Airheads, engineering and "Character"

From out of the blue, an unexpected post!

Due to a combination of circumstances starting with a friend unexpectedly purchasing two new bikes, fed by my curiosity and ultimately allowed by an unexpected and hugely appreciated financial windfall, I have upgraded from my old 1994 Yamaha XJ600S Seca II, a wonderful little cheap bike and a perfect first bike, to a 1985 BMW K100RS, a cross-continent style high-speed tourer.

A key component in this decision was BMW's standard of engineering - seeing the condition that 25-year-old Ks are in, compared to my 15-year-old XJ, helped explain how the extra purchase price for a new Beemer gets justified.

And that helped lead to this current train of thought.

Wherever humans are bought together by machines, they will start to anthropomorphise, and words like "character" and "personality" will start to crop up. In the world of motorcycling, there are standards to go by: Italian bikes have character, Japanese bikes don't have much, and Hondas don't have any .

BMWs are not known for their "character". Yet Hermann, the K100RS, has several aspects that I regard as forming a personality - the quirkiness of the design, with the engine laid horizontal, for a start.

Then there is the vibration in the middle of the rev range, and the way that he is so eager to dive into corners despite his substantial ~250kg bulk, and then stay leaned over, stable and with only the lightest of touches needed to make adjustments, through as long as the sweeper lasts.

Then there is the way that the tank gets really hot, and on a stinking hot day will start to affect the performance of the fuel pump. Or the way that extra heat comes up between the edge of the tank and the edge of the seat.

Which brings me to my next point: "Character" is too often synonymous with "poor engineering".

Hermann is the best-designed vehicle I have ever owned. There are touches of brilliance that I'm still finding. As a safety feature, the clutch can not be pulled in while the side-stand is down, but if there is no weight on the side-stand, the clutch lever will retract it. The indicator switches, infamously unique to BMW, are actually easier to operate in really thick gloves than the all-in-one single switch on every other bike. Everything that needs regular or emergency access is incredibly easy to get to. The fairing is even more effective than it looks, and it looks effective. The mirrors are positioned so that your hands are in the slip-stream.

I could go on.

The point, however, is that there are very few instances where they got it wrong. You can argue with their choices, and say that they didn't make it sporty enough, or attractive enough (the answer to which is "Well, don't buy one then"), but most of the issues I have are only an issue in unpleasantly hot climates like a Queensland winter and do, in fact, make it an unbelievably good bike for cold climates such as, to take one at completely non-random, Bavaria in the middle of winter.

As a result of all this excellently well done engineering, BMWs are accused of being characterless, or having no passion about them.

This is what one friend of ours, who owns old Jaguars and a six-cylinder Kawasaki Z1300 in fantastic condition, said:

"I bought one of those when they came out, but sold it and kept the Z. They've just got no character."

Okay, so why not? He continued, without prompting:

"They just do everything well. It doesn't take any skill to ride one fast. The Z you have to work at. The brakes are woeful, for example."

Okay, so poor brakes give "character" and competence is "boring"? Does anybody else see a problem with that?

Now, I am quite familiar with the idea that a vehicle can be competent to the point of boredom, but I have issues with equating actual flaws with "character".

To me, Italian bikes have character because their styling is inspired or entertainingly quirky, their handling is praised by all who ride them, and they know things about exhaust notes which the Japanese are slowly learning. The fact that Italian bikes are traditionally built with variable quality, unreliable electrics and temperamental great engines is also part of their reputation, but I have issues with people saying "character" in an approving manner when they mean "flawed".

Which brings me to airhead BMWs. For the uninitiated, that means the R-series of horizontally opposed twins, cooled by air alone, that they built from the R32 in 1923, their first motorbike, until a new design of R-series twin with oil cooling was introduced in 1993.

Here's the thing: They look old. They not only look as though the engine dates from 1923, but as though the styling does as well. And that engine, which has a huge ships-prow crankcase housing, dominates.

But I can't stop looking at them and wondering what they'd be like to ride. They're quirky, which is a word I usually try and avoid using. And despite the fact that it can take a keen and experienced eye to tell them apart, there was very real progress made, with the R75 reputedly one of the fastest bikes in the world when it was new, and the R90S just plain magnificent.

