How far to the Crowne Plaza?

We've just reserved our hotel room for Eastercon 2014.  The con is being held in the Crowne Plaza Glasgow.  The online booking system helpfully gives an indication of how far the various con hotels are from the venue.

One property of a metric is that the distance from somewhere to itself, d(x,x) = 0, for any x. However, the booking system seems to be using a more science fictional metric, since it thinks that d(Crowne Plaza, Crowne Plaza) = 176 yards.

Possibly the hotel is beside itself with joy at hosting Eastercon?

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my work here is overshadowed

I like to collect witty and apposite quotations. I also like to make sure that they are properly attributed.  There are many incorrect or apocryphal attributions around on the net of a million lies; anything unsourced should be treated with suspicion.  In my zeal to track things down, I have even been known to buy two different translations of a well known quotation in order to examine its meaning.

I've learned a lot hunting around for the correct attribution, such as the fact that Edmund Burke did not say

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

that Ralph Waldo Emerson did not say

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

and that Voltaire did not say

 I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Today I was hunting around for a source for the well known:

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

There appears to be an even split in opinion between Mark Twain and Lincoln, but they are all unsourced. Everything witty is eventually attributed to Twain, so these are always doubly suspicious, and if Lincoln had said it, surely there would be a source available somewhere?  More googling landed me at the Quote Investigator, a remarkably well-researched and well-referenced resource, putting my puny efforts to shame.  This will definitely be my first port of call from now on.

The correct attribution for the quotation?  Neither Twain not Lincoln, it seems.  It appears to have evolved over the years into its current form.

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foggy thinking

Driving in fog this morning I was again bemused by something I notice every time when driving in fog.

Visibility was varying between 100-200 yards.  Nearly all the cars had their headlights on; about half also had their fog lights on.

A few had no lights on at all.  I assume these drivers are the ones who either think lights are for wimps, or who don't think at all.

But what bemuses me, every time, is the ones who have only their side-lights on.  In fog, you can see a car before you see its sidelights.  These drivers must have got as far as thinking "fog; put lights on" but not got as far as thinking "put headlights on because sidelights are invisible in fog, as I can clearly tell from all those other cars with only their sidelights on..."

I excuse those with sidelights comprising a little row of LEDs; I suspect these are visible from low earth orbit.

It's not just me.  Highway Code rule 226 says:

You MUST use headlights when visibility is seriously reduced, generally when you cannot see for more than 100 metres (328 feet). You may also use front or rear fog lights but you MUST switch them off when visibility improves 

(Although I MUST say, translating the round number 100m to 328ft is ridiculously precise.)

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ambiguous instructions

So, I'm preparing a large document.  There are instructions for the layout.  One reads:

All margins (top, bottom, left, right) should be at least 15 mm (not including any footers or headers).

Hmm. Does it mean that, when measuring the margins, do not include any headers and footers in that measurement (that is, measure from the edge to the main text), or, when measuring the margins, do not include any headers and footers in the margins (that is, measure from the edge to the top of header/bottom of footer)?

Instructions are always unambiguous when you write them, because you know what you mean, so don't even see the alternative interpretation.  They become ambiguous only when someone else reads them. Sigh.

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"there's a legal issue with your ice cream"

Yesterday, while doing a routine grocery shop, I decided to be a bit organised, and buy some Christmas food in advance of the usual last minute mad dash.

Ice cream.  Yum.  Let's see what they've got.  Oooh, these look like a nice treat:

• Belgian Chocolate Salted Caramel and Hazelnut Ice Cream
• Belgian Chocolate Orange Blossom Honey and Almond

Not only did they look good, but they were on special offer, encouraging me to get two.  After all, Belgian chocolate.

So, we get to the checkout.  The Belgian Chocolate Salted Caramel and Hazelnut Ice Cream gets scanned, and then the assistant says "I'm sorry, there's a legal issue with your ice cream".  What?  She continues, "it's been recalled".  She put it to one side, then scanned the Belgian Chocolate Orange Blossom Honey and Almond.  "Sorry, that's also been recalled".  Oh.

Well, that's saved me a few pounds -- they are still in my purse, rather than going on my waistline!

A quick Google, and I discover that:

Tesco is taking the precautionary measure of recalling the above code of Tesco Finest Belgian Chocolate Salted Caramel & Hazelnut Ice Cream due a small number of tubs being incorrectly filled with the Orange Blossom Honey & Almond variant (the nut allergy warning is therefore incorrect).   

For identification, the incorrectly filled tubs have the Orange Blossom Honey and Almond lid/top.

