Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in entropy_online's LiveJournal:

Monday, April 24th, 2006
9:22 am	Today I am mostly offending you about... the roots of right-wing extremism This is further to my political correctness entry of last Monday. I read an article in a newspaper yesterday complaining about political correctness. It was gratifying to see my sentiments repeated at a national level (not that I'm claiming any responsibility for this; that would be farcical). The author of that article, in British broadsheet The Observer, pointed out an interesting problem with political correctness, which I touched on last week and would like to elaborate. The problem is this; when you make it improper or even illegal for people to talk about things, it becomes impossible to debate them. It is not simply a case of censoring the terms used to make debate less offensive; in censoring terms, one censors ideas, and this is unforgivable. The result is that the issues involved go unmentioned at administrative levels and thus undealt with. This in turn leaves those who would have brought the issues up in the first place unrepresented and disaffected. As centre-aligned major parties lose the support of these unrepresented groups, said groups migrate out towards the extremes where the rhetoric, at least, is more powerful (political commentators are quick to point out that British right-wing movements make a flash in the pan every twenty years or so and then sink without trace once the panic they thrive on begins to fade). The result, the writer claims, is parties like Britain's British National Party, generally regarded as a bunch of closet racists and fascists with a crackpot naziist agenda (I personally think they're a load of pathetic, annoying wannabes who don't deserve the association with fascism they're stuck with because of a paranoid British left). He has a point; only on the margins where groups sufficiently dedicated to find ways around political correctness can exist will the disaffected find a voice. However, as pointed out by a different writer in a different British paper today, this misses a more significant point. While immigration does inflict problems on working-class natives in Britain (this being the issue on which the BNP thrives), those problems would be vastly reduced if those same working classes actually tried to do something about the problem themselves. The problem being that immigrant workers are often more qualified, or cheaper per unit qualification, than their native counterparts. This is because the working classes seem to consist chiefly (not exclusively, but chiefly) of illiterates and uneducated hard-heads who spurned the generous education they were offered and wound up underqualified for anything but McDonalds. I should, at this point, mention that I don't fit into this category, nor could I by any stretch of the imagination, though I could name at least a couple of people among my aquaintants who are, and I have met many others. These shamefully uneducated people are fostered by the British benefits system, which all but pays them to be unemployed. The result is a populace who believe they can rely on their government if they complain loud enough about something and who, on finding they can't, turn to extreme parties. It's all a bit silly really; someone needs to sit up and take responsibility. I am, of course, aware that illegal immigration is a serious problem for most of Europe. I don't intend to deny that. I'm only commenting that the reaction on both sides of the debate is far in excess of what the circumstances warrant, even if it is mostly hot air. The British government should get its electorate back into work and stop coddling them. Hard talk should be switched for unpopular words. Words like 'you could have a much higher quality of life, if you'd made good use of the education we provided for you at great expense'. It's reckoned that the BNP might manage a 7% share of the vote in upcoming local elections in Britain in some areas. That's not really very big. The major parties should stop pandering to this minority and get on with the business of fixing their country before it comes apart at the seams. On another note, the US administration is under fire again; we have the dismissal of Mary O. McCarthy over allegations that she leaked information about 'black sites' to an American Newspaper last week, and today, Tyler Drumheller's oh-aren't-we-all-surprised revelation that Bush knew that Iraq had no WMDs before the war began. It's all a bit old news, really. The black sites story is frightening enough; one tends to think of this stuff as only happening in Tom Clancy novels (but then, he's been frighteningly prophetic before), but the complex web of CIA front companies and 'suspected illegal prison sites' across the world does seem believable enough. However, we're all so tired of hearing this stuff; we know there have been flagrant breaches of human rights, interruptions of due process, and arbitrary decisions with grotesque consequences. The problem is how numb to it we've all become. A year or two ago, this sort of thing was outrageous; front page headlines blared anti-Bush slogans and commentators talked of dire things to come. Now, it's squeezed into three short columns in the 'world' section of the Independent. We should still be raving. We should be