Sharpe's Opinion

It’s not often I come full circle on an issue in a single day, so I thought it worth mentioning. This morning, the European Court of Justice essentially banned gender-based pricing for things like insurance. Until now, insurance companies have long argued that since different groups of people – say, ‘women’ or ‘TV show presenters’ – represent different risk levels, they should pay different premiums. According to this judgment¹, this constitutes discrimination and is Bad.

My instant reaction was that this is pretty much absurd. I mean, yes, it is discrimination, but it’s also just a simple matter of statistics. Insurance companies are not insane, they’ve done the numbers, they know that men represent a bigger cost centre than women, and the premiums merely reflect this. It’s not bigotry, it’s science. Bloody EU, coming over ‘ere, eating our muffins, and all that.

Across today, though, I seem to have almost entirely changed my mind.

The first reason for this has also been explained by the Heresiarch in his usual thoughtful style. Just because, statistically speaking, women represent a lower cost centre overall than men, that doesn’t mean any individual man deserves to be pre-emptively punished for the actions of other men. That’s not to say he doesn’t represent a greater risk – he absolutely does – but he also deserves to be considered based on his skills as a driver and the choices he makes, not based on the aggregate information about his gender.

In fact, the only way to accurately assess a driver is using their history – how many miles have they driven, over how long, and in that time how many accidents did they have (in which they were at fault) and how many claims did they make. Insurance companies already have a system for measuring this – the no-claims bonus – and it’s really a far more useful method of assessing and rewarding good driving behaviour than blindly basing premiums on age and gender (though it does present some perverse incentives on insurance companies when assessing fault in accidents).

But the more I think about it the more I’m coming to think there’s another problem with the justification for men’s premiums being higher. We’re happily believing the insurance company line that men’s insurance premiums are higher because they represent a higher cost centre for car insurance providers – but that’s not the only possible explanation. Car insurance is a peculiar market, because the choice is either buy insurance, or don’t drive a car. If driving were generally less important to women than it is to men, and I’m willing to believe this to be the case, then a clever insurance company could use this fact to their advantage and charge men more than women for the simple reason that men are more willing to pay. That would be pretty standard price-targeting – the same reason walk-on train fares are higher than advance tickets, for instance, or that students get a discount on virtually everything. Of course, price-targeting tends to be fairly unpopular amongst the buying public, so that clever insurance company might want to consider backing up their pricing strategy with some kind of semi-rational logic to do with aggregate costs of insuring various groups.

Of course, I’m not saying that this is what is happening – merely that it is just as plausible an explanation for the disparity between men and women’s insurance premiums as ‘women are lower risk than men’. And price-targeting based on gender for most things in life would be not be considered acceptable by the masses (not that it doesn’t happen, of course, as the price of women’s clothing will readily attest), so why should it be in car insurance?

So do I still think the ECJ’s judgment was absurd? You know, I’m not really sure any more.

1. Disclaimer: I haven’t read the judgement itself. I’m pretty sure no one else writing about it has either. We have lives, after all. I’m sure Jack of Kent – who also has a life, but spends much of it reading legal judgements – will have read it and will be able to write about more accurately tomorrow… [↩]

Image by xkcd

I watched this video of Richard Dawkins speaking at the ‘Protest the Pope’ rally with a mixture of disappointment, alarm and brewing anger. Disappointment at the way he failed utterly to use reason, or logic, or rationality in his speech, preferring instead emotive platitudes and fallacious diatribes. Alarm at the crowd of protesters cheering his every sentence, reserving their loudest jeering for his portrayals of the Pope as ‘an enemy’, and for his characterisation of ‘them’ as running scared from ‘us’. Brewing anger at the way the name ‘atheist’, which I have identified with ever since I first heard it, has been dragged through the mud over the last weekend by both the Pope’s ridiculous taunting and by Dawkins’ brawling mob of ‘secular humanists’ or whatever it is they’re calling themselves now.

