The parties involved were Network Rail, trying to ensure the station would be fit for purpose for the 21st Century, the architects trying to impose their vision, and English Heritage, trying to preserve the historical character of the building.

It’s easy to dismiss the efforts of English Heritage as pointless bureaucracy, forcing developers to jump through hoops to get their projects approved, but a cursory examination of any city in this country will show why they’re necessary. It is in the instincts of architects to build things which they believe are beautiful, and which fit with the prevailing architectural fashions; by and large they have no care for the old.

Because of this, all across this country perfectly good old buildings were torn down and replaced. An example highlighted in the programme is the old Euston Station: it, along with its fabulous grand arch, were torn down and replaced with the 60s monstrosity we see there today. The same wanton architectural vandalism, veiled with the name of progress and modernism, is visible up and down the country. It’s almost impossible to count the number of town and cities where the heart and soul of the place has been torn out, replaced with weather-damaged concrete boxes, decaying in the rain.

I dread to think of the fate that could have befallen King’s Cross if they were allowed to just tear it down entirely. Maybe what they would have replaced it with would be as beautiful as the current Victorian train-shed with its towering brick facade, but there’s no guaranteeing that. There’s certainly an argument for little-c conservatism in the treatment of our built environment, and that’s without consideration for preserving buildings solely as important cultural, architectural, and historical artefacts in themselves. Whatever is done with these buildings could last lifetimes; we have a duty to treat that responsibility with the respect and caution it deserves.

I want to make it clear that I’m not opposed to architectural progress. I’m actually quite a big fan of the modern style of having lots of glass and metal. My only concerns are that we not get so carried away with ourselves that we trample all over our past, and that we have concern for what these buildings are going to be like, 30, 50, 100 years down the road. My favourite way to go is where modern additions are brought into an older building in a way that’s sympathetic with it; like the fantastic new roof over the British Museum.

This was the most satisfying thing about the programme; the architect backed down from his plans to demolish the interior features of the building, and submitted a new design that incorporated them, and merged them with the modern to create a design that worked with a balance of the new and the old. He realised, to only slightly paraphrase his words, that other people could be right. It made me feel altogether rather happy.

I assume most of you are familiar with Spotify; if you’re not, then where the hell have you been the last year? It’s pretty much ubiquitous now.

Anyways, Spotify Premium is £9.99 a month, and that entitles you to higher quality music, offline mode, and use on mobile devices, like the iPhone. A full comparison of the different types of account is available on the Spotify website. The main thing that drew me to paying for premium was the use on mobile devices, like my iPhone, and I have used it pretty extensively.

And, based on that experience, I think I’m going to stop paying for it.

There’s a few reasons for this: the catalogue on Spotify isn’t as extensive I would like, and has a really large number of omissions, the software is occasionally unstable, etc. but the major one is mostly a strictly human limitation. I found myself just listening to the same set of music over and over, or I was undecided about what I actually wanted to listen to on any particular day, and Spotify just isn’t geared up to make it easy to browse to find something you want. The tools available for finding entirely new music on Spotify aren’t really very wonderful, either.

What I could do instead with my £10 is just buy a new album (or two) every month, add it to my collection, and then use tools like Genius playlists on the iPhone to listen to the whole damn lot in nicely selected chunks, which I find a really satisfying way of consuming music. This plan also has the advantage that I get to keep all this music if I every subsequently decide to stop paying monthly.

Anyways, I haven’t made any final decisions yet, so I’d be very interested to see what other people think about this, any tips/tricks or perspectives to share would be great.

(Coming up soon: a series of posts about my holiday to Ireland, and hopefully just more posts in general…)

I suppose in some ways it’s the fault of the way that science is regularly communicated. We seem to really love the “Great Man” theory of History in the scientific field. We love to pretend that great advances in science are propelled forwards by the heroic efforts of individuals. It’s absolute grade-A twaddle.

Sure, Einstein was smarter than your average bear; he figured out a great many things over a short period of time and for this he is justifiably famous. In 1905 alone, he postulated the photon, explained Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, and laid out the first exposition of what came to be known as Special Relativity. It was a fantastic year, and is rightly known as his annus mirabilis.