I think they're one of the most interesting bike designs of the era, up there with the similarly weird cylinders-out-the-side Motto Guzzis, and I can see myself, in some so far unlikely cash-flush future, getting an R75 or even an R90S to enjoy on the odd weekend, or to tinker with.

Not only do they have character, but if they're looked after they will always work properly, and that's not something you can say about many bikes.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result" - road safety edition.

Excuse me while I rant about blatant idiocy in positions of power.
I am a motorcyclist. Anyone who has ever read this blog may have picked up on this.

This means that I have fairly strong opinions about other road users - if you put yourself in a position this vulnerable, with no safety cage around you and a much lower visual area from any angle, you either die or develop a deep and abiding distrust of everyone else. Why, only yesterday I had three people try to kill me on the ride into Uni - one truck pulled out into my lane too close in front of me, one car dived across into my lane and barely gave me time to brake before they collected my front wheel with their bumper, and one driver pulled away from its STOP sign in front of me while peering the other way looking for traffic in that direction.

Please note that I was not on something tiny like a postie bike - I was on a BMW K100RS which is, in anyone's language, on the hefty side.

So whenever I hear a report of a motorcycle accident in the media, I, being an informed reader, not to mention a Masters of Journalism student, read between the lines for the questions that the journalist didn't ask, and if the aricle says that the bike "struck a car which was pulling out of the shopping centre car park", you can bet that I will assume that the car was at fault and the rider, who admittedly may perhaps not have been paying maximum attention, was left without time to brake or dodge and his family can be consoled, at his funeral, by the knowledge that he was not at fault.

I am not, however, an apologist: I know full well that a great many motorcyclists take truly frightening risks regularly, and that the margins for crashing if you do are slim, and for dying if you crash, not much better.

But then we get this report of ignorant, knee-jerking, panicked policy making from the people presently in power:

Motorcyclists face zero alcohol limit (Courier Mail)

Now, I am all in favour of a zero alcohol limit for pilots, people who drive public transport, and surgeons. But just motorcyclists? Wherefor is your justification?

What we know is that the fatality rate for motorcyclists is ludicrously out of sync with their presence on the roads - the article quotes a fatality rate of 22% of the total, as against powered two-wheeled vehicles making up just 4.5% of all road users.

Ah, but why? Alcohol and speed are very easy things to both police and to blame, but what about being an idiot? What about people not paying attention and driving into another vehicle because they were distracted or not looking, disobeyed road rules, nodded off, had a vehicle failure, had an asthma attack, or misjudged the road and skidded, or hit a patch of oil?

And what about accident investigators who see a squid from a motorcycle tire (it's very easy to lock up the rear in an emergency braking manoeuvre) and tick the box that says "Excessive speed - at fault"?

The most recent comprehensive data for Queensland is from 2004 - this is how long it takes to collect, process, analyse and report on all the data. It can be downloaded as a highly inconvenient PDF from the Queensland Transport statistics page.

Let's just look at fatalities, because the official language and reporting never seems to mention the much greater number of accidents which merely cause property damage, pain and suffering, life-long cognitive or physical disabilities, unemployment and a massive drain on the health and disability care systems.

Out of 289 fatal crashes, 97(34% - one third, for argument's sake) involved alcohol or other drugs, and 52(18%) - less than a fifth - involved speed - please note that speed is not "exceeding the posted speed limit", it is "inappropriate speed for the conditions". Doing 80 in a 100 zone at night during a tropical thunderstorm may still be too fast, and registered as such if the reason you crashed was that your vehicle could not physically brake soon enough to avoid hitting the stalled car in front.

Alcohol/drugs was the most prominent contributing factor, but Inattention at 80(28%) and Disobeyed Traffic Rules with 79(27%) both outranked speed.

What was I saying about easy targets?

Lets look at the Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) figures, shall we? And, for simplicity sake, I will only talk about percentages now.

Drivers - 54% of total. Motorcyclists - 13% of total. Hmmmm.

Now, 13% is still a higher proportion of fatalities than of registrations, and at greater than 50% it's much higher than the average, but it's sitll far less than 22% of all fatalities.

I can't seem to find a similar comparison for speed, however. Odd.

