Songs of Lost Innocence

Don't I support Britain?

One of the least entertaining engagements I've had this past week has been with a UKIP supporter, where he basically said that UKIP was the only political party supporting Britain and I was a fool, a traitor and a charlatan for thinking otherwise.

Of course he's talking nonsense.  Everyone is supporting Britain.

The question is, of course: Which Britain?

Concepts like nationality are a complex, cloudy thing.  What is Britain?  What does it mean to be British?  It's something we all vaguely agree about in secret, shuffling ways.

Everyone supports Britain, but they support their version of it.  Conservatives support a Britain of entrepreneurs and wealthy gentlemen.  Old Labour supported of a Britain proud of leaving no-one behind.  The Scots Nationalists supports a Britain where Scotland unshackles itself from Westminster and ends at Hadrians wall.  UKIP supports a Britain where London prefers the shackles of Beijing, Washington and Moscow to the perceived ones of Strasbourg.

Everyone who wields political power in Britain wants their vision of Britain to prevail.  That's why we have elections in the UK, so that all these competing ideas of what Britain could be are decided by the

The question facing us in the next 12 months - with Local, European and a General Election coming soon - which version of a future Britain will you choose?

Confessions of a misspent Acorn youth

This post is a homework assignment for the Learning Creative Learning MOOC

I have a vague childhood memory of standing in Debenhams, or another similar department store, in Manchester city centre aged about 5 or 6, whilst my parents debated purchasing something that would entertain and inspire me for the best part of the next decade.

It was an Acorn Electron.
 

For those who fall either side of Generation-Y-ers like me, this was one of the crop of home computers that appeared in the early 80s. In between the early Atari-style home gaming system and the advent of Nintendo, the BBCs, the Amstrads and the Spectrums provided us with the gaming that is now common-place.

 They also had an advantage that no console could provide: We could program them. In fact, we were encouraged to. As soon as you opened it up, it would beep with the BBC basic prompt
 

The computer came with a book explaining how to write simple programs, but that was just a foretaste of the books and magazines listing how to get more (by today's standards painfully slow and basic) programs out of the beige box of delights.

 Did this turn me into a programmer? Not really. I now occasionally code for fun, but have never for profit. What it did teach me was an understanding of systems. Of how to relate the messy world of humans to the IF...THEN...ELSE loop. Of how to represent what I wanted to see as 8x8 icons and how to manipulate that. It didn't make me systematic, but it helped me generalise the qualitative so that I could make it fit.

So when someone doesn't do what I want them to, I can think in terms of what systems approach can I take to help us resolve the issue.   When a gadget doesn't work, I think of the electricity flowing through as if it was a program needing debugging.  When something needs repeating, I think of it as a FOR loop.

Why I don't blog about the day job

In a way, I'd like to be more of a writer.  So, why don't I write more about the day job?

I put it down to two factors: Privacy is one thing.  I deal a lot in specifics, and the more specific you are in terms of an issue or a clinical scenario then the greater the risk that I might say accidentally something which breaches patient confidentiality or corporate confidentiality.  I know some bloggers manage decent levels of pseudonymity, however I'm a bit risk-averse on this point.

The other thing is the gap between my everyday and the reader's everyday.  It's easy to forget how the things that seem mundane to me might seem exciting to others.  Would today's work bore them? I wonder.

Raspberry Pi:First Thoughts

Back in March, technology-circles were dizzy with glee when the Raspberry Pi went on sale. The websites handling sales crashed in a way strongly reminiscent of Take That tickets going on sale. And then... delay

 As a result of unexpected demand and a few unexpected glitches in the far east it took about two and a half months for my Raspberry Pi to arrive and become yet another piece of hardware that seemed a good idea at the time.  However, the question does arrive: what do I do with it now?

Give it credit where it's due, it's an amazing feat to create a functioning caseless PC in such a size and for such a cost.  It was never designed for people like me: a magpie-eyed technological-dilettante who never got beyond swapping PCI cards.  Just how do you hold it without touching human-static fragile components?

So I'm a bit left in limbo while people who it is designed at work out what to do with it.  Yes, there are some wonderful ideas coming through, but I'm limited by time, experience and talent from doing anything cutting edge with this cutting edge tech.

From the perspective of my living room, I'm feeling a bit like this infamous story from 1970s California where an early computer - the Altair - was the subject of much wonder and interest - but nobody could actually make it do anything useful

"Steve Dumpier set up an Altair, and laboriously keyed a program into it. Somebody knocked a plug out of the wall and he had to do that all over again but nobody knew what this was about. After all, was it just going to sit and flash its lights? No....
You put a little eh transistor radio next to the Altair and he would by manipulating the length of loops in the sofware - could play tunes....
The radio began playing 'Fool on the Hill'....Da da da, da da da....and the tinny little tunes that you could tell were coming from the noise that the computer was generated being picked up by the radio. Everybody rose and applauded. ... I proposed that he receive the stripped Philips Screw Award for finding a use for something previously thought useless. But I think everybody was too busy applauding to even hear me."

From Triumph of the Nerds PBS 2006 episode 1 : (Transcript)

iPhone clinical app wishlist

Let's have a thought exercise: Imagine you're about to give every junior doctor in a hospital an iPhone.  However, this iPhone will be crippled so that it's little more than a phone and a web-browser.  Before it's crippled, however, you have a choice of any clinical applications to install on everyone's iPhone - and then access to the appstore will be turned off permanently.

Obviously a clinical calculator would be good, but which one?  What other apps would be good for junior doctors?

(And yes, in this purely hypothetical scenario, let's assume I've already asked the doctors concerned what they want).

My small contribution to the Romney Bandwagon

I don't have an iPhone, so I can't download this not-particularly impressive social media application, designed to promote would-be-US-president Mitt Romney for his campaign for the newly-founded state of Amercia.  They'll need their own currency, I reckon - so here's my draft for US Lol-lars, and with a potential national motto.

No need to thank me, Mitt.  A trip to Camp Daffyd will do nicely.