Symbolic Forest

I’ve already written about the new design of The Guardian, and came across as pretty positive about it. Indeed, I am pretty positive about its design, as a whole. There is, though, one thing that’s a bit rubbish. The Thursday Technology section.

The old Thursday science and technology section was never wonderful. Apart from the wonderful Bad Science column, which, moved to Saturdays, survives, the science pages were always a bit spotty. There would usually be one good story, and I liked the format of pages 2 and 3,^* but a lot of the content seemed to be lifted from Nature and New Scientist.^** The computing pages weren’t great, but were probably better than what you’d expect from a general newspaper.

Now, though, the science pages (and jobs) seem to have evaporated aside from a single Saturday page. The old computing pages have been transformed into the new Technology section, on Berliner paper rather than tabloid. The problem is, though, the amount of content hasn’t changed; it’s just been stretched to fill the paper, leading to a very thin section. There’s a big front page article – today it was a rather good piece, actually, on learning to be a hacker – but the rest just seems to be games reviews and news about the latest mobile phones.

I’m hoping that it will improve over time. I was hoping that when I saw the first one, and I’m still hoping that it’s going to get better. And, one poor section per week isn’t going to stop me buying the paper. It’s a shame, though, because I’m sure they could be doing far, far better.

* similar, in fact, to the format of pages 2 and 3 in the new G2.

** which also comes out on a Thursday, of course. It took me a few years of reading the Guardian’s “Daedalus” column before I realised it seemed to be inspired by a column of the same name that ran in New Scientist for many years.

Keyword noise: Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, hackers, newpapers, redesign, The Guardian, New Scientist.

I’m one of those people who has trouble reading others. I can’t spot body language until it’s too late. I can’t spot inflection either. This isn’t good, when dealing with other people, but I’ve got used to the fact that I just can’t do it.

Now, that’s fair enough, but there seems to be another side to this that I’ve only just started to realise. Not only can I not spot other people’s feelings; other people can’t spot mine either. If I’m in a bad mood, people never seem to notice; if I’m not in a bad mood, I nevertheless constantly get comments like “why are you so pissed off today?”

There are two possibilities here – well, three really. Firstly, it could be that being useless at spotting other people’s emotions makes me useless at displaying my own, or that I am useless at spotting them because I’m useless at displaying them. Secondly, though, it could be just that everybody is as terrible at I am at this sort of thing. I just assume that it’s easy and natural, when everybody else is actually having just as much trouble as me.

Keyword noise: body language, emotion, feelings, inflection.

Back at the office today, and I wish I hadn’t been. The first things I had to deal with: a manager, not my own, complaining that I wasn’t doing my job properly; or at least her idea of what my job should be. My own manager’s response to that was: “Bollocks, ignore her,” but I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.

There’s not much motivation about at the office. There’s no joy in work when your only hope is to make people slightly less annoyed than they otherwise would be. There’s no recognition that we’re ever doing anything right, only constant complaints that we never do enough.

Keyword noise: colleagues, management, motivation, office politics.

And, I’m back, from a weekend away to North Wales.

I’m not going to recount endless details about the trip, because most of you would probably find it very boring. I met new people, saw some new things – new to me, I mean – and had an energetic time. I enjoyed it so much that, by the end, I was telling everyone that I’d definitely be coming back.

Keyword noise: Ffestiniog, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog, Ffestiniog Railway, Cymru, Wales, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, volunteering.

The big news of the day: convicted child-killer Ian Huntley will not get parole until at least 2042. It’s even bigger news here, because it counts as a Local Story. After lunch, it was all anybody in the office could talk about. According to legend, Huntley had done some business at the office a few years ago, whilst he still lived in the area. There’s no trace of it in our databases, but naturally everybody who has worked there since that time claimed they had a distinct memory of him, even though he would have been instinguishable, then, from almost everyone else who has rung the doorbell.

“Oooh, they should lock him up for good,” people said, “after what he did.” “Forty years isn’t enough!” said other people. Everyone seemed convinced: there was no way a 40-year-plus sentence was long enough for him. Everybody was very sure of themselves.

I kept quiet at the office, because I’m doomed to never feel sure of myself on issues like this. No doubt all these people talking are far more experienced than the judge, and no doubt they all know far more about Ian Huntley than the judge does too. Unfortunately, I don’t. I have no idea about criminal sentencing, and I’m entirely willing to admit that Mr Justice Moses probably knows much more about it than I do. All I know is that forty years and more is a very, very long time.