So let's look at the 46 fatal motorcycle crashes (with 48 fatalities): 59%(n=27) were single-vehicle crashes, and the motorcyclist was judged to be at fault in 35 out of 46 fatal crashes, which is 76% and, I suggest, far too low a number to be statistically solid.

The next figure is where life gets interesting: Most crashes occurred during daylight hours (67%), from Monday to Friday (52%). Now, what this says to me is: commuting - busy traffic, slow-moving, millions of near-misses every day and unlikely to be alcohol at all, unless there was an office party or sunset is really, really late. And the 48% on the weekend are likely to be a result of overcooking it in the mountains, but that is, of course, pure conjecture.

This suggests that BAC is only really a factor in extreme cases, and that it's simply that much easier to die when you have a drunken crash on a bike than if you're in a big metal cage, and the problem then is not "alcohol" it's "excessive alcohol", which is already illegal.

What's interesting here is that if the motorcyclist is automatically judged at fault in single-vehicle crashes, that means that out of the 19 multi-vehicle crashes, the other vehicle was most at fault in 8 of them. I put it to you that, with such low numbers, that is, as near as damn it, half. And yet I can't remember the last time I heard a police officer say "Drivers are being grossly negligent, and need to learn to look out." No, the closest I can remember is "Motorcyclists need to realise that they're difficult to see", which is tantamount to letting inattentive fools off the hook.

But to return to the article - the Police Commissioner didn't know about the no alcohol plan (uh, guys? Communication?) but had this to say about speeding:

"Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson said identification was an issue for police trying to enforce the road rules.

"Some really irresponsible motorcyclists as they go through a speed camera will even reach back and put their hand over the number plate so the motorcycle can't be photographed," Mr Atkinson said.

"So they're the ones in my view who are at a higher risk of death and injury and they're the ones we really need to stop.""

You what? "they're the ones in my view who are at a higher risk of death and injury"? On what do you base this base canard, Mr Atkinson? I have news for you: Physicists realised over a hundred years ago that heads wouldn't suddenly explode if you went much faster than a horse could run, and exceeding the largely arbitrary speed limit does not automatically equal death.

Now, I believe that a fair cop is a fair cop, and if you get caught speeding you should kick yourself for not paying attention and taking due care and attention - I have, myself, needed to do exactly that on four occasions, in total, to date (and yet never once on a motorycle). But equating an attempt to avoid detection while speeding with an increased risk of death appears, to me, to be a leap of logic that sales way over laughable into the rarified atmosphere of stupefied disbelief.

And then there's the response to detecting speeding - RFIDs. Radio Frequency Identification Tags. Oh, come on. We already know from experiments interstate that RFID toll passes don't work for motorcycles - so much so that in Queensland, the new no-cash GoVia (vomit) toll system waives tags for bikes in entirety, dong all identification via, wait for it, photographs of the number plate. Cars get charged a "video identification fee" if they don't have an electronic tag, but bikes don't, because that's the only reliable option.

And they want to get RFIDs working for a speeding bike, using portable equipment? Dream on, I say, dream on. The point about RFIDs is that they're not necessarily powered - otherwise, you have to rely upon people replacing the batteries, or wiring them into the bike. They are usually devices which reflect a radio signal and modify it with identifying information, which automatically halves the effective range.

So - we have a limited response to two safety issues, based upon low and therefore unreliable sample rates using data that is, CSI be damned, not possible to collect in a perfectly accurate and correct manner, and although a zero alcohol limit has the benefit of greater credibility, it's being highly discriminatory.

The United Motorcycle Council of Queensland was quoted as saying yes, that's fair enough, but how about zero tolerance for everyone else, as well?

The UMCQ is, however, not the united body of all motorcycling associations - take a look at the membership list and see what I mean - it starts with the Bandidos, and continues in much the same vein. The UMCQ has a vested interest in being nice to the police in public, and that journalist should be shot for calling upon them as a representative voice of all motorcyclists.

How about the MRAQ as a more legitimate, representative and politically active body?

And how about some reasoned discussion, and sitting down with the groups involved?

And how about considering the current training standards of all road users, while you're at it.

