Thabo Mbeki, presumably in an effort to appear even-handed, has lashed out against the nicknames of our national football teams. One of football’s big three, Jomo Sono, former coach of the national side and owner of the Jomo Cosmos club side, agrees.

They squads are fondly known among supporters as Bafana Bafana (the boys), Banyana Banyana (the girls), and for the junior team, Ama-glug-glug (in imitation of a famous advertisement by their sponsor, Sasol). Likewise, the Springbok rugby squad is often referred to as Ama-boko-boko. Even the paraplegic teams haven’t escaped the trend: they’re known as Ama-kroko-kroko. This is both funny and endearing, and has done a lot to raise their profile among sport fans.

But these names are disrespectful, Mbeki believes. This all appears to stem from the controversy around the name of the rugby Springboks. As the second story above makes clear, there’s a perception that “the national sides used to be known as the Springboks during the whites-only apartheid era which ended in 1994, but most of the teams have since adopted new monikers such as the Proteas in cricket.”

The last part is true. Only the rugby squad were excepted from the Proteas rule. But I fail to see what the Springbok emblem, colours, name or history have to do with Apartheid.

The South African rugby union side was called the Springboks long before isolation, long before Apartheid, and before even the Union was formed in 1910.

In 1906, as the programme alongside shows, they not only played as the Springboks, but delivered a Zulu-derived war cry. (Accounts differ, but the Springbok war cry may even have predated the New Zealand team’s famous Maori-inspired war dance, the Haka.)

“The public should participate in a plan where we look for new names for our national teams,” Mbeki is quoted in the article as saying on a local radio station. “I’m not saying we must call all our national teams Springboks, but we have to change the names, the emblems and the colours the teams wear, so that they can be recognised as representatives of South Africa.”

Firstly, I don’t know what name would be more recognisable than the Springbok. It’s a famous African animal, and is far better known that the pretty but relatively obscure Protea.

Second, and more importantly, the public were involved, and they decided on Amabokoboko, Bafana Bafana and Banyana Banyana. What the politicians call the teams is their own problem. Please don’t feign “consultation” and “participation” and all that tripe when you’ve just told people that the names they chose are disrespectful and insufficiently patriotic.

If they want to call all national colours “Proteas”, fine. I’d be sorry to see the Springbok symbol go, because it’s a strong rugby brand with a long history, but they’re South African colours and I guess the government that issues them gets to call them whatever they want.

But what officials don’t get to mess with is the nicknames teams get from their supporters.

On the other hand, perhaps we should ban the word “Bucs”. Bucanneers! How unoriginal. And who’s ever heard of an African side being named after French outlaws who made bacon in the Caribbean anyway? They’re Orlando Pirates, and don’t you forget it. Anyone — especially Amakhosi — who calls them Bucs should get a fine, or perhaps an hour or two in the stocks outside the stadium. Speaking of Amakhosi, they aren’t. They’re Kaizer Chiefs. Besides, honkeys confuse it with Ezenkosi, and that makes Jomo cross.

Look people. It’s simple. You’re being disrespectful and unpatriotic, and The Honourable State President Mr Thabo Mbeki says so. He’d have wagged his finger, if he could, but he was speaking on radio.

You know, you’d think that the news director of the country’s public broadcaster would bristle at accusations that he’s just a government spin doctor. That he’d protest that yes, he used to be the communications man for a government department, but what journalist hasn’t stooped to PR to pay the rent on occasion, and anyway, you can’t assume someone would have any obligations to past employers.

Not Snuki Zikalala. He revels in it. The Times has the story: No news is good news, says Comrade Snuki.

The SABC would not have broadcast stories about Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s behaviour during her hospital treatment, or on her conviction for theft for stealing a watch from an unconscious patient — because the public broadcaster only carries stories that aid the country’s development.

“We are guided by the constitution not to incite violence or hatred in our reporting, said Snuki Zikalala, the SABC’s chief of news yesterday.

“Publishing such a story is disrespectful.”