The fact remains though that all of this work was riding the physical zeitgeist; for instance Special Relativity simply pieced together the work of Maxwell and Lorentz and many other contributors into a coherent framework. The pieces necessary were all ready and in place for the discovery, so somebody would have figured out the final piece — the principle of relativity — sooner or later. It was ripe for discovery.

Nor has that venerable theory gone unaltered since Einstein. It received a fairly substantial boost (no pun intended, physics fans) when Minkowski noticed that the theory made the most sense when cast in the form of a 4D space-time, which was named Minkowski space in his honour.

I apologise for the physics examples, but it’s just what I know best; I’m sure evolution and Darwin suffer ever more greatly from this phenomenon, where the central character becomes mythologised as law-giver.

This mythologised status, and the invented infallibility which goes with it, irritates me because it neglects that this sort of foundational work was done an awful long time ago, and science hasn’t been sitting on its hands for a hundred years. Today it doesn’t matter one iota what Darwin or Einstein did or said. That is relevant only as historical curiosity; as practical science they have been superceeded. Nobody learns mechanics by reading Newton’s “Principia”, or learns evolution by reading “On the Origin of Species”. These are not unquestionable sacred prophetic texts, but merely starting points on the road to a fuller understanding, to be amended or discarded as appropriate.

What got me immediately riled up was this article that John Gruber was dissecting, which falsely attributes some fairly odd platitudes to Einstein (as a side note, I desperately hate it when people over-extrapolate physical concepts beyond their range of applicability. It’s moronic). It shouldn’t matter what Einstein said, or thought, even if those thoughts weren’t just invented ad hoc by a lazy journalist. He was a good physicist, but his opinion would be fairly worthless in most fields of human endeavour. He was smart, but not an expert in everything!

The fact is that Darwin could have raped kittens for fun and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference to the correctness of evolution. He could have screwed up one of his arguments, or mis-interpreted evidence, and it wouldn’t matter. Newton was an absolute bastard, but it doesn’t invalidate his ideas about gravity. His wacky religious ideas and theories on alchemy are rightly discarded and forgotten, because they’re nonsense, even though they’re from a figure as towering in the history of science as Newton.

I suppose it’s far easier to teach and understand the simplistic great man narrative; maybe it speaks to something which we want to believe. Alas, I fear it’s a way of thinking which does nothing but give succour to our enemies. It’s a bit like the terrible, misleading, New Scientist headlines, I think.

I have to say, so far I’m really rather enjoying it. It feels like this slab of glass and metal has just arrived from the future; it has this sense of violating usual expectations simply by existing.

The screen is glossy and beautiful, and it feels dense and sturdy. It’s heavier than you’d initially expect, but certainly not uncomfortably so. I’m not exactly a bulgingly muscular he-man, but I don’t find it uncomfortable to hold. They’re not wrong about the keyboard being large, it’s actually pretty comfortable to type on with the iPad in your lap, and you can get a pretty respectable typing speed with a little practice.

Pages load fast, browsing is fluid, and video on sites like the iPlayer work great. I started watching a Bettany Hughes documentary on Atlantis earlier on here, and it was a very pleasant experience. YouTube videos too look great, and I just last night found a service (although I now remember being told about it by Will Otter) called TV Catchup that allows me to stream live TV directly to my iPad, which is pretty cool.

As apps go, iPhone applications look flat-out ridiculous on the iPad. There’s not really a way around that one. They run, but you have the choice of running them at normal size, isolated in the middle of your display, or blown-up to fullscreen where they really just look appalling, pixellated, only having the iPhone keyboard rather than the superior iPad one, etc. You’ll want to use dedicated iPad apps wherever possible.

The catalogue of available iPad apps is comparatively smaller than its iPhone stablemate but there are already some pretty impressive apps available, and the number will only increase as more developers make iPad optimised versions of their existing apps. For instance the brilliant Google Reader client for the iPhone Reeder should be releasing and iPad version soon, and I can only hope that the Twitter for iPhone app formerly known as Tweetie will too receive an iPad version.