challenging the president's right to rule. We should at least be investigating these claims in full. But no. We give more space to the latest recording by a certain mass-murderer currently hiding somewhere in the middle East (you will never see me refer to Bin Laden as a terrorist; even that title grants him a legitimacy that the murderous monster does not deserve). And what are we to make of him waxing wroth about America's crusade? Well, we can say he brought it down on Islam himself, if we really want to, but only if we remember that America brought him down on us. It is to be expected that figures like Bin Laden play on leftist fears of a right-aligned Christian theocracy in America launching crusades against the Islamic theocracies of the Middle East in ten years' time. The best thing we can do is pay him no great mind and let the appropriate armed forces take care of him. Entropy Out Current Mood: discontent (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
6:24 am	Currently headbutting the screen about... First Programs I decided I'd change the title of these bits of my blog. I didn't like the other title, but I couldn't think of anything better at the time. I prefer this title; a bit less serious, a bit less patronising. This is also the most difficult bit of my blog to make interesting, since most people don't understand computer programming. Feel free to skip this if you aren't interested. Anyway, this morning I finally recieved my copy of Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's 'The C Programming Language', which is pretty much the C programmer's Bible. Ritchie was the man who originally created the language, way back in the seventies, so you can guess that the writers know the language inside out, backwards and while standing on their heads. They're familiar with all the conventions and (and this was a pleasant surprise) they know how to write a decent, concise, precise and helpful book about it. And yet, on page 7, I find: '#include [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<stdio.h>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] I decided I'd change the title of these bits of my blog. I didn't like the other title, but I couldn't think of anything better at the time. I prefer this title; a bit less serious, a bit less patronising. This is also the most difficult bit of my blog to make interesting, since most people don't understand computer programming. Feel free to skip this if you aren't interested. Anyway, this morning I finally recieved my copy of Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's 'The C Programming Language', which is pretty much the C programmer's Bible. Ritchie was the man who originally created the language, way back in the seventies, so you can guess that the writers know the language inside out, backwards and while standing on their heads. They're familiar with all the conventions and (and this was a pleasant surprise) they know how to write a decent, concise, precise and helpful book about it. And yet, on page 7, I find: '#include <stdio.h> main() { printf("hello, world\n"); }' enclosed in a boxout labeled 'The First C program'. Now, this is a program so inordinately simple that anyone should be able to get it. The '#include' bit tells the computer to look in the file 'stdio.h' (the most common standard C library file) for what to do when it sees things like 'main()' and 'printf'. The 'main()' means 'do the commands between the braces ('{' and '}') first'. 'printf' means 'display the text enclosed by the brackets and double quotes' (the '\n' just means 'go onto a new line' - like what happens when you press the 'enter' key on your keyboard.) You could put anything between the double quotes. Almost literally. C is a hugely flexible programming language. But almost without exception, books about programming in C begin by taking you through exactly the string of code above, and they always use 'hello world' in the brackets. I was lucky; my first C book, Dan Gookin's excellent 'C for Dummies', began with a program that displayed 'Goodbye, cruel world!' rather than 'Hello world'. When, after several years away from programming, I sat down at my computer last year to relearn the language, my first program displayed 'Oh look, a programmer!' (since I wanted something I could use as a self-esteem boost; quite sad really, but never mind). You could get the computer to say 'Hey, I suck!', or 'You know, this program's really a bit rubbish'. If you wanted a computer that was smarter than you, you could get it to say 'I know something you don't know'. Almost anything you can say in English can be displayed by this program; why, then, do programmers insist on 'hello world'? It bugs me; it can't be that all successful programmers are so completely devoid of imagination that they still find this amusing. Gookin's book encourages the reader to experiment with what the 'printf' command will and won't display. I'm sure it's not the only one that does, but such books are in the minority. Kernighan and Ritchie don't spend more than about a page and a half on 'hello world' before moving on to more complex things, but there are books that waste pages going over it in great detail. Were I to write a 'how to program in C' book, I'd let the user choose their own printf string. Too many 'hello world's has already gotten boring. If, by the way, you're