Keyword noise: Ian Huntley, justice, Mr Justice Moses, prison, public opinion, sentencing, Soham, murder.

As you’ve already read elsewhere, the first photos of a live Giant Squid have been released to the world. Unfortunately – even though according to the BBC story, the squid-hunting team took over 550 photos – only a handful have been published; between them the two stories linked here repeat all of the photos in the original research paper. Presumably, the full range of photos goes something like this:

1. Photos of murky blue sea with no squid in sight (107 shots)
2. Look! Squid! (4 shots)
3. Ooh, we’ve captured a tentacle! (2 shots)
4. The crew cooks calamari (143 shots)
5. Blurry pictures of drunk sailors (314 shots)

Keyword noise: exploration, giant squid, leviathan, ocean, sea, squid, the midnight zone, kraken.

You can tell it’s getting closer to winter. This morning was one of those mornings when everything under the duvet was at that perfect cosy sleeping temperature, but you just know that the air outside the bed will have a nasty chill to it.

Keyword noise: autumn, morning, bed, seasons, waking up, winter, the calendar.

On Friday, I took the morning off work to take the car for its service. I’d told the garage I’d stop and wait there, in the hope that it would get done a bit quicker. Expecting to be stuck in one place for a couple of hours, I took a book with me in the hope that I’d continue reading it once I was at home. This week’s Book I Haven’t Managed To Finish Reading: Samuel Pepys: An Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin.

When I was small, I had a children’s biography of Pepys;^* second-hand, falling apart, probably from the ’60s and probably about 50 pages long. It was an intriguing introduction to the great journal-writer, but was really just about everyday life; very little of it specifically about the diarist himself. He lived in such interesting times that it didn’t need to be. When PepysDiary.com started serialising the diary in real-time – over two years ago, now – I intended to read it daily, but soon didn’t manage to keep up. It still left me knowing little about him.

An Unequalled Self is a very good book, it has to be said. It’s also a large, complex book; and to do justice to its subject, it has to go into seventeenth-century politics in-depth. That’s vital, because – especially around the start of the Diary – Pepys’ life was affected so much by the changing politics of the period; but it was also my undoing. So many events and figures blur together that I start getting to the bottom of the page without having taken any of it in. That’s always a sign that I’m going to give up reading before long, if only because on picking the book up again I can’t work out where I am.

The common thread here, between this and our last book, is that my downfall is Too Much Information. If it’s something I know about: no problem. If it’s a new subject, and the information is packed too densely: that’s when I stop paying attention.

* Well, I almost certainly still have it somewhere.

Keyword noise: An Unequalled Self, Books I Haven't Read, Claire Tomalin, diaries, literature, Pepys Diary, reading, Samuel Pepys.

Last Wednesday, in the office kitchen, making a cup of tea. A random colleague with a history of attention-seeking pops her head round the door: “I had a dream about you last night.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yeah.” They looked around quickly, to see if anyone was within earshot. “I was naked, and tied up like this” – they mimed a hands-above-head position – “and you were whipping me!”

“Riiight.” Run away! I was thinking. Run away! “Um, better go and do some work. See you later.”

Keyword noise: colleagues, dreaming, fantasy.

In today’s Guardian, an interesting article with a firsthand experience of being arrested as a terrorist suspect, for trying to catch a tube train whilst carrying a rucksack and wearing a big jacket. And, interestingly, it includes a list of things that the police are looking out for that mark you down as a potential terrorist.

They’re all very mild, innocuous things that anybody might do – looking at other passengers on the platform, not looking at policemen guarding the station, appearing to enter the station with a group of people. What amazed me even more, though, was that suspicious behaviour includes keeping your luggage with you at all times. Given that, if you travel anywhere in Britain by train, you’re constantly being told to do this – because if you don’t, stations get evacuated and trains stopped for hours – it was quite surprising to hear that doing it is a good sign that you might be a terrorist. You have to ask just how many people don’t look like terrorists to your average police observer.

Update, September 24th 2005: more about this story on Going Underground and on Slashdot.

Keyword noise: David Mery, fear, London Underground, railway, overreaction, policing, terrorism.