Question Time (aka Dear Nick …)

Nick Griffin’s Question Time appearance lived up to expectations, public passion, some good speeches against racism and the man himself couldn’t really defend his views. Having said that there’s a few key subtle points that differentiate Griffin from other politicians on the show – and his performance demonstrates exactly why politicians seem to have their own dialectic.

• Too Much Honesty – when he admitted that homosexuals make him uncomfortable he exposed himself to much criticism. He was asked what his opinions on the matter were, and he gave them – but this isn’t how the game is played! If he had simply replied “I don’t believe it is any business of the state as to what people do in their own homes.” (which is his position on the matter) then he wouldn’t have been boo’d and might have picked up respect.
• Not aware when’s on camera – the BBC cameramen frequently turned their gaze upon Griffin whilst he wasn’t talking, this is fairly usual when a point is being about a person, or an organization they represent. During this time Griffin was looking at his notes, or staring blankly. The most important thing when someone is speaking about you is to look like you’re listening. Even if you’re mentally sticking knives into a voodoo doll. This makes it looks like you are respectful and interested in what others have to say, rather than preparing your comeback.
• Failure To Reframe the question – When faced with a difficult political question it is always more beneficial to reframe it in terms that support your perspective, party or interest group. For example when Nick Griffin was asked about whether the BNP were sullying the name of Churchill he addressed the concerns of people directly by describing the unpopular ideas the BNP has that Churchill shared. A far better line of attack would have been to talk about the benefits of a strong Britain and play on people’s concerns about immigration. The more a politician swings debate to areas where people have common ground with them the more votes they get.
• Insulting your hosts – He commented negatively on the BBC, after they had gone through much trouble to have them on the show. Even if his supporters don’t trust the BBC (and recent surveys show they have a far higher than average distrust of BBC Journalists than most people) then he shouldn’t be making himself look impolite on national television. In some sense this is a sub case of being too honest.

The fundamentally interesting conclusion of all this is that the discursive approach that members of the public always want more of from politicians, honesty, directness etc. is exactly what gets you in trouble on political discussion programs. This applies to mainstream politicians as much as to Griffin and the like.

Gordon Brown isn’t a subtle politician – but he is honest, straightforward, hard working and tries his best. These are qualities that are often described as missing from politicians – but in the modern age politicians don’t control the channels of communication in which their message gets to you. So it doesn’t matter if you are honest and straightforward – what you need to be is manipulative of the soundbites that come out of your debates.

Nick Griffin got caught out in terms of his media interaction, in a way that I haven’t seen happen to a politician since John Major called some of his cabinet colleagues bastards and that made for an interesting evening.

Richard Warburton : 23 Oct 2009 01:05 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BNP Bingo/Drinking Game

Its been nearly two months since I last blogged, far too long, but this Thursday evening Nick Griffin of the BNP will be appearing on Question Time. This appears to have caused considerable controversy that I shall not be addressing – but I will be proposing BNP Bingo Rules!

The aim of the game is to get 50 Points. Different events listed below are worth various points. If you are not watching question time at the time the event occurs, you are not allowed the point! I believe this could also be played as a drinking game, with 2-5 points worth a shot, depending on how much you normally drink.

• 2 points every time Nick Griffin says “We are a legitimate party”. 20 points if the point is argued by anyone else, though this reduces to 5 if this is ironic.
• 5 points every time someone claims that the party are illegal, due to the recent ruling on membership. 2 points if this is Jack Straw, 1000 if its Nick Griffin.
• 5 points if a member of the audience insults Nick Griffin or the BNP directly, 10 points if its a member of the panel. 20 points if the BBC are forced to ‘bleep’ out a word.
• 2 points if Dimbleby picks up Griffin on a point of policy, 10 if he refers to racism explicitly.
• 5 points when the discussion goes totally off topic and turns into arguments over the BNP.
• 2 points whenever the issue of the BNP appearing on Question Time arises, 5 points if its a question asked by the audience members.