interested in programming but don't know where to start, I recommend you visit http://www.delorie.com/djgpp - this site provides a free C compiler, plus all the documentation you could ever possibly want on how to operate the compiler and all the utilities that come with it. It doesn't, however, have any instructions on programming in C; for that, you can buy a book. Gookin's book, like most in the 'for dummies' series, is very good at the basics (it takes a whole book to cover the first chapter of Kernighan and Ritchie's - much shorter - volume), or, if you're prepared for headaches and a very fast learner, you can try 'The C Programming Language'. Neither book is cheap, however, and there are other ways to learn. For example, for the next few weeks, while I'm still in search of actual programming projects (I'm good at programming; not so good at program design), I'll probably write a set of articles explaining the fundamentals of C programming, and I'll do it in much the way I have today; I'll give an example of some code and then explain what it does, step by step. I'll be doing this because it's the way I find easiest, and Kernighan and Ritchie's book doesn't. This makes it very hard for me to figure out what's going on; often, there'll be a page of code which will just look like so much gibberish to me until I go through it with a fine-tooth comb, carefully tracing variable values, function calls and so on until my brain gets tied in even more knots than it already is and I start thinking about insane ideas like writing computer programs to tell me what computer code does (doubly insane since I couldn't make said programs without understanding what the bits of code I'm trying to understand mean). Anyway, that's all for now. If you know of any simple programming jobs going - even (possibly especially) those that don't pay - please let me know. Entropy Out. Current Mood: disappointed Current Music: REM: Automatic for the People (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
11:48 pm	Have you read... Harry Potter? Well, I'm guessing you have. There aren't many people with internet connections who haven't read at least one of J.K. Rowling's books (if you're one of the lucky ones, a lot of this will probably be meaningless to you; sorry). I first read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (yes, I know it's Sorcerer's Stone in the US; I read a British copy) in 1998, before 'Pottermania' hit. At the time, the book was well-regarded in the literary circles in which I (and, more importantly, my mother, who bought it for my sister as a birthday present) moved; it was known as an excellent children's novel, but little was known of J.K. Rowling and her plans for the series. When I read it it was just another good book; engaging, sympathetic characters, a pleasantly non-challenging morality, humour on both the obvious and subtle levels (it took something like six months for the family to pick up on the 'Diagon Alley' joke), and a really good villain in the spectre of Voldemort. The action was clever and entertaining, the ambiguities in certain members of the Hogwarts staff intriguing, and in all, Harry's world was one I was happy to spend time in. When news reached me that there was going to be a sequel, I was overjoyed. Chamber of Secrets was an excellent book; darker and more gripping than the first, but without losing the warmth which bound me as a reader to the characters and made all that tension meaningful. It was a bit mature for a children's book, possibly, but it was still a children's book and a very good one (just like Shrek - in many ways quite a mature film - is still a very good children's film). Then it all went horribly wrong. Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book in the series, came out. It was trapped in a terrible vortex between children's fiction and traditional epic fantasy. It was too long. It lost too much of the warmth of earlier volumes. The atmosphere fled. The dementors, a fantastic and relatively original fantasy nasty, lacked the punch of Voldemort. Peter Pettigrew and Sirius Black were no good as subsitutes for the roles of Quirrell and Snape in Philosopher's Stone - as the annoying but harmless nice guy who's actually the baddy and the ominous, dark figure who's actually on Harry's side - though Sirius himself was quite engaging. In gaining length, the book lost the focus of its predecessors. Now the books are all twice as long as Prisoner. I haven't read four, five or six. I won't read seven when it comes out. Though I did see the first film, I haven't seen any since (nor will I; the first film was dire). If the later books suffer in the same way that Prisoner did - and people I know who have read them say they have - I cannot imagine the appeal (I could rant for pages about overlong, poorly edited books, but I'll save that for when I tackle Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series). However, it's not really the appalling lack of editing and overindulgent writing which went into the third and, apparently, later books which I take issue with. It is J.K. Rowling's attempt to escape the children's genre for teen writing. She is (or at least was) an excellent children's writer; she has the combination of imagination and humour which has done wonders for Eva Ibbotson, Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl), Jill