The Prettiest Girl in School

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

It was early September 1991 and I was about learn something I’d use for the rest of my life.

I was sat on a park bench, watching the sun go down, very much aware that the sun was setting on my supposed last summer of freedom. I didn’t mind, I’d left school to start work. That meant I’d soon be able to afford my own place; somewhere I just didn’t have to deal with all of the people all of the time.

A trio of young mothers not much older than me trundled pushchairs past where I was sat. Their voices seemed harsh to me, like rattling knives in a cutlery drawer.

The families had all but drifted home from the children’s play area. Away across the grass was an old, lonely merry go round where a group from my former school were sharing a bottle of cheap cider, playing the game of how long can you hold on as your friends spin it ever faster.

I knew them. A year or so back I was right with them. I had the hair mousse, baggy jeans and branded t-shirts. I could fit right in if I wanted to. But major brand sportswear and me had officially changed our relationship status to “it’s complicated” and were about to break up forever. I was starting to feel a lot more me.

A newcomer strode purposefully through the gate. The evening dress she wore cut a sharp contrast with the municipal recreation ground scene. She skipped the last step and, with no regard for said dress, plonked herself on the bench next to me. “I’ve just been at a family function” she said, answering the question I was inevitably going to ask, “I saw you from the car”.

I smiled, it was the first time I’d heard anyone my age use the word “function” in that way. Then she delivered the first of two lines that are why I remember this scene more than 30 years later.

“I’m going to miss you”, she said.

Now, if you think I’m about to tell you a seemingly unlikely love story about the geek and prettiest girl in school, you’re wrong. She and I were friends, just friends, and I was going to miss her terribly, too.

It wasn’t always that way. We were once simply classmates thrown together at the start of high school. All of us there, different abilities, different backgrounds. Nevertheless the groups, the cliques and the unspoken hierarchies formed along predictable lines.

There are always a few people who sneak under the radar. Sarah1 was one of them, she was quiet back then, didn’t really talk to people, didn’t answer many questions in class or excel at sport. Nobody noticed much about her at all.

My first few years at primary (elementary) school had been difficult. British schools in the 1980s were obsessed by normalness. If you were outside the centre of the bell curve, the bullies started to circle.

I was not in the centre of the bell curve.

As I got to about 8, I’d realised two things. Firstly that, through careful observation, I could easily mimic what other people did. I could pretend to be normal. Secondly, despite the assumptions people tended to make about a geek, I was naturally good at ball sports. It also turned out [long story] that I was pretty useful in a fist fight, too.

As time progressed I got better at all of the above. I came to High School very conscious of it. I created a character, basically a mimic of the average boy with biases applied for some of my genuine character traits. At age 11 it seemed pretty easy to do and in some ways I felt more grounded for having some kind of conscious awareness of who I was (or at least, who I was pretending to be).

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,

William Shakespeare / As You Like It

I’d just about got the hang of that when the boys starting noticing the girls and the girls started noticing the boys (and thanks to Section 28 absolutely no boys noticed boys or girls noticed girls2). We broke up for summer and when we came back a lot of boys noticed Sarah.

The popular girls noticed Sarah too and it wasn’t long before she’d been wrapped into their fold. That’s when I really got to know her, because I was in just about every sportsball team and when boys are noticing girls and girls are noticing boys, the boys sports teams and the popular girls get to meet a lot.

Yes, I know, but it was the late 1980s and that’s how things were.

Sarah and I naturally gravitated towards each other. She knew who every member of New Kids on the Block was, but she could also recite Kakfa. I could name every member of the England Football team but I could also recite Dostoevsky.

Back on the park bench, Sarah and I got talking about that particular summer. “I had to to make a choice” she told me. The quiet girl wasn’t her, it was just her default protection mechanism: don’t say anything; don’t do anything remarkable or unusual. Hide and try not to get noticed. But what she saw for herself, using that mask, was a future where everyone passed her by, she was never regarded, never consulted, never involved. She didn’t want that, so over the summer she (with some help from her mother) worked on a new character, someone who was much more assertive, much more engaged.

That’s when she delivered the second line.

“I saw what you were doing and I figured I could do the same.”

I nearly fell off the bench. I thought I’d perpetrated the perfect subterfuge. The idea that someone had seen right through it rocked me to my core.

Well, not really, if I’m honest. My conscious mind was pretty shocked but my subconscious very quickly told me to get over it. Being someone you’re not is exhausting. You have to pay attention to every detail, every reaction, every nuance. Your mind is screaming at you, but you have to block that out: concentrate, everything has to be perfect, the stance, the facial expression, the tone of your voice, the position of every finger. You are playing and writing a character every hour of every day whenever there’s anyone else around.

In social terms, school is a really high pressure environment. There’s just no way I could be at the top of my game all day every day.

The popular kids didn’t notice me sneaking into the library, or more likely they didn’t care. The kids in the library – which was sometimes literally the library, often just an unused classroom somewhere – they did notice. And they noticed that I talked about Dostoevsky, not football.