Richard Warburton : 22 Oct 2009 03:54 |  Tags: Bnp Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

TPHOLs + Munich

I’ve split this blog post into a section about the conference, and another about Munich so people can read whatever is appropriate to their interests. Its a big one guys.

TPHOLS

I’ve just got back from TPHOLs, and I really enjoyed it. I only submitted an ‘Emerging Trends’ Paper, which doesn’t really count for anything, but the feedback from talking to people seemed worth while and positive. I even talked to a guy who had the rest of a compiler verified, using the same semantics as I do, and really wanted my work done so there was an optimising phase. Sounds like an excellent idea to me! Probably better focus less on this crazy bug fixing idea after all, and get back to some proper verification.

There were some really interesting papers, Quite a bit of low level code verification and techniques that viably work in ‘real world’ situations. Top of the list were the L4.Verified guys who were presenting two papers – one on extending their framework to include a separation logic for C and the other on their actual C Verification framework. I was surprised when talking to Gerwin Klein how few restrictions there were in their C subset. Allegedly they even have function pointers now – though it sounds like only verifying simple properties about them is sane at the moment.

One of the annoying feature about C is the non-determinism within the reduction of their expression semantics. Notably that evaluating an expression with a binary operator doesn’t have to evaluate its left hand side or right hand side totally first. Norrish’s original semantics for C capture this by bagging up side effects and then unbagging them non-deterministically – their new framework captures this, but for practical verification, they discharge appropriate proof obligations for common syntactic forms – eg expressions without side effects, functions calls with no reduction required in the arguments. This sounds like a fairly simple and reliable approach.

The Verisoft guys had some fairly heavy duty C verification tasks that they were undertaking as well – its good to see people attempting these large projects. They seemed to believe that they could finish in a year – quite impressive in my opinion.

The other thing I was surprised at was people making an effort at verifying properties of continuous maths, as well as traditional Computer Science. It somehow seems obvious with hindsight to define real numbers as a co-inductive definition, and operate on them co-recursively but I would probably have never made that intuitional leap myself – probably a side effect of not really reading any papers in that area. I always wonder how hard it would be to prove implementations of floating point arithmetic correct against a real number spec correct – I’m tempted to see if anyone has considered this kind of thing before, seems highly ambitious.

The conference organisers really deserve some credit for their efficiency – the directions were excellent, the hotel well chosen, things generally ran according to plan. We went on an excursion to a lake, which I had the utmost belief would result in people getting lost, but I don’t think anyone was at all. This was a complete masterpiece that totally validates my stereotypical belief in german efficiency. At certain key points, eg when a train would turn up or when we had to turn a corner – Stephan would clap his hands, and then all the local organisers would clap, and people knew what to do. The lake was picturesque, the Buccheim Museum interesting and the banquet excellent. Though I still haven’t figured out whether Zander is the German name for a fish I’ve eaten before, or a new fish.

Munich

I managd to forget to bring my camera, so any pictures I recall to put in will be efficiently cribbed from the internets. I visited the Englishgarten, which is a park near central Munich, containing a some splendid nature and a few interesting buildings.

I also had a wander through central Munich, which contains a few old buildings of varying architectural interest.

I had decided not to visit the workshops on the Friday of the conference, since I have less interest in Coq and none in Computer Algebra. I consequently spent the day acting as a tourist. I walked slowly, accidentally bumped into people, mumbled under my breath about the length of time it took for the road crossing lights to change and I even saw some of Munich! In the morning I went to the Deutsche Museum – which is a technology and engineering museum with a bit of SCIENCE thrown in for shits and giggles. This is what we should have more of in the UK.

We used to take family trips to Techniquest as a child, which was ok since it provided ways to play around with a cool demonstration of basic scientific principles, but I found it somewhat simplistic even at my young age, and I can’t imagine particularly enjoying it today. This place on the other hand went into low level detail about all sorts of engineering stuff – and had cool things for kids to play around with! Things like water wheels, boat sails, planes, damns, bridges, railways. This is really cool, and even gave me an idea for a simple physics game where you build a bridge. I’m sure its been done before – but might be cool to write anyhow maybe I can finally get round to learning some proper physics.

