Salocin

I recently came across a Grace Hopper quote I'd heard before, although I had no idea who Grace Hopper was. The quote in question was...

A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for.

I love that quote. Somehow the phrase "take risks" doesn't convey the message, and there's something about the metaphor that really works.

I was inspired to look up her other quotes and a little about her - it turns out she was a Rear Admiral in the US Navy, and a bit of a computer geek in that she helped design higher-level languages by inventing the compiler. She was also a serial retirer, leaving the navy on a number of occasions before being promoted to her final rank of Rear Admiral.

She is also credited with a couple of other quotes, in particular.

It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.
 
The most dangerous phrase in the language is, "We've always done it this way."

More about her over here,

A couple of days ago, Brazil announced that it was breaking the patent on Efavirenz, a drug manufactured by Merck that combats HIV/AIDS.

The method of breaking the patent was to authorise (actually, to issue a "compulsory license") for the importation of a generic version of the drug from Thailand.

Clearly, this is the right decision in terms of the immediate short term problem of getting the latest drug to the most needy. Brazil's aggressive management of the challenges posed by the AIDS epidemic has been widely lauded and with good reason - the progressive measures adopted by the government have managed to slow the rates of infection dramatically.

However, solving that problem in this way comes at a cost.

Let us, for a moment, assume that every country in the world follows Brazil's example. Merck's sales of Efavirenz drop to zero as the sales of the generic alternative skyrocket. Everyone who needs or wants this drug gets it for a fraction of the original cost.

Six months later, Efavirez-resistant varieties of HIV emerge, as they have for every other drug developed to date, and infection rates begin to pick up as the effectiveness of the new drug diminishes. The world turns towards the pharmaceutical companies - the only organisations in the world capable of investing the billions required to scan the infinite candidate molecules for AIDS-resisting properties, and asks, "when is the next drug coming out?".

If I were the director of Merck, with the mission to protect, enhance and profitably invest the funds of my shareholders, I would answer, "It's not coming from us. Due to the political climate surrounding AIDS-related drugs, we have determined that it is strategically impossible for us to recoup the cost of researching the drugs in question, and have turned our attention to other problems, which affect wealthier countries that are actually willing to pay for the medication they take."

Cruel? No. It's not cruel at all. It's simple reality - either they make this decision, or they bury their company researching drugs that will get ripped off with the blessing of the World Health Organisation, the developing world and every NGO on the planet, who don't understand the role economics plays in getting resources into the research for anti-retrovirals. Their shareholders and creditors didn't give them money to spend on charitable activities - that's what the NGOs are for.

While in the near-term, people may live that would otherwise have died, every time a decision of this nature is made, it weakens the foundations that support the effort for finding future drugs. This decision affects variables in equations that are used to determine whether investing a few hundred billion dollars over the next 30 years in AIDS-related drug research is a good idea, or a bad idea, from the point of view of the person to whom that money belongs.

Personally, if I had AIDS, I'd want drugs later as well as now, and I'd want drugs that worked. Decisions like this are the enemy of the quest for a cure, and while they may allow the currently infected to lead better lives, they are the equivalent of using an elastoplast to treat a broken leg when it comes to treating the epidemic itself.

For a more informed view : In The Pipeline has an article on this.

Did you hear the one about the North Korean who told a joke about George Bush ... to the only audience in the world who wouldn't get it?

What do you mean, I'm going to live? That's just so inconvenient.

It there to make you safe - it's put in place, maintained and enforced by your elected representatives, and it gets in the way of everything that you do. People have lamented its existence since the dawn of paper, and a collection of new terms have evolved to deal with its existence.

Red tape.
Bureaucracy.
Process.

To some this is an incredible burden (as I am discovering, to my cost). To others, this is an opportunity to make money for nothing.

I will illustrate with two examples.

I recently bought 10 classical music CDs. Classical music is complicated, you can't just buy Brahms String Trios. There are dozens of recordings, in dozens of different venues, with different trios of differing qualities and characteristics. Suffice it to say that when you're buying classical music, you know the CD you want, and it's not always available.

We in the old world like to think that we've got the monopoly on class, culture, civilisation and the finer things in life. So it may come as a little surprise that I had to order most of the CDs I wanted from the United States. They came in two packages delivered by international post.