You know, all this wouldn’t be such a problem, if people could realistically be expected to ignore it, and switch to a more wholesome news station. If the SABC wasn’t the dominant player in a small government-protected cartel. Market forces don’t act very robustly when the government only permits a single free-to-air licence holder to compete with the SABC. When the owners of any device that can receive TV signals must pay mandatory TV licence fees which go to the SABC. When new competition cannot arise without an invitation from the Minister of Communications, and then is likely to be required by law to charge fees from their viewers, or even agree in their licence conditions not to carry news at all.

I suppose people could switch to non-TV media. But is this a realistic expectation? The fact is that there’s no robust competition against the SABC in the huge middle- and lower-income demographic, so the government’s propaganda outlet is virtually guaranteed to find a huge audience. And while their income might be lower, their votes count just the same.

(Hat tip: Sarah Britten, who recently started a Facebook group on the subject of media freedom in South Africa.)

No sooner had a judge carved huge holes in the famous one-click-checkout patent which Amazon.com swindled out of the US Patent and Trademark Office, than the very same idiots at the very same mental institution awards it a patent on another amazing new thing: putting search terms into a URL.

The novelty, it appears, is that the entire contents of the section which follows the first single slash is a search term, instead of referring first to a file, and then placing the search term after a question-mark character. The application was made in March 2004, so it took the patent researchers over three years to even comprehend the enormity of this invention.

True, it is mind-blowing. Imagine, being able to interpret the path specified in a URL to actually pass data to a web application? Imagine if it didn’t just have to indicate a file name, but could reference an object? The implications are staggering. The innovation is profound, the ambition soaring.

The time and investment that Amazon.com put into this must have been immense. Mean time, people in Amazon.real are starving. Someone should just give them some Amazon.com shares. Imagine being able to sue, by proxy, most of the people who have ever written anything for the web! Surely, anyone who admits knowledge of REST, or has ever hacked a 404 page to parse and act on the given URL, would be guilty as sin? The Amazonians (real and imaginary) would be rich!

I’m thinking maybe I’ll licence this brilliant idea. I don’t want to give too much away here, but just think what you could do on the command line, for example, if the string following a command could actually contain data, like options and parameters, to be parsed by the command you’re running? Or better yet, if the very same script could be called using two different names, and do different things, depending? Think about it. It would revolutionise computing! History books would talk about the mainframe era, the client-server era, the internet era, and the Amazon.ivo era. That would rock. (Anyone who wants to invest, please leave your name, number and proposed capital commitment as a comment. My people may call you, pending pre-qualification screening.)

There is legitimate debate among free market supporters about whether a patent is a justifiable application of property and contract rights, under which the owner of a trade secret agrees to disclose it in return for the temporary protection of that intellectual property (in which case the patent should, in fairness, last in perpetuity), or whether it is an articifial monopoly bestowed by government that has no place in a free market. The latter is perhaps theoretically more sound, but it also makes unlikely allies of private-property-rights libertarians and information-wants-to-be-free socialists. I tend to agree with the concept of patent protection, because if they are not granted the information won’t be free, but will remain secret. I think it’s worth rewarding people for disclosing trade secrets, so they become publicly available for innovators to build upon, without expropriating the rights of the original inventor to the fruits of their labour.

However, that does assume a working patent registration system, which makes sure trivial patents on non-secrets aren’t awarded to every Jack and his lawyer who bothers to turn up to the USPTO in Virginia. The one-click-checkout patent, obvious though it was, survived ten years of lawyering and judging and reviewing before it finally took a serious knock. Millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours were wasted on lawyers, judges and reviewers because of that single daft patent. And now they’ve got another one to play with. Someone should check this scheme for kickbacks and corruption, but even if it’s clean as a whistle, it’s evidence of a government’s awesome skill at burning cash.