I’m not even fully certain about writing this post, and it will be with a heavy heart that I press the ‘publish’ button and send my thoughts out to the wider world. Not because I would expect Richard Dawkins or any other of these prominent atheists to actually read my words, but because I’ve had such brimming respect for him and others for so long, and I’m sad that it’s rapidly dying away¹. I read The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker and especially The Ancestor’s Tale, and they filled me with a sense of joyous wonder at the majesty of nature which I have never discovered through any religion – but right now, I find myself feeling that the author of these great books has lost his way.

When the Pope told us, during his overly-expensive-but-otherwise-mostly-harmless State Visit, that Hitler was an atheist and secularism is the root cause of the Holocaust, my first reaction was to laugh. I mean, Hitler? Really? Obviously, it’s unlikely the Pope’s ever been on a Usenet discussion group (though HM The Queen was sending email in 1976, so anything’s possible) but have none of his speechwriters, helpers, aides or support staff ever heard of Godwin’s Law? Whether Hitler was an atheist or not makes no odds, so apart from a little light ridicule, who gives a damn?

Apparently Dawkins does. Not only that, but he’s hell-bent on proving to you that Hitler not only wasn’t an atheist, Hitler was a Catholic. He devotes some five minutes of his speech to this – nearly half of the video. It’s still utterly fallacious; still pathetically stupid, still pretty much playground debating (‘you’re a Nazi!’ ‘No,you’re a Nazi!’) but nevertheless, the crowd aren’t saying ‘now hang on a minute’, they’re going bonkers for it. Yeah! The Pope’s a Nazi! And a kiddy fiddler! Woo!

Well I’m calling time on this. I’ve grown tired of Dawkins and his unholy crusade. I’ve been having misgivings for quite some time, but now I’ve had enough. Apart from anything else, I don’t know what he’s out crusading for. This used to be about atheists not being discriminated against – a problem for more relevant in the god-fearing southern states of America than here in broken Britain. In England, at least (and I appreciate it’s more complex in Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland), you can be pretty much anything from Atheist to Catholic to Jedi and rarely does anyone bat an eyelid. So what’s Dawkins’ problem?

Is it merely the existence of religion which so gets his goat? I’m as versed as anyone in the atrocities carried out in the name of religions, but is Dawkins really so certain, so absolutely sure, that religion itself is the very root of these problems, rather than merely being itself a symptom of a deeper problem with humanity? If Dawkins really believes that atrocities like the Crusades, the Salem witch trials, the Holocaust, the 9/11 attacks or the abuse of children by figures of trust and authority couldn’t possibly have happened without religion, where is his evidence for this? He does believe in the need for evidence, doesn’t he?

I’ve argued with many people over many years who’ve tried to tell me that ‘atheism is just as much a religion as Christianity or any other faith’. I’ve always tried to patiently point out the errant stupidity of this – that atheism has no core doctrine of faith; no unified hierarchy or organisational structure; no codified group of beliefs to which all atheists ascribe. The very idea of it is self-evidently oxymoronic.

And yet looking at Dawkins now, I see not a defender of rationality, not a beacon of light in an dangerous world of faith-based stupidity. I’ve begun to see a figurehead of a new and somewhat sinister religion. One which cares not at all about those genuinely positive things which have come from faith on a personal or global level. One which isn’t interested in introspection, or analysing the faults in the arguments on which it is based. One which is built on a foundation of hatred towards the members of all other religions, which is willing to persecute Catholics on the basis of atrocities they didn’t commit, and which sees all of this as a battle between ‘us’, the enlightened forces of good, and ‘them’, the irredeemably evil ones. The enemy.

I don’t know what that is, and I don’t know what to call it, but I’m certain that it isn’t the atheism I grew up with.

Star Wars seems to be about as close to a religion as the people I’m closest to have ever had, and strangely enough I feel like Star Wars has a lesson which can be applied here – Anakin Skywalker fell from grace because he began to hate, and to see others as his enemy. This sermon could end on no better note than with the words of Master Yoda – “fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate; hate, leads to suffering.”