The in-built apps all look and work great, and one thing that surprised me was that even on the wifi-only model, location still seems to work fairly accurately, if not pin-point. I thought there was no GPS hardware, so I suppose it’s doing a trick using wifi hotspots to figure out my location. Whatever it’s doing, that’s quite cool.

I have a feeling that i’m going to change my habits quite a bit having this. I’ve already been tempted to impulse-purchase a movie from iTunes, and the iBook store would look terribly appealing if I didn’t already have a backlog of physical books (currently going through Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman) and I can see a lot of sitting in bed, browsing, tweeting and reading email in my future. Apart from high-powered hard-core gaming and writing code, there isn’t a huge amount of reason to go turn on my PC any more.

Anyways, I really like it, so there. This post was entirely written on the iPad.

Personally, I’m going to apply Hanlon’s razor to this: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Google were collecting wifi data for the purposes of performing rough geolocation without the aid of a GPS module; if you collect the approximate position of a wifi access point (identified by its SSID and MAC address), then you can later calculate the location of a mobile device by cross-referencing with what wifi access points it can see. This is perfectly legitimate — all this data was being broadcast in the clear into public areas, it’s not personally identifiable, and Google were never going to disclose it directly anyway; only the results obtained from the use of the data.

The contentious bit is that they hoovered up payload data as well as just SSIDs and MACs. This means emails, web pages, downloads etc. etc. This isn’t too horrendous as anything actually important and sensitive e.g. financial stuff,  is encrypted at the transport layer by SSL anyway. The collected data could potentially be compromising and embarrassing however, and it is legally very dubious to collect and store.

Given that it’s a PR disaster and potentially illegal, I think the most plausible explanation here is cock-up. Somebody on the Street View team got sloppy and used some code from another part of the company without asking too many questions about what that code did, over and above what they were going to be using it for; said guy is now probably getting one hell of a bollocking.

He played this:

Download audio file (drums.mp3)

(Incidentally, I know about the weird broken layout to do with comments. Not sure yet how to fix it, got broke by a Disqus update. Edit: Fixed! Although in a supremely hacky way…)

It started with an exam in Quantum Field Theory. Painful, but I think it didn’t go too badly. Had a bite to eat, then it was straight into some last minute revision on the Queen’s Lawn for the second exam of the day in Optical Communications Physics, which was actually sort of pleasant, in a slightly strange way. Less like the hideous mental assault which constituted my other exams, anyway.

To celebrate, Rowan, Susan and I took a trip to our customary haunt — Nando’s — and proceded to consume chicken. It was delightful.

After that, I decided to take a trip into central London to grab some comics at Forbidden Planet, and as I was strolling up Monmouth Street I walked past none other than Neil Gaiman, award-winning fantasy writer and graphic novelist. By the time I’d realised it was him he’d already walked past me and gone round the corner. It took me a few more hours to realise that I was in fact carrying in my bag a copy of his “Sandman” graphic novel “Dream Country”, and that asking him to autograph it would have been incredible. I later found out via the wonder of Twitter that he would have signed it if I’d asked. Never mind!

So yeh, went to Forbidden Planet, grabbed a new Buffy comic and a Penny Arcade book, and went and sat down on a wall just up Shaftesbury Avenue and read my purchases for a while, and watched the world go by. I don’t spend nearly enough time in central London, which is a shame because I love it dearly; it’s so full of life and bustle and remarkable buildings and architecture and it goes on and on in all directions.

Rather than go home, I decided to take a bit of a walkabout. I set off east towards Holborn, passing whichever way took my fancy.

The first thing I discovered was what looked to be the entrance to an underground tramway.

I wonder how long it’s been since it was used, and where the other end of it surfaces, if it still has another end.

I wandered over to where a section of street had been blocked off by Crossrail signs. This old building, a sign on which read “The Ivy House” was abandoned, encircled by signs exhorting me to visit the site office. The building across the street bore the likeness of, and a dedication to, John Bunyan. It too looked decayed and abandoned; I turned the corner into a desolate alley, and leaned to look through some railings; through them smelt of damp and decay.

The building was apparently called “Kingsgate House”, and despite appearing to be derelict, somebody still seems to be in habitation, judging by the light and the open window.

