low-speed areas is part of a plan to cut the road toll.

There are logical holes in that. There is no justification that camera vans help to lower the road toll, they are concentrating resources on areas with a very low percentage of the toll (57 in two years, when the two-year total toll is in the region of 600) and where death is less likely due to the low speeds anyway.

Are non-suburban areas less important? Or is it harder to put resources there, so it's too much of an effort?

There is not even any indication of how many deaths are related to speed anyway, which would give the public some hope of working out for themselves if the tax money they're paying to be used in crude behaviour modification on them has any hope of being spent in a way remotely resembling good value.

From the Brisbane Times (December 18), we have Sixteen reasons for covert speed cameras.

Ooh! Justification!

Hahahahaha, psych! No, it's just another article saying "We have road deaths, let's do something simple and easy."

Here's the interesting part, right up front: 16 speed-related deaths in two years in 40 and 50km/h zones. That's 16 out of 57 in low-speed zones, or 28 per cent, or less than one third, and that's out of a tiny proportion of the total. Tell me: What are the police doing about the 72 per cent of deaths that weren't speed-related? Anything?

If we take a two-year total of about 600, that is, as pointed out in the comments to this article, about 2.7 per cent of deaths getting the added attention of two covert camera vans. May I suggest that's a little disproportionate?

There is, however, a balancing although inadequately explored opinion delivered by National Motorists Association of Australia, saying that covert cameras are all about revenue raising and can never be as effective as police on the streets.

It would be nice to have some sort of discussion about why that is.

Finally, appearing in the RSS feeds as "Speed cams are lifesavers" (what, muscular men in red speedos?), the Courier Mail gave us Covert speed cameras linked to Queensland plummeting road toll.

Okaaaay. Linked by whom? Statisticians? Accident researchers?

Well, I've read the entire article twice and I'm still not sure. It's not really stated.

The salient points are: A poll showed 25 per cent of motorists have changed their behaviour as a result of covert speed cameras; quite a lot of money has been charged in fines this year, and; there are concerns of a bounce in the accident rate as people adjust their expectations and return to previous behaviours.

The whole "cameras = less deaths" thing is only ever hinted at.

It is assumed that "changed their behaviour" means "safer." They might, instead, be driving slower but angrier and more aggressively. They may be safer but it could be because people are more alert on the roads trying to spot covert police and are therefore more aware of road and traffic conditions, rather than because they're driving slower.

If that's so, then good. But there might be better, more generally useful ways of getting the same result.

It's even assumed the current low death toll has any explanation beyond annual fluctuations. I've forgotten too much about statistics to know what the thresholds are and gee, it'd be nice to hear someone explaining it.

As an exercise, I went to PubMed, typed in "speed cameras" (with quotes, to get the actual phrase) and had a quick read through the abstracts of relevant articles.

There's the usual problem of identifying articles that have anything to do with the topic, and then when you find them there are a nice smattering of methodological problems. I even found one article finding a difference in effectiveness between different types of roads, and then another article using one category of road as a control and the other as an intervention group.

There was also, astonishingly, a Cochrane review, conducted by researchers right here in Brisbane.

Going to the source, we find that the Cochrane Library contains 12 articles relating to prevention of traffic crashes.

(NB: The conclusion of Motorcycle rider training for the prevention of road traffic crashes is "We have no idea, no study has been of a high enough quality to justify drawing any worthwhile conclusion.")

The camera review is here.

A review of 35 relevant studies concluded that cameras are associated with lower speeds and lower rates of accidents, but the degree of effectiveness can't be confirmed because the studies are of varying and generally moderate quality.

There, see? We have a result: Research has concluded that speed cameras help lower the road toll. It took me five minutes to find that.

Now, before I have any faith that my tax dollars are being well spent, I want to see:

• Discussion on the best form of cameras - point-to-point, visible fixed, visible temporary, covert temporary, and visible or covert vehicles in the traffic flow.
• Discussion on what to do about all the accidents that aren't related to speed.
• Some sort of visible commitment to research-based policy.
• Research into why cameras have that effect, and how to maximise it.

I know, "tell him he's dreaming'."

We can hope.

Smartphone, n.: A device with not quite the lot

Picture this: you're shopping for a new luxury car, and the salesman is explaining that the seat can be adjusted in seven different ways via the one control and it can save settings for seven different people, and the steering wheel can control the radio, gears, cruise control and climate control, and it can steer itself between the lines and control distance to the car in front via radar, and...

Then you notice that it doesn't have an interior rear-view mirror and the wing mirrors are adjusted manually. The salesman looks baffled and says "It's got mirrors, doesn't it?"

That's how I feel we're being treated by smartphone manufacturers.

Item: HTC still hasn't worked out how to build a decent loudspeaker or camera.

Item: Nexus S, built by Samsung to be Google's next developer phone, doesn't have a memory card slot.

Item: my current shiny, with which I am still mostly very happy, the Nokia N900, doesn't have a now-and-even-when-it-was-new standard magnetometer to go with its not having MMS inbuilt and the version of Ovi Maps installed not having any facility for storing bookmarks.

Seriously, what are the thought processes going on in their heads?

With the iPhone, you knew you weren't going to get a feature until Apple was good and ready to give it to you, and that's a perfectly fair and reasonable decision.