Okay.  Several things of interest here:

1. Why were the items not removed from the shelves?
2. If the items can be identified from the incorrect tub/correct top combination, why weren't these removed and the others allowed through?
3. Why was the Orange Blossom Honey and Almond tub also removed, since it had the correct almond warning?
4. I didn't know nut allergies are specific to the kind of nut -- that someone allergic to almonds could nevertheless eat hazelnuts.  (Well, technically, I still don't actually know if that's the case.)

So tonight, I tried to buy the ice cream again, assuming they would have cleared the shelves and replaced with new goods.  I checked: the tub had a matching hazelnut lid, so was not part of the bad batch.  But the same thing happened at the checkout.  No Belgian Chocolate ice cream for me this Christmas.

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funfair mirror trees

One of the trees in our garden has died.  It died last summer in the drought, but we gave it a year to prove to us it really was dead.  It is.  So we need to replace it.

I was wandering around the web, looking for trees, when I saw a picture of the type we wanted.  The page also included a helpful impression of its mature size.

6m high, 8m spread: too slim

And a very impressionistic impression it is too.  This graphic of a slim-looking tree is labelled as being 6m high, with an 8m spread.  It's actually broader than it is high! 

So I had a look at a few other tree graphics on the site.

10m high, 10m spread: too slim

20m high, 10m spread: too wide

It's the exact same graphic every time, with not a single one of them using the same scale for the height and spread!  Only the "human figure for scale" and the labels change.  Why go to the effort of including a graphic to show the mature tree size, then not bother to do it right?

The pictures should look something more like this:

height/spread ratios just right

Now it's clear we shouldn't plant our new tree too close to the fence.

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thank you for travelling

In the Good Old Days you travelled as a passenger on a British Rail train, and that was that. (These Good Old Days to which I refer were, of course, after the original Golden Age of Rail Travel.)

Then BR was privatised, and suddenly we were all "customers" of a variety of different franchises. Signs sprouted in stations, saying "Thank you for Choosing to Travel with XYZ franchise", as if we actually had any choice in the matter.  Franchises are mostly geographical with little overlap (except for a few main lines), so if I want to go from Cambridge to London, say, I don't exactly have a vast array of rail operators to choose from.

Anyhow, franchises don't last for ever, which leads to continual repainting of rolling stock in their new liveries, and a continual need to change those "thank you" signs to the new franchise name.  Evidently they got fed up with all that palaver at my local station, which has resulted in a sign that was mildly irritating becoming simply ridiculous.

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I don't think this can be correct

Sign seen last week in a Motorway service station:

My first thought: and that leaves where, precisely?

My second thought: and the claim is rather easily refuted...

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what's wrong with "and"?

An Amazon Marketplace book delivery arrived this week, with a bright yellow sticker attached:

Goods Do Not Meet
The Requirement Of
Article 9 and 10 Of
The Contract For The
Foundation Of The
European Community

I have no idea what this means, and, judging by the result of Googling the phrase, neither does anyone else whose parcels have sprouted this sticker.

Presumably it has something to do with the Treaty of Rome, but I have no idea what.

But more to the point: What's With All That Unnecessary Capitalisation Of  Every Word Except "and"?

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improved!

So here's the latest box of tin foil we bought (yes, I know it's aluminium, not tin, but tin cans are made of steel, tin foil is made of aluminium, and silver paper isn't silver):

 

What caught my eye was this:

Improved thickness!  That must be good, eh?  It's improved!

But just what precisely is improved?  Well, the thickness, obviously.  But in what way?  Careful scrutiny of the box revealed no further clues. (Yes, yes, I know.  Anything to delay actually having to do any actual cooking, you see.)

Improvement presumably implies change. What changes could one make to foil thickness? I could think of four:

1. thinner
2. thicker
3. more even thickness
4. less even thickness (added simply for completeness)

But are any of these improvements? Thinner might mean less waste, but more fragile; thicker would then be more waste, less fragile.  More even thickness might be better if that made cooking times more predictable (I haven't a clue whether it does or not, I'm just hand-waving); then maybe less even thickness would make life more interesting by adding greater variability to the cooked result. 

On eventually opening the box and feeling the foil, it's definitely thicker than the previous batch.  So, that's an improvement because ... more waste?  And lo!  This box has 30m of foil, whereas the previous box of thinner, unimproved, product contained 40m of foil.

So the improvement is that I have to buy foil more often?  Well, sarcasm aside, presumably the implied improvement is that it's less fragile, that it is stronger.  But then, why not say so? Why not:

 

Or even:

Or if that doesn't have enough oomph, what about:

But ... improved thickness?