In the 1980s we really didn’t understand neurodiversity. Any kid, if they could mask well enough or otherwise find a way of remaining in mainstream education, they did. The alternative was special needs, which was effectively just a wastebin for kids who society had given up on.

That might seem unfair to the many dedicated and conscientious people who worked in special needs, I don’t mean that. They couldn’t be effective because they’d been given an impossible job. They were supposed to teach people who had a whole spectrum of issues with formal education without having any functional understanding of what most of the issues were.

Sarah and I made it through, but by age 16 we were both exhausted. Neither of us could deal with another two years of full time education – or at least not another two years of high school education.

I took up an apprenticeship to become an electronics research technician. Despite having landed the full set of top grades, Sarah became an admin assistant.

Today I see people I went to school with saying things like “we never had any autistic people or ADHD when I was at school”. I can very, very much promise that you did. You just didn’t see them; either they were pretending to be normal, potentially at a lot of personal cost, or they were shuffled away into special classes, even special schools.

I finished school broken, bitter and angry. I never wanted to step into another classroom. Aside from a handful of the freaks and geeks, I never wanted to talk to anyone from that chapter ever again.

Ultimately I went into computer science and, in particular, into developing mission critical software for emergency services control rooms and front line response. If you make an emergency call in the UK, there’s a good chance that the call taker, dispatcher or responders are using a system that I designed and engineered.

We’re now starting to see research that suggests certain types of neurodiversity are an advantage in particular professions. I kind of feel we knew that anyway.

We, as humans, did not become the dominant species on earth because we were the fastest, the strongest, the fiercest or even the most intelligent (we probably weren’t). We became dominant because of our ability to communicate and cooperate. We became dominant because of our diversity, because different humans are good at different things. We are able to take advantage of that diversity and achieve more as teams than we could individually. We were able to build a society that was stronger and more capable than any one person because we have different skills an abilities.

That is, perhaps, the one thing that The A Team got right.

Today we need that diversity as much, if not more than we ever have done before. Let’s celebrate that instead of whining about it.

Footnotes

  1. Not her real name. I have no way of contacting her so I’ve changed and omitted a few details to avoid identifying her. I’ve also taken a lot of short cuts over what is, in reality, a very complex story. ↩︎
  2. Just for the avoidance of any doubt, I’m being sarcastic. Section 28 made zero difference to who was or was not gay. It did make the lives of gay kids and anyone who had any interaction with them more difficult. ↩︎

Mange Tout, Rodney

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

What’s in a name? What if mispronouncing it were part of a secret language? Decades ago, I encountered exactly that. It didn’t end well.

Tech background: the Postgres database system was built to replace Ingres. Postgres is portmanteau of Post-Ingres. When SQL support was added, they did it again and we got PostgreSQL. Many people call it Postgress, some add the SQL part in some way.

If there is a pronunciation of PostgreSQL that’s wrong, it’s Postgree. I can understand the confusion, though, so when the management team started saying that I tried to be nice. As the company’s foremost database geek, I figured if I dropped “Postgress” into conversation a few times they’d catch on. After all, if the management of a technical business mispronounces technical words, that doesn’t promote confidence in the business – and we were all pulling in the same direction there, right?

We were not. If anything my “help” made matters worse. I even started to hear the overall technical lead call it Postgree. So I invited him out to the car park for a polite word.

“It’s a management thing,” he told me, “it’s one of the ways they distinguish if you’re one of them.”

Omitting much for the sake of brevity, A them and us culture had developed (or perhaps was deliberately fostered). It included a secret language used by the management team. They were perfectly aware that all the buzzwords they were using were ridiculous and that they were, indeed, mispronouncing PostgreSQL. It was a tool which allowed them to talk openly but still exclude people from the conversation.

It won’t surprise you to know that the business struggled, in many ways.

I met up with someone from there a year or so back, “We’re dead,” he told me, “COVID has killed us.” The company couldn’t recruit technical people, which he firmly blamed on the rise in remote working. What he had wrong was that the company couldn’t afford to pay enough.

It’s true that some people focus only on the wage slip. It was a factor. Most of us are far more complex: we want job security, job satisfaction, camaraderie, things that make the course of the day a more pleasant experience.

That company still had a toxic culture. Nobody wanted to work there, but options in that region – before COVID – were limited. Now tech people had much more choice, they were choosing not to work there.

In a market where good people are excruciatingly difficult to attract, if you want to build a successful business you have to build a positive and progressive culture, make somewhere people want to work. It’s a necessary investment that’s good for all of us.

Let’s Talk About Wednesday

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Reading Time: 7 minutes

I love a hypothesis. Even silly ones. It’s not about the outcome, it’s all about the journey. Just like Strictly Come Dancing. A while back I was trying to explain how my mind works, “basically,” I joked, “I’m Wednesday Addams”.