In the afternoon I went through the Residenz Museum, which is based in the Palace where Bavarian Royalty used to live, The Residenz. Unfortunately we bombed it to hell during the war, and its still being slowly restored. For example the facade is painted on plaster in some places, rather than being the original ornate part. Fortunately some of the interiors, and most of the fine art and furniture survived by being moved into the country. Really nice in some places, and it tells a bit about the way the Bavarian Dukes lived back in the day.

Afterwards I visited the hofgarden, beside the Residenz, walked around for a while, then sat down in the sun to have a beer. At this point in time it decided to rain … awesome. I managed to migrate myself so I was protected by a parasol and then ate a rather awesome slice of cheesecake. It was larger than my face. Then I wandered back to hotel via another park. Managed to get off at the wrong station on the train to the airport, its platform was marked with the word ‘flughafen’ which is German for airport, and I noticed this – it seemed a bit weird but I rushed to get off. I then realised that the sigh was saying “Flughafen Glies” – which meant it was the platform for going to the airport, rather than Munich city. Thankfully I had plenty of time, and trains were every 20 minutes. Plane flight back was ok.

Richard Warburton : 23 Aug 2009 19:53 |  Tags: Conference Holiday |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

WOMAD 2009

Here’s some typed up gig notes from this year’s WOMAD. Note ratings are entirely opinion, and I didn’t write notes for every gig I heard.

Thursday

Music from the Penguin Cafe

Brief reformation of many of the Penguin Cafe musicians under Simon Jeffes’ son. Good set, especially since it was on the pre-programme. Really ought to listen to some of the original band’s stuff.

6/10

The Skatalites

WOMAD really has a habbit of attracting aging pop musicians, but who are really competent with their instruments. Despite the name the band actually plays a mixture of Ska, Reggae and Rocksteady. Some really nice soloing here. Every year I consider listening to more Jamaican music, but end up getting put off by the pop/dance focussed reggae that seems to have been the overly popular product. Damn you Bob Marley.

7/10

Friday

Victor Deme

Based on writeups I labelled this guy as some what of a wannabe Ali Farka Touré. Impressive soloing, somewhat more traditional compositionally, and I’m sure some of the lyrics would be blatant efforts at catches (what an outrage!) if I understood French. I also listened to his late night saturday set, that was much better – guitarist was showing off more and the audience were into it a bit more.

6.5/10

Cimarron

Fado + Flamenco outfit, nice acoustic sound for the mood I was in at the time, can’t really say they stood out for any reason though.

6/10

Mariem Hassan

Soulful, Bluesey singer from Sahara. Nice, but meh.

6/10

Eliader Ochoa

Former Buena Vista Social Club member, included a few of their songs in his set list. Similar style musically – ought to check out some of his solo stuff.

7/10

Carrivan Palace

How do well sell gypsy Jazz to the younger generation Brain? We do what we do every year Pinky – we put a hot singer on the front and a dj playing incredibly tedious dance beat behind. Crowd were really into it though, and good stae presence.

4/10

Rokia Traore

Does have a good voice, slightly meh otherwise. Allegedly collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, maybe I should listen to that.

6.5/10

The Black Arm Band

Collaboration of Australian musicians presenting a show hilighting aboriginal issues. If Billy Bragg were an australian – he would have been here. I was somewhat disappointed that a lot of the music itself felt very inspired by western protest movements. There were the ballads glorifying the common behaviour of the abused group, we had verses structured as lists of things that had a gone wrong. Pretty basic stuff. But they had a good didgeridoo player, so its all good right? Gave rise to much thought as to whether human rights and poverty issues within third world countries and 1st world countries demanded the same approaches, and the ethic of it all. Heartful performances by all the musicians that really came across live.