Links:
Article "Motorcyclists face zero alcohol limit" from the Courier Mail online.
Queensland Transport road safety statistics
Original launch report for the K 100RS, if you're interested.
Motorcycle Riders Association of Queensland

How you use a tool determines what tool you use, which determines how you use it...

I am a big fan of the fact (I'm not even going to call it a principle, concept or idea: It's a fact) that usage determines need.

I'm talking about mobile phones here, but any technology will do.

I, for example, am extremely unlikely to ever buy an iPhone, because recent usage of my  N95 has shown that I need a better camera, stereo speakers, a hardware keyboard, the ability to use it wearing gloves, and a better application finding system than scrolling through multiple screens. Oh, and multi-tasking.

I would also dearly love a QWERTY keyboard, and so when Nokia announced that the E71s replacement, the E72, would have a 5MP camera, I thought Yes!

However...

I have recently got my hands on a BlueAnt Interphone, a bluetooth hands-free phone and intercom system for motorbikes.

I have been using this to play MP3s on the road, thanks to the N95, a power socket newly attached to the bike, and a car charger.

This is where life gets more complicated.

You see, the  N95 introduced a "dual-slider" design, which simply means that as well as the screen sliding up to reveal the number pad, it slides down (and the screen flips to landscape) to reveal four media control buttons: back, play/pause, stop, and forwards.

The thing is, if I put my phone in the map pocket of my tank bag, I have it in front of me, visible through the plastic map window, and, more importantly, I can press the media buttons through the plastic, provided I'm wearing light-weight gloves (which I don't, these days, it being winter here in sunny Queensland, and the morning temperatures getting perilously close to the freezing point of water at sea level).

I am almost certain that I couldn't do the same thing, accurately, with the E72s oh-so-very-compact and optical D-pad.

Which puts me in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, the natural next phone for me is therefore the N86, which is extremely nice and an improvement over the N95 in every way.

On the other hand, I would so very much like a QWERTY!

Damn it, my largely academic desires have become complicated again.

"Predictive text" that actually is.

(This has been updated, because I was an idiot. For some reason, I attributed the software to the wrong company. Ah, the power of Twitter and a company that knows how to use it.)

Some time ago, I got unduly optimistic and went looking for a proper predictive text solution for S60, assuming that somebody had implemented one.

What I found was a couple of commercial betas and vague promises.

But there was one company, Keypoint Technologies, who are Scottish and therefore clever (seriously, have you any idea how many inventions pivotal to the creation of the modern world that Scotland can claim credit for?), that were making a trial of their solution available.

It was called Adaptxt, and I promptly went and tried it, and wrote of my experiences here, just barely over a year ago. It was ... Beta. Very, very beta.

Times move on, however, and programmers keep on working, and Adaptxt became a more mature beta, and it's time to give it another go.

So I am.

How it works, in a nutshell, is that instead of just working out possible options based upon what you've already entered and displaying that much of the first-choice possible word, it shows the rest of that word as well and lets you select it before actually finishing entering it. Which can save you considerable keypresses and, theoretically, time.

In addition, it displays the other possibilities in a pop-up menu, which allows the user to scroll down for a different option. Very nice.

The final piece of prediction is that it can attempt to predict several words in advance, theoretically (there's that word again) allowing you to finish an entire sentence by hitting Select > Select > Select ...

Does it work?

Straight away, my main complaints with the earlier model - not working well with dedit, in which text editor I spend rather a lot of my time - has been resolved. It works just as well in dedit as it does anywhere else. Notice I didn't say "perfectly", but I'll get to that.

There are two major problems left, both of which are hugely annoying.

Problem number one, the easier one to explain, is that it is a truly enormous RAM hog. On my N95, it can use up to about 10MB, which is not only startling for a text entry system, but also highly unpleasant on a phone which has about 20MB free if you're lucky. I opened a support ticket about that, and they assure me that they're working on it.

Problem number two is a little more subtle. You can't chose between the normal case options of Abc (first letter capital, then lower case), ABC (all capitals) and of course abc (all lower case). No, it decides. This is great with "I", and of course it knows about sentence starts, but otherwise ...

Names are generally okay, because they're usually in the dictionary with a capital first letter. But suppose you want to put a capital inside quotation marks, or a regular word is being used as a proper noun, or indeed anything else? How do you force it to enter what you want it to?

