City of London Towers at Dusk

Sis and I went to high-end kosher restaurant 1701 the other week and came out on Bevis Marks at exactly the magic moment of dusk. We snapped away with our cameras - iPhone for me, AS510 for Sis, and got these. The City just doesn't look any better than this.

New District / Circle Line Rolling Stock Test

So I'm standing on Sloane Square station a couple of Tuesday evenings back during a week off work, when something strange comes into the station. Whoo-hoo new rolling stock on test!

Just looked this up, and it's called the S-stock, and is the through-corridor stock that's used on the Met line now. Fewer seats, more standing, seven cars. (That's a lot of people standing by Hammersmith eastbound in the rush hour.)

Concrete Vices vs Abstract Virtues

There's a video in the MUAMTS (Man Up and Marry The Sluts) genre which I watched because Dalrock mentioned it and I had nothing better to do. A guy called Mark Driscoll, who is some kind of big-name pastor (which is what Protestant vicars are called in the USA because they can't be vicars, because that's a C of E thing, and there is no Church of America, so they are freelancers, which means that their first responsibility is to bring in the money, but I digress...) and he says amongst many other loaded things...

"You've got guys who are...consumers, not producers, so it's food and it's sex and it's drugs and it's alcohol and it's video games and it's entertainment and there's no production, there's no life and growth and help and hope and healing for others." 

And my jaw dropped open. Read that again. Slowly. 

Didn't see it? All the bad things are described concretely: sex, drugs, alcohol, video games. Short of mentioning actual brands, he couldn't be more concrete. But when it comes to the good stuff, it's all abstract nouns: "production", "life", "growth", "help", "hope" and "healing for others". I'm guessing those are code words where Pastor Driscoll comes from but I don't speak the code.

This happens every time someone wants to diss the way a bunch of guys live: they describe in concrete terms what they want the guys to stop doing, but when it comes to what the guys should be doing, they use more abstract nouns than a bad passage of Hegel. "Life". For frack's sake. I'm not even going to guess what that's code for. It's as dumb as those people who say "you should be out there living". Yeah. Let's see. Living. That would be the thing that if you're not doing it, you're dead. Right? And since I'm not dead, I must be alive, and that means I'm living. So I tick that box. Or did you mean something specific? You did? Like what? Uh-huh, you call that "living"? Jeez.

The good Pastor can't get to specifics, because then everyone can have a discussion about just how desirable, possible, affordable and otherwise do-able those specifics are. And because in modern consumer society, most of the things we can do are pretty darn pointless and can, depending on exactly how much you squint and tilt your head, be seen as self-indulgence, then the good Pastor can be seen as substituting one bunch of worthless crap for another. (I'm willing to bet that more than once Paster Driscoll has suggested that all those nouns can be made concrete by, oh, raising money for his ministry? D'ya think?) 

This is partly Pastor Driscoll being sneaky, and it's partly a problem with the way evaluative language works. Most concepts in the English language are piebald: slightly descriptive and slightly evaluative. Even if the evaluations are your own personal views. Brands have value exactly to the degree that people have warm fuzzy feelings towards them: "Coca-Cola" is the name of a drink and a company, but it's also something towards which you have feelings (I'm a Coke man, do they even still make Pepsi?). "Pornography" is a concept with descriptive content and examples, but there's also some evaluation in there, even if it does vary from person to person. "Life", as the good Pastor uses it, is not what we all do or we'd be dead, but something ineffable and Good. Lots of evaluative weight, but almost zero descriptive content. And the moment he gives it any specific descriptive content, the evaluative weight drops off, because we can say "Whoa there Nelly! What's so freaking great about that ?". Words like "good" or "bad" are purely evaluative, and don't mean much more than "I you do that, I will un-Friend you" or something along those lines. The Pastoral trick is to use words that look like they mean something specific - like "production", "life", "growth", "help", "hope" and "healing for others" - and indeed do mean something, just different things to different audiences. As opposed to real descriptive words, which mean much of the same thing to almost everyone.

It's not about any asymmetry between virtues and vices. Vices are naturally concrete. Galatians (via Wikipedia lists):  adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings. All of those have pretty clear descriptive and even legal meaning. The virtues according to the Catholic Church - faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude - are also pretty specific, and very far from wishy-washy stuff like "life, growth and healing for others" - even if prudence (which in Catholic theology means a sound situational judgement of what should be done) is a little vague in practice.  