With Windows Phone 7, they appear to have deliberately decided to cripple it by denying it memory cards or cut and paste and, well, at least they're being consistent.

But nobody else has that explanation. Even when you get the hardware it may not be activated - the N900 has FM transmitters and receivers, but there was no radio software in early firmwares to use the receiver.

Then there's Samsung, who produced one of the best mobile phone cameras in the i8910 but haven't put anything remotely as worthy in any Android phone.

Then you have screens. Motorola came out with the XT720, which had all the potential to be a great tablet phone, with good speaker and even good camera. And a screen so mirror-finish you can't use it outdoors in sunlight.

Even Nokia have been guilty of this, perversely removing the sunlight-friendly transflective layer from the N97 mini.

There appears to be a "95 per cent" attitude in the technology world at the moment. Apple gives you 95 per cent of the features you want, but does them really well. Everyone else tries to give you all the features, but only gets it 95 per cent correct.

Only one company seems to have the commitment and meticulous dedication to engineering perfection that even justifies a label like "flagship" and they're such control freaks I couldn't justify giving them money even if I could justify their prices.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony.

It's been a truism for a while now that Nokia doesn't release new phones when they're finished - you need to wait for a couple of firmware releases for that.

At the same time, the hardware set of top Android phones is the reason I've bought two more Nokias in a row. Samsung and Motorola are getting very close to convincing me, but Motorola have done stupid, unfriendly things with locked bootloaders - preventing custom firmwares while not committing to prompt and guaranteed updates themselves - and Samsung goes and does something like the Nexus S with no card slot and an average camera.

What I want is an N900, next generation, all updated and upgraded hardware, maybe the N8 camera (we can dream), still the keyboard, and Maemo 6, not MeeGo. And now that's doomed forever. Do I think the first MeeGo device will be worthy, and complete?

Don't make me laugh bitterly.

Queensland solar power: covered in coal soot

I stared at this story for a while, wondering what my response would be.

Then the Government published a media release as well, and I decided to go with: Pathetic, foot-dragging pack of short-sighted hypocrites.

The story is:

Under the definite headline Queensland to host one of the world's largest solar power stations, says Stephen Robertson, the Courier Mail reported conditionally on December 15 that:

Queensland could become home to one of the world's largest solar power stations, Energy Minister Stephen Robertson says.

This tendency to make unjustified, definitive claims in headlines (ie, "lying") is one of my biggest complaints against editorial practices in poor-quality journalism. Bald statements tend to get remembered, and headlines tend to get remembered, so the end result is the perpetuation of inaccurate perceptions. This, particularly in science journalism where a nuanced discussion of uncertainty is paramount, is unnecessary, destructive to an informed public and unforgivable.

But I digress.

The fact is that for a state blessed with wide open spaces and lots of sunlight (anyone not associate Queensland with sunlight? No? Didn't think so), Queensland has been as backwards as the state's reputation, and needs to stop being proud of plans that will barely even catch us up to where we should be.

This is a state addicted to burning things. Electricity generation is built on a platform of coal, and more coal. Even "renewables" production depends heavily on burning things. According to a 2009 report to the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (ABARE), in 2007 bagasse (sugar cane mulch after the sugar is extracted)  provided a third of all electricity produced in Queensland from renewable means. Surprisingly, hydroelectricity was most of the rest. Biogass and wood pulp contributed and there was a frankly surprising contribution from wind. Solar, including solar hot water heating, barely even registered.

To be clear: Even if you don't accept global warming, a heavy reliance on a finite resource has never been intelligent. Any manager with half a brain plans for things like expansion and increase, and any geologist, geometrician or anybody capable of acknowledging the spherical nature of the earth can tell you that no fossil fuel is available in unlimited supply.

If you do accept global warming, something it's becoming harder and harder for even the obstinately ignorant to avoid, burning agricultural by-products is questionable and burning fossil fuels is asking for trouble we've already started getting.

Nor is it acceptable to hide beyond excuses that "the technology wasn't ready".

Let's recap, shall we: Solar concentration through lenses was achieved BC and the first solar hot water heater was build pre-1900.

The photovoltaic effect was recognised in 1839, exploited in 1883 and explained by Albert Einstein in 1905, for which he won the Nobel Prize.

The United Nations held a conference on solar power in 1961 and spacecraft were solar-powered in 1967 (only the electrics, obviously).

The first solar car race in Australia was run while I was in primary school, and Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the White House in 1977 - they were later taken down by Ronald Reagan, who believed that the job of a leader and government is to prevent, at all costs, doing any actual leading or governing.

I believe that governments are elected, and paid out of our tax money, to lead, govern and look to the future. I'm also disappointed in their response to water management, but that's another rant entirely.

At this moment, in Australia, we have companies developing quite exciting concentrating dish photovoltaics,  concentrating dish solar thermal and dye-sensitised photovoltaic solutions in addition to the more conventional solar photovoltaic panels. And that's just what I uncovered in five minutes googling.

Whyalla in South Australia (40MW) and Mildura in Victoria (154MW) are both planning, or even constructing, large-scale plants. Yet the best the Queensland Government can do is a lot of plans, high-sounding words, ambitious statements and a couple of measly little power stations rating in the hundreds of kilowatts. Wizard Power is building a 40 megawatt, 4,000 kilowatt, station in Whyalla, a city a lot further south than the Queensland border. That plant is expected to produce 66 gigawatt hours of electricity each year.