7/10

Portico Quartet

Excellent set. Womad used to run a lot of classical music, most notably Indian Sarod and Sitar players, in the evening performance slots – but the change of festival director 2 years ago seems to have purged them from the programme. This is a real tragedy since it used to be a real hilight of the festival for me. This is one of the few late evening slots that I’ve really felt has lived up to that quality of musicianship. The band themselves make a lot out of their use of the hang – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_(musical_instrument) – an instrument I’d come across before, but never really seen showcased rather than used occassionally during performances. Here it sets the soundscape and is interspersed with and juxtaposed against some avant-garde jazz sax and bass. I’ll definitely listen to their previous album, and their new one when it comes out in October.

8/10

Saturday

Zambezi Express

Lively show, telling the story of a boy trying to avoid working in a mine by becoming a footballer.

Music itself was pretty boring djembe rythms – 4/10

Dancing and live show was excellent – back flips whilst skipping is quite pro – 8/10

Oumou Sangare

Traditionalist singer. Audience not really into it at the start (it had rained a bit just before the gig) – but she whipped them up a bit and then everything got into full swing. Not really my type of thing but good vocalist. There aren’t enough purely instrumental sets at womad anymore.

6.5/10

Peter Gabriel

Aging rockers always put on good live sets, think its because live sets used to be really important to a Band’s fanbase in the 70s and 80s. I blame MTV for everything. Weirdly Gabriel has now appeared twice in 3 years at WOMAD, previously to celebrate its silver anniversay, and this time round to support his charity .

7/10

Enkh Jargal

Pro mongolian singer and horse fiddle player. Hilarious horse impressions on stage when trying to explain what his instrument’s strings were made from – awesome.

7.5/10

Sunday

Styl’O’Styl

Combination of modern dance and minimalist jazz. Not really my kind of thing, but was an interesting set nonetheless.

6.5/10

Ba Cissoko

Excellent progressive Kora player – really going in different direction to his contemporary Diabate. Occassionally picked up the talking drum during set as well, when he was singing. Good stuff.

7.5/10

Youssou N’Dour

Yeah, and its not the first time I’ve seen him either. Screw you!

Once you get past the pop crap (the sung the chorus to 7 seconds and thats all in this set) – you realise that he’s actually rather a good musician, and he’s surrounded by good musicians. Last time I heard Youssou N’Dour he was playing more traditional, griot oriented stuff – this set was more modern, mblax focussed stuff. He works the audience well to, just a shame it was raining. (Why do idiots bring umbrellas to festivals, rather than ponchos?)

8/10

Roy Ayers

AWESOME. Second time I’ve heard him live. Started off with minimal actual playing (I was unduly worried, though he barely touched the vibes during his opening number) and playing some of dance/funk/pop numbers that he’s famous for, including the obvious irony of ‘everyone loves the sunshire’ whilst it was raining heavily in wiltshire. My Dad and I had been singing the song all afternoon – I was ridiculously up for this gig. The gig then turned into a 20 minute cover of classic jazz standard ‘One night in tunisia’ by Dizzy Gillespie which was basically an excuse for some seriously epic jazz soloing.

9/10

Richard Warburton : 27 Jul 2009 20:58 |  Tags: Music Review |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

European Election Predictions

Polling in the UK is far less reliable than the US, and for that matter national support for Labour, the Lib Dems and UKIP is incredibly erratic at the moment, but here goes. Percentages are for national voting average, and won’t directly correlate to number of MEPs.

1. Conservatives – 29%
2. UKIP – 18%
3. Labour – 17%
4. Lib Dems – 16%
5. Greens – 10%
6. BNP – 7%

You can’t criticize me for not being bold! UKIP are in second place on the back of their strong polling over the weekend, and Labour’s troubles this week. Lets hope Brown’s reshuffle works out for him, so the next election is in some way competitive. He was actually quite good in Prime Minister’s Question Time .

I find it rather saddening that european elections are always an implicit referendum on British involvement in Europe, and political parties current national status, rather than being related to the issues involved in Europe. Oh and …

DONT FORGET TO VOTE!