From where I’m sitting, Dawkins already seems to have lead us to hate. I dearly hope that’s as far as his new crusaders go.

1. It’s worth mentioning that this doesn’t apply to all prominent atheists, either – Stephen Fry’s speech for the Intelligence Squared debate, for instance, is a wonderful example of an emotive yet still rational and reasoned argument against Catholicism, and Tim Minchin’s Pope Song [Caution - Very Explicit] is simply wonderful – though arguably that is as much a song about offence as it is about the Pope specifically [↩]

As I’m sure many of you reading this know (there are still one or two people reading, right?), for the last year(ish) I’ve been making a podcast called House Of Comments with Mark Thompson, writer of the Mark Reckons blog. Last week we recorded our last episode of the podcast, and I though it was worth jotting down a few bits and pieces about it, lest nothing be left to posterity to mark it’s passing.

The reason for stopping was as boring as it was simple – Mark and I have both ended up in a position where we just do not have the time or the will to talk about politics any more, whether through a blog or a podcast. Our original intention was to create a podcast by bloggers for the blogosphere, and it’s hard to see how we could fulfil that remit to any decent level if neither of us have a stake in the game anymore. Besides, creating a podcast like House of Comments is a fairly time-consuming experience, and requires keeping a close eye on the blogs and the media throughout the week, or else it can be hard to feel you’re actually able to contribute to an episode.

When Mark and I first started talking about a podcast (there is, sadly, no great story as to how it came about – I can’t even recall who approached who with the idea), our number one goal was to make something that we’d be interested in listening to ourselves. At the time there were no blogosphere-generated podcasts at all, and it felt like an under-served market. The fact that others have cropped up since we started – such as Iain Dale’s Seven Days Show, or the inimitable Ben & Arnie Show by Benny Austwick and Arnie Craven – I like to think goes to show that we were right.

That said, I was still somewhat amazed (and, of course, delighted) when we did actually find a genuine audience for our podcast – in fact Mark and I have both received emails which could almost be called ‘fan mail’! I feel I must take a moment to say thank you to those who’ve sent either of us kind (and indeed constructively critical) emails and tweets. It certainly makes it easier to produce something when you know it’s being appreciated by others.

One question we have both been asked a number of times, naturally, is to do with listenership. I’ve never really wanted to be too specific with numbers because I never wanted to be judged on that basis – particularly since it’s possible to measure the listenership of a podcast in so many different ways as to make comparisons utterly meaningless. I put together a system to measure our download statistics so that we could get an idea of what was going on, and by our reckoning our peak listenership was around election time, when somewhere nearing 1,200 unique IP addresses (which we’ll roughly equate to listeners, even though that figure might be a slight over-reading) were downloading each episode within the first week of release. In terms of raw downloads (which I never directly measured, but could sort of figure out through server logs) that equated to somewhere around 6k-8k downloads a month. In the months since the election our listenership dwindled somewhat, quite understandably. Needless to say, we were extraordinarily pleased with these figures – particularly when you consider that our first episode was only listened to by around 75 people in the first week!

I’ve also recently been asked about the technical aspects of how we were recording and editing the podcast. I don’t think I could get into too detailed a discussion on this post, but here’s a quick overview for the curious (if you’re not interested you can just skip to the next paragraph). We used Skype ()a constant source of irritation) to call the guests and host the conversation, and then on my Mac I used Soundflower to route the audio from Skype into Logic Pro (a couple of times we used GarageBand instead, which is actually more than adequate for this kind of recording). Using multi-track recording software (like Logic or GarageBand) gave me the ability to edit the sound from my microphone separately to the sound from Skype, which in turn made it much easier to keep us all roughly at the same volume as each other. Mostly I avoided using effects other than the bare minimum needed to clean up the sound – noise gates are effective enough for removing annoying hums, hisses and background scuffles when nobody’s talking, and I added some EQ to my microphone to get my own voice sounding reasonably rounded. The EQ was never very useful for the Skype track, though, since invariably, an EQ setting which gave one guest a voice like honeyed gravel would make another sound like they had a cold and were talking through a megaphone over a transistor radio. Occasionally, when there was very bad background hums or hisses I would use a program called Amadeus to do some analytical noise reduction. I believe Audacity includes similar noise reduction functions, and has the advantage of being free and cross-platform.