There are two ways: enter a new word into the dictionary, or: start a new line, enter the desired word, then go back and join the lines up again.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, highly annoying.

They claim, however, that they're working on that, as well. I have my fingers crossed.

What else doesn't quite work? Well, for me, the look-ahead prediction, which is claimed to learn from what you enter. This is probably, to be perfectly honest, because I will write anything and everything - twitter updates, this blog post, random fiction, emails - all on this phone, which makes predicting what I will type next difficult for me, let alone a tiny little piece of software.

What's brilliant? The dictionary is, get this, user-editable! Learn from this, Nokia!

Is it faster? Well ... Maybe. I haven't actually done any speed tests, but the time taken to examine the provided options, enter more text, scroll, select... Makes it feel no faster than using full T9. This, however, needs to be considered in light of my rather impressive T9 speed. The real advantage of Adaptxt is the key presses it saves, which may not save time but certainly saves energy, and is a lot more relaxing.

Unfortunately, they have, for a while, removed the menu entry which shows you how many key presses it's saved you, how many first-choice options you use, how many second-choice... etc. Which is not useful, but is very cool to know.

Will I continue to use it? Yes. It feels very relaxing, which is an odd reason to have, but it works for me. I will, however, be extremely disappointed if they don't release a new beta, and soon, with some significant updates in memory management and grammar options.

Would I pay for it when it comes out of beta?

That, I'm afraid, will remain to seen.

This has been awhile: Another Microsoft failure

I have been so successful at avoiding Microsoft products lately that they haven't had an opportunity to seriously annoy me.

But some people just have to try and drag me back in.

My work insists upon using Outlook Web Access for out of office email which, considering my at-home employment, includes me.

I have asked most of my colleagues to use my personal address, which has the added advantage that I check it, but I still occasionally get emails through Outlook and they occasionally have Excel files attached.

And this is where the story really starts or, if you prefer, the plot starts to smell like a two-month-old egg.

For Outlook Web Access, being a Microsoft product, attempts to display the Excel (a Microsoft format) file in-line. Which would be fine, although it works atrociously (by which I mean barely at all, it loses basically all formatting) but for one thing.

There's no option to download the attached file. I swear, there isn't, I've looked everywhere.

Which means no downloading it to work on, and, which is the big problem in my case, no printing a version which works.

The only option I have is to view it as a web page, which restores all the formatting by converting the Excel to HTML. Which is just silly, and not all that helpful.

Nice going, Microsoft. You fail at providing intranet email solutions.

Libel has no place in science

This is a slightly messy post, because I do not have the time to make a cleaner one.

The central problem is this: Libel and defamation laws (in Australian law, defamation is anything spoken and libel is anything printed, recorded or transmitted, but we can safely ignore that distinction) exist for the very important purpose of protecting the very valuable social and professional reputations of members of society. But, they are all too easily twisted into a tool for the suppression of dissent or criticism of those in power, or those who have the power of money or the ear of politicians or the courts.

These problems are well recognised - click the "FOE" (Freedom of Information) tag on the left to see a couple of other posts discussing this, or google the chilling effect of libel.

In terms of world libel laws, the UK and Australia are well recognised as being plaintiff-friendly (i.e., it's very easy to sue someone successfully) and the USA, buttressed by their First Amendment right to freedom of speech, is extremely defendant-friendly - if you try and sue someone, you'd better by really positive that you have a case.

In the UK, in recent times, Guardian columnist, blogger and qualified MD Ben Goldacre was sued by vitamin pill salesman Matthias Rath over statements made by Ben that he, Rath, was trying to sell a useless product to people who needed proper medical care. The Guardian, to their credit, backed Ben and the case eventually went in the right direction.

More recently, columnist, author and blogger Simon Singh has been sued by the British Chiropractic Association for saying that it, the BCA, was promoting therapies that had not a shred of evidence to back them up. There are many, many commentaries online about this. Google, or go to Bad Astronomer for a starting point.