According to that ministerial statement, Queensland's "first solar farm" will produce 335 megawatt hours of energy per year.

The state-government-owned CS Energy is building a solar thermal add-on to a polluting power plant, and it's planned for a capacity of 44MW and all it has to do is pre-heat water entering a coal-fired plant rated at 750MW.

For a state that prides itself on self-sufficiency and is selling itself as "the smart state" and "ClimateSmart" and the "Solar State", there is an awful lot of catching up to do and a deplorable lack of ambition. And that's even before we factor in the fact we export more coal than we burn.

No, that memory card slot is not optional

The more we demand our smartphones do, the more on-board storage they need.

As cameras get bigger and better quality, image files increase. Music playback is now standard, so we need somewhere to put the music files. Many devices still remember when "smartphone" meant being able to edit documents, and we still need somewhere to put them. Podcasts. Ebook readers. High quality video playback. Extra applications (more of a problem on platforms that don't have any to begin with). The list goes on.

And then there's the simple fact of operating systems getting bigger and bigger, and needing somewhere to put all the system files.

Once upon a time, "extra space" meant having a memory card slot. Then someone had the bright idea of soldering a memory card to the motherboard, and hey presto, on-board storage.

Most devices have both for added flexibility, although some of them make it a painful business getting at the removable card - under the battery cover or, in some particularly stupid cases, under the battery. Some only have the on-board storage.

And then there's Windows Phone 7 which, apparently, won't have a card in any device.

I don't care about Windows - there are many other and much better reasons why I won't have anything to do with it - but it doesn't make me very happy when other people decide to save themselves a buck by cutting that off the feature list.

Here are the reasons I will never, if I can at all help it, own a device without:

Easy portability

Let's face it, nobody's encouraging you to buy a phone and keep it for two years, even though that's how long plans generally last. Some devices aren't even supported properly past one year. So being able to take all of the files you want with you from one device to the next easily is nice, even if you're not a reviewer who has to do it several times a week (I'm not, sadly, I just manage to sound like it). Some people, of course, may be tempted to point out that nowadays we can do that easily with desktop software and syncing, which brings me to my next point:

Software agnosticism

Having removable storage means I'm not tied to someone else's - frequently quite bad - idea of how I should manage my own files. I use Linux on my desktop computer, so I can't run most desktop "companion" software anyway, making it specially important for me to not have to care. Microsoft have announced that Windows Phone 7 will only talk to their Zune desktop software, which is one of the very good reasons they can take their software and shove it. Apple devices only want to talk to iTunes, although there are workarounds. That sort of arse-hattery is one reason I still haven't considered buying an iPhone or iPod, even if I wanted to pay their exorbitantly inflated prices. I was bitten by buying a digital audio recorder that relied upon companion software which, surprise surprise, doesn't run on Linux. And even if you are happy using Ovi suite, or iTunes, or Zune, what if you buy a different platform? Ovi Suite will only talk to Symbian, I'm not sure about iTunes but I'm pretty sure Zune won't be happy talking to iOS or Android or Symbian or Bada or... Nokia have gone down a fairly sane route - their on-board memory is generally accessible via USB Mass Storage, the same way USB memory sticks and cards plugged into card readers are - but even then you are relying upon the phone working.

What if the device breaks? 

I managed to kill my N97 mini by leaving it on the roof of a car. My anguished scream is still echoing around the multiverse. Considering the interesting shape the phone was in after it was run over, I was amazed to find the SIM card and memory card unharmed. I could simply plug them back into my ancient N95, resync my calendar and contacts with Google, and away we go - images and ebooks and podcast downloads all intact. My alternative would have been to go to a repair centre, wait an indeterminate length of time and pay someone for the privilege. No thanks.

Upgradeable storage

With 32GB of on-board storage appearing routinely now, this is almost a non-issue. But, what the hell, why not say it: If the on-board disk dies or fills up, having a replaceable, upgradeable extra is not to be sneezed at.

Software installation

You may not have noticed, but some software demands memory cards, or comes on memory cards. Some GPS software companies will send you a card containing available maps. If you install a mapping program that can store maps locally (and if you don't, you're relying far too much upon network coverage), they will often warn against storing maps on a built-in drive.

As a final, bonus point: I don't trust the bastards.

You can make up your own minds, but I know which way my wallet will be voting.

You can take your guilt trip and shove it

Our electricity bill landed the other day.

There's nothing particularly special about that fact - it happens with depressing regularity, four times a year.

What is interesting, however, is this little snippet:

"You generated 1.9176 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions during this period. To reduce your environmental impact, switch to Government accredited GreenPower, and offset the the carbon emissions generated by your travel."

Let's play a little game: How many mistakes can you spot in those two sentences?

There should probably be a hyphen in "Government accredited" because it's playing the role of a compound adjective, it's not clear whether GreenPower relates to travel or to household usage and oh yes: I generated 1.9176 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

I'm sorry, who did?

Over the period covered by that bill, I emitted various greenhouse gases by normal biological processes. My transport patterns, dictated first by the fact I don't live within cooee of public transport, has released many more greenhouse gases but since I use a motorbike mostly, not a car, that puts me slightly ahead of most people but behind those who are able to afford an electric vehicle. I also chose to use household electricity in various ways which, ultimately, determined the size of this bill.