Whilst I handled the technical aspects of the podcast, of course, it was Mark who really kept the show on the road – though we never officially assigned roles to each other, he fell very neatly into the role of ‘Producer’, and did a marvellous job contacting potential guests, getting people to agree to come on and sorting out topics for us to talk about. Those who know me know that generally I would have a considerable trouble putting together a drinking session of any sort in any form of alcohol manufacturing plant, and I imagine we wouldn’t have got past the first episode had I been left in charge of getting guests together. Thanks to Mark I’ve been able to chat with MPs like Tom Harris and Lynne Featherstone, with bloggers like Charlotte Gore, Iain Dale and Chris Mounsey, and with all sorts of other interesting people from across the political spectrum. It truly has been a blast. So, fans of our little podcast, do raise a glass to Mark!

Just before I set down my keyboard and ride off into the sunset (or, more accurately, pour a glass of wine and sit on the sofa), I suppose the logical question to end with is what happens in the future. Mark forwarded a very nice email to me from one James, a self-confessed fan of the podcast who wondered if we’d consider handing House of Comments over to some other bloggers to produce now that we’re no longer making it – if, of course, there was anyone out there interested in taking over. It’s certainly an interesting thought – and indeed thank you James for the suggestion – but here’s the problem: I’m sure there are plenty of bloggers out there who could carry House of Comments on in the spirit in which we created it, but this raises the simple question of why they’re not already doing it! Why do they need us? I understand the reasoning behind the suggestion, but rather than hand our podcast over to someone else, I’d prefer somebody else to have been inspired by House of Comments into making a podcast of their own¹.

So, I should think the House of Comments name and format shall lie fallow for the forseeable future. I’m not averse to the idea of making a new podcast about something other than politics – after all I do have a very lovely microphone that isn’t being used for anything right now – but until that comes along I guess you’ll hear a little less of my voice. Overall I’m very proud of what we made, and even prouder that other people have enjoyed listening to it – but for now, it’s time to stop.

1. Incidentally, if that sounds like you, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me. I’m rubbish at answering email, but I’ll try my best to help if you’re interested in making a podcast but not sure how to get started. [↩]

So, thought I to myself, how should I continue now, having just announced in such a casual manner that this blog is about politics no longer? What will I write about? What will I say?

Well, obviously the first thing to talk about is the iPad, since I bought one when they came out on Friday and it’s clearly a hot topic. The difficulty with this is finding something interesting to say about it, that hasn’t already been said. But I suppose the purpose of any review is to answer a simple question: is it worth buying? Maybe I can help.

The short answer (for the ‘tl;dr crowd’) is a definite and decisive ‘well… It depends’.

Not much help so far, I suppose. I bought one, but I couldn’t buy one for me. I’m a programmer and a web designer by trade, and one thing to notice about iPad is that you can’t design web sites with it (or can you…) and you can’t program with it. So, I bought one for my wife, who uses our ageing laptop mainly for Facebook, iPlayer, news, email and finding and printing recipes.

And I can state with a great degree of certainty that she absolutely loves it. For a lady who usually greets my enthusiasm for all things technological with rolled eyes and a pithy “that’s nice, dear”, she was genuinely smitten with her new gadget, and though I have admittedly stolen it off her probably more than I should have done, in five short days it has easy replaced our laptop as the go-to computer of the house. It helps that the battery life is truly impressive – by even a conservative estimate it can manage 10-12 hours of constant normal usage even with the Wifi turned on and the screen brightness turned up. I don’t know who at Apple sold their soul to the devil to get their hands on this battery technology, but they clearly got a bloody good deal.