I got two cards through the door and I had to go pick up the parcels at my local Post Office depot. That's a long story that involves shouting, roadworks and buses, and is best left for another time. What's important is that these cards indicate that I owe a little over £30. I was under the distinct impression that I had already paid for these CDs.

Upon arrival, a red sticker on the side of each parcel breaks down the cost for me. First there's the UK extracting it's pound of flesh by charging VAT (you're not American, and you live on an island, so pay up). But 17.5% multiplied by the cost of my CDs doesn't come anywhere near £30. The remainder is £8 per parcel of "post office customs management charge" or something similar (I don't have the labels, their very presence being so nausea-inducing).

£8 per parcel, to cover the costs of administering a £5 tax. Good money if you can charge it - especially since the consumer, by the time he faces this bill, has already paid for the goods in question and the post office is holding them hostage pending payment.

The artificial red tape that exists in affairs of importation and customs serves the dual purpose of raising revenues for the government and buttressing the overweight buttocks of the post office as it struggles it's corpulent rolls of fat up the mountain of capitalism. If I'd paid extra to have it shipped express, DHL or someone would have charged me for the VAT, extra for having it over the Atlantic in two days, but probably no special administrative charge, which would have made the entire thing the same price and would have had my CDs on my kitchen table in a fraction of the time.

I hate red tape.

Example number two is to do with my flat. I am trying to rent it out at the moment. I've found tenants, they seem nice, I'm going to rent the flat to them and get it all done as soon as possible. The problem is the rules and regulations I now have to contend with. A couple of illustrations...

The gas boiler needs a certificate of safety - so I call the local agent for my boiler, and ask them to service it and provide a certificate of safety at the same time - surely they can do that... Surely?

Apparently, there's a whole profession around certifying gas boilers - the people who do the safety inspection are not qualified to service the boiler, and the people qualified to service the boiler are not qualified to certify its safety. When Adam Smith had his big idea about the division of labour, he did not intend for two people with essentially the same skills to double their collective workload and charge unsuspecting punters twice. That the law is the source of their ability to do this adds insult to injury, especially since it adds absolutely no value to the public.

I also have to register with a deposit agency, because landlords are apparently not to be trusted with the deposits of their tenants (meanwhile, their tenants are untrusted with a property worth hundreds of thousands of pounds!). This additional requirement has spawned an entire additional two pages to the contract for a shorthold tenancy, and added a good 10% to the hassle of renting one's flat. I still need to get the inventory done, the movers to get my stuff out and the special form that allows me to not have tax collected at source for my property while I am abroad. The amount of paperwork involved would give a rainforest an anxiety attack.

The entire property industry is contorted around these (and other) rules, with some people making money from them and others losing money from them, but the value they add remains deeply questionable. In effect, they act as a disincentive to rent a property, and consequently as a brake on the economy. By reducing the incentive to rent a property, they also reduce the number of properties on the market, thus artificially inflating the price by exacerbating the demand/supply mismatch.

The red tape is not my friend.

As we all know, and lamented when had enough free time to give a damn, Microsoft Windows completely dominates the desktop computer market. The only company ever to give them the slightest cause for concern was Apple, and now that Microsoft Office is the de facto productivity software of choice on that platform also, the deluge of cash pouring into Redmond seemed set to continue for a few years yet.

For a long time, Linux was mooted to be the challenger waiting in the wings, and - when I had all that time I mentioned earlier - I went through the motions of installing it on some of the earlier computers I owned. Usually when I had just bought a new windows machine and I had little else to do with the old machine.

Installing Linux - in those days - involved some pretty hairy stuff. The comcept of a "distributed binary" was fairly rare, and installing software usually involved compiling it, which invariably resulted in missing libraries, the wrong type of compiler, incompatible software and a version of X-Windows that crashed out on a regular basis, assuming you were able to get it started in the first place.

Not so any more. The latest version of Linux comes on a free CD (which you can order online), is named using a word in a suitably trendy African language (it's called Ubuntu) and works straight out of the box. In fact, if you just want to see what it looks like (or fix your Windows installation when it won't boot) you can load the operating system from CD without installing it and get a feel for how it works.

It also comes with productivity software which, while it's not quite as easy to use as the Microsoft equivalents for those of us who have been weaned, trained and subjected to them for the past few years, is largely interoperable with Microsoft file formats, very similar to the Microsoft interface and very reliable overall.