Concrete Vices and Abstract Virtues is a rhetorical trick used by people whose main aim is condemning rather than offering a positive vision of right behaviour. Just like Pastor Driscoll.

I Live In The Countryside - Leafy Lanes and Fields

I don't think of sunny Feltham-by-the-M3 as having to do with the countryside. I think of it as having to do with industrial estates and the airport. What I forget is that regular villages often have a nearby light industrial estate nearby. Anyway, a few weeks ago now, when the days were really long, I took a couple of walks round the block, which looked like this, and which really did feel as if I was in the country, and not on the edge of London.

I Live In The Countryside - The Combine Harvester

I returned home a couple of Wednesdays ago, after leaving a very worn pair of shoes at Crockett and Jones on Burlington Arcade for repair, and dropping a few pence on some photography books at Waterstones, to find this sight on my local air park. A combine harvester. Just like it's the real countryside.

Who Left That There?

Sometimes no further comment is needed. I passed this on a walk round my block the other week.

Simple, Fast, Insightful. Pick Two.

There's a really neat presentation by the man with the coolest job in IT-town ("I'm Ira Hunt, I'm CTO of the CIA" and he says it real fast). It has many interesting points that shows he gets the whole Big Data thing, and yet, and yet... one of the things he wants is to reduce the dependance on expensive data scientists who are in short supply, and produce a piece of kit that lets regular analysts with degrees in History and Politics from Georgetown search their way through the databases.

Now where have I heard that before? How many times have I heard that before? And why does it never work? Well, here's how the Miracle Information System gets demo'd: "Let's say you want to look at all the e-mails sent by people who are one link removed from Hamid al Hamid to people who looked at the al Jazeera video on You Tube about the bombing in Katusk-al-Katusk and then Facebooked a Like? So all you'd do is (makes a few mouse movements) and there's your answer." Applause, coo-ing and million-dollar orders swiftly follow.

Except. How did the analyst know that those e-mails were there? How did they know how to click that box, then drag that? How did they work out the boolean conditions required for the search? How did Hamid-al-Hamid's name wind up on a drop-down menu? And so on and so forth. Of course when they get the system, the regular analysts won't learn all this stuff, and there will be a handful of guys who do, and they will have dead-end guru jobs for a decade being whizzes on the system.

To handle a data set, however small or large, you need a picture of it, and the way it gets fed from the outside world, and the hierarchy of tables within it, in your head. To be any good at all with it, you need to know the names of all the major identifying variables and categories (you'll need to tell the computer it's Hamid-al-aHamid the Iraqi terrorist you want, not Hamid-al-Hamid the second-generation US citizen and Queens Halal shop owner). That's often a task of scholarship in itself.

Even if you use a GUI to design the query and cut the SQL (or whatever) for you, you still need to know about join types, boolean operator precedence and lexicographical ordering. Nope, right there, that's lost everyone who doesn't have a STEM background. Seriously. Join types, operator precedence and lexicographical ordering. That's all it takes to stump ninety-five per cent of the population. FOR LIFE. (I am the only person on a floor of one hundred analytical people, including many well-paid SAS analysts who knows what operator precedence is. Everyone else instinctively keeps what they do simple enough so they don't have to. So that affects how insightful and complex the work is.)

There are only so many people who can do that, just as there are only so many people who learn the contents of Grey's Anatomy and a zillion other disconnected facts to become some kind of medic, or who can learn the endless VAT statutes and rulings. No-one suggests replacing surgeons with a nurse and a GUI, and everyone has given up trying to develop "expert systems" for tax legislation, so why do IT guys keep trying to get rid of their surgeon-equivalents, the data scientists (or whatever they get called these days)?

They don't of course, but they have software to sell, or buy, and projects to run, and promises to make, so they pretend that, yes, you can exploit data as complex as the CIA and NSA has with a neat GUI and a joint honours degree in International Relations and Farsi (I have nothing but respect for people who can learn Farsi or any other non-native language, it's just that it won't help you design the query you want.) No. You really can't. And unless you put the design of the databases in the hands of people who have an end-to-end appreciation of the issues, you will wind up with some contractor encoding everything in sight without asking anyone who will actually use the data, and then refusing to change anything because you can't demonstrate a business case for doing so. Maybe the CIA don't have that problem. Maybe they can just kill DBA's and Sysadmins who won't do as they're told. (Do you think so? Can I work there if they can?)

Nah. Until we can, we are all safe from Big Brother, because Big Bro simply doesn't have the technical chops. Actually, nobody does.

Simple, fast, insightful. Pick two.