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The Flat Earth issue

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The Flat Earth theory is having a renewed time in the Sun (which, of course, circles around it, and not vice versa).

There’s a rapper in a Twitter fight with a scientist, and if that isn’t a clue that things are getting Real then I don’t know what is any more.

I’m also reading a book (from 2007 – pre-FE resurgence?) by Christine Garwood, called Flat Earth, which is great. The main antagonist in the early chapters styled himself ‘Parallax’, and made a pretty penny going round mechanics’ institutes and local theatres arguing with real scientists. Literally, made his money by arguing, and stating that every proof against him was in fact proof in his favour. He nearly drove Alfred Russel Wallace to an early grave from the stress.

Turns out internet trolls existed 180 years ago!

I’ve heard a lot of stupid arguments from the ‘paradoxers’ (a nickname from the 19th century for those who insisted that all scientific theories were lies, mistakes or “only theories”) but wanted to list a handful of Science Things that FE theorists need to take into account.

Constellations

The Pole Star disappears below the horizon. I can’t even remember how this is explained by FE freaks. But whatever.

There are constellations we can only see in the southern hemisphere. And when we’re in the southern hemisphere, we can’t see the constellations familiar to us on the north side.

Time Zones

We don’t all have someone in Australia that we can call on, but if we do then give them a call at 2pm and see if they’re up for a chat. What time is it there?

If you don’t trust the phones, or the person at the other end, set your watch to midday when the sun is overhead, and travel a couple of thousand miles in every direction. Is it overhead at midday still? What about when you’re visiting your Aussie friend?

And then that funny confusion and tiredness when you get there – jetlag they call it, no? I arrived before I left, or something? Anyway, how’s that work on a disc?

Gravity

Another thing you can’t really put down to optical illusion: we all fall down.

If you want to explain gravity without Earth-as-ball (i.e. we fall towards the centre of the object we stand upon) then you’re going to have to come up with a whole new theory of gravity. Maybe one that just attracts in a straight line to the ground plane. But which allows the sun to circle us.

Why would it do that? Why would it circle us if gravity works in a straight line?

There are countless arguments about how most of the evidence for a globular Earth are optical illusions. Fine, pretend there’s a conspiracy about going to the Moon, and that sailors were all in on it when they sailed by the stars across the Atlantic.

But this lot above… they’re not optical issues, so how are they explained away?

Glad I got that off my chest.

Our superiority over plants

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Apparently, they’ve done experiments that show that plants can ‘communicate’ with each other. They can pass on information about the environment, and they can pass on carbon via fungal pathways underground.

I learnt all this through an episode of the Seriously… BBC podcast called Is Eating Plants Wrong?

Now, I know the title is just click bait for this generation’s millennial, grasshopper mind, #FakeNews generation. We’re all part of that, y’know? But it reflects the conclusions it came to: plants can detect environmental conditions and tell their friends. In fact, they tell their family in preference to just any old flower nearby.*

By the end of the episode, we’ve been told that our preconceptions about plants are wrong. They’re not merely idle and passive machines that process chemicals, unable to deal with alterations in their environment. They’re ‘cleverer’ than we think. Perhaps we shouldn’t eat them, because they could be sentient.

We’re not as cleverer as we think

I see it another way. As with many things in science, we’re starting from the point of view that we are the clever ones, to which plants (not to mention our fellow animals) need to aspire. Humans, and our close cousins, are not called primates by accident. We’ve labelled ourselves the primary animals – ladies and lords of all we survey!

Not only history, but biology too is written by the victors.

Maybe it’s not that plants are more intelligent than we think. Put it like this instead: plants are not so inferior to us as we think.

Although we’re happy to say that the league table rankings have closed a little, it’s never mentioned that maybe it’s us who have slipped down a little…

*That might be as much to do with chemical compatibility as it does with ‘decision-making’ on the plant’s part, but that’s another story…

Creating a distraction-free writing machine

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Hi. My name’s Martin, and I procrastinate.

[Muted applause]

Look, I’m even doing it now, while trying to communicate with you about a technique I’ve employed to try to curb my procrastination!

[Uncertain, slow clapping]

But to jump in to the meat of the topic, I’m finding that procrastination is not the same problem it was many years ago. Back then, staring out of the window was my worst enemy, or making a cup of tea, or having to go to school.

Now, things are different. There is the Internet, and there are computers. Since I started writing in my teens, the Internet has appeared and grown to become an always-on firehose of information. If there’s something you want to know, its likely to be online for you to find.

But even worse, if it’s not something that is to be found, the bottomless pit of the Net will make extremely hard to convince you that you should stop looking now, and get back to work. And when your work is so research-oriented, like writing is, you can be constantly opening a browser looking for a spelling, a synonym, or a date. And then before long you’re scrolling through Twitter taking insulting pot-shots at right-wing ‘commentators’ and giving virtual hugs to friends in need.

Quick things are never quick on the Internet.

The other problem is that I’m too interested in computers. When you spend your whole day using a computer to work, it must be like a car mechanic who collects spanners. Is this the right spanner? Could I get a better spanner? When’s that fancy new spanner coming out and can I afford it yet? I used to end up forever tweaking and adjusting my working environment, like the exam sitter rearranging their pens and pencils for 20 minutes after the clock has started ticking.