I am not Wednesday Addams. I’m a middle aged professional from a pleasantly leafy area of rural England. But writers rarely pluck a character out of nowhere. Even Pinky and the Brain were based on real people. Somewhere there might have been a real Wednesday…

Before I go any further I have to add a content warning. This gets really dark, really fast. Right after this kitten picture.

Read more

The Kids Aren’t Alright

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Reading Time: 5 minutes

“You’re brave”, I was told many years ago. Had I battled a terrorist with a narwhal tusk? Had I smuggled a Soviet dissident through Checkpoint Charlie in the boot of a Trabant?

No, I chose not to have kids. For a moment I struggled to contemplate how this could possibly be brave.

Then I remembered I was not normal.

There are two things parents commonly tell me. The first is that “I love my kids, but if I had the chance to go back, knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have them.”

Those same people, moments after telling me in a quiet corner that they think they made a mistake, can often be found discussing the joys of parenthood with other parents. We live in a culture where it’s socially unacceptable to regret having children. Of course, this isn’t a simple matter, few parents would want their children to know they regretted having them. Nobody can blame a parent for maintaining the pretence justified by that alone.

The other thing parents often tell me, whether they regret having children or not, is that they’re not entirely sure why they chose to have them. The most common theme is that “it’s just what you do, isn’t it?”.

Is it?

The Herd

The herd is useful, tradition is useful. The chances are that if something is a standard or has been done a particular way for centuries then there’s a good reason for it. Many people have decided they know better, ripped up the rule book only for it to be an unmitigated disaster and before they know it things are back to pretty much how they were before, only with slightly different names to try to cover up the failure.

The herd, of course, has a plan for your life. You start by playing a few games, then do a bit of education, find a job, find a partner, raise some kids, find some hobbies then retire.

Going against that plan is the harder road. There’s safety in the herd, masses of animals all doing the same thing. Any animal that does something different is a cause for concern to the rest of the herd. It might do something that puts others in danger. It might even be a predator in disguise.

Rarely does anyone ever ask the question why someone chose to have kids. Dare not to have them and we get the nagging and the constant leading questions, “When are you two going to get round to having kids?” And the stories about the great aunt that ran out of time and always regretted it.

If you want to add a horse tranquillizing quantity of alcohol, then apparently we would have made great parents and it’s people like us who are responsible for reverse Darwinism, if that’s actually a thing.

Some people, of course, always wanted to have kids: it’s a strong part of who they are. I couldn’t be happier for them, but that’s not everybody. On the flip side, there are those people who are resolute from the start that they don’t want children.

But there are those in the middle and they’re the vulnerable ones…

Blackberry Smoke / One Horse Town

I find that an incredibly sad song, about how a society can railroad you into a career, into marriage, into parenthood before you’ve had a chance to think and whilst you’re still naive enough not to know better.

Then you’re trapped.

To work out how to escape this, I want to reverse back up to that leading question which I was asked in so many different forms over the years, “When are you two going to have kids?”. If your social group, your family, your friends, even your colleagues expect you to have children then the first thing you have to do is separate your personal, true thoughts from those of your community, your family and even those closest to you.

We are all different, it is not a duty or responsibility to have kids, you don’t owe it to your family or anyone else. This is about you and your feelings alone. It is entirely worth taking the time, alone, to work out exactly how you feel.

I can’t emphasise this enough: it is your call.

If you have a partner, of course they’re important, but don’t allow someone else to override your own feelings on this. You can never truly reverse having had children. If having kids is a deal breaker, then the deal is broken. Going your separate ways now might be painful, but it’s better than spending the rest of your life with children you don’t want.

And please don’t let anyone tell you that you’ll change your mind when you first hold the baby. It does work for some people, but it doesn’t work for everyone.

The decision not to have children is, mostly, the less permanent one. Sure, if you’re a woman the point where it pretty much becomes permanent is a lot earlier, but you don’t have to close the door forever at age 18. None of us can predict the future that well. If you don’t feel that you want kids now then that’s fine.

The problem is not you. The problem is other people…

People are Weird.

Unless you tell them differently, people tend to assume that you’re broadly the same as them. Not wanting children is such a defining aspect of life choices that it can upset people’s notion of who you are. People can get weird about that.

Sometimes people choose their perception of you over who you actually are. They start trying to mould you to their perception, not the other way around. Or to put it another way, they’ll tell you you’re making a mistake and you’ll change your mind. This, clearly, is their problem, not yours.

Some people’s own visions of their lives, particularly those who want kids, can also involve you having kids. They expect you to run parallel lives, which can mean they feel betrayed. They’re betrayed by their own assumptions, but it doesn’t always come out like that. Again, not your problem.

A common response is an overly-assertive demand to know why. That’s not always easy to answer, because the truth is often simply that you don’t feel any need or desire in that direction. That is justification enough; if anything the people who need to give the better justification are those who chose to have kids. You don’t need to explain further.

There are any number of emotional responses that can come out from people whose world you’ve just upset. The one thing I can say for sure is that you won’t lose any friends. There’s a small chance you might find that some people you thought were friends are really just acquaintances, but the earlier you find that out, the better.