Of course if being good was what was required to succeed, Windows - with it's constant crashes and endless configuration options - would never have succeeded in the first place. What you need is political clout and the ability to get yourself installed on PCs before they even ship.

Well, this appears to have happened. Linux is now a configuration option when you buy a Dell. I can confirm that this is a good option, I am currently typing this article on a Dell Latitude D410 running Ubuntu, which I picked because, having spent 250 poudns on a computer, I didn't then want to spend as much again on the software that made it useful - everything on Ubuntu has come for free, and it all works like a charm.

It also operates very happily with my home PC, a big iMac, since Macs run on Unix with a desktop overlay, and so the two computers were making like best friends within the day.

In fact, Ubuntu seems to have done away with many of the original problems I experienced with Linux - the software auto-detected my hardware and configured itself very quickly, the wireless card worked with only a little coaxing (although it refuses to work on certain networks, and I cannot for the life of me understand why) and OpenOffice Spreadsheet opened all my old excel files with barely a misformatted column.

For the first time, I find myself believing that - should Ubuntu continue to develop as it has so far - there may be a serious alternative to Microsoft productivity software, with definable advantages and a distinct price level. If I were in Redmond, I'd be smelling a change in the weather.

"It's a matter of perspective".

I wonder how many different things could have this simple phrase applied to them. How point of view skews our view of the world. Douglas Adams, talking about a completely different topic, once put it like this...

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
~~ Douglas Adams, September 1998.

So when we pass judgement on what is 'normal' and what is 'acceptable', it is perhaps worth remembering that our norms and values are evolved and influenced by a mess of complex interactions ranging from Darwinism to group-think and peer pressure to the manipulations of our political and religious leaders. Nevertheless, however we have reached them, we are fairly coherent as a species over the broad-brush rules of what is acceptable behaviour, even if we occasionally collectively lose the plot, go to war and commit genocide over the details.

Would a different context provide different solutions to the more intractable problems we face? Had Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat been put in space station, in geostationary orbit above their contested patch of dirt, and forced to reflect on the possible solutions to their situation on the ground, would the sight of the sun dawning repeatedly over the edge of the earth, against the backdrop of the heavens, have given them a perspective more conducive to agreement?

Perhaps such a situation would remind such important figures of their potential role in the universe rather than their role in the political and electoral process?

I like to think so.

I'm in the process of relocating from England to France for a new job. Not being in the thick of a daily grind has a similar (if less pronounced) effect. I am staggered to remember the intensity of the anxiety of the most (with hindsight) inconsequential problems, decisions and events. I shudder to think of the influence I allowed certain people and things to have over my state of mind and my happiness, when the narrow and blinkered perspective exaggerated the importance of the most trivial events.

Will it happen again? Probably, I think it is a part of the human condition. Maybe I should learn to meditate.

My current situation allows me the luxury of seeing others suffering from my previous affliction. As the decisions of their next few hours assume disproportionate importance, their world shrinks, the meaninfulness of trivial things is blown out of all proportion and each and every choice feels like a win-or-lose situation in a high-stakes game of survival. I want to tell them how ridiculous this seems, and although they make the noises appropriate to understanding, they cannot see what I see - their reality is different to mine, they have another perspective, and from their point of view, their point of view is the only one that matters.

Language has lots of expressions to describe these things, we understand them intellectually, but remain subject to them emotionally - we'll say "you really need to slow down and smell the roses", or we'll recommend someone take a step back so that they can "see the wood for the trees", but for all our intellectualising, and our ability to point out the fault in others, we remain slaves to it ourselves.

When I did my skydive for charity, I spent the next few weeks looking at the sky and, on occasion, thinking, "I could be falling through that". That helped anchor me to a wider perspective than I would ordinarily have had. But people are different and what worked for me will not work for others (not to mention the fact that many may find the idea of throwing oneself out of a plane a little bit far to go for the sake of a different point of view). Anyway, the effect was temporary and faded over time. I do think, however, that had I taken up skydiving as a sport, it would have been more for the mind-expanding perspective it gave me than for the adrenaline rush of stepping off the aircraft.

Sorry if you were hoping for a conclusion - I was just thinking out loud, or in text, or whatever this counts as, so as they say... "move along, nothing to see here".