Memory Booths

Being on holiday is cool, I'm currently catching up on my reading and another of Derek Parfit's awesome thought experiments has me thinking.

The idea is that I could go on holiday and on my return home, go to a memory booth and have the memories stored on a disc. I could pass this disc on to friends who could visit the same store and have my holiday memories uploaded to their brain. Giving them the memory of my holiday. They would then have a memory of somewhere they hadn't been.

Possibility

The technical possibility of this process was never the question. It is merely a postulate to open a discussion on what constitutes a real memory. Can you have a memory of something that didn't happen? What is "the self" are we a "stream of conciousness"? What would happen to that stream if the memories that are the link backwards in time to "me" 5 years ago, 10 days ago are false?

My interest

While the above questions are interesting, what really caught my attention were the sensory questions raised by having someone else's memories. When I remember certain events, I do not just remember the details of an event, I remember the emotional context of the event. For example, if I remember an argument with someone close, I also remember the feelings of anger or hurt.

What would it be like to experience someone else's feelings? I love that first wave of heat when I get off a plane in a hot country. Other friends have told me they feel the same, would this friend? How stressed would the friend get trying to find a taxi and a hotel in a foreign country? How much better would I understand them after walking a mile in their shoes?

Imagine the first meal at the restaurant, it sticks in your friend's memory vividly due to the excellent prawns. However, you hate seafood... would you enjoy them in this memory? Or would there be some sort of conflict?

Imagine your holidaying friend does a bungee jump... What would their feeling of exhilaration be like? Do they experience excitement in the same way you do? Or is it a totally alien feeling? Imagine you are afraid of heights, could there be such a conflict that your mind rejects the memory? In the same way that the body recognises donated organs as foreign?

Social uses

Could the victim of a crime give their memory of the incident to their aggressor? Could this be a more effective form of rehabilitation?

I have had quite a nice day today - tomorrow I might even leave the house...

Breakfast of Champions

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I believe I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done.

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

So, AV or FPTP

Obviously, AV seems a much fairer system when you look at the maths of it, this blog post describes things rather well. However, the concept of AV being "better" is only a good thing if the underlying system that it improves is worth while. For example, using cup to get drinking water from the toilet bowl rather than sticking your face in there is a better method without being an ideal way to acquire water.

As I see it, the underlying system in this case is that the general public should get to have a say in how the country is governed, by selecting a candidate from 1 of 5 or so groups offering expertise in the area. Now, if we ignore such complexities as whether these people are actually in a position to run the country or not and focus on the concept that running a country is a specialist job. Can we think of any other scenarios where we'd let the great unwashed public decide... well... anything?

I'm imagining NASA and two top engineers discussing the 3 most relevant theories of jet propulsion. Each gives a different answer and only 1 can be right.

Scientist 1: "Ok, well I just can't work it out, this is a total stumper."

Scientist 2: "Likewise, I guess the only thing left to do, is fill a room with people of average intelligence and get them to vote on it."

Scientist 1: "yea, make them mark the paper with crayon - edible crayon, we don't want a repeat of last time."

I walk to work and so I see a fair amount of the public. I believe it would be a landslide victory for the theory with the best name.

Scenario 2 - "we interrupt this episode of Coronation Street / So you think you can dance / Big Brother to inform viewers that the bomb squad is at an impasse, please dial the following number: ----- then press 1 for the green wire, 2 for the red wire or 3 for the blue.

Of the people I see in the street, I reckon I could trust 1 in 100 to vote on the correct way to run a bath. Perhaps we are better off with a smaller percentage of the population making decisions and our vote should be about how to select the right smaller percentage of the population. In much the same way that I have never put my xrays up on ebay to get a more rounded opinion of what is wrong.

Obviously this isn't a trivial issue and my only aim here is to gently mock, but I wonder what a country would be like if people who knew about stuff were in control?

iphone web apps

I work on a mac at home and like it quite a lot, I am also a big fan of windows 7, so I have no axe to grind on the "fan boy" front. I have been working on a mobile development project recently and thought I would share my findings and thoughts. We decide to build a W3C Widget HTML, CSS and JavaScript packaged up as a web app. Because the iphone and Android don't yet support these we are wrapping them with the awesome Phonegap. At present, we are resisting the urge to use Phonegap for anything other than wrapping.