Patent reform is sorely needed. It must be comprehensive, including but not limited to properly researching the prior art and non-obviousness criteria on an application, limiting the practice of patent ring-fencing, declining to issue patents on inventions that have long been in commercial use, or preventing patents on mere concepts that have not actually been developed and cannot be demonstrated. A good approximation to some of this is to abolish software patents altogether. It’s so broken, it may not be fixable.

And patent reform is needed before international patent harmonisation at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, I might add. Harmonising so everyone has the same broken system is hardly progress.

So someone please shut down the laughing stock that is the USPTO. Impeach them. Vote them out. Do whatever it is Americans do with tax-funded boondoggles. (Oh wait, scratch that. Do whatever Americans usually fail to do with tax-funded boondoggles.)

The bureaucratic clowns over in Virginia make anyone who supports patents in principle look like an idiot.

Nick van der Leek’s comment on my climate change column got me to thinking. He says that the facts in my column, on the apparent inaccuracy of, unaccountability for and secrecy about the source data used by the global warming lobby, are just “details”. He says mentioning it in the media constitutes mere pedantry. He believes that articles like mine, which don’t pretend the debate is over, “confuse people even more”.

Unless he was referring to the inadequacy of the prose itself, my readers may take offence at this insult to their intelligence. So should his own readers. After all, he once told them:

If bloggers are to add any value to the internet in the near to medium term, and make any impact on the media machine, we need more credible writers, prepared to be who they are, write what is worth caring about, and being willing to back what they say.

I’ll let you be the judge of my credibility, but I am who I am, I write about what I believe is worth caring about, and I’m willing to back what I say — not only as a blogger, but even more so as a columnist. Yet he argues that my column did not add any value, because “the most obvious just gets left behind”. I missed what is “self-evident”, namely a fairly arbitrary factoid, worth more for an opportunistic bet than for serious discussion, from which one should reach a broad conclusion that in turn permits one to lecture people on their habits. They “ought to” change them, my correspondent says.

I have no doubt that — in addition to smoking, about which he rightly lectured me already — my other habits are indeed slothful, dissolute and iniquitous. I have no doubt he knows how we all should live. I have only the deepest respect, and indeed awe, for the cosmic enlightenment of greens and cyclists. However, even if he were a bona fide saint — not that I’m saying he isn’t, you understand — telling the rest of us how to live borders on petty fascism. Even if he’s right that “human beings may be largely responsible for climate change”.

My real point, however, is simply that he’s wrong. I’ve made a list, and counted the ways. Here’s why I don’t believe in global warming.
Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Yon, on the gulf between media perceptions of Iraq and the reality he sees on the ground:

No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.”Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.

Today I am in Iraq, back in a war of such strategic consequence that it will affect generations yet unborn—whether or not they want it to. Hiding under the covers will not work, because whether it is good news or bad, whether it is true or untrue, once information is widely circulated, it has such formidable inertia that public opinion seems impervious to the corrective balm of simple and clear facts.

Forget the shocking images and sensational sound-bites we are fed between ad breaks on TV. As always, Yon’s first-hand reportage is comprehensive, honest and perceptive. It makes for riveting — and often heartening — reading. Especially if you view Iraq’s fate as rather more important than its use by lazy editors as a source of bleeding leads. Particularly if you view Iraq’s future as rather more important than its utility as a political billy-club.

Zimbabwean activist Natasha Msonza touches on a sensitive topic, all the more dangerous when spoken in a country where the ruling kleptocracy routinely blames the country’s economic problems on white racists, neo-colonialist farmers and imperialist foreigners. Referring to a column published in the Zimbabwe Independent, she notes several telling instances of racist behaviour, and writes:

I couldn’t help agreeing with Muckraker when he/she wrote: “…primitive racism is now the official creed of Zanu PF.” Now before anyone starts labeling me an unpatriotic born-free who doesn’t understand the sovereignty our ancestors died for; will the real racists please stand up?

(Via Sokwanele.)

• This was first published as a column in print in Maverick magazine in South Africa on 6 September 2007. If the denial machine reads this, I am still waiting to be well-funded, so at least consider subscribing, please.
  