The last thing to mention is that some people are pretty persistent. The in-laws who ask literally every time you see them; they exist. Some friends will also ask as often as they think it acceptable to do so. This, of course, is a type of bullying and you’re totally justified in telling them to back off, or referring them to the reply given in the matter of Arkell vs. Pressdram.

Remember, it’s a huge decision to make and it’s your decision alone. You don’t need to justify it to anyone else; “I just don’t want to” is the only response you need to make. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Flying Wine

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

Remarkable, isn’t it, how good your local supermarket is at keeping your favourite wine on the shelves? You might assume they have a huge stock somewhere, but they don’t. They fly the wine in.

Land in the UK is expensive. Stock rooms in supermarkets are space that’s not selling goods, if they could get away with it, stores wouldn’t have stock rooms at all. And those enormous buildings by the motorways are distribution centres, not warehouses. They don’t really do any warehousing at all.

The old business model was to buy in bulk from abroad and warehouse in the UK, feeding it out to stores as required. It turns out that it’s now cheaper to leave wine with the producers around the world and then fly it in pretty much directly onto the shelves.

The key business drivers are the balance between cost and responsiveness. This is how, when some celebrity is pictured drinking “Herbert’s Herbgarden” supermarkets can ensure they have enough of it on their shelves at competitive prices. That’s important, because if they’re out of stock customers are going to go to competitors and they’ll buy more than just a bottle of wine there.

From a consumer point of view, this is a demonstration of the free market working perfectly. Competition between the major supermarkets has forced them into some of the most economically efficient and streamlined supply chains in the world. They might make big profits overall, but they’re only making a tiny percentage on each item.

The free market is a hugely useful tool, but it’s worth saying this twice; it naturally finds what is economically most effective. It doesn’t care at all about people or the planet. In particularly, the free market is extremely effective at finding ways to use more energy. Right now, because less than 20% of our energy comes from renewable resources[1], that’s a very bad idea.

If we want to make the free market beneficial to society we need to twist it, we need to tip the playing field in our favour, make the free market do things that secure our future rather than wreck it.

Herein I have a problem: I’m an engineer, not an economist. I don’t know how to do that. One thing is very clear, however.

What I’ll do, then, is I’ll put an idea to you and you can tell me if it’s silly, OK?

Let’s start with three pertinent facts:

  • Wine doesn’t perish quickly. I’m told that mass production wine should be drunk within 2 years of bottling.
  • Local wine shortages are not critical or even particularly damaging to society or humanity. If Tunbridge Wells is short of wine for a week, it will cause nothing more than moaning. And there’s a lot of moaning in Tunbridge Wells already.
  • Europe produces a lot of wine that can be shipped overland very efficiently.

So, why can’t we substantially increase tax on shipping wine and other similar luxury non-perishables by air?

Then we could use that extra revenue to fund sustainable shipping methods? Surely someone is going to give me a really good reason why we can’t, why we haven’t?

That would give supermarkets and consumers the choice. If they want to keep their entire range in stock all the time, they could warehouse wine from more distant regions. They could choose to fly the wine anyway, at additional cost. Or they could choose to cover any gaps by shipping alternatives overland from within Europe.

Moreover this is all really just a symptom of something I hinted at further up; our view of energy usage is seriously skewed:

  • We’re very conscious about our direct, personal energy use and largely ignorant about our indirect energy use. We diligently recycle, then impulse-buy a t-shirt from China completely unaware of the enormous amount of energy it takes to make just 1 piece of clothing and ship it across the world.
  • We get our focus drawn into clean energy and forget that – right now – reducing the total energy we consume (mostly indirectly) is more effective.

The Climate Emergency is in the public consciousness, we know that things need to be done. So far we – as Western society – have been very good at telling people what they can do directly, but there is very little awareness of our indirect effect.

We need to tackle consumerism, we need to tackle throw-away culture, artificially short design life, etc. We’re fighting an uphill battle here; the Free Market is ever so good at selling us things to reduce our energy usage, but to get anything done it relies on profitability. The messages we need to convey aren’t profitable except in relatively niche ways.

What we need to do is keep the conversation moving. Point out that supermarkets fly wine and how ridiculous that is, how idiotic fast fashion is. Write blog articles, social media posts about indirect emissions / carbon / energy. The point here isn’t to get people to take personal responsibility – although everyone that does is a bonus – the point is to shove this issue up the political agenda so that politicians actually have to start thinking about how to restructure the economy to reduce our indirect energy consumption and our indirect emissions.

[1] Somewhere North of 30% of the UK’s electricity is renewable, but we do burn a lot of fossil fuel directly, so our overall energy percentage is much lower.

Government and Personal Accounts Don’t Mix

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

The UK Minister for Food recently made a gaffe about using a personal phone. He might not realise how big a gaffe it was, however. His comments were part of a wider debate about the UK’s Home Secretary having admitted to using her personal email account for government business. Whilst government business should be carried out using government (approved) equipment and services, there’s a big difference between making a phone call and sending an email.