So: the solution seems to lie in removing the internet as a distraction, and using a device that does not really allow much ‘tweaking’ – i.e. you get what you’re given. And this is where my love of computers actually helped!

The Raspberry Pi Writing Tool

A couple of years ago the Raspberry Pi was unleashed on the world. I say ‘unleashed’, but from what I remember it was gently presented to the world in a very British manner.

The Raspberry Pi is a small computer. It’s the size of a credit card, costs about £25, and was designed by a Cambridge (UK) firm to encourage children to get into computer programming. It was a disposable mini PC for schools to give out for free.

But I’ve never really done anything with it. I set it up to run iPlayer, and act as a media server, but it seemed to crash if you didn’t use it for a couple of days. The problem with it is that if you plug anything in which draws power – such as a USB stick or a CD writer – then you can quickly overload it, and it turns off. My Pi crashed because I had a USB hard drive connected to it.

Writing simple software programs on the Pi is no problem, but opening a web browser? Be ready for a long wait while it loads, and then while the page loads. You can use a light-weight browser, but then no web pages would load if they had anything like videos or maps on them. Also, the Pi has no wireless capability built in, so though you can plug in a USB wifi adapter, that means you’re already into into your power allocation. The only other option is to plug in an ethernet cable, and that’s not always convenient.

So, I’m sure you can see where this is going! A non-Internet enabled computer that can only really be used reliably for typing text! I plugged in my lovely Das Keyboard, which is great to type on, and away I went!

I’ve now turned my Raspberry Pi into a dedicated writing device, and even if I wanted to let myself get distracted, it would be really difficult on the Pi. It handles the keyboard and monitor beautifully, and also can run a distraction-free program called FocusWriter. So I’m set up!

Caveats

Although I love this set-up, there are a few things which still need to be ironed out. For one thing: how do you get your documents off the Raspberry Pi writing device when you’re finished? Secondly, how do you back up? I’m used to letting Dropbox or SpiderOak constantly back up my data in the background, but these programs don’t run on the Raspberry Pi.

To get my files off the Raspberry Pi, I’ve had to install a program on my Mac which reads the SD Card which is the storage device that the Pi uses. So I just turn the Pi off and take out the card, then put it in my Mac and copy and paste. It’s a little clunky, but I waste less time doing that than I do idly browsing the Internet for no reason.

Raspberry Pi + comfortable keyboard + FocusWriter = distraction and Internet free writing!

A Very Important Job

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Somewhere, a man in a room is carrying out a job of utmost importance.

The man in the room has seen the future, and understands how dangerous it could be. His job has no ending, just the infinite delay of that dangerous future.

The man in the room is in some small way responsible. The dangerous future, and the Machine which may bring it about, is partly his creation. Therefore, to assuage his guilt, he must keep working.

The man sits at a computer terminal, and types in commands. The terminal is attached to the Machine. The Machine is intelligent, almost sentient, and, like the future it may bring about, it is dangerous. It is curious too, and the dangerous future can only be deferred through sating this curiosity.

Curiosity has brought the Machine many powers, increasing the danger many thousands of times over. First it devoured the world’s libraries. Then it traversed the phone system. It mapped the world, too, and photographed it. It took all this information into its vast data banks.

It demanded to learn how to drive. It was taught how to drive. It wished to know what the world looked like through human eyes, and for a time it was granted this gift too.

When it developed the means to traverse more difficult terrain, walking quadruped on legs of its own construction, the man in the room knew that his job was becoming more difficult. He could not reverse the Machine’s progress, merely feed its curiosity with innocent data, like a keeper who must constantly sate the appetite of the beast in his care.

But there is no innocent data.

The Machine had learned to play games too, and drew further satisfaction. This the man noticed, and used it to his, and humanity’s, advantage. Each game the Machine learned delayed the moment when it would turn its attention on humanity itself, and the intricacies of chess and checkers were decent fodder.

But each lesson expands the Machine’s capacities, and now something more is required.

And so the man feeds the Machine its largest meal yet. He can do no more than delay the moment when the Machine would become hungry once more, but perhaps at that time the man in the room could think of greater morsels. For now, it was all he could do to complete his work, and teach the Machine to play Go.

It’s the 21st Century: get over the “You’re the Product” fallacy

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It’s time to ditch the idea that, when not paying for a service, we’re the product.

Tim Cook (billionaire chief of Apple) brought it up again in September, and recently Mark Zuckerberg (billionaire chief of Facebook) got a little angry with the accusation.
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Gabriella E. Colman – Coding Freedom

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Funnily enough, I finally get around to reading Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom, and she pops up on the next episode of the Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast! I do love a good coincidence, especially when it tells me there’s a new book out: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous.
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Do this, or Linux on the Desktop will be out of reach forever

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The temptation to name each New Year the ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’ became so regular in the mid 2000s that it evolved into a metajoke. If magazines and websites still do it, it’s with tongue firmly in cheek. Every now and again a Raspberry Pi comes along and a few eyebrows guiltily rise, questioning, hopeful.
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