You can relax. The hottest year in recorded US history was not 1998, and 2001 isn’t even in the top ten anymore. Hey, facts change, you know.

The news couldn’t have come at a worse time for Newsweek. It had just published a cover emblazoned with the headline “Global Warming is a Hoax*” The footnote reads: “Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine. By Sharon Begley.”

Contributing editor Robert J Samuelson repudiated the story in the very next issue, however. He calls it a “moral crusade”, “righteous indignation” that “undermines good journalism”, “a vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.” Wow. With friends like these…

Then there’s Steve McIntyre, already infamous in climate change circles for revealing the fatal flaws in the Michael Mann “hockey stick” chart adopted by the UN’s International Panel for Climate Change. His original aim had been to verify the adequacy of the US network of temperature sensors, many of which were being influenced by encroaching urbanisation. Some of them sit in the middle of hot tar parking lots, or near the hot exhaust fans of air conditioning units, for example.

The NASA official in charge of the most cited database of US temperatures, James Hansen, not only refused to disclose the adjustments that were being made to correct for bad siting of sensors, but also removed public access to the locations of meteorological stations. McIntyre had to reconstruct both. He did.

In The American Spectator, Michael Fumento wrote: “In retrospect, you knew there would be trouble when you put the people responsible for the Space Shuttle program in charge of tracking US temperatures.”

Read the rest of this entry »

“The press is a machine, it doesn’t have any freedom. Freedom belongs to the people, they have a right to make choices.” — Dali Mpofu, CEO of the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation, quoted in the Mail & Guardian.

More funnies in the same story, from Snuki Zikalala i’Afrika, the government spin-doctor turned SABC news director who has undisclosed information on the dipso klepto health minister that differs from everyone else’s, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, the presidential hagiographer who thinks journalists harbour subversive fantasies involving baked beans and trespassing on the body of said minister.

This is somewhat surprising. In this picture, you might see expensive toys. Dr Gaurav Khanna saw the makings of a cheap supercomputer.

Instead of paying the government $5,000 a session to rent time on its supercomputers, this enterprising physicist simply clustered eight Sony PlayStation 3 games consoles, and gets the same power, indefinitely, for the grand total of $3,200. And the machines were donated by Sony, so it cost him nothing. With a headline you’d expect to see in The Onion, Wired has more on the story: Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s.

There is, of course, a reason Khanna doesn’t use, say, Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming consoles. Nice machines are useless if you can’t hack ‘em. Khanna runs Linux on the PS3 consoles, and discovered something remarkable about the Cell processors at their core:

Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. And there is still tremendous scope left for extracting more performance through further optimization.

Khanna uses the parallel computing power of the eight-unit PS3 cluster to research fascinating but very complex arcana such as the gravity waves produced when two black holes merge.

I think this story makes a fairly good point about the notion of governments and their capabilities. Often, when I argue that the private sector is inherently better suited to provide products and services than the public sector, I hear examples of government innovation and research that the private sector didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t engage in. And to be sure, such innovations exist, especially when the research is directed to the needs of tax collection or the defence sector.

In response, I point out that a government is worse at innovation not because it is inherently less capable, innovative, or efficient than any one company (though that is often the case). It’s because a government funds one project, to find one solution, and when it fails, can only really repeat this process in series. If something succeeds, the innovation stops. By contrast, the private sector consists of multiple actors committing risk capital to trying multiple solutions in parallel. They all compete with each other on performance, features, cost, and time-to-market. So not only are the chances of rapid success that much higher, but even those that succeed face competition from other, possibly better, solutions.

When a government does develop a solution, which it often does by excluding potential private sector competitors either just by tapping the almost bottomless well of taxpayer funds for capital, or by explicitly legislating to forbid competition, who’s to say whether the solution it comes up with is actually cost-effective? There’s usually no market to benchmark it against. Until someone like Dr Khanna comes along.