The TL;DR, phone calls are pretty secure but email absolutely is not. Read on, I’ll explain, as succinctly as I can.

On the surface of it, using one type of communication device or technology might seem much like another. In reality the technology underneath and the security of them varies drastically.

Telephone Calls are Reasonably Safe

Your common or garden telephone in the UK is considered pretty secure. Your land line is connected to an actual cable that goes to a cabinet in the street. That cabinet is connected via real cables (or optical fibre) to the telephone exchange. You call is then routed from there around a network owned and operated by BT[1], eventually working its way to the destination. It’s pretty difficult for a rogue actor to get access to that pipeline. They either need to tap the wire at one end or they need to get into BT’s secure network.

Mobile phones are a little more vulnerable. It is possible for a snooper who’s physically near either end to listen in to the radio signals between the phone and the mast and hear the call audio. Also, as more organisations get involved in anything so the risk of a compromise within one of them grows. A call routed from Vodafone through BT to EE is more vulnerable simply because there are three organisations involved.

There have been incidents where large telephone networks have been hacked, but it is relatively unlikely that unfriendly foreign organisations are listening in to telephone calls in the UK.

Naturally, government business should be conducted on government (approved) devices. There are many reasons for this, but let me give you just three:

  • People tend not to encrypt or adequately access protect their phones. Both can be enforced by policy with a government phone.
  • Although it’s difficult to intercept an actual telephone call, some smart phones have been hacked to record audio and even video and relay that to rogue actors. Again, organisations can set policies to try to reduce this risk.
  • If a government phone is lost it can be remotely disabled immediately.

Email is Horrendously Insecure, End of Story

The basic protocol the internet uses for email is now more than 40 years old. It was developed when The Internet was a very different animal to what it is today. There have been a number of security updates since then, but there are still some big holes.

One obvious problem is data at rest. Email is a store and forward system, when you send an email from your phone or computer it goes to an email server which then tries to work out what to do with it. That email server stores your email. Because email is not an end-to-end encrypted protocol, the mail server has access to the contents of your email, as does anyone who was sufficient rights (whether legitimate or hacked). I once demonstrated this to an unbelieving manager by changing emails that he sent.

What’s more, when data is written to storage it has a funny habit of hanging around. There are systems to try to make sure that deleted data is really deleted but not everybody uses them, the result being that it’s sometimes possible for a hacker to retrieve emails that passed through the server a long time ago.

Now let me take another angle, if you can receive emails, that means you have an email server somewhere that’s acting on your behalf. That email server is open to The Internet. If you’re foo@bar.com I could connect to the email server at bar.com, say “Hi, I’ve got a message for foo” and under the original protocol your mail server wouldn’t even check who I was. Almost all do now check, but the checks aren’t 100% fool proof and it’s still possible to send emails that appear to be from people they’re not.

As sender and receiver, we also have no control over the path that the email takes. The vast majority are simple, I’ll send my email to the mail server at tomfosdick.com which will look up your server at bar.com and directly transfer the email. As long as both email servers are uncompromised and the link between them uses an up-to-date strong encryption that’s relatively secure.

But there’s no guarantee that will be the route that gets taken. It could end up going through an email server in Russia. It could go between two servers that aren’t using strong encryption or even any encryption at all.

There’s a whole library of different techniques and different ways that email can be compromised, intercepted, altered and faked. If it’s done well, as an end user it can be impossible to tell if it’s been compromised. Even experts can’t absolutely tell if a message has been observed by a rogue actor on its journey, or if it’s been left on an insecure server somewhere for a hacker to pick up at a later date.

A final note here, one of the reasons that it’s important that government officials (including Ministers) to only conduct government business using government (approved) devices using government accounts is because they’re monitored and logged. This is a completely separate reason why a government official using a personal account is a serious issue; it opens the person up to the allegation that they were deliberately avoiding scrutiny. There are times when Ministers need to do secret things, but there are protocols for that. Avoiding scrutiny is a pretty good sign that a government official is working in their best interests, not ours.

WhatsApp et al are Comparatively Secure

A lot of newer messaging apps are comparatively secure compared to email. This is because they’re end-to-end encrypted. Your phone (or web client) encrypts the message and only your intended recipient has the key to decrypt it. It doesn’t matter how many servers or other pieces of network equipment it passes through, they could all be compromised, it wouldn’t matter because they don’t have the decryption key, they can’t view the message contents.

Having said this, there is information in the metadata; an attacker who did manage to compromise the network might be able to see who the message was from, to, when it was sent, when it arrived, how big it was etc. This kind of information can be extremely useful, but unless a hacker can crack the encryption, they can’t view the message itself.

Of course today’s strong encryption can be cracked by tomorrow’s mobile phone, so just consider that if your data does get stored, someone in the future might be able to crack it.

Do be very aware that not every messaging service is end-to-end encrypted. Twitter direct messages, for instance, are not. Their contents are also stored by Twitter indefinitely. Not only could the Twitter organisation exploit the contents of your direct messages, a data leak could easily expose your direct messages to threat. If you’re a government official there’s a reasonable risk your entire twitter DM history could end up on Wikileaks.

