(This article — which contains an illustrative range of ‘profane’ terms — started out as a tangent in an upcoming post, but has grown too large — so here it’s by itself.)

The author of a fiction website I like to keep up with has a proposal for a simple ‘rating’ scheme for websites to declare their suitability for age and sensitivity of readers. (It may be based on the US film industry’s rating scheme, not sure.) The system is used on-site, normally rated ‘all welcome except those with uptight parents’, but the author found it necessary a few years ago to supersede that with an age-14 limit for one story. They had decided to use stronger language, and make it more honestly (rather than cartoonishly) violent than usual.

I believe the idea here is that you try to reassure the parents of some of your possible audience that children are safe with you (most of the time anyway). And fair enough. Trouble is, if I was a parent, I wouldn’t trust authors’ self certification — even if I thought access restrictions were all that useful in the first place. It’s much like the content description meta tags we learned to distrust years ago. They may be useful, but I’d want independent content rating, based on an actual examination. Of course I would also want it to be genuinely independent and objective, which may be hard. I fear many parents, and self-appointed advisors of parents, just want the appearance of safety measures, irrespective of practicality.

I also fear that, though I am no longer fresh in the world, some people and organisations seem interested in managing my access for me. The increasingly alien UK government, for one, have decided that the UK population will have access restrictions by default, and enforced by social stigma.

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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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