In this book Jamie Whyte, a former philosophy lecturer at Cambridge University, does pretty much what he promises in the subtitle: “Exposing the bogus arguments of politicians, priests, journalists, and other serial offenders.”

This book starts off with a very in-depth logical approach that is, at times, a little bit too pedantic even for my taste. For example, the first chapter talks about the cliché “You are entitled to your opinion” and goes through the painstaking logical deduction that, although you are free to hold an opinion, it is obviously not guaranteed to be correct. Therefore, when debating the correctness of your opinion versus another opinion, the cop-out “I’m entitled to my opinion” is entirely irrelevant to the topic under debate. Roughly equivalent in merit to a statement such as “I am wearing leather shoes!”

Later in the book he mellows out a little and gets closer to Ben Goldacre’s style in Bad Science — pointing out public blunders and pseudo-scientific nonsense. Such as New Labour’s 1997 claim that 35% of British children live in ‘poverty’, under the rather unconventional definition of ‘poverty’ as “household income less than 60% of the national median household income”. His analysis is sound and comprehensive, but I’ll be flippant and say that this statistic is about as useful as declaring that 50% of children live in ‘poverty’ because they have a below-average household income. Something must be done! Increase taxes!

Another amusing part that makes a good anecdote is The Times reporting a BMA statistic in 2000, saying that anorexia affects 2% of young women and kills a fifth of sufferers. Jamie ran the numbers and concluded that, at this rate, anorexia is so deadly that it kills sixteen times the number of young women that die from any causes, including anorexia. Something must be done!

Overall this book is an interesting read and at only 150 pages in length, it’s not an epic. Persevere through the beginning — it gets better in the latter half and there are a few great gems waiting there for you.

My current digital camera is one I bought in New York City a few years ago, at a spectacular store called B&H Photo Video. I was reminded of B&H by Joel Spolsky's recent article highlighting the fact that Circuit City went out of business yet B&H Photo Video still thrives. The reason for this is that B&H is an awesome place to go shopping for photo and video equipment.

I was visiting the USA and on the look-out for a digital camera. I visited all the usual big-name consumer electronics stores and the technology counters in department stores, but was continually disappointed by the apparent lack of sales expertise in the products. When I ended up in New York and met up with Zack, he recommended B&H to me, he said it was the place to go for a camera. It turned out I had walked past the store earlier that very day, without so much as noticing. I'm observant like that. (Maybe it was because they didn't have a shiny store-front with lots of eye-catching technology right in the window, like all the other over-priced tourist-trap camera stores in New York City.)

Zack was right. This store was huge, and had all sorts of photo/video related stuff inside. I went in and started looking at cameras. The nearest salesperson closed a sale and then asked me if I needed assistance so I started talking to him about the cameras I was considering. He clearly knew what he was talking about when he started talking about comparative CCD sensor sizes between the models, then breifly paused to help another customer change the language on a camera from Japanese — he seemed to know the menu structure on that particular model off by heart, since I'm pretty sure he wasn't fluent in Japanese.

Most of the employees were Jewish and the store ran to military precision. The workflow was like this:

1. As soon as you go near the cameras some guy starts explaining every feature to you, answers all your questions, and generally knows what he's talking about (most of the people at other places I'd been to didn't know the cameras that intimately)
2. You eventually decide on a camera, after having the sales assistant explain the intricate details and relative merits of your candidate selections
3. He scribbles down some product codes for your chosen camera and accessories and tells you to take it to a guy at a computer terminal
4. The guy at the computer punches in the barcodes and takes some details down, then says "It'll be here in a minute"
5. Some other guy brings over your order in a green crate, with a receipt
6. You take the receipt to the payment counter (without the goods) where you pay using the method of your choice and get a receipt
7. Finally, you take your receipt to the goods counter and pick up your neatly packed order.

I'm not sure why their system is so arcane, but I expect it's to deal with high demand situations. I was there at closing time on a weekday, and people were buying cameras at the rate of one every few minutes. At peak times I expect their system deals admirably. (Joel postulates that the system is an anti-theft measure, by involving multiple staff in each sale, but I doubt that's the reason.)

Each of the "counters" I mentioned above have an airport-check-in-style zig-zag queue cordoned off in front and room for about 5-10 staff members at the counter.

They also have an elaborate roof-mounted transport system for moving orders out of the stock rooms.

If you're looking for a camera and happen to be in or near New York City, go to B&H. Heck, go there even if you're not looking for a camera, just for the cultural experience!

Ever since reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman I’ve looked upon everyday objects with a newfound insight into their subtle yet significant design flaws.

For instance, the elevators at my office have a sleek control panel in brushed steel. Modern in appearance, minimalistic, utilitarian, and robust.

It’s usually the details that make the difference in design, and this interface has some subtle shortcomings:

1. Poor contrast of the engraved markings makes them difficult to read.
2. Restricted viewing angle of the light for each button makes it difficult to see what floors are already selected when at the front of a packed elevator.
3. Minimal differentiation between the “door open” and “door close” decals makes it difficult find the correct button to hold the elevator for someone as the doors begin to close.

Not that, I’m not complaining. There is worse design elsewhere.