When Apple first said they wouldn't be supporting Flash on their mobile products, I thought it was a brave move and a sensible one. I justified it on the grounds that a big part of the problem with early Windows systems was that it allowed developers to do whatever they wanted. Many of the reported crashes with which Windows became synonymous were due to bad software rather than the operating system. I am mainly concentrating on "flash has not performed well" section of Apple's argument and less so on the "we're making the web an open field of delights with puppies for everyone" (1 of many sources on Apples position).

Developing on the iphone has given me a further glimpse into where this position has taken Apple. It's been quite interesting to work on a project where I have had multiple mobiles to develop on side by side.

Mobile libraries

Initially, we went for jQuery Mobile, which at the time was still in alpha. I think it will be an excellent product when finished if you want to do rapid mobile development using jQuery and it's theme system. I am not a bit fan of having the structure of my HTML and CSS taken away from me, especially by something in such early stage of development. So we decided to hand roll a mobile library, which was relatively easy, quite performant and a great learning experience.

position: fixed

At first we only had an Android to test on, while we waited for the iphone and developer licence - oh and the mac we'd need if we wanted to develop for the iphone... The app we built had a header, main and footer section. We affixed the header and footer with position: fixed and all was well. The first time we tested with iphone, we realised why jQuery mobile was using a JavaScript solution. Because many web sites built for desktop use large header and footers, supporting position: fixed could cause lots of sites to display poorly on a mobile phone. Apple's position seems to be to remove support for position: fixed as a preventative measure. PPK explains and has suggested a solution however, web developers are left hacking in fixes. We decided to hijack the touch events and build our own scrolling mechanism - on the iphone css transforms for the scrolling give a much better effect than the usual manipulating the CSS top.

Video

I was disappointed by my android when I found that it refused to play my html 5 video in either ogv or webm format when in webview mode (i.e. as a web page installed as an app). The same video would play perfectly well when browsed to normally. The iphone on the other hand was lovely, it played the video flawlessly, if you don't mind it taking control of the playing of the video fullscreen. However, the video element ignores all touch and click events. This is because it requires them for it's own controls. In theory, removing the control attribute from the video element should allow you to attach events, however, in our web app, this has not yet been the case - investigation continues.

I am torn here in that I like using my mac and it's ease of use, stability and performance. I dislike the reduction of freedom involved with the iphone and ipad - which is why I have an Android. But then, I bemoan the performance of my Android... What tears the balance for me, is developing for Apple, where I can't use standard code because Apple has deliberately stopped support without providing an alternative. This seems counter-intuitive from their point of view as it forces developers to introduce hacks outside of Apple's quality control.

Customer service tips

Ok, so, I am going to write this as a "how to improve your company's customer service" post to disguise the fact that it's merely a rant about Currys. Obviously I am going to avoid mentioning I purchased something from the same chain as PC World, because that makes everything that happened my own fault for choosing a company renowned for poor service.

Tip the first

Say a handsome young man walks into your store and orders a new fridge freezer. He then pays 10% extra just to have it delivered at a specific time. This customer is telling you something very important about his priorities: his time is worth more to him than that amount of money. This is very useful information if you want to keep him happy as a customer.

Tip the second

If you are going to use technology, use it wisely. If you have a "when will my stuff be delivered" section on your website, have it detect when the estimated delivery time has elapsed. If it has elapsed, offer the customer a contact route, remember, at this point they are likely frustrated.

As with the website, if you offer a phone service with a "if you are phoning about a delivery press..." service, if the delivery time has elapsed put the customer through to a representative, don't leave them with a constantly looping message telling them their item will be delivered at some point in the past.

Tip the third

Be helpful. I personally don't care how many times someone from a call centre tells me how sorry they are to hear I have an issue. I may be cynical but I am yet to be convinced of their genuine nature. This feeling is compounded when the person who is very sorry is also incapable or unwilling to be even remotely useful. I want to know when my item will be delivered and I also want a refund for the service I paid for and didn't get.