I will say, though, when I gave it to my wife part of me had cheekily assumed that we’d be able to sort-of-share it. It turns out that’s not how it works. When she opened the Facebook app (which sadly hasn’t yet been updated to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen), she entered her username and password and boom, it’s her Facebook account. When I set up Early Edition, an RSS reading app, I added a load of RSS feeds that I thought she would find interesting, but there’s not really a sensible way to have a ‘Stuart’ set of feeds and an ‘Ellie’ set, so I don’t really get to use it. Her email account is the default email account – even though I’ve added my own email as well, it feels secondary. Though there are some apps – Twitter, Instapaper, and WordPress spring straight to mind – which I use and Ellie doesn’t, the iPad, really, is designed to have a single owner, and I’m very much relegated to ‘named driver’ status.

In this sense, iPad is a far personal computer than the PC has ever really been. Much like the iPhone, over a period of time your own device becomes set up just the way you want it, with apps logged in to your accounts and things set up ‘just so’.

Oddly enough, though, the person who likes it the most is our 4-year-old daughter. Apart from the (gorgeous) free Winnie-the-Pooh ebook which comes free with the iBooks app, she’s got a fantastic Toy Story interactive book/game, a similar (though not quite as full-featured) Cat in the Hat storybook, a number of games and a drawing app. She constantly wants to play on the iPad, and has grown quite accomplished at using it. The other day she decided she wanted some music on, so she opened up the iPod app, searched around for a song, hit play and spent the next 3 and a half minutes sat singing along to Safety Dance – if that’s not worth the price of admission on its own, I don’t know what is.

Leaving small children aside, though, this thing is made for watching TV in bed. You can get live television streamed straight to the device using TVCatchup, you can use iPlayer for catchup TV, or the excellent StreamToMe app to watch videos streamed over wifi from your computer (using the free ServeToMe companion app), or, of course, you can sync and buy videos straight from iTunes. Unlike when we’ve tried watching TV shows in bed using a laptop, the iPad doesn’t get hot, it’s easy to manoeuvre into a position suitable for watching, and unlike an iPhone it has a big enough screen for two people to watch comfortably. It’s great.

This is also the first computer ever that can be used sensibly in the kitchen. The free Epicurious app is dead cool for finding recipes and cooking, and the BBC Good Food website is similarly usable while the iPad is propped up at the back of the kitchen surface. And while you’re eating, you can plug it into a hifi to play music, and set it to ‘picture frame’ mode to cycle through your photos. This is, officially, awesome incarnate – though I admit I’d like finer grained control over the slideshow since the pictures scroll by a little too quickly for my taste.

I also love reading on the iPad. I mentioned Early Edition above, but it’s worth going on about some more: an app which takes RSS feeds and transforms them into a custom newspaper that you can view at leisure. It’s just a great way to skim through headlines and take in news in the morning. The Instapaper app is also quite marvellous (if you like reading websites and blogs and don’t use Instapaper, start using Instapaper) and a joy to use. There still isn’t an exceptional plain RSS reader app yet, so far as I’ve seen, but according to Smoking Apples there’s a few coming soon, so I’m hopeful. For Twitter there’s Twitteriffic, which is far superior to it’s iPhone based baby brother – but presumably Loren Brichter is out there somewhere developing Twitter for iPad, and undoubtedly this will simply blow me away. In short, though, there simply isn’t a better device on the market for reading teh interwebs.

Typing is easier than I thought it would be, too – though I did make three typos whilst writing those 10 words, so maybe I’m just being generous. With the iPad in landscape mode in a case propped up at about a 20º angle, the keyboard is quite usable, though I do miss having tactile feedback and wouldn’t be averse to plugging in a proper keyboard (which can be done using either a Bluetooth keyboard, or the Camera Connection Kit¹) for typing long documents – such as this blog post.