Murphy (The Worst Witch) and other authors who massively enriched my childhood. She does not deserve to wind up in a genre which includes such 'delights' as K. A. Applegate's Animorphs and all those TV show spin-off novels (I'm thinking here of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its ilk). Nor should she try, since her talents lend themselves much better to the heart-warming and often very intelligent children's genre (Phillip Pullman once pointed out very eruditely that children's books are often far more intelligent than their adult counterparts) than to the annoyingly hormonal, angsty, pathos-ridden world of teenagerhood. My complaint is this; Rowling should have let the series, or at least the characters, go after the first couple of books. She should have taken a leaf from C. S. Lewis' wonderful Narnia sequence and shifted the focus quickly away from Harry and Ron to younger generations of wizards, so that she could keep doing what she was good at. It's all well and good that Harry is the messiah or whatever, but hormonal teenage messiahs don't really interest anyone except themselves. I would have been much more interested had Rowling not lost track of the series' innocent appeal. But I'm just one voice. One of the tiny Potter-hating minority, constantly drowned out by the cries of the millions of children - and adults - who still enjoy and love Harry Potter. I haven't read the most recent books (the thought of trudging through one book that big, while the writer struggles to switch genres against the will of her setting and characters, let alone three, is a little too much). What do I know? (this is often the answer Potter fans come up with when I raise my criticisms). Well, what I know is this; from my experience, J.K. Rowling has demonstrated no ability to write teenage fiction, despite her tremendous aptitude for children's writing. I have rarely read a book I could honestly call 'good' which was as long as the most recent Potter tomes, and certainly never a successful children's book that long. I have no desire to slog through that much bad writing when I could read a much better, more mature book half the length and then have half the time I would otherwise have spent spare, for doing other things (like writing this journal). Entropy Out. Current Mood: cranky Current Music: U2 - Under a Blood Red Sky (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 16th, 2006
8:41 pm	Today I am mostly offending you about... political correctness I was reading a website the other day when I happened across an advert for a blog that ran something like this: 'Right wing blog; there's a reason why left and wrong share the same antonym' (this isn't exactly what it said; I can't remember it exactly). Antonym, if you don't know, means basically opposite - in this case 'right'. Now, I didn't read the blog. I didn't read it because, as a left-handed person, I found the advert quite offensive. It was only some time later - when I ran across the same advert a second time - that I realised this was really a political correctness issue. I, a member of a minority group (in this case, unlike most other situations where political correctness is an issue), was being offended by the use of a particular term in a public speech context. Having said that, I have to say I'm mostly against political correctness. Don't get me wrong; there are things it's very inappropriate to say, and political correctness infringements are a great way of getting influential hard-line politicians and journalists out of their jobs, but I think it's often taken to very silly extremes. For example, in British classrooms, it's now against whatever the relevant code of practice is to use the word 'brainstorm', apparently because it's offensive to sufferers of a mental condition - I don't know the name - which is similar to a small electrical storm passing through their brains. I couldn't imagine why anyone would find this offensive, or at least why a victim of the condition (are we even allowed to call them 'victims' now?) would find it offensive. I would expect them more to feel patronised by the introduction of the code of practice than offended by the use of the term. However, here I am, sat at my computer, feeling thoroughly offended by the simple association of 'left' and 'wrong' (and not even wrong in the sense of evil; wrong in the sense of incorrect). It's an interesting situation; if it was a Ku Klux Klan blog associating black and evil for the purpose of a racist agenda, an advert along those lines would almost certainly be banned. However, as far as I'm aware, there are no rights-lobby groups for left-handers (we don't need them, as possibly the least-discriminated-against minority in modern society), so this advert will continue to be displayed until the person who paid for it stops paying for it, unless someone complains. I haven't complained, despite having seen the advert twice. It would be almost no effort to write a quick email to the owner of the advertising service - who I doubt would be hard to track down - and I doubt that he or she would be reluctant to ask the person who submitted the advert to change it. I haven't complained because other people's complaints about political correctness almost always irritate me (the political correctness complaints I have been exposed to have been almost exclusively from affluent, white, middle-class service professionals who are heterosexual, Christian and therefore members of no discriminated-against group). Should I complain? Well, I don't think so (obviously, or I would have), but the current mentality does seem to be that it's okay to make as much fuss as you want, regardless of how much valuable time you waste with it. The white, rich Americans who complained about the use of the term 'nigger' in 'Showboat' when it was turned into a film - and managed to get it removed from the script over protestation from the afro-carribbean community - are a prime example of this. Which brings me to a couple of issues dear to my heart; discrimination against the words 'black' and 'man' (notice, I said against the words). 