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Perhaps it’s its forbidden nature

One of the many things that can get me riled is the use of "it's" when the writer means "its". C'mon, it's not difficult: "his" and "hers" don't have apostrophes, so why would "its"? And formal writing (where the mistake also often pops up) tends not to use contractions; it should either be "it is" or "its", never "it's".

Given my pedantrypassion on the subject, I immediately noticed the sentence

Perhaps it’s its forbidden nature that consumed me.

in a "Big Idea" blog post. What a gorgeous juxtaposition. Why have I never noticed such a construct before?


obBTAF:

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modelling reality

I first came across the difficulty of modelling reality when I designed a database for my books. This was back on the early 1980s when I was a physicist, and had barely even heard the word "database" before I got ViewStore for my BBC Micro. What's a book? Easy, you might think. But what about Ace Doubles? (two novels in one binding). Or a novel in three volumes? Or the same book with a variant title? Or a new edition? Or a translation? Or an abridgement? Or a book published over several editions of a magazine? Or...

The next big realisation was alphabets. In the 1990s I was involved in the international standardisation of the Z formal specification language. We needed to standardise the character set, which included lots of mathematical symbols. And our Japanese collegues wanted non-Latin alphabets. How hard could it be to allow different alphabets? So I went off to read the Unicode Standard. Oh.

I was remined of these issues when I saw a post by Charlie Stross discussing the post "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" by Patrick McKenzie. People's names are difficult to model.

So is time. Different calendars. Calenders with negative and positive years, but no year zero (which is why some people ended up celebrating the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon a year too early). Changing calenders from Julian to Gregorian -- give us back our 11 days (of tax payments, that is). Changing calenders at different times in different countries. Leap years. The algorithm for leap years (and the difference between the Julian and Gregorian algorithms). The argument about whether the year 2000 should be a leap year. Time Zones. Changing time zones. Summer time (aka daylight savings time). Summer time coming and going at different days in different countries. Double summer time. Leap seconds. And so on.

One of the comments in Charlie's post references "Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective", a post with an interesting analysis of marriage database design (ignoring the name problem), and how some designs make changes harder than they need to be.

Notice the continual use of "ids" in that post. Names (even if we decide how to model them adequately) are not unique, and so are not suitable for an identifier. What properties might make a good unique identifier? I recall hearing of a new police database that used "Surname, initial, date of birth" as a unique id. The story goes that this database was installed a few days before the Kray twins were arrested...

In fact, no attribute is immutable, and so should not be used in such an identifier. The same person who told me the Kary twins story also told me of the problems a hospital had in assuming that the "sex" entry was immutable when they did their first sex-change operation.

Wait a minute. No attribute is immutable? What about "date of birth" (dob)? How can that change? Well, remember this database information is a model of reality, not reality itself. Models can have errors. The dob might have been mis-entered, or been lied about (when my maternal grandmother died, the family discovered from her birth certificate that she was 10 years older than she had let on to her children), or it might simply be unknown.

So ... if modelling designed (social) reality is this hard, why are we surprised that it is hard to model the natural world? If our own names, dates, whatever, refuse to fit some neat classification system, why should biology, geology, astronomy? Is a virus alive or not? Is something a separate species or not? Is Pluto a planet or not? When reality doesn't fit our classification, the fault lies not with reality, but with the classification system.

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pedantry alert: signing silly declarations

I've just submitted yet another research funding proposal. As part of the bureaucracy surrounding this process, I have to sign a declaration, one clause of which states that I "confirm that I have no personal, financial or other interest in this project". I know what it means, of course, but it still feels silly to sign that I've no interest in this piece of work that has consumed the several months effort, and which, if my application is successful, will consume the next several years of my life.

"pedant": A man who likes his statements to be true.
--- Bertrand Russell. The Good Citizen's Alphabet. 1953

It's not just men, btw...

I've also recently renewed my passport, which process required me to submit my old passport. I had to sign a declaration that said, in part (I forget the exact wording) "If I find my lost passport, I will return it immediately to the office". But I haven't lost my passport -- it's here, with this very form I'm signing -- so I don't have a lost passport to find. You might wish to argue, well, it's a joint form covering both renewal and replacement of lost passports, so if I do subsequently lose my passport, I'm saying I will return it. But I only need to return it if I've reported it missing, presumably by applying for a replacement, on a new form, where I could sign an accurate declaration.

And to cap it all, when a note was pushed through the front door saying that they had tried to deliver my new passport but I was out (they only deliver 9am-5pm Monday to Friday -- when most people are, of course, out), it said I would have to provide some ID when I went to collect it. One form of ID suggested was, you've guessed it, my passport.

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