It appears that I’m not the only one to find this building interesting.

Places like this fill me with wonder, make me think about their history, why they were built, and how they fell on hard times. I wonder if Crossrail is doing any good to this little microcosm of Holborn at the moment; I must confess that apart from the Astoria, I’d never really considered the impact the building of Crossrail would have.

I turned north, and found that Warner Brothers keeps replicas of the Hogwarts house insignia in the Foyer of their offices.

From there I wandered into a residential district, near Great Ormond Street hospital. Houses draped with the flag of St. George, people in bars, drinking and chatting, the beautiful chattering sound of people enjoying themselves wafting over the streets. I walked down an alleyway that passed through a building, joining the street through a crack in the facade of a shop. Behind this was tucked a little house, sounds of a party coming from inside.

It was getting late, so I headed in the direction of Russell Square tube station, marvelling at water fountains, and a house draped in lights for some unfathomable reason. I came across a park called Coram’s Fields. The sign above the gate read “No Unaccompanied Adults”. I thought this was marvellous.

For such a centerpiece policy, it is breathtakingly vague. Nobody understands it properly, not even many people within the Conservative party. One shadow minister said: “The ‘big society’ needs to be turned into more practical, voter-friendly language. We need to turn Oliver Letwin’s Hegelian dialectic into voter friendly stuff.” When you’re using the phrase “Hegelian dialectic” to describe why something is tricky to understand, you know you’re in deep trouble.

Not many people (who don’t have philosophy degrees) are going to know that Hegel was German philosopher, one of Marx’s influences, and like the philosophy of Marx the ideas of the Big Society display an earnest idealism totally stripped of even a single iota of pragmatism.

The Big Society is supposed to conjure up an image of us as a country spontaneously coming together to fix “Broken Britain”, volunteering to fix our social ills, to cure a culture of entitlement, to restore power to the people, etc. It speaks of a social movement to bring about change, and in the face of the Big Society, the Big State will wither away.

That’s bollocks. It’s the same mad utopian dream as that of Communism.

There is no social movement, no grass-roots activism for the Big Society. Cameron didn’t even mention it in the debates, and their polling is hovering steady in the low thirties; this is no popular movement. It’s just words, words with nothing but vague appeals to working together for change. It’s all just political hot air.

The real intent, the real policy, is a return to something like the libertarian aspects of Thatcherism, or worse. The state will not be allowed to wither as vounteerism takes up the slack; the state will be hacked away with glee, cut to the bone. Provision for the poor, for the weak, will fall through the cracks as charities and volunteers struggle to cope. It’s a reversion to how things were a hundred years ago or more, before these functions were absorbed by the state. Police and Fire services were once run by dedicated volunteers, and there’s a damn good reason that we don’t do things like that any more. Similarly with social services; look at what’s happened in Hammersmith and Fulham as council provision has been stripped away. It’s ugly, so very ugly.

In many ways, the individualism inherent in Thatcherism, the belief that “There is no such thing as society” is part of the root of what is wrong with Britain today. We were told, as a nation, that we should look out for ourselves, that greed was good, individualism was king. Are we surprised that people took this to heart? That kids who grew up in that time, and in the time since, act as if they have no responsibility to anybody? There’s a thread running directly from Thatcherism to the rise of the ASBO.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for charity or volunteering; absolutely there is. It’s a noble thing to give of your time and money for a good cause, but it should be in addition to the services provided by the state, not an alternative. The richest and strongest have a responsibility to the poorest and weakest, whether they like it or not.

The Big Society is also economically nonsensical. The wealth of nations is at least partly based on the division of labour. If I do my job well, and efficiently, it will generate wealth. That wealth can partly be used to fund somebody whose job it is to provide social services, which they too will do efficiently. If social services are performed by volunteers, then they will be performing both their day job and their volunteer work, reducing overall efficiency.

Before I’m accused of being a mad Big Statist, I’d like to point out that I am a Liberal Democrat; the first paragraph of the preamble to the Lib Dem constitution includes the words “we aim to disperse power”. The state doesn’t need to be large, monolithic and centralised, and that has been a major failure of the current Labour government, but it also shouldn’t be wiped away entirely.