Richard Warburton : 04 Jun 2009 00:45 |  Tags: Elections News |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Poor man's /ignore in trac

IRC generally has the useful /ignore command (this may be clients, but I don’t really care) that allows one to ignore people who are particularly annoying. Sometimes public bug trackers have the same basic issue – that you really need to ignore someone, in order to get on with more important issues.

The computing society website uses the trac system for bug tracking and wiki provision. We really just use it as a bug tracker, but its fine for that purpose on a small project. Trac allows custom reports to be written in a sql-like language, and the report of win is report #3 – which orders everything by milestone. In order to implement /ignore follow the following steps:

1. Create a new report, and call it something trolly like “Serious Tickets”, give it an appropriate description.
2. Copy the report query from report 3, and paste it into your query box.
3. Within the where clause of the report add the clause: “AND NOT reporter LIKE ‘silver’”

Hey presto – life is grand!

Richard Warburton : 28 May 2009 01:08 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

European Elections

In the past, I’ve written about council elections and this election cycle we have some european elections going on. If you live in the Coventry area there are no council elections this cycle. Interesting update from last year, the whoberley wikipedia page still needs more information. Clearly I should do this at some point in time.

In the european elections there’s a party list, so you don’t get to necessarily vote for a specific candidate, as far as I can tell, but its still worth looking at the candidates and parties I think. Currently the west midlands is represented by 3 Conservatives, 2 Labour Party members, 1 Liberal Democrat and a UKIP member, within the next parliament we will be loosing one of our representatives, through shifting demographics. Interestingly enough if the treaty of Lisbon had passed, it would have the West Midlands another seat, maintaining our current level of importance. The BBC provides a helpful grouping of different european party affiliations on its website.

Candidates

Of the existing representatives, all but one are looking to get re-elected to their positions as MEPs.

The Conservative Party

1. Philip Bradbourn

Number 1 on the Conservative party list, Bradbourn has been a member of the European Parliament since 1999. He has also advised Wolverhampton City Council, and stood for elections at a national level in 1992. When caught smoking inside the EU Parliament building, he allegedly said “I’m a member. I make the rules.” Richard Nixon would be proud.

2. Malcolm Harbour

2nd on the Conservative list, Malcolm Harbour worked as an engineer before his election to the European Parliament. He has stated strong support for software patents.

3. Anthea McIntyre

3rd Conservative on the list, not currently an MEP, Stood in the 1997 election and lost. According to her website, she wants to keep the pound and encourage the single market – but wants no further integration within the EU.

The Labour Party

1. Michael Cashman

Former East Enders) character actor Cashman, has been an MEP since 1999, where he has worked on the Civil LIberties committee. He was elected MEP of the Year for Justice and Fundamental Rights by his peers in 2007.

2. Neena Gill

Another member of the 1999 MEP intake, Neena GIll sits on the Urban Housing intergroup in the European Parliament, and was also a Vice President with the Anti-Racism and Diversity intergroup. She is also listed as a Friend of Football.

3. Claire Edwards

Currently a Rugby Councillor, about whom it is hard to find further information.

Liberal Democrats

1. Liz Lynne

Yet another 1999 intake MEP (I wonder if this trend is nationwide), Ms Lynne is a former MP. She is currently a Vice-President, for the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, and the disability intergroup. She has also worked with Amnesty International.

2. Phil Bennion

Has a fascinating website that I advise everyone to read. As a working farmer with a PhD, including alleged expertise in BioMass – which I think means shit, Dr. Bennion stands out instantly. He was agricultural affairs advisor to Charles Kennedy, also a former Lichfield councillor, where he campaigned against local post office closures.

3. Susan Juned

A former Avon and Warwickshire Councillor, Dr. Juned has a PhD in environmental sciences, and plant biology and is quite focussed on campaigning for environmental issues.

I think the next two parties who have a chance of electing someone are UKIP and the BNP, and I don’t want to publicise their racist views, otherwise I hope this has been helpful. I might return to this topic again soon. It has stirred some thoughts within me as to what issues the European Parliament could have an impact on.

