Category Archives: Musings

Vegan Superpowers

LRP, Musings,

Someone proposed using snake-skin in a LARP as a prop (by which I mean shed snake skin, not harvested skin) and some other people from “Team Vegan” piped up and said “not for us thanks” and went on to explain that they didn’t care how it came off of the snake, they want nothing to do with it.

I’m now wondering if they feel the same way about wool. Both snakes and sheep must shed their outer layers for their own comfort on a regular basis. Sheep can’t do it themselves (due to those traits being bred out of them) and need our help to do so. Not helping a sheep shed its wool in the summer is actually crueller than shearing it as it won’t be able to cope with summer heat with the thermal layers of wool. Snakes shed their skin as they grow, squeezing out of the tighter layer being shed to be more comfortable in the new larger scales beneath.

Jeremy is currently in blue at the moment (preparing to shed) which may be part of my reaction to this, but all I can think is that “Team Vegan” is so against any kind of animal product being used that they’re objecting even to the use of naturally discarded bits. I don’t get that. I can understand working against animal cruelty, and modifying your lifestyle to match, but not using natural discards seems overboard to me.

Antlers are discarded by deer every year, scales are shed by snakes regularly, sharks constantly replace their teeth. You can collect all of these things and more without ever harming or even capturing the animals in question – there’s no cruelty involved. It strikes me as being similar to objecting to cutting down forests and refusing to use fallen branches in a fire to keep you warm. It also strikes me that such extreme attitudes will lead to an increase in the use of synthetics, which will pollute the earth faster and cause more damage to animals in the long-term.

I don’t know – I just don’t get the extremism. Unless you really do get Vegan Superpowers from it.

Beermat Maths

Musings,

I’ve been doing some beermat maths regarding the recent UK election. It started with my spreadsheet where I mapped out how many seats each party should have won based on proportional representation compared with how many they got (Tories, Labour, and SNP got too many; Greens and UKIP got too little), and has progressed a little more into a armchair political theorist discussion on the effects of proportional representation on the electorate.

My hypothesis is that proportional representation (PR) would not only give a fairer distribution of parliamentary seats, but also radically change the makeup of those seats. Most of this comes from the aforementioned beermat maths.

The first thing to be aware of is that 46.4 million Britons are currently eligible to vote (only about 30.6 million voted), and that there are 650 parliamentary seats at present. That means that in order to get a seat in a PR system, you should only need 71,424 votes. That number is the magic one that makes all of the rest of this slide into place.

Currently, the candidate with the highest proportion of votes in each constituency gets the seat – regardless of how many votes they actually got. This means that there are many seats where the sitting candidate has less than 40% of the votes from their district – but they’re supposed to represent 100% of the people in it. Somehow, that seems unlikely to me. It is my belief that because of this, many voters vote for parties whose policies they do not support fully out of a “better than the alternatives” mindset. So not only are people not getting the people they want in parliament, they’re settling for who they think can win it and do alright by them.

While proponents of the Green Party[1] are decrying the fact that they only got 1 seat (0.15% of the seats) with 3.8% of the votes, others are supporting the current system for ensuring that UKIP only got one seat despite having 12.6% of the vote. The popular belief here is that PR would be good for both parties, but Britain might suffer under more UKIP representation. I believe that the numbers from the current election do not reflect in any way the numbers we would get under a PR system.

It is my belief that a PR system would open the door to a political system that actually invites people to have the representation they want. If your vote is a national vote rather than a local vote, then it doesn’t matter if you’re the only person in a 100 mile radius to vote for CISTA[2] because as long as there are 71,423 other people across the country that want CISTA to have a representative. Being able to vote for a political platform you believe in without having to settle for a party that might win has to mean that people will vote for the parties they actually believe in.

It is my belief that bringing in PR will massively boost the less mainstream parties, and encourage people to vote for groups that get them what they want without going to the extremes of UKIP. I believe that a PR system will actually reduce the number of UKIP votes, not increase them. I also believe that PR will increase voter turnout as every vote will matter – your vote won’t be washed away by 40% of your constituency voting for a bigger party.

It is my belief that all of the smaller parties will benefit from PR and that the larger mainstream parties will suffer and it is because of this that no right-thinking Conservative will allow anything like a bill changing the vote to a PR system to pass before the next election no matter how much the other parties rally behind it. We may get a concession towards a better voting system in the future, but I can’t think that PR would do anything but hurt the Conservative party, and they’re unlikely to support a system that removes them from power in the next election.

The maths on this election is rather fascinating. 36.9% of the voters voted for the Conservatives but they won 50.9% of the seats. 66.1% of the electorate showed up to vote, which means that 24.4% of the electorate determined 50.9% of the seats. Given how the election maths actually works, any Conservative votes in areas that don’t have a Tory seat should be discounted as they didn’t contribute towards the won seats, and that actually makes it worse. I don’t have those figures, but that means that less than 24% of the eligible voters determined over half of the seats – when those are the numbers you’re looking at, can you really support First Past The Post as a valid method of determining who gets to sit in parliament?

All numbers referenced in this post were drawn from the BBC election results webpage and the derived interpretation is my own.

There are already various efforts to change the electoral system, including this Green Party campaign and the Make Seats Match Votes campaign.

Featured graphic from Morag Hannah, a Green Party candidate standing in the  Holyrood 2016 election. She was corrected on Twitter as it is in fact an Euler diagram but I didn’t feel the need to upload the corrected graphic.

UPDATE: This campaign for fairer representation by a teenager too young to vote has now broached 200,000 signatures and momentum is still gaining. There’s a part of the petition that I like that expresses my feelings quite succinctly:

“I don’t want to vote for a party I disagree with to keep out a party that I disagree with even more. I want to vote for a party that I believe in.”

 

UPDATE: I have been pointed at Martyn Eggleton’s D’Hondt analysis of the election[3] which splits votes by region and works out proportional representation on that basis. It’s interesting to look at, and the figures are interesting. The Conservatives and Labour have more seats under than my nationally based figures suggest, and UKIP and Green both lose seats comparatively. Local parties like Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein, and the Democratic Unionist Party come out ahead in there areas rather than losing seats.

This analysis doesn’t hugely appeal to me as much as my own does purely from the bias that my vote (for the Green Party) wouldn’t matter as only 39,025 people in Scotland voted for the Green Party this election, and that isn’t enough to score a seat in Scotland.[4] However, I still think that under this system you’d see a better representation of what people wanted from their government and that people would be more likely to vote for the party they believed in.

 

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. ↑ Full disclosure: I am not a member of any of the Green Parties, but I support their political viewpoints and voted for the Scottish Greens
2. ↑ The Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol Party
3. ↑ Credit to Phil Hyde for the link.
4. ↑ Interestingly, UKIP got 47,078 votes in Scotland which is more than I thought they would but not actually that much more than the Green Party.

Huh. I’m a hipster.

Musings,

Just had a realisation. When it comes to tech, I’m something of a hipster. I can legitimately say things like “I had a smartphone before they were cool” and “I had a smart watch before they were cool”.

Probably because I saw something about an Apple Watch again, and was just kinda going “I’ve had a smart watch for two years”. We had a conversation at work about it and everyone was going on about what it could do and I was going “I’ve had a watch that could do that for two years with a better battery life”.

As I said above, I’ve legitimately had a smartphone since before they were cool as well. Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. I had a Lobster 700TV in 2006 the best weight loss supplement. A phone with Windows Mobile on it, that let me watch TV and listen to digital radio wherever I happened to be.

Now kinda wondering what the next trend I’ll get into before Apple does.

Hiding from Big Brother

Musings, ,

I got pointed at CV Dazzle today. It’s fascinating how a bit of makeup or a hairstyle can make your face unrecognisable for computers.

Of course, LARPers already knew that – Facebook can rarely tell when someone in heavy makeup is a person, and the nose on some helmets functions in much the same way as a hairstyle in breaking up the face.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard of things like this. The common one I’ve seen is using a particular type of LED mounted around the face (in the brow of a cap or on glasses) to blind cameras by putting out light on a frequency that they’ll detect but other people won’t. I find the entire concept fascinating, and keep meaning to try some experiments with it.

My original thought about the makeup is that all they need to do is get a relatively clear shot and PhotoShop the annoying bits out. Of course the point isn’t to avoid that, but to avoid the automatic logging of your face and take control of your own privacy and when you get picked up by cameras – not to stop cameras seeing you at all.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have criminal potential. Blinding cameras so they can’t see your face (just a white blur where your face should be) certainly has criminal applications, but it also requires a degree of electronics knowledge, and is ultimately little more effective than a balaclava as people will look for the person who’s blinding cameras instead of the one in a mask.

Perhaps I should spend less time thinking about criminal opportunities, but I find it an interesting field to hypothesise in. As a thought exercise, there’s something compelling about finding ways around the Big Brother attitudes towards modern security from how to bypass airport security to how to stop computers recognising our faces. I’m not alone in this as both conversations with friends and the CV Dazzle and similar projects show.

Invisible was one of the other interesting projects that’s come out in recent years. It seemed to start off as an art project – something which worked but wasn’t meant to go commercial in any way despite the labelling like a product, but more recently it’s gone up for sale [1] and DIY guides have been published so you can make your own versions of the products. I was never that interested in it (interested enough to sign up for more information) but the concept of a product designed to erase your DNA samples was again something that intrigued me from the perspective of what can you do with it?

From a certain perspective, the idea that I’m in the public eye and being observed constantly has never bothered me. The idea that someone might monitor my emails (or this blog) for dangerous content and thus put me on some list bothers me a little more, but machine analysis of my life doesn’t intrinsically bother me or send me into fits of paranoia. I’m careful with what I do and what information I share but not to the extent of desiring these products as anything more than a curiosity. I am not a fantastic proponent of paranoid security, really, but I do see the advantages even if I don’t necessarily see the value in adding such to my own life.

This post has become rather more serious than I intended. Suffice to say that I enjoy finding out new ways to manipulate forensics and security systems, but I don’t particularly have a need for them outside of a hypothetical situation (except where it comes to LARPing, as my characters may be far more paranoid than I am).

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. ↑ limited run of 100, which reinforces the art project feel especially as it’s being sold by a museum

The ponytail equation

Films, Musings

I was doing some hairstyle research[1][4] and I discovered the ponytail equation. I couldn’t actually believe this was real. I thought it must be an April Fools that got into a Wikipedia article. Then I realised that I’d seen some of it before.

It’s the phrase “Rapunzel number” that causes familiarity. I’ve heard it used before, and that triggered a vague memory of previously discovering hair equations – possibly even this one. It still seems a little ridiculous, but there are people who have calculated stranger things (I mean, have you seen some of the stuff Randall Munroe gets asked to figured out?[2]). Actually, it’s entirely possible that it was something Randall Munroe wrote that caused the Rapunzel number to come to my attention, or it might just be the massive news coverage it seemed to generate in 2012, or it could be one of the times I’ve found interest in a video talking about how they do CGI hair (the Monsters Inc CG team put a lot of work into making Sully look like he had real fur – it was a massive leap in the technology at the time[3]).

Anyway, I just thought that the idea of a ponytail equation was a bit ridiculous and thought I would share it, even though I can massively appreciate the advantages such an equation can bring to the CG world.

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. ↑ I wanted to make sure the hairstyle I was mocking was indeed a reverse mullet. References disagree on how a reverse mullet should look, so I’m not actually sure. It was basically something like an undercut ponytail – long hair along the top gathered at the back into a ponytail with a short back and sides underneath. I do not understand why anyone would want this style unless it’s something like how you keep a devilock out of the way when you don’t want a devilock, but he didn’t look like the type to have a devilock so…
2. ↑ what if? by xkcd
3. ↑ VentureBeat article on Sully’s hair in Monsters University
4. ↑ I did a lot of hair research… considering I didn’t really intend to do any.

Stats

Musings, Websites

So I have all of these statistics available to me now about this site and one thing stands out: I get more visits when I publicise the posts on social media. Not just from a “well of course everyone clicks the link to see what I wrote” perspective, but I usually find that there are one or two other posts that people have a look at as well.

I’m also finding that I get a lot of visits directed from SEO websites which I have no connection with, and no real desire to visit. Places like “best-seo-offer.com” and “buttons-for-your-website.com”. Apparently you can be directed to my website from those links.

What it doesn’t tell me that I would find quite interesting is which of my domains people use to get here. The default location for my domains is this blog unless I’ve assigned it elsewhere, which means that drunkoncaffeine.com, drunkoncaffeine.co.uk, f291.net, yoda.ninja, covertrobot.co.uk, and nokvir.net all point to this blog.

I’m not going to publicise this post, so if you’re reading it why not tell me what domain you use to get here, and how you found it if you’re not one of those people who have known about this domain since I registered it.

Poetry

Me, Musings

Today I have had a poem running around my head. A new one, not an old one.

I used to do a lot of poetry in school – I won competitions, and I think I was even published at one point. Of course, that was in primary school, so I’m not going to say they were brilliant by any standards. Did less in secondary school, and even less since. But occasionally the poet’s grace touches me and I compose something. I don’t usually do anything with it, but sometimes it’s for a purpose, and I put it to use.

The poem that had been forming itself in my head today got written down and emailed to the person it was for, and they appreciated it which was in itself the goal. I’ve previously written poetry to express my depression, or just to get something out of my head in an ordered fashion – using the structure of a poem to unravel my thoughts.

My early poetry, along with my propensity for reading is probably why I had a larger than average vocabulary for a kid in my area (though not higher than average for my year as I’d say most of the kids in my year were also in the smart kid crowd even if they also fit in the popular crowd where I didn’t).

But still, prose has its purpose, and I do like to write poetry occasionally – putting effort into a single piece and rearranging it until it works. Of course, since I do that with just about anything I put in the public eye, I’m not sure how much extra effort I can claim to put into the more poetic pieces.

Bad experiences

Depression, Me, Musings

So I’m kind of reblogging a reblog while I wait for my hair dye to activate. I originally wrote this in 2010, reblogged it in 2013.

Since then, I’ve had a varied “love life” with a few people passing through my life in various ways. Some I’ve screwed up, some just haven’t worked out (I’m pretty sold on the idea that I’m straight, but playing with gay guys can be fun too).

The reason I’m thinking about this right now is that I was talking to someone and realised that they didn’t know these stories – didn’t know the things I’d been through – and I couldn’t quite decide if I should tell them or not. But I made these things public for a reason – hiding it isn’t going to change things – and I know that they will read this, and can choose whether or not to follow the links above for themselves.

I was in a different place when I wrote both the original post and the comments on the reblog, but this still affects me. Today was the first time I’d thought about it in a long time, and I can now say that I’ve conquered a lot of the issues that came of it – but that doesn’t mean that they’ve gone away, or that they don’t linger – the moments that define who you are don’t just go away, they make you who you are; losing them would be losing part of who you are and I’m pretty happy with where I am at the moment.

 

[Lost] Character drabble

Isles of Darkness, LRP, Musings,

“Alright then, alright then. What can I get for ya? Everything you could want, I got – or I can get it. Well… everything available with a modicum amount of effort – I don’t got no one-of-a-kind Holy Grails or nuttin’ and I don’t do quest work in the main – that’s not my bag.

Ain’t no Imitation Brand items here: either it’s the real deal, a Gen-U-Ine product, or it’s not on my stall. I only make honest trades, and I don’t sell shoddy goods. Sure, it might have fallen off a truck or four, but that don’t make it shoddy. I take barter and favours mostly – cash if you’re hard up but there’s a premium on that.”

A bit of a drabble about my Lost concept for the new Isles of Darkness chronicle. I’m currently thinking of calling him Honest Denzo (or Uncle Denzo) but I don’t really know where that name is coming from.

Spent the trip to collect my phone last night building up the character and exploring the concept and what he does, who he is, and what sort of person he is. All in all, he’s not a nice person, but he’s not a bad person – he’s in it for his own gain and he doesn’t really mind if that hurts other people, or if their desires backfire.

Thinking Spring Court with some Autumn Contracts. All about the desire, with the ability to tell what magic items do/are.

Seeming/Kith is where I’m a little more stuck. I’m thinking of using inspiration from the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth – pale skin and blind in face with eyes in his hands which I intend to phys-rep with a mask and make-up[1]. To go with the mask, I’m thinking a creepy pale blond wig á la Richard O’Brien as Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Taking this all into account, I’m either thinking Darkling or Ogre. Darkling has the pale creepy vibe down pat (especially Tunnelgrub and Palewraith), but Ogre has Cyclopean and I quite like that as a means of subverting the blindness. Wizened would also work, but I’m less convinced about wanting to play one.

The character is a bit of a mish-mash of Riff Raff from Rocky Horror, Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses, Badger from Firefly, CMOT Dibbler from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and other similar characters. Bit of an attitude, thinks he’s better than he is, proclaims himself an honest gentleman while trying to swindle every customer for all they’re worth.

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. ↑ I’m actually not sold on the eyes on hands thing, but some kind of pseudo-blindness appeals to me

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Counting the minutes

Me, Musings

Left my phone on the bus this morning, and now I’m counting the minutes until I can get out of here and get it back. I can’t do chat programs or Google+ in the office, and not knowing if people are trying to get in touch with me that might need me for some reason is getting to me a bit.

I could probably use the occasional internet deprivation stint, really. The honest truth is I feel like something’s missing – and I only felt this way since I noticed I didn’t have my phone around midday. Even subconsciously knowing it’s there is an ease on my mind even if I don’t know exactly where it is. There was palpable relief when I finally tracked it down to the Longstone depot and got in contact with Lost Property.

Why are we so addicted to our tech? I was getting positively twitchy as I tried to track my phone down – and not just because it isn’t insured. It’s an interesting question, and I don’t really have an answer – I’m just waiting for the moment I can go and get my precious back…