In Bad Science Ben Goldacre takes the time to carefully demolish a variety of pseudo-scientific myths that the mass media, industry, and advertising, has induced upon us. He doesn’t make a lot of generalisations or sweeping statements, just presents a lot of  facts and clear evidence – something the mass media rarely does.

He also introduces the reader to a lot of knowledge about scientific methods, the traits of effective (and ineffective) research: control groups; the role of placebos; double-blind trials; why brand name drugs are no better than generic brands, except by virtue of the fact that you pay more for them which, paradoxically, gives you a greater placebo effect (because, subconsciously, a drug that is more expensive must be more effective)!

Two of the biggest medical abbreviations from UK media in the past decade, in my mind, are MMR (the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella combined vaccination, and its links to autism) and MSRA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the hospital ‘superbug’ outbreak). In his book, Ben calmly presents some facts and details that the mass media may have forgotten to go in to (perhaps because “just kidding, we’re not all going to die after all!” is not quite as newsworthy).

He also covers common “knowledge” such as vitamins, antioxidants, other nutritionists’ products and claims, homeopathy, and more.

I’m trying hard not to enter into too much detail here because I know that I’ll degenerate into a cynical rant that simply won’t do justice to Ben’s carefully measured words and well-balanced arguments. Instead, here is a quotation from my favourite part of the book:

“What you are seeing here is a tabloid journalist telling a department of a world-class research microbiologists that they are mistaken about microbiology. This is an excellent example of a phenomenon described in one of my favourite psychology papers: ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’, by Justin Kruger and David Dunning.

They noted that people who are incompetent suffer a dual burden: not only are they incompetent, but they may also be too incompetent  to assay their own incompetence, because the skills which underlie an ability to make a correct judgement are the same as the skills required to recognise a correct judgement.
[…]
People who performed particularly poorly relative to their peers were unaware of their own incompetence; but more than that, they were also less able to recognize competence in others, because this, too, relied on ‘meta-cognition’, or knowledge about the skill.”
         — Ben Goldacre, Bad Science, pp.267-269.

See also: The Dangers of Bread

I went to Heathrow Terminal 5 the other day. Here are some observations:

1. Cool: The short stay car park has a camera at the entrance barriers which reads your number plate and prints it on your parking ticket moments later. (I wonder if they've had problems with ticket transferral in the past.)
2. Expensive: A one-hour stay will cost you over £6.
3. Annoying: There is no passenger pick-up point. Just a drop-off point. The signs for "pick-up" lead down a one-way route to the car park. If you want to pick someone up, arrange to meet them at the departures drop-off point instead.
4. Confusing: The international arrivals area has two gates from which passengers emerge, separated by a good distance. There is no indication of which side a given flight will emerge (and it is not clear if this is even deterministic). There is no single area through which all exiting passengers pass through. There is enough curvature and pylons in the layout that, at even a moderately busy time, it is neigh on impossible for a single person to monitor both sides simultaneously, even with a lot of constant side-to-side neck twisting.
5. Useful: Now that they know your number plate, next to the pay machine there is a "find lost car" machine to help you find out where you parked you car! I should have tried it to see what kind of granularity it works to. I'm not sure if they continue to use cameras throughout the car park to track your location, or perhaps they have an embedded RFID chip in the parking ticket.
6. Practical: Checked luggage was delivered to the passengers!

You may have heard of Le Parkour or Free Running. Now try that on a bike!

After participating in a couple of Gumball 3000 events (a 3000 mile rally where nice cars race through the streets of numerous countries for a week or so) Alex Roy decided to drive across the USA, nonstop, in a record time of 31 hours 7 minutes, in a largely modified BMW M3. 90.1mph average speed; top speeds of 160mph+.

If you think that’s a little bit reckless, think again… he spent 5 years planning for this with a full team of dedicated people. Did a couple of "low speed" trial runs of the full route, then watched the video footage non-stop in real-time (when's the last time you watched a 30 hour movie non-stop?) to fully learn from the mistakes they made. They had GPS devices, radio scanners, laser jammers, real-time traffic and weather reports, something like seven cameras mounted on the car (including a thermal imaging camera in the front grill feeding a 7-inch dashboard-mounted display… you know, for night driving), and also (now get this) a spotter plane flying overhead.

It all sounds a bit gung ho but it's exactly the opposite. They reviewed driver transcripts from similar things that had been done previously so they could learn everything they could. Analysed fuel economies in Excel spreadsheets. Looked up potential speed-trap locations, reviewed low-angle air photographs of the areas, marked them up on their GPS guidance. Looked at traffic laws and maximal jail sentences in each state so they could set the cruise control 1mph below the relevant thresholds. They developed threat analyses and operational protocols that dictated what should be done in various situations.

These people are, basically, insane.

Here's an informative presentation Alex did at Google to promote his book.

Alex Roy clearly subscribes to the policy that "If you're gonna do it right you've gotta do it hard-core."

A few of weeks ago Kelley and I got a cat from the (rather massive) shelter in Battersea. Kelley reluctantly agreed to let me re-name her ‘Remarc’, (though she calls her Remy most of the time.)

She is about four years old, came from a household with lots of pets (to one with none), and has been very well trained; She is very gentle and considerate, has a soft coat and she likes to cuddle.

Now that she’s had all her vaccinations and treatments she’s allowed outside so she’ll have a whole new world to explore. I just hope she doesn’t get into any trouble out there!