Gallimaufry of Whits, by Sean B. Palmer

Now that John Bercow has been Speaker for a few days, it seems that he's settling in very well to his new position. I'm glad that the members seem to have mainly avoided forming their opinions along party lines in the secret ballot.

One Labour MP, whose name I don't recall, was told by a journalist it was good that there was no whip candidate. The MP responded that actually there quite obviously was a whip candidate. So even amongst Labour MPs there was at least some who tacitly accepted the contention that Margaret Beckett was the party line choice.

Beckett fared very badly in the voting, and I'm glad because that reflected what I'd hoped to achieve in my own small contribution to the process. Party politics should not determine who sit in a neutral chair. In retrospect, I should not have noted my own choices. I'd chosen one Lib Dem and one Con candidate as examples of whom I hoped might be a solid neutral choice, but they didn't really turn out that way.

Sir Alan Beith (Lib Dem) gave an excellent speech, but not a house pleasing one. Sir Patrick Cormack (Con) on the other hand, usually a stalwart of quiet common sense in the house as far as I can tell, gave a surprisingly generic and yet heated speech which did nothing to garner him votes. It did at least provide moments of good comedy:

“Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire) (Con): [...] There is obviously a limitation to what any Speaker can do. I never forget the most immortal words that ever issued from the Chamber of the House of Commons, by Mr. Speaker Lenthall on that January day in 1642—
Mr. Paul Keetch (Hereford) (LD): You were there.
Sir Patrick Cormack: Yes, I was there.”

There were concerns that Bercow was a polarising candidate, constrasting with a unifying Sir George Young. Indeed, Sir George was even said by one (Labour?) MP to be more of a reformist than Bercow. But worse than this, Bercow's speech was, to me, though entertaining and pleasing to the house, in places contradictory and confused. On that basis I would have voted for Sir George, and yet I think that in a sense the two main party leaders did hit on this kind of confusion being an asset as well as a drawback.

Gordon Brown told Bercow, “You said that you had now cast aside all your past political views; some of us thought you had done that some time ago.” This was a reference to Bercow's continually changing political position. David Cameron told him that “I also noted, as all colleagues did, what you said about casting away your past political views, and I think that on the Conservative Benches we would say, ‘Let’s hope that includes all of them.’” This was a reference to the fact that he was becoming increasingly Labour aligned.

So we have a Speaker who is perhaps best qualified to be above party politics because when he was involved in it, he was involved in so many of its sides. Maybe he wouldn't be as reformist as Sir George Young, but Sir George was one of the leading candidates in the last election, so how much of a step would voting for the same widely liked candidate have been?

But the underlying point is that reform seems to be coming from circumstantial necessity, and as long as a Speaker is willing to do what is necessary then that's reasonable. As one MP put it, the house weren't faced with division over Young vs. Bercow, but choice. It was a hard choice, but the members made it.

One footnote, though. The Father of the House, Alan Williams, was required to chair the proceedings for the interim whilst choosing a new speaker. He was widely and genuinely thanked for how well he'd managed, and I was impressed too. Bercow's speech had been founded on a joke about Speakers, and the regressive notion that they ought to be exceptionally old; and yet Alan Williams chaired the house to universal plaudits — unlike Speakers Martin and Bercow.

Today I contacted my MP, or rather my MP's Westminster office, for the first time, regarding the Speaker's election.

I told the secretary that I'm a constituent in the relevant area; that I'm concerned that my MP may vote for a partisan candidate, especially Margaret Beckett; and that I'd rather my MP voted for an experienced and balanced candidate such as Sir Alan Beith or Sir Patrick Cormack.

I explained that, of course, I'd been following recent events and that as a constituent I'd like for Parliament to be handled fairly, and that I'd been especially impressed by Sir Patrick Cormack in the debates about the speaker, with his reference to the Norway debate and so on.

Though I said that of course I understood that it was up to the conscience of my MP to vote for the right person in an anyway secret ballot, and that I'm only one constituent amongst many, I hoped that my concern would be noted especially since it's the first time that I've contacted my MP.

The secretary said that he appreciates my call, and was sure that my MP would be grateful for my input too, and that he will let her know before the vote this afternoon.

Summer Evening Lights is an account of some strange lights that I saw last night. I'd been photographing some wildlife at dusk, and happened to have my camera in a high ISO setting, so I was able to take photos of a strange light and even a short video clip.

