Rants Blog

In 7 years of working with non native english speakers I’ve noticed some recurring themes (the first thing is always the mistake, the second how it should be)

• Shortly instead of Breifly
• Actually meaning currently (French and German speakers)
• participate to instead participate in
• interested to instead of interested in
• Use of conditional instead of imperfect/pluperfect in counterfactuals (“if you would come to my house, I would give you a killer whale”) – esp German and Flemish Speakers
• Control instead of check.
• (Flemish speakers) helut instead of health
• (German Speakers) use of own as a normal adjective without “your own”,”my own” etc… e.g. “Do you have have an own web site?”
• (All) use of infinitive instead of participle: e.g. “it
  

Increased use of contraception (or some other way of having less children) would help with SO many things other than pensions (which it wouldn’t help with):

• Global warming – less cars, less consumers, less people needing housing.
• Starvation – if a species have more than 2 children surviving to sexual maturity per couple for a sustained period then eventually it will lead to a catastrophe. It’s basic maths. So as well as giving people food in countries where people are starving and also having 6 children if they can, we should try to change this.
• Other resources – less competition for resources generally.
• Pollution
• Quality of life – less people in the rat-race, more open spaces, less noise…
• Species loss
• Deforestation

So we might have a bit of a pension gap for a few years, but personally I think it would be worth it. Population growth, like economic growth is just not continuously sustainable.
I love the bit in the Al Gore movie (an inconvenient truth) where he mocks the marketing image of a pair of scales – the earth on one side and gold on the other. As though you could have gold without the earth. I think the same thing applies to the simplistic way of thinking about population growth in relation to economics.

http://www.gilestv.com/boatforsale.html

The UK government has recently uncovered a series of plots to blow up 55 aircraft using fabric based explosives. An undisclosed source in MI5 said the government had reason to believe that an Al Goldstein terror cell had been working on wearable explosives and was planning a multi-pronged attack at all of Britain’s airports.
As a result, new regulations have been put into force requiring naked travel on all flights out of the UK. Exceptions have been made for clothes bought on board or in the airports as it was felt that more money could be made. All passengers discovered to be wearing clothes were required to put them in the hold so that they could be stolen by airport staff.

One of the biggest problems in society is that you can’t get people to agree to do something if it depends on everyone else doing it in order to get a good result. It’s a social bootstrapping problem. People often say things like – well if I stop driving my SUV, what difference will that make? If I stop driving it, nobody else will, so there’s no point.
I personally believe that one should usually act such that if everyone acted the way I act, then the overall result would be good. My basis for this is that if you look at a positive final result in such situations, then the only path to that postitive final result is almost always a few individuals taking responsibility independently of any certainty about whether the other members of the group are going to follow their lead. In getting from state A, with high Co2 emissions, to state B, with low emissions, how is it possible unless some individuals initially take responsibility. It’s like the “journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step”. I don’t see any route to reduction of Co2 emissions for example, other than a few individuals and then gradually more changing their lifestyles. Of course policy and scientific progress and technology will help, but the same thing is now happening on a national scale – the EU doesn’t want to be the first to take on economic disadvantage to take the lead in emissions reductions.

Just saw a BBC panorama report saying it’s been deliberately covered up, big time:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/5389684.stm

From here
An AirTran flight from Atlanta to New York

Here are my top 2 annoyances for user interfaces – very easy to fix – don’t know why it hasn’t been done.

1. When searching sent mail in Outlook and Thunderbird, the search field doesn’t change to recipient instead of sender (which is always me for sent mail).
2. Those alarms on big trucks which say “peep peep peep, this vehicle is reversing”. Firstly – what difference does it make if a vehicle is going backwards or forwards – if it’s a big truck, I’m going to notice it anyway. Secondly – why – THIS vehicle – of course it’s this vehicle – you’re not going to have a noise like that about another vehicle. Thirdly they do it every time so most of the time you just get completely desensitised to it and it’s probably more likely to make you ignore the vehicle – it’s an annoyance rather than a warning.
3. Web interfaces which say “your submission has been saved” and keep on saying this even when you’ve made some more changes.
4. Windows allows you only one set of wireless network connection settings.
5. Windows doesn’t give you a don’t overwrite all option when copying lots of files. (it gives you an overwrite all option).
6. Internet explorer in windows mobile edition does not save login details.
7. MS word does not convert all of a selection to a selected style when you tell it to do so.
8. MS word still screws up bulleted lists even after all these years.
9. MS word puts drawings in a stupid box which gets mixed up with other boxes.
10. MS word hasn’t figured out an easy way of doing intuitive text flow around or under images.

I was musing on country tessalation the other day. I wondered how many places there are in the world where 4 countries meet. So far, I can only find one – Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia. There are some other places where this almost happens – also in Africa – but this is the only one where they really appear to come to a point.

Open a new windows notepad, type “this app can break”. Save it. Reopen the file. Voila. Only works with that precise text. Very strange!
Well there is an explanation – notepad doesn’t know which encoding the file is and it does an ad hoc test. If your text coincides with another encoding (in this case some kind of chinese hexograms), then it gets interpreted as such. If you don’t have that installed, you see the squares…