Wrapping It Up

For the vast majority of business and government needs, the good old telephone is plenty secure enough, but make sure that you comply with your organisations usage policies and don’t bleed your professional communications across into your personal accounts.

For the majority of business, email is fine. The reality is that millions of emails are flying around all the time and only a handful have anything interesting or valuable to a hacker. Emails are also, generally, pretty secure within the organisation itself. If you’re sending an email from your professional account to the professional account of someone else in the same organisation, that should be relatively safe.

Do be aware that if you’re sending information to people outside your organisation there’s a chance that email might be compromised. There’s a small risk that anything bad will happen, but it is there nonetheless.
A top tip is to remember that the telephone is comparatively secure. If you receive an email message that you are in any way concerned about, or you suspect anything not entirely straightforward, call the person.

Again, do not bleed professional stuff into your personal accounts. That’s a big no-no. Don’t, for instance, send a document to your personal email because you can read it better on your phone that way.

Newer messaging apps can be more secure, but check that they’re end-to-end encrypted and using a encryption technique that’s currently considered secure. You might be surprised how insecure some of the common platforms are.

[1] Yes, there will be people reading this and the words “well, technically, it’s not that simple…” will be on the tips of their tongues. I know; there is always a balance to strike between being technically accurate and boring the vast majority of readers into a stupor. You might consider T-REC-H.248.1 a little light reading before bed, but you’re a very, very niche minority.

Motor Sport: The New Bastion of Bigotry?

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Reading Time: 5 minutes

If there’s one industry that’s pale, male and stale, it’s the automotive industry. That’s why I was impressed to see Gareth Thomas at the Ford Motors stand at Goodwood Festival of Speed talking about the prejudices that still exist in the industry and how it can move forward.

Sure, there may be an element of rainbow capitalism going on with Ford and the #verygayraptor, but the fact that Ford is pushing this message into the pick-up market is an indication that we really are making progress.

In motor sport however, we seem to be going backwards. In the past few weeks we’ve had a driver using homophobic and grossly racist terminology on a game stream, a former driver being racially derogative about a current one and spectators at the Austrian and Hungarian Grands Prix being reported for homophobic, misogynistic and racist behaviour.

In the past few years, Formula 1 and motor sport in general has spoken strong words, but it’s now starting to sound like it’s all talk.

Just before Festival of Speed, Formula 2 driver Jüri Vips had his contract with Red Bull suspended (and later terminated) after he used racist and homophobic language in a live game stream.

With someone whose first language isn’t English there are always some who leap to the defence that the person may not have understood the impact of their words. Sure, when the term itself is considered offensive, but there’s more to it than that. It doesn’t matter that much how offensive the terms are, it’s the fact that you are using race and sexual preference in a derogatory context that are the real problem.

It also emerged, over that same weekend, that former F1 driver Nelson Piquet (Snr) had been racially derogatory toward Lewis Hamilton. In response Piquet issued a statement which essentially said that the word he used isn’t considered offensive in Portuguese, so we should all get over it and move on.

Again this misses the point. Let me make 3 statements:

  1. Paul Smith is an overly aggressive racing driver.
  2. Paul Smith is a white racing driver.
  3. Paul Smith is an overly aggressive white racing driver.

Spot the problem?

There are plenty of contexts where it would be valid to talk about his driving style or his race. The contexts where it would be valid to bring both to the fore at the same time are very limited. So why has someone deliberately chosen to mention Smith’s race, in what is clearly a criticism of his driving style?

It might seem pernickety, but this is something people of colour have to deal with all the time. Positive contexts rarely include their race, whereas negative ones do. It’s racist propaganda, but because nothing offensive or incorrect is said the significance of the bias can be easily missed.

It’s even a tactic explicitly used by racist groups, deliberately trying to associate negative images and negative stories with particular races. A few years ago there was a rash of new “news” web sites and social media pages which largely carried celebrity gossip and negative stories about people of colour.

Because nothing directly derogatory is ever said about someone’s race, the operators claim they’re not racist. The reality is that they’re operating at a more subtle level, applying a bias to what they choose to report in order to portray people of colour in a negative light.

This is why Piquet’s defence plain doesn’t work and why Vips is in such deep water. Regardless of the language used, they both demonstrated prejudices.

Hamilton’s response is as it generally is these days; he’s a mature, thoughtful and eloquent man.

For too many years there has been a kind of standard procedure in motor sport; if you’re caught saying something bigoted, you issue an apology, state that your “unfortunate” choice of words doesn’t represent your true values… blah, blah, blah and everyone nods quietly and moves on.

But we’ve been giving the message long enough now and loudly enough that nobody can pretend they haven’t heard it. So when, if not now, are we going to move from “that’s naughty don’t do it again” to “here’s a 5 year ban from attending any F1 event in any capacity”?