I did not, however, contact the electricity provider and insist upon all of that electricity being generated by fossil fuels.

If I were still living in Tasmania most of it would have come from hydroelectricity, which only generates greenhouse gases through maintenance work. If I was in Denmark, 20% would come from wind power. If I lived in various parts of various countries around the world, I would be getting a lot of it, without making any decision, from various forms of solar, wind, geothermal, wave or hydro.

Because I moved to Queensland, I am getting it almost exclusively from coal.

The electricity providers in Queensland are blessed with high levels of sunlight and large amounts of unused land and even though our water supply is questionable, there are actually generators built into the dams which supply our water.

Yet we get our electricity from a finite, non-reusable resource which is dirty before it's burned and dirty after it's burnt.

I do have an option of ticking a box and getting charged more for electricity generated partially by renewable resources. Because my partner and I are both in casual employment and have debts to pay off, this is not a sane option for us.

On the other hand, the government is complicit by providing subsidies to the fossil fuel industry (PDF).

Subsidies. So stop saying "But coal is cheaper!" or "solar is too expensive!" Let's move all of those subsidies from fossil to renewable resources and see what happens. Of course, that might mean we charge China slightly more for the coal we export, but since there's so much of it I'm almost sure it wouldn't take much to make up the costs.

The reason "I" generated greenhouse gases is because this state is inherently conservative and technologically anachronistic.

I'll make you a deal: I'll keep an eye on my own usage, making savings where I can, and you do your job and plan for the future, whether it involves a carbon tax or trading scheme or not, and stop trying to make me feel guilty by blaming me for your lack of foresight, planning and courage.

The only thing you're doing now is hastening me moving to an alternate provider.

Treating drivers as simpletons is a major cause of road accidents

All of a sudden, five stories from the Queensland Times appeared in my RSS reader.

They are, in the order in which they appeared: Speed cameras do help save lives, Drivers disregard the Fatal Four, Forget the phone, you're driving, Enough is enough - Drive 2 Stay Alive and Count the cost of careless driving.

Spot the theme?

It appears that Drive 2 Stay Alive (I will withhold my comments on cutesy SMS-like usage of homonymic numbers) is a program adopted by the QT to encourage road safety, and all five of the articles list the other four in a "Related links" box right at the top.

Which is all very admirable - the intent, I mean, not the internet formatting. I really can't fault the QT for public interest journalism in this matter.

In fact, it's fantastic that the last-named of these articles points out the costs of road accidents aren't just in fatalities, and include medical treatment, disability care, clean-up bills and legal costs as well as costs to the economy in loss of labour (I've always wondered how they calculate that...)

But I would like to make a few points, because my cynicism doth runneth over.

Over the next four weeks, we will provide informative features to help you stay alive on our roads, and by taking the online pledge, you are saying enough people have died needlessly on our roads.

Umm... I will withhold my opinion of online pledges, as well, but admirable, admirable.

Let me get into the meat of criticism, now, and it's exemplified for me by this statement:

Colin Goodsell from the RACQ said distraction while behind the wheel was one of the top causes of accidents on Queensland roads aside from the fatal four – speeding, drink driving, seatbelts and fatigue.

Okay, first of all, not wearing a seatbelt is not generally a cause of accidents. It can be - you could lose control because you moved relative to the seat in a corner or while braking - but it's generally a cause of getting hurt in an accident, not a cause of the accident happening. Language like this may be approved by marketing and may present a united front, but I'm not sure it helps.

Also, if the "fatal four" is speeding, drink driving, seatbelts and fatigue, is it a "fatal three" for motorcyclists or do they have a different set?

And then there is the argument that distraction is the biggest cause because if you were truly paying attention then, either you wouldn't be speeding or it wouldn't be as a big a problem, you wouldn't be drink driving and you would be managing your fatigue.

All of these road safety campaigns, possibly in an attempt to get the message across, over-simplify matters so badly that you're left with the impression of a collection of tick-a-box, exclusive and non-related options. I have been complaining for years that some of the most dangerous drivers I meet on the roads are the ones who aren't speeding, and I've been much more comfortable in cars where the driver was speeding but competent than in some cars where the driver just wasn't paying attention to much except the speedometer, the road signs and the conversation.

I am convinced that ignoring the interaction between all cognitive factors and driving decisions is just going to lead to trouble.

It's also a major factor in my complaint against the anti-speeding arguments and the anti-speeding initiatives and the crowing of authorities when a rise in speed cameras is correlated (say it with me: "Correlation does not equal causation") with a reduction in road fatalities.

If they don't, in public, consider the possibility that the reduction is not because people have decided to not speed but because they are keeping a much sharper eye out for cameras and camera vans and are therefore more likely to spot and respond to other dangerous situations, then I just aren't going to take them seriously.

In fact, the "Speed cameras do save lives" article is a classic of waffling, unsubstantiated claims that would get laughed out of any research proposal. "Police have linked...", "increase in speeding detection... has been credited..." Oh, puh-lease.

And then there's the almost throwaway line "... more people driving to the speed limit and road conditions."

