On Essays

A friend recently suggested to me that there was no way she could do well at [humanities subject]. Despite being reliably articulate, and having a deep interest in the subject, she was convinced she could never be so virtuosic as to write a Good Essay, like a proper Student of Literature. I found this pretty horrifying, but I suppose it's not hard to see why certain parts of the humanities might cultivate this sort of harmful mystique about basic writing skills.

In particular, I point the finger at literary criticism, which has spent the last few decades in a desperate struggle to prove its own worth and relevance. It's not that lit crit shouldn't exist; someone ought to be keeping an eye on our civilisation's cultural output. But as a discipline, it is embarrassingly insecure, and it's not hard to see why.

Easy mocking with Clojure [tech]

Attention conservation notice: Technical post of interest to programmers only. If you just want the link to my mocking system for Clojure, click it.

I hate testing.

I know that when I have a computer checking and re-checking the behaviour of my code, it's more reliable. I know that I can make changes more confidently, knowing that if I accidentally break something, it will probably get caught. I know all this, and yet I am still put off by the sheer tedium of building all the scaffolding any non-trivial piece of code usually needs.

So here's a library to make it easier, in my current favourite language.

The Social Messages of "Tangled"

Pixar has historically been slightly tone-deaf on gender issues. This jaw-dropping quote, allegedly from a Pixar executive, embodies the problem:

"We're very aware of it and we're trying to change. But sometimes it's just so hard to find a way to justify adding a female character to the story. We want to be fair, but every character has to have a reason to be there."

(If you can read that without thinking that something is obviously, glaringly wrong in the imagination of the speaker, you might want to skip this post - it relies on premises I'm not going to go into right now.)

But come back, Disney animation, all is forgiven. Tangled has genuinely strong female characterisation, a frank description of emotional abuse, and is quietly packed with positive messages.

Startups, China, and my increasing ambivalence about capitalism

I used to be all for entrepreneurship. I long took it for granted that I’d found a software startup as soon as possible after graduating. But I’ve started to worry that prolonged direct contact with the incentives of a free marketplace would either demand that I be - or worse, turn me into - someone more morally compromised than I really want to be.

The genius of a free market is that it measures the entire complexity of the world in one dimension - price. But this one dimension along which the world is measured does not precisely correspond to "good", in any human sense. It's not completely unrelated; it correlates well enough to have produced immense advances in human well-being over the last few centuries. But the invisible hand teaches to the test: it optimises ruthlessly for the one thing it measures. The market is like evolution: not evil, but an extremely powerful force not quite aligned with your or my interests.

The Green Counter-Revolution

I now have a piece up at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank, about Iran's eavesdropping on GMail, how it happened, and some international context. I even have a go at some policy implications (internet censorship: a bad thing, apparently).

It sort of grew out of Monday's post on the topic.

Iran Intercepting Access to GMail

Technical summary: A user in Iran is reporting on Google's support forums that users attempting to access GMail from Iran are periodically being given a false SSL certificate. Update: Google have now confirmed this on their blog.

Non-technical summary: The Iranian government appears to be getting increasingly sophisticated in their war on Internet dissidents. Notably, this is one of the first "in the wild" applications, by an authoritarian state, of an attack that has been widely forseen by security experts.

(Updated some links Tuesday)

(Updated "advice if you're in Iran" on Thursday. I have now written an article on this attack for the Royal United Services Institute, including a bit more international context)

Nokia's Downfall: A Self-Inflicted Wound

Update Sep/Oct 2011 - The N9 Meego phone has finally launched. TechCrunch has labelled it "the most amazing phone you'll never buy".

Nokia's fall has been sudden and swift. They have lost the smartphone wars decisively: Unable to mount a competitive response to the iPhone and Android, their last-generation platforms have been spectacularly outclassed, and their efforts to produce something new were too little, too late. They bowed to this reality earlier this year, in a deal which makes them little more than a hardware manufacturer for the struggling Windows Mobile operating system. Plenty expect the rump of the once-proud phonemaker to be on the auction block within the next couple of years.

This is all true, as far as it goes. But what these accounts miss is that Nokia shouldn't have been reacting to this revolution in the first place. They were years ahead of it, until they squandered their industry leadership in a strategic blunder driven by internal politics.