In Piquet’s case it’s hardly his first offence. He knew exactly what he was doing, appealing to a certain demographic who might have a racially based preference, in particular, for the driver who is current dating his daughter.

Vips is a little different. Young people do say stupid things, things they know are stupid, things which genuinely don’t represent their principles, for a variety of reasons. I’m open minded on this; his language (sadly) wasn’t atypical of Call of Duty streams in general, so I could believe that he meant nothing other than to vent frustration. However, other drivers also play Call of Duty and they’ve avoided crossing the line.

This means the burden of proof now has to fall to Vips. In his cut-and-paste, obviously written by someone in marketing statement he assures us that the sentiments he expressed do not represent his true values. Fine, if that’s the case then he’ll understand the seriousness of the issue and be prepared to take meaningful steps to demonstrate what his true values are. He has the platform to do that. In fact he has a great opportunity to take ownership of the issue and to demonstrate real leadership on it. However, right now it looks like he’s just trying to keep his head down and is hoping it’ll all blow over. We just can’t continue allowing people to do that. We have to face these issues, not let people keep sweeping them under the carpet.

Just as I was doing what was supposed to be the final edit of this article, ugly events were reported at the Austrian Grand Prix. It was good to hear Naomi Schiff, in this weekend’s pre-race show, call it out directly for what it was, racism, misogyny and homophobia. We need more people prepared to tackle these issues head on and not just talk in general terms about “unfortunate behaviour” and sweep it under the carpet again.

It now transpires that there has been another clutch of incidents reported at the Hungarian Grand Prix and senior figures are reporting a sharp rise in online bigotry – and there does seem to be a pattern forming. It does seem to all be centred around one particular team and coming from the supporters of one particular driver.

Yes, it’s good to see Mercedes and Hamilton take such a positive lead, but when they’re the ultimate target of most of the bigotry we can’t expect that to be effective. Most of the teams and many of the drivers have, in fact, issued strong statements. The response from some has been notably weak, which doesn’t help.

Yes, it’s good to see media organisations like Sky TV being stronger than they previously have.

Yes, it’s good to see the new “Drive it Out” campaign from the FIA and F1 management.

Words do have a lot of power, but they only get you so far.

It looks like we’re facing a new wave of bigotry in motor sport. We need to put it down immediately; we cannot afford for it to take hold. That means more than just words. As Hamilton says “Time has come for action”.

The Truthiness Horizon

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

Truthiness is a concept most of us heard about associated with Trump’s first presidential campaign.

Stephen Colbert uses “truthiness” on the debut episode of The Colbert Report

The concept is simple, whether you tell the truth doesn’t actually matter that much; what matters is how believable what you say is. People in general don’t check facts, especially when those facts confirm their pre-existing biases.

This forces us to face up to something rather uncomfortable: in a debate, telling the truth only matters if your audience is well informed. If the audience is not well informed, it’s often possible to construct a false narrative that sounds more convincing than the actual truth.

We know this, we’ve seen it in action.

I want to introduce a new concept: the truthiness horizon.

It’s when someone is faced with a level of detail on a subject that’s so far removed from their own knowledge that they can’t even tell if it’s plausible, let alone true – so they reject it.

Sounds crazy, right? It is, but if the person has a pre-existing bias it can happen really easily.

Nobody Knows How a Smartphone Works

One example from personal experience: a friend of a friend asserted that nobody understood how a smartphone worked. I’ve worked in digital electronics, optoelectronics, radio and software so I do know, reasonably well.

“Go on then”, he asked, “how does the display work?” I started explaining how an AMOLED display worked. He asked some very odd questions. After a while he just folded his arms and said “Nah, you’re making it up, nobody knows this stuff”.

At first I thought he was joking, but he got quite angry and abusive, maintaining the theme that I didn’t really know and I was just making stuff up to sound clever. This is an extreme (and irrational) example, but it demonstrates the point very well.

People get emotionally invested in their opinions, when you make a challenge you’re starting on the back foot. People’s first reaction is to preserve ego, to look for ways they can discount your challenge. We all do this, but we hope that professional people override that initial emotional reaction and consider the wider argument objectively. Not everyone is professional, however.

The person here started with the premise that nobody knew how a smartphone worked and was always looking to maintain that state. The questions he asked weren’t intended to get more information, they were intended to find gaps in my knowledge and prove that I didn’t know how a smartphone works.

His problem was that I do.

My problem was that at some point I crossed the truthiness horizon. I sounded too authoritative to be credible and an alternative narrative popped into his head. He reasoned that the chances of meeting a friend of a friend who genuinely had such in-depth knowledge were vanishingly small, therefore he could safely conclude that I was making it all up to try to sound impressive.

There was only one teensie-tiny problem with this line of reasoning: it was bollocks.

At the time I didn’t really understand it, I just laughed it off and told him that one day not listening to people who knew what they were talking about would get him into trouble.

On reflection, however, I don’t think this is really all that rare.