Just try and convince me that the two are necessarily (to use the word in its nice and exact meaning) related. Go ahead, just try. Most articles run like that: "Speeding.... speed limit... too fast... dangerous.... road conditions." Slipped in almost as an afterthought, the one most important factor - road conditions. Driving to the speed limit at all times is just a recipe for disaster the next time there's a decent storm.

What I would like to see, in all of this pleading, public displays of hurt bewilderment and patriarchal trumpeting from the various authorities, is this exhortation: Take responsibility for your own driving, and look out for everyone else.

That's it. Drop all this talk of specifics, mention it when it's relevant to individual situations, but just keep reminding people that, actually, they have a "licence" to drive, not a "right", and they are in command of several tonnes of metal travelling at speeds never before attained by human beings and in excess of what our physiology and neurology evolved to cope with.

Start treating drivers like complicated, thinking, sentient human beings and, just perhaps, they'll start behaving like it.

Yes, I wish we could all ignore reality and use all the water we wanted to, as well

This post will prioritise an angry response over diplomacy, and as such I'm about to make a lot of people very angry. Many of whom are very big men who think fights solve things. I shall rely on my relative anonymity to go sailing past unnoticed.

One of the biggest issues I have with my fellow human beings is short-term thinking.

Take the current argument over the extremely sick Murray-Darling Basin river system, a considerable chunk of south-eastern Australia and the water feed to a considerable chunk of our agricultural output, not to mention other primary and secondary industries as well.

Breaking the issue down, the propositions are:

1. Agricultural and mining industries need water
2. Reducing their water allocation will hurt them
3. Communities are hurt if their industries are hurt
4. The river system is dying because it does not have enough water in it.

Try and add those up to something that works. Go on, I dare you. Can't? Start feeling sorry for the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, then, who have to.

Let's try looking at this a different way, using impeccable logic:

• When total output consistently exceeds total input, total volume decreases to zero.

Now that just doesn't help at all, does it? Looks like we might have a problem!

Now, to me this represents an interesting and complicated issue which will probably require innovative, sideways thinking and a complicated set of solutions.

Changing crops and maybe adjusting Australian eating and clothing habits, perhaps. Researching new water delivery systems that involve less spraying out into the air and more targeted feeds. More efficient processes. Not growing rice which needs to sit in standing water, possibly. 

Much of this won't be cheap, won't be easy and won't be quick. Neither was converting from manual to automated farming methods. And the alternative is we either become Fremen or we end up with a Water and Power authority. It's not a coincidence that when Frank Herbert had his Bene Gesserit describe the most basic form of control through withholding scarce resources, he used water as the exemplar.

The problem is that all of the complaints I have heard to date have boiled down to 1+2=3. If you reduce water, you reduce productivity, which means masses of job losses, so therefore let us keep the water.

Unfortunately, the scientists are saying 4. Water volume in the Basin is steadily decreasing. Basic physics says that if this continues, there won't be any. At which point, everybody is .

It sucks, it arguably shouldn't have been allowed to happen, but guess what? Life is hard, particularly when vital, irreplaceable resources start running out.

And just in the past few days, legal advice has come down that the Authority failed to adequately consider the social and economic impacts of their proposals, and stressed environmental considerations too much.

Step back a minute: Option A. is: the entire Basin dries up, we're all . Option B. is: We get to some sort of stability where enough water is returned to keep it at its present level. Option C. is: We rejuvenate the whole thing, with enough water as is required.

Obviously, Option C. is most desirable, environmentally speaking, but would involve considerable human hardship. The problem is that Option A. results in considerable human hardship as well, just not before the next election. And maybe not when the current irrigators turning out and burning copies of the preliminary draft guides to the report are still working. Maybe when they're retired and the town crumbles about their ears, leaving them homeless.

Option B is probably the best we can hope for, and the thing is: If we don't get Option B as a minimum, you can wave goodbye to maybe not your livelihood, but definitely your childrens' livelihoods. Feel good about that, do you? 

Threatened or actual riots aren't going to make it rain. Burning things is only going to accelerate the carbon cycle, not fill the marshlands. Complaining about job losses is not going to restore parity.

The only thing that will restore parity is ensuring that outputs are maintained at the level of inputs, or below. Anything else is trading long-term stability for short-term selfishness. 

So start talking. Stop shouting, start talking. 

You're not winning any concessions from reality, and you're not winning any respect from the rest of us. 

There has been intelligent discussion - there have been people talking about improvements already made. There has been discussion centred around lack of consultation, rather than the result. 

But the sad fact is that shouting and burning make for good television, and bury anything intelligent that anybody may have to say. 

So: Either start thinking, you're homo sapiens, you're supposed to be able to, and: shut up, you're not helping.

Speed camera defences are facile and unhelpful

Recently, while riding or driving, I have done the following obviously dangerous things

• Strayed onto a white line in the pouring rain, and had the bike slip sideways in the middle of a corner.
• Almost pulled out in front of a car because it was 2am and I had a lapse of concentration.

I have been threatened by other road users in the following ways:

• Overtaking vehicle leaving its wheels in my lane, next to me, while looking at something else.
• Vehicles cutting in front while driving slower than me, making me brake sharply.
• Vehicles trying to merge into me.
• Vehicles starting to merge in front of me while I was overtaking.
• Vehicles creeping into road in front of me from a side street, leaving me unsure what its intentions were.