Tip the forth

Don't say stupid and annoying things which are not true. "I will fix this for you immediately":

• That statement should not be followed by on hold music.
• In my case, it would involve time travel.
• "Fixing it" does not involve explaining why my delivery is late.
• "Fixing it" does not involve not being able to give me a new ETA.
• "Fixing it" does not involve not being able to give me a refund.

Tip the fifth

Make getting a refund easy. If someone pays money to save their time, making it difficult and time consuming to get a refund makes them feel cheated. Empower customer service people to give unhappy customers what they are looking for and entitled to.

Top 5 games

This is a trip down memory lane and makes me want to install an emulator. You can have any game on the platform of your choice, with updated graphics, but the game play must remain the same.

1. Elite

   Possibly my most fondly remembered game, I would have it as a console game now with updated graphics. I played this space based fighter / trading game for days and days, then weeks and months. It's open ended game-play allowed your imagination to turn it into a role-playing game inside your head. I, like so many others, think it should be resurrected as a modern game.

2. Ultimate Doom

   I would have this as a console game too, with updated graphics. The arcade style action made this game ultimately re playable, it's one of the few games I can still clearly remember the route through quite a lot of the levels. It also had some amazing game-play moments, I still remember the ground shaking and seeing my first Cyberdemon - awesome. It also had fantastic level design and a co-op mode.

3. World of Warcraft

   There's not much to be said about wow - it's like the heroin of addictive games, nothing else will suck down the hours quite like it. With a decent group of friends, there are few gaming experiences to match it. It is probably unrivalled in delivering memorable gaming moments, from your first epic, to seeing the Fel Reavers for the first time. I only stopped playing when world pvp become almost impossible to find.

4. Unreal Tournament 2004

   My favourite online shooter of all time, I even spent hours practising against the bots. Bombing run was one of the best game types I have played - shame no-one else agreed and it was removed from future versions.

5. Super Smash T.V.

   I wouldn't change a thing about this game, not the controls, the graphics, the console and certainly not the cheesy one liners "I'd buy that for a dollar". Way too many happy memories of both single player and 2 player mode.

Honourable Mentions

There are lots of amazing games I missed out - notably the plot driven games, which I feel lack the longevity for this type of scenario - Half Life (I didn't get into the multiplayer), System Shock 2, Assassin's Creed II, Dead Space 2. I also didn't have room for Quake 2 or Diablo - really looking forward to Diablo 3.

Top 5 T.V. Shows

This is a tough one as there are so many good series that were cut short with only 1 or 2 seasons (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). Conversely, there are many average shows which aired relentlessly. Quality or quantity... hmmmmm.

1. Archer

   Only in it's second series, but definitely the best thing on T.V. atm by some considerable distance. Adult viewing, not for the faint hearted, but it really does make me laugh. There are some things that only an animated series can get away with.

2. Sons of Anarchy

   Another amazing series from FX. This details the ups and downs of a motor bike club. The premise didn't grip me at all at first, but I was badgered into watching it and was gripped from episode one. Fantastic story and great characters.

3. Married with Children

   An oldie, but a goodie. What can I say, Al Bundie makes me laugh and he is personally responsible for my love of New York Cheesecake.

4. American Dad

   I have too many fond memories of Stan and Rodger to miss this one out. When a series has added new accents and phrases to your way of speaking, you know it's had an effect - "Dimmer switches!". I have championed American Dad over Family Guy and seen a few people come round to my way of thinking.

5. House

   As with all the series mentioned here, I can watch re-runs of house all day. I take the criticism that the episodes are formulaic - no-one knows whats wrong with the patient; things get worse till House decides to do something totally unorthodox; everyone disagrees, but House is right and saves the day. I don't watch the series to see what happens to the patients though, I watch it for the characters and the sub plots.

Honorable Mentions

Breaking Bad is an outstanding series, but it is very much story driven, so it's replay ability is low for this list - highly recommended though. Firefly was terminated during the first season, but was awesome. Fringe is a very easy watch too.