An election is coming
You heard it here first. Election before the end of the year.
The difference between red and blue in a picture. (via John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times).
CCTV watching the view
It was probably sometime in 1992 when I heard Wally Axford describing the lens-less camera of the future. It was in the Photo Science labs in the basement of Riding House Street and, I think, during an extended image processing practical session with an Acorn Archimedes something or other. Wally's theory was that the future camera would just be a GPS device. All you needed to know was where you were.
It would generate the perfect picture by composing something from a combination of stock imagery for where you were with the curated images of the people you were with. His theory was that a) most people couldn't capture a great landscape photo, b) most people didn't like most pictures of themselves, and c) no one cares really about the actual picture, more it's the memory it evokes or the message it sends.
At the time there was some Kodak research floating around that the most common photo was granny in front of a bin in the garden. So Wally's idea would give you the best photo of granny with the best bits of the garden (without the bins, or a telegraph pole sticking out of grannies head).
Tech went in a different direction, with computational cameras in every pocket. But I can't help wondering if the highly curated feeds on facebook, insta or wherever are telling us that we'd be better off with something closer to Wally's vision.
But then there's deep fakes, which is pretty much exactly what Wally envisioned. Except they've not (yet) reinvented and replaced the camera.
COVID home testing
First attempt at COVID home-testing ended up with a void result. Turns out that there's insufficient buffer fluid in the sachets to overcome the surface tension on the inside of the extraction tube. When you invert the extraction tube to get drops of fluid onto the test strip the fluid sticks to the inside of the tube and never makes it to the end.
From a box of three tests we got one success. I guess penny-wise and pound-foolish means you can count a larger world-beating amount for the number of test kits supplied, even if those kits don't work.
You might think that the requirement to report results would let someone wise up to all the void results. But the covide.gov.uk reporting site is a PITA. You have to give it an occupation even though you've already said it's for a student. You have to say what country you're in even though you've already provided a postcode. And the final nail in the coffin? You have to prove that you're not a robot by identifying objects in pictures that are meaningless in British-English. Here fire hydrants are underground so good luck identifying with those bollard things while a crosswalk is about as easy to spot as a cross oak. The UKs GDS even published Design Principles for all this:
> We’re designing for the whole country, not just the ones who are used to using the web. The people who most need our services are often the people who find them hardest to use.
Sorry, I did promise a less snarky C r o s s o a k. It might be a while.
Haircut
F had a haircut. It cost less than the £37 billion allocated to the UK Test & Trace system and, unlike the Commons Public Accounts Select Committee conclusion about Test & Trace, there is clear evidence to judge the haircut's overall effectiveness.
At some point the usual, slight less snarky, service on c r o s s o a k will resume. In the meantime I bet you wished I'd stuck to the abstract stuff.
Seattle in January
"The 20th Century was about getting around. The 21st Century will be about staying in a place worth staying in."
James Howard Kunstler
Today's Coffee Table Thought
"People buy expensive machines to do garden chores — cut grass, blow leaves — to save time and to save work . But because the lack of work makes them unfit, they then buy expensive gym memberships so they can use other machines that make them work . Just as well they saved all that time on garden chores, otherwise there'd be no time to go to the gym."
Coffee table, not thought, from Seattle Marriott Waterfront .