That's just what I can remember, right now.

Notice anything about all of those? Notice any uniting factors?

There were two of them:

1. They all involved lapses of judgement, and (with one arguable exception) concentration, and;
2. None of them involved exceeding the speed limit

And yet, the one message we have rammed down our throats is "Speed kills!", "Don't speed!", "Speeding fines are for your own good!"

The most obvious reason is, of course, that speeding is easy to police and it's a low-hanging fruit: Set up fixed cameras with radar/laser attached, set up mobile cameras and leave them, put automatic equipment in patrol cars.

It's much harder to police fatigue, much harder to police inattention (although very obvious when the inattention leads to something dangerous actually occurring), much harder to police drug and alcohol usage (just look at the effort involved in running a random breath test) and much harder to police the road rules in general, although we do have red light cameras.

I have four basic issues with the campaign against speeding:

1. It focuses on a factor which has been identified, at various times, in various jurisdictions, as being quite a minor contributor to accidents fatal or otherwise;
2. It is conducted in a way which is offensive to the intelligence of all road users;
3. It obscures the far more important discussion of driving technique and skill;
4. I do not remember any sensible discussion justifying this focus, merely scattered claims in advertising.

You could also add: I've never seen any sensible explanation for why speed limits are set the way they are, or justification that they are anything but arbitrary.

And now here we have another contribution, an opinion piece submitted to the Courier Mail from the chief executive officer of RiverCity Motorway, the organisation running the clusterfuck that is the Clem 7 tollway tunnel:

Speed cameras help keep Clem 7 on the road to safety.

When you read this article, you at first don't notice that it's anything but a news story. Then it dawns on you that it's editorialising a bit, then it gets personal, then you look down the end to notice the byline.

Online, this needed to have been flagged as a column from the very start.

The big problem with this article is illustrated right here:

For those people who don't believe speed cameras are an important road safety measure it is worth looking at the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, which opened in 1992 without speed cameras. In 1997, it became the first road in NSW to have fixed speed cameras installed.

This action was taken when it was found that 30 per cent of drivers using the tunnel exceeded the speed limit by 20km/h or more. The highest recorded speed in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel was 199km/h.

After the cameras were installed, the percentage of speeding motorists fell dramatically.

Closer to home, the speed cameras inside the Clem7 are in place to safeguard the people who use the tunnel. Speed cameras are the only practical method for speed enforcement in tunnels.

I would like you to notice that at no point in those four paragraphs was there any mention of any accident, crash, injury, fatality, minor bingle, brief nudge, complaint, collision or scrape.

No logical pathway, in fact, from "For those people who don't believe speed cameras are an important safety measure" to "speed cameras inside the Clem7 are in place to safeguard the people who use the tunnel."

No mention of whether the dramatic fall in speeding in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel was in any way, shape or form associated with a drop in accident rate.

Speeding is wasteful in fuel, reduces safety margins, is potentially rude and, in traffic, hazardous if you puts you at a different speed to everyone else. The faster you hit something the more damage you do, but this bald claim? I'd like to see anyone get this through an undergraduate essay in any science or otherwise research discipline.

So I have to ask: Have people become so used to seeing the proof that they assume it, and skip over the bit in the middle? Or is this just a debate that runs on unthinking consensus, ideological certainty?

If it's run on proof, then more of that needs to come out in the public debate.

At the moment, there are two factors limiting my speed: What I think is safe, and: the likelihood of getting fined and losing licence points.

And a slavish adherence to the big black numbers in the red circle doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I think is safe. Far more important to me is the behaviour of other road users, the quality of the road, how awake and focused I am, the light conditions, the atmospheric conditions, the vehicle I'm on or in, and the likelihood of somebody or something running across the road in front of me.

I have become used to people I overtook back there overtaking me here because my reading of the conditions made me slow down. I'm used to people who do 75 in the 80 zone then doing 75 in the 70 zone. I've become used to people doing 70 in the 80 zone who do 60 in the roadworks 40 zone, crowding me or trying to get past while I'm riding 2 metres from people wielding shovels.

Speeding? That's the least of the things I worry about.

At the end of this abysmal, preaching article there is this:

It is very pleasing that the vast majority of motorists are driving safely through the tunnel.

And the only evidence presented is that only .5% of motorists have collected a speeding fine.

It's very difficult to have any faith in the ability of any authority to manage any roads when this is the quality of their debate.

There is no such thing as a "will of the people"

I have tried to avoid this. I really have.

Commenting on this farce of an election.

I was not an angry voter, but I was not an undecided voter either.

I was disappointed by Kevin Rudd's managerial style after being elected, but pleased by many of his policy initiatives. I was disappointed when he caved on emissions trading, but more by his failure to more vigorously pursue the carrot approach of incentives to manufacture clean power plants combined with a nicely predictable timeline to phase out the manufacture of dirty plants. I was disappointed by the way he was deposed, but didn't feel personally betrayed by it since I, as a voter, don't remember ticking a box saying "I want Rudd as PM", it was just a consequence of the way we all voted, and maybe a factor in it as well. I'm not that impressed by Julia Gillard, frankly, but she has done some good things.

On the other side, I am personally disgusted by a lot of what Tony Abbott believes and find him, as an individual, to be just a bit creepy. I don't like many of his colleagues either, but then again I don't have much respect for many Labor parliamentarians so I suppose that's all right.

In actual fact, I maintain that the only two major figures who got through the entire campaign with dignity intact were Malcolm Turnbull and Bob Brown.

The simple fact is that I have progressive social views, a strong sense of social justice and a firm belief that the job of a government is to govern, lead and develop not sit back and let private enterprise do it for them, so I am constitutionally inclined, if forced to choose between only the two majors, to pick Labor.

But I'm not impatient or annoyed or upset by the outcome. I'm more interested by this hung situation than I could have been by any other outcome. This horse-trading currently going on as the two parties sit just short of majority and three traditional conservatives plus one (now Adam Bandt has formally sided with Labor) are desperately courted by two leaders who would prefer to ignore their existence, is the best show we've had in politics since Rudd spanked Howard (not literally, we should be so lucky) at the last election. 

It's certainly more interesting than anything that happened during the actual election campaign itself, leaks included.

And, bizarrely, it's shown Bob Katter to be a reasoned, considered man of noble principles and not (only) the half-crazed loon the city-centred rest of Australia thought he was.

But there is one thing I can no longer keep silent about (yes, there was a point, I was getting here, honest).

"The Australian people spoke."

May I just say: Piss off.

What is this "Australian people" of which you speak?

"Australians managed to engineer the only result which made sense." How? By colluding? Sorry, I don't remember getting instructions to vote this way so the result would go that way.

This idea that the outcome of millions of individual decisions reflects a group-think is old-fashioned, very wrong and, in my view, deceptive, discourteous and probably disingenuous as well. It's a convenient shorthand but it reflects sloppy thinking and it shouldn't be used.

The result is the result of many factors, possibly including a protest-vote which may have been influenced by a belief that Labor would win anyway so it was safe to do so. Possibly including a genuine sense of dissatisfaction with the major parties and a turn to minors, yet I notice the major parties did still manage to win 145 out of 150 seats (at present counting). Possibly including a genuine lack of compelling electioneering which resulted in people defaulting to party lines and sorting out the swinging voters into who they really do lean towards.

I don't know, and frankly I don't care. What I do care about is that we stop saying "the will of the people" was expressed, or "Australians wished" or "The electorate decided" or, more appropriately, "the electorate failed to decide".

This member of the electorate made a decision. So did millions of others. Independently of all save maybe family members or friends. And the result of all of those independent decisions, when filtered through an electoral system incorporating preferences, electoral boundaries and a system of government predicated upon a mini-democracy of seats voting along party lines, is a hung parliament.

There is no "will of the people" involved. There is the consequences of the wills of the people.

Termites build geographically aligned mounds without a guiding intelligence. Flocks of birds or schools of fish stay together without traffic control. Ants find and exploit food by each individual ant following a hierarchy of simple rules, not a grand centrally-coordinated master plan.

Please don't take the easy way out of thinking and accuse me of insulting voters' intelligences: I wish to point out that simple rules, expressed many times, produce complex outcomes.

The "will of the masses" is an illusion, albeit a very powerful one. It is a ghost arising out of the machine. It is pareidolia of politics. It is a chimera constructed from millions of individual inputs, each one meaningful, together adding up to a result which is not meaningful, it simply is.

Both major parties failed in their bid to convince a sufficient majority of voters across a sufficient majority of electorates to vote for them. This is the real and only message here.

If we work backwards from that, asking why not, we may begin to pick apart the reasons, we may begin to find the policies that, through popularity, reflect a majority of opinion.

But please, for the love of whatever deity, faith or otherwise vow of passion you believe in, don't put the cart before the horse and think that "Australia" "passed judgement" or that "the electorate wanted this". I suspect you would find, if you could survey all individual voters, that instead of being satisfied with this outcome they're alternately annoyed, sick of it and apathetic.

Don't ask if the electorate would pass a Turing test - not because it might not, but because it's the wrong question to ask. "The electorate" is only intelligent if an ant heap is intelligent. It's just far, far more complicated and difficult a job to engineer a result from a collection of voters than to engineer a result from a collection of ants.

Probably.

How to ruin a perfectly good tool by taking it up-market

A brief diversion, if I may (I'm going to anyway, so: deal), to discuss a subject near to my cynical heart:

The prettification of tools is not inherently bad - just witness a damask steel blade, or a swept-hilt rapier. Hell, even a cavalry sabre from recent centuries is gorgeous, and no less deadly for all the decoration.

And then there are Japanese knives, possibly the greatest thing that country has ever contributed to world culture (I'm biased, I know).

However, when form gets in the way of function, we have serious problems.

Take, for example, one of the most WTF, penis-replacement, pointless aspects of modern Australian culture - the high-performance ute.

Now, the utility was famously invented by an Australian Ford dealer when a farmer's wife asked for "A car that my husband can use to take me to church on Sunday, and his produce to market on Monday."

The result, a truck tray grafted onto a sedan cabin, has now been immortalised not only in Australia, but in America too - when the dealer took his prototype to Detroit to show old Henry himself, Henry was so impressed that the "pick-up truck" (and right there, is a major difference in approach between Australia, where we do them properly, and America, where they are owned by rednecks who shouldn't be allowed to breed) has become so popular that Ford's F-series is one of the biggest-selling vehicles of all time.

