Having spent most of my life alternately bored stiff of or driven to despair by the one-dimensionality of conventional descriptions of political thinking, I am interested to find a website based on an explicitly two-dimensional rather than one-dimensional analysis: The Political Compass. Their two dimensions and many interesting graphs are stretched between poles of “social authoritarianism/libertarianism” and “economic left/right (or communism/neoliberalism)”. So, from uselessly simplistic to descriptively two dimensional. Not much of an improvement, given the hugely polydimensional nature of politics and the underlying factors that produce it, but an improvement nonetheless.

(Though there is a curious echo here of The Thatcher Lie about the initial divisibility of economics and society. I don’t wholly reject these graphs, but I think it important to understand that social policies have economic implications, economic policies have social implications, and both have wider ecological implications. These things arise mutually.)

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It’s not news that it is possible to use a laptop computer (or other device)’s built in camera to take pictures without the current user being aware of it. I ran across some discussion of this recently which seemed odd. Some people suggest (e.g. here) that the standard security response of taping (or equivalent) over the camera is inadequate because a usable image might still be obtainable by post-processing. The suggestion may not be serious, but it hadn’t occurred to me; I have never thought much about whether a piece of metal foil tape or black tape would be better than the little square cut out of a post-it note I’ve been using all these years. I prefer a post-it note because it’s easy to remove if you ever actually want to use the camera — though there’s nothing stopping you using metal foil tape on top of a post-it note.

Anyhow, evidence. This is a self-portrait image taken with my laptop webcam, with a light shining directly on me, through a single layer of purple post-it note. The original image was almost black, so I ran it through the Photoshop Equalise filter.

The speckling is partly jpeg and partly low-light randomness. However, I suspect it would be a challenge to extract a usable image from this even if you could access the raw data. It doesn’t even give much opportunity for pareidolia. Semitransparent tapes might not give the same level of protection.

Result: Probably not a security issue in the foreseeable future. And I’m quite pleased with this picture. I look much prettier than usual.  

found some old photos from 2009:

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I recently found and read one of the best manga series I’ve ever come across. Beautifully drawn, mostly beautifully written. Charming, poignant and amusing by turns. But that’s not what I want to write about.

What I want to write about starts with the fact that I had never heard of it. That’s not unusual; there are more manga in Japan and on the Net than are dreamt of in any one place on Earth. And Sturgeon’s Law applies — ninety-five per cent of them are crap. Many of them unbearable. Yet here we are; amidst the worthwhile five percent, a gem. And I would never have heard of it if it hadn’t been for: scanlation sites. Nor is this the first time I’ve come across excellent works in this way.

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Trough cheap technology it will be possible to use the passing of vehicles to illuminate the city

— http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=136895&CultureCode=en

Someone in Mexico wants to build a sort of below-ground bellows system to produce “sustainable” energy from passing cars. Or pedestrians. Apparently not aware that this is a means of decreasing the fuel efficiency of the traffic, hence not exactly sustainable.  

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The hoariest of old koans ^[1] asks, what is the sound of one hand clapping? This appears to have inspired an article on the Science Daily site about some research into the neurobiology of empathy, where the quoted researcher’s name is “Coan”.

People need friends, Coan added, like "one hand needs another to clap."

Coan, koanish and corny; I approve.  

But: What is the sound of one unempathic person clapping? Or, more accurately . . . what is the empathy-equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping in an unempathic person, or indeed a friendless empathic person, and are these distinct?

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