The key problem is this: Singh, and Goldacre before him, are making statements of scientific truth - given therapies do, or do not, work. These claims may be correct, incorrect or partially correct under given circumstances, but they are statements which can be assessed scientifically. The statement that a given person or organisation is peddling bogus therapies is therefore dependent upon a scientific test.

The courts are most emphatically not the place where science should be determined. Not for evolution, not for homeopathy or mega-vitamin therapy, not for chiropractic "medicine". The BCA are using a legal trick in their suit - complaining not that Singh was accusing them of promoting falsehoods, but that Singh was accusing them of knowingly misleading the public, which is of course a claim which directly impacts upon their reputation.

Ignoring, for one second, the Evidence Based Medicine position that the BCA may not deserve to have a good public reputation, we can come to two either-or conclusions: Either chiropractic treatments are worthless, in which case the BCA is deliberately misleading, or speaking in ignorance, or: Chiropractic treatments are worthwhile, in which case Singh made an incorrect allegation either way.

Now: Wouldn't it be so much better for a body which claims medical authority to defend themselves on the basis of medical worth and scientific validity first, so that they can dump the full weight of bullshit upon Singh, rather than just "He's picking on me!"? Well, of course not - they know they'd lose.

Either way, the courts should not now, nor should ever, have any authority over science. Courts attempt to discover truth (of a sorts) via a given set of techniques. Science attempts to discover the truth via its own set of techniques. Occasionally, they look similar. Never, however, is a court the correct avenue for deciding what a scientific truth is. And the efficacy of chiropractic treatments is a matter of scientific truth.

Therefore, the button I have just added on the top left - Keep Libel Laws out of Science, by the British group SenseAboutScience.org.uk. Unfortunately, the layout may not be friendly to the width of the button.

I wish Singh all the best for his appeal against the atrocious preliminary ruling.

Notes from the N95: v6

Another, quite short, collection of random notes from the new smartphone, composed on the phone:

AppManager really needs to be able to filter by first letter, at the very least. It's so crude it looks as though they threw it together as a stop-gap and forgot to go back and fix it. "Broken gets fixed, mediocre lasts forever."

No facility to set appointments, memos or to-dos to repeat at set intervals, or to copy. What the fuck? Four years ago, my T630 could do that!

Massive credit, still, for letting you select the previous entry in the T9 options.

How can it lose a wi-fi interface it was using only two seconds ago, and have to search for it again? Repeatedly? This is REALLY ANNOYING.

If I send a txt to a number not in my phonebook, there is no way to then select that txt, and save the number. God dammit.

This is just plain stupid: the N95 has a dual slide mechanism, much hyped at release and re-used in just about every sliding Nokia since, that puts a line of audio player controls - stop, play/pause and forwards and backwards - at the top of the phone, accessed when you push the screen down. This also activates landscape mode. The thing is, although they apparently work as controls in the N-gage (what? Exactly) gaming application, they are otherwise stubbornly linked to the built-in media player. Which means that if you're in a third-party music player, or Nokia Audiobook player, which is a beta application written by a Nokia engineer who realised that if wanted a proper audiobook player he was going to have to write it himself, all that happens when you press one of the control buttons is that the media player launches. This is annoying enough, but what is totally ridiculous is that they don't work in the Voice Recorder application either, and that's part of the standard phone suite, not an add-on! Insanely, insanely, frustrating.

Essential free software installations:

• Jbak TaskMan - The control panel that S60 should have built-in.
• Active File - what the built-in file manager should be.
• Dedit - Text editor - the world's most basic and useful utility. From the same programmer as TaskMan. Clever man, this Russian.
  
• ShoZu - jack of all trades, master of none, but free and comprehensive. Just make sure it's what you want - it's too powerful to just use randomly.
  
• Google maps - less annoying than Nokia Maps, has a neat non-GPS location finding trick using network towers (imperfect, but surprisingly good), and you don't need a subscription to get basic directions, but does use data.
• Free iSMS - bringing Palm's threaded SMS to Symbian, by way of iPhone aesthetics.
• Mobipocket Reader. Because it's just about the only option available.
  

I won't put in Opera Mini, because S60 is good and doesn't need replacing, unlike the built-in file manager. Opera is a nice adjunct, not an essential. N.B.: Most of the controls in S60 Web aren't documented. You'll need to do some googling.