Ennis Aitch was reading about invisible arguments, and as we discussed this we both simultaneously went to use a programming language analogy to explain impersonal verbs.

When I was playing Kalusa, a game where you invent a new language by voting anonymously on translation pairs, I was also learning perl6, and it was interesting how much overlap there was between the two. Programming languages have a very strange relationship to natural languages.

Ennis suggested making a competitive language game with “some kind of way to foster competitive creativity, to iterate the fractal of semantic expressability.” I suggested my old Nomilang game, a language nomic, as the basis. The competitive element could be something like rewarding people for coining words that have the widest currency.

To keep the game active, Ennis suggests a “systemic incentive to utilise new words, e.g old words decay through use like food getting eaten in an ecology” and comments that “perhaps there'd be various semantic cycles analogous to nutrient and gas cycles.” Quite mebs, I should say. But fluidity could also come in creating a large pool of useful suffixes and idioms and so forth, and developing style early on.

The strange thing is that proto languages and folklore and mythology seem to actually be interwoven not just because people studying them tend to be in the same department at universities. Language is naturally tied to cultural identity, and when you create a new language, there is a kind of cultural vacuum that people naturally seek to fill as they create the language.

Indeed, the biggest challenge in creating a language is just getting people to do it. We don't tend to learn more language than we have to (so I read in some linguistics article), so making the activity into a game as Kalusa did and Nomilang described might be an interesting avenue. But making the game itself is quite an interesting game too.

Amazon have a system where you can put a label in the URI before the ID of the book or whatever, in order to make it easier to figure out what the link is for. You can put in any label you like, so for example these URIs both refer to the same thing:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/STC-Early-Visions/dp/0007204574
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Holmes/dp/0007204574

Of course it's also possible to use a bogus or misleading label. To get around this problem, you could set a canonical label to redirect to. So if I have an article about how far fireflies are visible from at night, say, then this might have an ID of “123”, but the label that I'd use could be something like “visibility”:

GET /123/ → (302 to /123/visibility)
GET /123/article → (302 to /123/visibility)
GET /123/visibility → (200 OK)

Now, if I change the canonical label, all that happens is that the redirects now go to that new label instead. So if the article is now primarily about fireflies, and I use that as the label instead, then the old /123/visibility label will still work but it'll redirect:

GET /123/visibility → (302 to /123/fireflies)
GET /123/article → (302 to /123/fireflies)
GET /123/fireflies → (200 OK)

The only problem is that Apache can't be configured to do this easily in an .htaccess with mod_rewrite. I thought it might be possible with a variant of some rules that I'd been working on, but the more I looked at it the less less likely it seemed to be. I asked in #apache and they had the same suspicion.

In datatype terms, the field tree is similar in that it gives you a permanent ID for each label that you use in what is otherwise just a kind of ordered hashtable. But it also lets you use the label by itself to address something and so of course there can't be any canonicalisation. In the Amazon system, you can do canonicalisation in the way that I've described, but the ID has to be part of the link.

Somebody wrote that the oblique function in phenny has gone too far, so I added a configuration option to specify which services to use:

29:e7f963f6b307 Added config option for specifying services to use.
30:759a17787ead Slightly cleaner oblique.py

There's an interesting quote on the Wikipedia entry about Francis Galton, the Victorian anthropologist and generally smart chap:

“In 1906 Galton visited a livestock fair and stumbled upon an intriguing contest. An ox was on display, and the villagers were invited to guess the animal's weight after it was slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 gave it a go and, not surprisingly, not one hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Astonishingly, however, the mean of those 800 guesses came close — very close indeed. It was 1,197 pounds.”

Apparently this quote has caused some controversy. Richard Feynman was apparently of the opinion that averaging guesses was rubbish. He gives a slightly different example, that of measuring the length of the Emperor of China's nose whom most people hadn't seen:

“To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very ‘accurate’ because you averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.”

Of course the best way to determine whether crowd opinions are worth getting would be to run a big series of well controlled experiments. The conditions would have to be looked at carefully: in the ox scenario, for example, people saw the ox and were trying to be accurate, whereas in Feynman's example you're doing little more than averaging wild guesses. And there are questions of shared bias and so on.

One thing that's especially interesting about this is that it seems to show that people derive general conclusions from vivid examples easily. It would be an interesting test to take two control groups, and teach them Galton's example and Feynman's example each in a different order. Would they be more inclined to align themselves towards the views that they heard of first?