Is it any wonder, then, that the government, as a large end-user with diverse and advanced needs, does sometimes manage to innovate in its own interests, to meet its own needs, but that even when it succeeds, those innovations are soon made obsolete by the private sector? That the government developed the first electronic computers, but that it took IBM to turn the super-expensive behemoths into efficient computing machines for general use? That the government developed the embryo of the internet, but that it took thousands of private sector companies to bring its costs to within reach of ordinary consumers, and develop its full utility by developing new features, better usability and compelling content?

Is it any wonder that the US government runs expensive national supercomputer facilities, but it takes one researcher with a begging bowl and a brain to build a dead simple, dirt cheap lab hack that thrashes them all?

So next time your kid asks you for a PS3, know that he could deploy powerful tools to investigate the ripples binary black hole systems create in the fabric of space-time. Literally.

If you’re going to play legal footsie with pirates over paying for music, best you pay your internet domain fees. This site used to belong to these guys. Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica has the story.

(Hat tip: Bretton Vine.)

With those immortal words, Dirty Harry Callahan confronts a scumbag with a gun of some size (”Freeze, cop! Now, left hand, pull out your gun. … My, that’s a big one!”). It is a movie classic. It makes you grin with a deep sense of sympathetic satisfaction.

Why? It’s horribly violent, is it not? Would you let your kids see ol’ Clint deliver sweet extra-judicial justice through the barrel of a .44? If not, why not?

I can’t help thinking that we used to handle violent behaviour in children far more elegantly than we appear to do today. In the old days, violence was simply punished, often with moderate violence. Usually, it just became a non-issue.

Today, we have zero tolerance school policies. Kids get suspended for even talking about violence, or drawing stick figures with guns. We have films rated inappropriate for children not only because of sex, nudity and bloody extremes, but for common violence, language and all manner of prejudice.

We’re extending the repressive psychology of taboos. Did it work for sex? Weren’t the free love generation exactly the kids who grew up when prudes and censors were all over the media industry? And with our conservative nanny approach to violence in the media, do we have any less violence among children today? Do we have less bullying?

I don’t know, but I can’t remember any school stabbings or shootings when I was young. These days, they’re regular tabloid fare.

Ever thought that violence may, in fact, be quite normal? When do you react violently and hit the keyboard? When you’re frustrated, and have exhausted rational options of dealing with a problem, not so? Wouldn’t the same logic go for violence in children? Wouldn’t they succumb to violent outbursts when they’re unable to deal rationally with problems? Yet we keep getting told that violence in the media — films, computer games, news bulletins — is what causes violent behaviour. That it somehow teaches children that violence is okay. This simply doesn’t make sense to me.

What makes far more sense to me is research described in Scientific American, which suggests what most parents probably know already, but some no doubt will not admit about their little angels: violent behaviour in children is perfectly normal. It is to be expected, as a natural expression of frustration when they struggle to communicate, or are unable to affect their circumstances through rational action. Proclivity to aggression varies not by what kids see on television, but by their genetic makeup, early development and social skills.

Moralistic and over-protective policies, whether imposed by parents on their children, teachers on their pupils, or governments on their citizens, not only constitute a dangerous infraction against individual liberty, but they’re probably counter-productive too.

When they told me I was too young to see Year of the Dragon, they should have known they’d only provoke a violent reaction.

(Hat tip: Jonathan Davis.)

This is a little psychopathic perhaps, but then, fantasies of how we’re destroying the planet (and how we can “save” it) appear to be fairly common, so perhaps indulging our inner psychopath isn’t so abnormal after all.

LiveScience.com has a thing about lists. So they put together a useful collection of techniques they think might be destructive on a planetary scale. Things you and I might be able to pull off. From messing about with strangelets or black holes to hacking away with planetary-scale earthmoving equipment, from building a self-replicating earth-eating machine, to being a little careless with the energy trapped in a lightbulb. Don’t let your kids read them: I have no doubt that a suitably geeky six-year-old with a chemistry set and an electronics kit will figure out a way to make this stuff happen.