Richard Warburton : 27 May 2009 02:07 |  Tags: Politics |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Hotspot Print Assembly

Since google fails at providing this information, and I haven’t blogged in a month:

It is possible to print assembly produced by the SUN Hotspot JVM’s JIT Compiler. In order to do so you will need a debug enabled JVM from http://download.java.net/jdk6/binaries/. The magic flag is +PrintOptoAssembly, and since its a JVM flag it needs a -XX: prefix. Additionally, code is only printed out as assembly if it gets JIT’d – so if you want everything printed, then you reduce the compile threshold. Consequently, an example command look like:

java -server -XX:+PrintOptoAssembly -XX:CompileThreshold=1 SomeJavaClass

Hopefully this is helpful to other people

Richard Warburton : 15 May 2009 21:51 |  Tags: Java |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Economic Stimulus

Towards the end of last year the government chose to attempt to stimulate the economy using fiscal means – that is to say that spend more (creating jobs) and tax less (incentivizing purchases and harder work). This is a traditional remedy in time of economic strife – action that the government can undertake to encourage the economic to grow faster, or shrink less in this case.

The conservatives opposed the measures on the grounds that they would increase government debt. Debt they argue is bad because it its hard to repay, it requires that at some point in time in the future one must either raise taxes or cut spending – either way the economy will be damage by the inverse effects of the stimulus. Some commentators pointed out that the stimulus would only increase the fiscal deficit (ie the amount added to national debt) by 1/15 of the amount that it was going to rise by anyway, and the Conservatives weren’t opposing the ‘stabilizers’, ie the natural reduction in taxation and increase in spending that happens during a recession. It seemed obvious to me that that was merely political expediency, that they didn’t want to be charged with sacking doctors and teachers for example.

There exists only a limited amount of investment capital, the kind that is required to fund businesses and drive forward growth. Since the cause of the economic issues was fundamentally related to the debt markets, and banks in the Uk that have had financial issues have generally been over-exposed to the debt markets there currently exists a climate of irrational negativity with respect to investing in firms, and in general to spending money. The government’s monetary policy, the cutting of interest rates to their lowest rate ever, is an attempt to provide some disincentive to saving, and thus encourage spending and investment.

This all seems to ignore one critical aspect of the financial crisis that has been, in my opinion, heavily overlooked. When a flight to safety occurs, when investors look towards companies that are unlikely to go under during times of economic hardship, the British government’s bonds are always in demand. People already want to invest their money in buying government debt, because its comparatively safe, why encourage this trend? It crowds out the private sector from much needed funds, both in terms of medium term investment and short term spending. Given the size of the deficit during the coming two fiscal years, and the fact that someone has to buy the debt that is issued, there is a lot of money thats going to the public, rather than private sector.

One could argue that since the government are committed to injecting all the debt that they are accruing, via deficit, into the economy it actually isn’t something to worry about at all. Private sector companies are laying people off in ordering to save costs, whilst the public sector can simply plough on, injecting capital where it is needed. If one accepts this duality between debt and spending, however, it means that the net benefit of a government running a deficit is actually the different between its deficit and the amount of bond capital that wouldn’t have been investing in the economy, ie the amount that would normally be stored in some kind of savings account. Since we are currently bailing out banks because they lack these kind of funds … epic sigh.

So having thought about it a little more maybe we should be less gung-ho about using a fiscal stimulus in the current climate. Not that i believe that a fiscal stimulus is useless, but in a situation where there is a such a virulent flight to safety the effecting of crowding out the private sector could do more harm than good. Of course, interest rates have already reached their lowest level ever and can’t really help. I’m still somewhat uncertain as to how exactly demand is going to be stimulated by quantitive easing. To quote the great and wise Bender Bending Rodriguez, “We’re boned!”

Richard Warburton : 13 Apr 2009 12:31 |  Tags: News Politics Reflections |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Identi.ca

As an experiment I’ve started microblogging at Identi.ca. My microblog’s url is:

http://identi.ca/richardwarburton/

Richard Warburton : 17 Mar 2009 02:21 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem