AC Grayling on Militant Atheism

“Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we’re doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don’t like it.”

While you can say this is merely because civilisation has progressed, “believe in what I say or we’ll kill you” has a different ring to it than “we think you’re being a little foolish and causing harm in the process”. This view also begs the question of why civilisation has progressed.

I was just thinking about the Fairtrade movement. It occurred to me that “fairtrade” is effectively a euphemism for “I’ll not use my position in a member of a rich, developed country that bulk-buys produce on a huge scale in order to screw over farmers”.

Reading the side of a bag of sugar, telling me that buying fair trade helps to provide “education to farmer’s children”, you’ve got to wonder what else the purpose of buying sugar is, in addition to gaining some sugar, than to pass a portion of my generated value along a chain—rather than merely to get something as cheaply as possible. The selfish satisfaction in securing the cheapest deal is very shallow and short-lived.

Open Graph is Facebook’s Beacon Pivot

I recently discovered Adam Erlebacher’s blog. It’s a great read, talking insightfully about several different topics, from business to technology to the way design helped Roald Amundsen beat Robert Scott to the South Pole. I found an article on Facebook’s OpenGraph efforts of particular interest; I’d not made the connection between Beacon and OpenGraph, but once you see it, it becomes obvious.

The implications of Open Graph are extremely important. Through user-generated “Likes”, Facebook will become the central repository for your and your friends’ preferences and that information will be used by FB and its partners to make recommendations (sell things) to you on- and, more importantly, off-Facebook. Like Beacon, Open Graph attempts to leverage users’ off-Facebook actions so that FB can be there when the user has the “intent” to buy that concert ticket. But Facebook learned its lessons from Beacon’s failed attempt to (some might say) surreptitiously track and broadcast users’ actions. Unlike Beacon, Open Graph will succeed by giving “control” to users. Namely, the Like button will get users to voluntarily share their Likes with friends. Facebook will then use this information off-Facebook at the concert site when the user’s intent is to purchase tickets. There is no lack of cunning in this Beacon pivot.

I’ve been setting up a wifi network in our new flat and have been looking for tools to help determine the best placement for the wifi base station. It turns out there’s a handy tool built right into OS X, which will tell you the signal strength being received by the Airport card for the network you are connected to. It’s hidden deep inside your library folder, and must be run from the terminal:

I keep reading and rereading Ryan Sarver’s post to the Twitter API mailing list, Consistency and Ecosystem Opportunities, trying to work out exactly what Twitter is trying to say with this. The message is confused and inconsistent, which is leading to various ways to read it, from “we see users being harmed” to “screw you, client developers”.

I really want to see the positive side of the message, but the more I read it, the more I tend towards the latter. The recent moves to install more investor-friendly members in Twitter’s boardroom denote an increasingly revenue-hungry bent to the company. In a similar way to the wireless carriers, Twitter seem desperate to avoid becoming merely the infrastructure and appear to want to exert control over the experience to forcibly prevent this from happening.