Back home, the ute has been a strong seller for Ford and rival Holden ever since, with those brands the only two to hold to the original half-sedan, half-truck concept - everyone else, starting with a clean sheet of paper, has built small trucks with comfy cabins.

The utility part, however, has never been compromised - they are for tradesmen who need to cart around raw materials and tools, they are for owners of large dogs, ceaseless gardeners and people doing massive home renovations.

And they need to stay that way.

The only way, and I stress this the only way, for a ute to look like a display piece is if it's a classic, and there are some truly gorgeous old Kingswood utes, polished to within an inch of frictionless, floating around.

Anything else is a sad, pathetic attempt to look tough and working-man, while actually just being insecure and inadequate.

Take the XR6. There are several traitors to the cause being sold by the factories, but the XR6 happens to be the one I have to drive occasionally for work.

I've bitched about it here, before. About the crap gearbox and the dangerously inadequate visibility.

But now I need to add: It's useless as a ute.

For a start: It gets the leaf-spring suspension from the one-tonne ute which, apart from being a ludicrous choice for a fast vehicle, should suggest that it can take a tonne of load, right?

Just you try it, then. We grabbed the opportunity to collect a large bail of straw, while driving the ute because it overlapped with work hours, so I had to, and although the bail sat within the try, well...

Problem one was that the rear suspension squatted until the ground clearance, which was already pretty poor, started looking alarming. I promptly scrapped it merging back onto the highway from the produce store, then scraped what sounded like the muffler as I left (this is the funny part) a Queensland Transport office.

Then we needed to take it out, and here I can confidently say that it doesn't weigh a tonne, because four of us managed to slide it off the tray, then two of us managed to lift the end still on the ute and flip it over, and we were neither of us exactly burly. In fact, it only felt slightly heavier than a 150kg water tank we helped a builder neighbour of ours move, last weekend.

So: It can't take decent loads without damaging the bodywork on bumps.

Then we have the tailgate. Design fail: The latch to open it is on the inside. We had to close it hard against the hay and then, when time came to open it...

I just barely managed to wriggle my hand down far enough to find the latch, and then we needed to lean against the tailgate to take the pressure off enough for me to be able to pull it all the way across.

Useful doors can be opened from the outside. But no, that would have spoiled the styling.

Shall I mention the tray cover, again?

Yes, I think I will. It's held on with a zip-lock arrangement, all the way around. Leave one tiny bit up, which is easy to do, and tension or wind pressure can peel it off and leave it flapping around behind you. Then, if you're really lucky, it'll lift off entirely before you have a chance to pull over or, if it's very late at night and you're on alone on a motorway, even notice that it's happening.

And finally, we have the tray itself. It's plastic.

It's lined with plastic on the sides, and the base is plastic. It's clearly very tough plastic - I've had hoists and wheelchairs in and out, and it hasn't been scratched yet - but it's still plastic.

It flexes when you push against it. It has seams around the edges which are loose fitting and which seem to exist for the sole purpose of collecting rubbish and being difficult to clean.

In other words, it's less well designed, and less ultimately tough, than decent metal.

The twits.

I don't like this car for many reasons, and I just keep collecting more.

In an attempt to create a performance utility, they have created a committee-designed camel which sinks in loose sand and gets blinded by a decent wind.

Not one of their finest moments, really.

Dysfunctional health system: Break the law, go to hospital

I have commented before in this blog about the fact that, although I am cautiously against the death penalty, I find the way it is implemented to be balmy and generally offensive.

But there is one thing that is just ridiculous.

Item, overheard from somebody else's TV: mass murderer in Africa, HIV positive, gets full medical care and anti-retro-viral drugs while in prison. His wife and child, not in prison, get nothing and can't afford it.

Can anyone explain to me how exactly this, in any way, makes sense?

My opinions on the death penalty come down to this:

1. Make it the penalty of last resort.
2. Throw all your effort into ensuring that the case is water-tight, and set the standard for the death penalty high.
3. Care for the prisoner as you would any other, until the penalty is carried out.
4. Do it as soon after the trial, and all permissible appeals, as possible.

To this I would like to add:

Prisoners get the same medical care that is available to all members of society, no more, no less.

If you have universal health cover, such as Australia, then give them that cover. If you have a user-pays system, such as the laughably named United States of America, then put in place a health care economy inside the prison. Provide health cover as you would an employment contract, perhaps: They obey the rules, they participate in all prison tasks, they work if required to work, and they get a representative style of health cover.

If your country doesn't have any employment-related health cover either: Well, then, why is your prison system making itself such an attractive destination for the down-and-out and the sick?

That is, surely, all that you are doing. When somebody has hit rock bottom, guaranteed accommodation, food and medical care starts to look pretty good.

My views on universal, "socialised" medicine (notice which terms get used in countries where "socialism" is a dirty word?) are that it is a primary function of society to provide care for its members, and that must include medical care, which improves quality of life, productivity, and the crime rate.

So my opinion on prisoners getting free medical care in prison is the same as my opinion on your average man, woman, child or indeterminate individual on the street getting free medical care: Yes.

My opinion on a state which denies care to good, decent, well-behaved law-abiding citizens while providing it to the worst of the worst of offenders, is: What the fuck have you been smoking?