The free markets and spontaneous individual action are not, and cannot, be the solution. When individual initiative is allowed to run too far, unrestrained, the consequences are usually disaster. Look at the banking crisis. Look at the Roman civil wars in the first few decades B.C. Look at the dictatorships of the world. We have a democracy because we know that pluralism, not individualism, is the way forward. We are stronger together than we are apart.

1. The Web

Flash is predominantly used as a container for video content, Flash-based games, and the occasional little widget. Almost every other use is a disaster; I’m sure we all have horror stories of terrible Flash-based websites.

Apple’s argument in this space is one I completely agree with: letting one company, with one proprietary implementation, control several important classes of web application is just wrong. Emerging standards like HTML5 video and canvas tags, and support for them in all the major browsers (Chrome/Safari, Firefox, IE9)  mean that we have no need to stick to Flash. Even if we were to assume that Flash was high-quality, secure, performant, and stable, which it isn’t, letting it have total control of web video would be an incredibly bad idea. The sooner it dies a miserable death, the better for all of us.

2. For The Writing of Cross-Platform Apps

This one is somewhat more of a grey area.

First off, let’s be honest; Flash doesn’t help you build cross-platform apps. It helps you write apps that run on Adobe’s platform. They want you to write Flash-based apps for the same reason that Microsoft wants you to write Windows apps, or Apple wants you to write iPhone OS apps, or Valve wants people to use the Steamworks APIs: they want you locked to their platform, for their own business reasons. There isn’t any altruism here, no matter how much Adobe wants to play the martyr.

This is why Apple is refusing to let apps which target Adobe’s platform to run on their OS. Adobe are making a power-play to subvert Apple on their own platform, and Apple are rightly telling them to go fuck themselves. It’s not an unreasonable position, even from a user’s perspective. One of the reasons that Windows is a cluster-fuck is that fundamentally Microsoft lost control; they need to keep backwards compatibility with almost every Windows app ever written, even the ones that don’t play by the rules and call undocumented APIs in broken ways. That’s a millstone around their neck, preventing them from ever moving quickly. That situation is good for nobody; it hurts application stability, and it hurts innovation.

On the other hand, Apple are keeping control with an iron fist, in a fairly velvety (albeit thin) glove. Call undocumented APIs, don’t natively target Apple APIs, you get bounced out. On the other hand, it means Apple can keep nimble. They know that because all their app developers are playing by the rules, they can change things rapidly. Change CPU architectures? Boom, most apps will just recompile without needing changes. Stick a third-party toolchain in there, and you get unpredictable effects; every app using that third-party system could stop working.  What if Apple want to add new features? If Apple exposes a new API, native apps can start consuming that API straight away. They don’t have to wait for a third-party platform to figure a way to pass through that API, if they ever do. They don’t have to worry about developers only targeting the minimum common feature set.

It’s a Faustian pact. Nobody is denying that. If you don’t like Apple’s strategy, you don’t have to buy an iPhone OS device.

For the moment, I’m happy with the trade-off. When I decide on my next phone, you bet I’m going to look at Android. But I’m happy right now, and I quite want an iPad…

Anyways, if you really want to write cross-platform code, you do it the same way we’ve always done it. Write core code in C++, staying agnostic as possible to the real environment you’re running in. C++ pretty much works everywhere. Hooray for open standards! Also, on another note, I also think that half the time the FSF is full of shit. Or to be less inflammatory, they’re so committed to their ideology that they’re blind to reality. But that’s a story for another day.

I think this bit is interesting:

The second issue is the Liberal Democrat party’s rules. Formally Cameron and Brown have a free hand in negotiations, Clegg does not. The Southport Resolution in the Lib Dem rules requires him to get the support of 75% of the Parliamentary Liberal Democrat party, and 75% of the party’s Federal executive (and failing that the support of two-thirds of the wider party) in order to enter into any agreement that “could affect the party’s independence of political action” – taken as meaning a coalition agreement. While all the leaders would in practice need to take their parties with them, only Clegg would have such a formal process to deal with somehow.