In terms of using iPad for content creation, I’m using the free WordPress app right now, which is serviceable enough, but not especially great – much like it’s iPhone counterpart. Apple have rewritten their iWork suite for iPad, consisting of a word processor, a spreadsheet app and a presentation app. I don’t have much need for presentation or word processing apps right now, but I bought Numbers and it’s surprisingly easy to use. I whipped together a quick spreadsheet to work out our home finances in about half an hour, and for light spreadsheet/database work I can see it being quite useful – though as we’ll get to in a minute, iPad clearly isn’t quite ready to be used as a full-blown work device just yet.

On the other hand, iPad is clearly very well suited casual gaming. Games which were a tad fiddly on the iPhone take on new dimensions on the iPad’s large and crisp touch screen display². Mostly I’ve been sticking to cheap and cheerful games like Pinball, Parachute Panic and Tap Tap Radiation, but with classic games like Worms for only £2.99 or thereabouts, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get fun distractions. iPhone games work on the iPad as well, so you don’t need to rebut everything – though the larger screen does make them a tad fuzzy. Also worth a mention, even though it’s not strictly a game, is the Magic Piano app by Smule – which is, as the name suggests, quite magical.

All of this is sounding pretty good, but let’s consider for a minute a few reasons why you might not want an iPad. an obvious place to start is the lack of support for Flash. If you haven’t yet, it’s maybe worth reading Steve Jobs’ open letter ‘Thoughts on Flash‘, which attempts to explain Apple’s technical reasons for not supporting Flash on the iPad, but I must say that this is largely a non-issue for me now. Flash may not work, but YouTube does; Vimeo does; TEDTalks does; iPlayer does. Considering how supposedly ubiquitous and necessary Flash is, I’ve been surprised by how little its omission has affected me.

However, I’ve spoken to many people who feel – either practically or ideologically – that the lack of Flash on the iPad is a big enough omission as to be a deal-breaker. If you’re one of those people, then clearly the answer to ‘should you get an iPad’ is ‘no’.

Similarly, if your use of a device depends on its ability to print, iPad clearly isn’t for you – yet. I’m firmly of the opinion that printing is something Apple have on the cards for iPad, but like Copy & Paste on the iPhone, it’s fairly low priority, so they’ve left it out of the first release so as to get it right later on down the line. As it stands, though, you can take screenshots, you can send emails, but you can’t print.

Another thing that’s a little disappointing about iPad is its handling of documents. Since files can’t easily be transferred between apps, and as a user you have no way of getting to the underlying filesystem, getting documents transferred to and from a computer is quite complex and fiddly. When saving files in Numbers, the only way to get them on and off the device is by email or through iTunes, with no simple way to keep synchronicity between the version on the computer and the version on the iPad. Apps such as the marvellous Dropbox and the almost-as-cool AirSharing (sadly a little out of my price range so I’m still using the cheaper iPhone version) go part of the way towards fixing this, but Apple really need to find a way to square this circle if the iPad is going to fulfil its potential as a full-on mobile computer and a tool for getting work done on-the-go.

Overall, it’s something of a mixed bag, and whether or not you should get one really depends on who you are and what you want. If you’re the sort of person who would want an iPad, iPad is definitely what you’ve been looking for all this time. Conversely, if you’re not the sort of person who would want an iPad, it’s probably not worth getting one.

Clearly, this is Apple’s attempt to define the next generation of computers in the same way that the original Macintosh defined computing for the two decades after its first release. Much like the Macintosh, it is limited, and has modest specs. Like the Macintosh, it has seemingly arbitrary restrictions over developers and is impossible to (officially) upgrade or expand. Like the Macintosh, though, it has truly enormous potential, for those who want to see it. Overall, the iPad seems to do more than enough to make my wife and daughter very happy with it, and goes about 70% of the way towards entirely replacing a laptop for me.

And this, it must be said, is just the first one.

1. The Camera Connection Kit, when it comes out, provides a USB port for connecting cameras, keyboards or USB microphones, and an SD Card slot. Sadly, I couldn’t get hold of one when I bought my iPad. [↩]
2. You see what I did there, right? [↩]