Bullshit Baffles Brains

There’s an old army saying, “bullshit baffles brains”, or to put it another way, if you need to convince someone of something but you don’t have a good argument, just make up a load of complex stuff that you know they won’t understand. There’s a good chance they won’t want to lose face by admitting they don’t know what you’re talking about, they’re not in a position to argue against it, so their only option is to go along with it.

Data overload is another, related technique. You dump a huge load of correct raw facts on someone you know hasn’t the time or the expertise to interpret them. Then you tell them it means something it doesn’t. They’re in full possession of the facts, they presume that you wouldn’t lie to them because they could find out the truth – if they tried.

My proposal of a truthiness horizon is based on the hypothesis that these and similar techniques are now so engrained in our society that people are basically wary of any situation that appears opaquely complex. Such a stance might well help them in daily life, not being sucked in by bogus investment schemes, etc. A side effect, however, is to make them vulnerable to manipulation through truthiness.

There’s a balance to be found here and I don’t believe we’ve found it.

Right now, if you are an expert or significantly knowledgeable in a particular area it’s good to keep this in the back of your mind: people might disengage not because they don’t understand, but because they don’t believe.

One Step Forward…

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

Up until very recently I hated Yoga. I did it through gritted teeth. Then I discovered this one weird tip that could change your life forever.

I know, I should give up trying to write clickbait and stick to what I’m good at – but the weird tip thing is true.

The tip is to accept that you’re a beginner.

That was a hard pill for me to swallow, because I’m one of those super-annoying people who seems to pick stuff like Yoga up. I can feel people rolling their eyes as, 5 minutes after trying something new, it seems like I’ve been doing it for years.

Yoga wasn’t like that. It took a hell of a lot of effort and just basically hurt. It was not the relaxing, fulfilling experience that was pictured on the packaging.

I did not find myself magically transported to an empty beach in the tropics. It did not spark joy.

Two weeks ago I bit the bullet and signed up for a beginner programme, 20 minutes a day, a gentle introduction. There’s been a lightbulb moment in pretty much every class so far. If there was something I could do wrong, I pretty much was.

Suddenly now I get it. I understand it. It works for me and I actually look forward to the next class.

This article isn’t about me, though. It’s about pride. It’s about assumptions. It’s about having the fortitude to swallow that pill and accept where you really, truly are and that the road to where you want to get to might be longer than you’d want.

It’s even about having the humility to accept that, at some point, you might have been further forward than you are today.

I know every cheesy self-help book or blog says it, but it is true; even a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

We need to have the courage to make that step, to understand what it means, to consolidate that position – even if it is a way back from where we wanted to be – and to be prepared to take the next step and the next step.

We need to learn that it doesn’t really matter where we’re starting from. The only thing that matters is that today we can smile, knowing that we are a step forward from where we were yesterday.

Dry January

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

Blame legendary DJ Stuart Maconie. It’s his fault.

I was listening to him talk a few years back; he was explaining that he didn’t think he drank a lot until he and his doctor worked it out. Turns out it was a lot.

A few weeks back I wondered what effect COVID had had on the amount of alcohol I was drinking. I knew the answer, I just didn’t want to hear it.

James Bond would tell me to lay off the sauce.

When you live in a rural area you get used to the fact that pretty much everything requires travel. Not drinking becomes the norm when you go out because the chances are you’re driving.

On the flip side, if you’re home of a dark evening there’s often not that much to do, so you open an improving book and pour yourself a glass of something degenerating.

Then COVID comes along and suddenly the few things that were open are shut. For lockdown #1 it didn’t matter; we got to laugh at people fighting over toilet roll in the supermarket and everyone knew COVID would all be over by the summer.

If the entire world had coordinated and shared responsibility, it might have, but that was never going to happen. So here we are two years later staring down the barrel at Omicron. Life never did get properly back to normal and it certainly isn’t going to for a while yet.

The NHS recommends that you don’t drink more than 14 standard units of alcohol per week.

A small glass of wine, a standard shot of spirit or half a pint (284ml) of average beer is a unit. Your modest Claret with dinner, followed by a diminutive glass of port as you retire to your wing backed chair by the fire will see the NHS smile warmly upon you.

Trouble is, a small glass really is quite small and my pouring arm is awfully twitchy. Very few people ever pour themselves a small anything.

Then there’s the night you’re staying in and having a few drinks with your partner and the other night when your friends pop round for a few quiet beers quite a few beers…

Now, the NHS isn’t daft, the doctors know that few people are going to stick to 14 – it’s really just a bit of psychology to give people a sense of proportion. Nobody really knows what a safe limit is anyway. Opinions and recommendations across the world differ. Everyone is sure of one thing, however: even a small amount can be dangerous. Less is better.

Having assured concerned friends and relatives that the economy of the Douro Valley is not, in fact, dependent on my patronage, I’m doing Dry January this year. For me it’s a bit of a cultural experiment. By going a month without drinking at all I’m hoping I can find some new ways, ones that don’t rely on a side order of sauce.

Hopefully I can then take those forward from February and get back to something more like how it was before COVID-19.