'Man' first, since it is a shorter complaint; I have heard several stories in the past few years of male heads of committees - chairmen - being robbed of their titles by women who insist that said chairmen must be referred to as 'chairpersons' or simply 'chair'. I find this highly ridiculous, particularly the idea of referring to a human being as a 'chair'. I would certainly feel demeaned if a woman with whom I had to work insisted on referring to me as an item of furniture. And 'chairperson'? I have encountered few more ugly words in the contemporary lexicon. Why deny such people a gender? I have no problem with the use of the word 'chairwoman' (though I appreciate it is a little hard to pronounce) or, better 'chairlady', and I do not think that any successful businesswoman set at the head of a committee would object either, at least to the latter. There are similar issues elsewhere, also (the demise of the term 'actress', for example), but I'm sure I will return to this topic at a later date, so I'd better save something for then. The issue over the term 'black' is a more complex and difficult one, particularly since a lot of young afro-caribbeans have begun to base their identity on being 'black'. It's an effective answer to racial discrimination along black-white lines; become proud of the same thing that people discriminate against you for. And, in a way, I applaud them. I have always admired the 'black race', if such a thing exists (and I know this sounds very rich-white-middle-class-patronisation; forgive me), for surviving the terrible trials and challenges set upon it by whites, and for fighting its way up the ladder towards social equality. The achievements of successful black figures like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and various of the successful jazz and rap artists of modern culture (I won't embarrass myself by pretending to know what I'm talking about when it comes to rap artists and music) are welcome and gladdening signs of a growing respect for black culture. However, 'black' as a word has suffered a great deal by its association with the race issue. Things have settled down a bit now, but a few years ago, there were circles in which it was incorrect to speak of the night sky being black. There were even suggestions that the term 'black hole' be changed. My complaint here is really that the word 'black' is suffering unjustly. It performs a very important language function, much like any other colour noun, and is actually pretty inaccurate when applied to human beings (I have seen a very few, if any, human beings who could accurately be called black-skinned). And yet, there have been some ridiculous situations where using the word 'black' has got people into trouble. I would rather see (if we have to use racially discriminating terms at all, and to be frank I don't see the need) the term 'dark-skinned' in use in racial contexts; I know I'd rather be thought of as fair-skinned than 'yellow' or 'pink', let alone 'white'. Maybe I'm wrong about the use of these terms. I'm not a woman or dark-skinned. However, a lot of things done and said in the name of political correctness are very silly indeed. With that in mind, I will not be emailing either the author of, or the agency behind the distribution of, the 'left=wrong' blog. I have better things to waste my time on. Entropy Out. Current Mood: annoyed (Comment on this)
1:17 pm	Hello, I'm Entropy Hello everyone, My name is Entropy (okay, it's not my real name; this is the internet). This is my brand new blog. Chances are you aren't reading this when it goes up, so I'll keep this brief. Also, I'm new to blogging, so if this is a little weird, please excuse me. I don't have many interests to talk about, so it's fairly easy to divide this blog up into sections. Stuff I write here will either be about politics and philosophy, books and authors I've read and liked/disliked, or computers and computer programming. To make differentiating easier, I'm going to have three standard subject formats for journal entries; 'Today I am mostly offending you about...' which will be dedicated to my (sometimes controversial) political and philosophical beliefs. 'Have you read...?' which will be about books and authors. 'If you understand ... read on' which will be computer stuff. I'd ask that you treat my ideas with respect and not get too offended if you disagree, but I think that's a little futile and hypocritical when I've already admitted that I'm going to offend a lot of people by writing these entries. Ah, well, it's hard to have fun without offending people. Entropy Out (Comment on this)