Categories
Politics

Priestly Identity

Why would the Vatican think that further separating seminarians from other students can help prevent them abusing children? If anything, becoming more enclosed and collegiate will make them less likely to reveal the criminals within their ranks, not more. What this tells us about the Church’s mentality is shocking, but not surprising. Inevitably a religious institution, even one as worldly and cynical as this, reverts to magical thinking: As God’s representative on Earth it cannot be wrong, not fundamentally. Therefore the causes of abuse must come from outside. It stands to reason.

The further implication is that the problem can somehow be traced back to the slight liberalisation that paved the way for more open seminaries. Plenty living people can attest to being abused before Vatican II of course, but such evidence is invalid because it doesn’t fit with the magical thinking. Or indeed, with the general prejudice in the Church against openness.

But what is worse, it shows the Vatican still resisting the idea that clerical sexual abuse is its fault. It must have been tainted by exposure to other people. Other, less pure and spiritual people. Women, is the word that’s not being spoken aloud here. If the Catholic Church can somehow blame women for child abuse, it will.

This is wilful self-delusion. Of course the problems of the Church do not come from the pernicious influence of ordinary people. They come right from the soul of the institution – the belief that it is an instrument of the will of God. This is what allows it to consider itself above the law, to ‘protect’ its own members from justice, to let them keep raping.

The Catholic Church can never be trusted with children until the day that it admits it is not an organisation carrying out God’s will. And that day will never come.

Related articles
Categories
Politics

Unclean

It's all about projecting a market-friendly image

Enda Kenny just rang the opening bell on the New York stock exchange. He spoke for many of us I feel – indeed, for his whole country – when he uttered the immortal words “Me love you long time, five dollah”.

OK, possibly not his exact phrasing, but we won’t quibble over details. The gist of his appearance was that the country has invested in a new tub of lube and we’re ready once more to give the markets what they want. What did we learn from our recent, unhappy affair with global capital? That we’re a bottom, it seems. Not a lot else.

The Taoiseach is there to assert that we’ve put our financial house in order. Pretty much. Well, it’s still in a subsidence zone, but compared to some neighbouring houses it’s very very well propped up. That’s all fine, but what about Wall Street’s house? Foolish borrowing and mismanagement of the euro were factors, but it was the unstoppable flood of credit that washed away the foundations and caused the entire economy to slide into the sea. And that all began with the wilful pretence that bad debt could be magically turned into a good investment – basically, a confidence trick.

Shouldn’t it be Wall Street ringing the bell?

Related articles
Categories
Technology

On Top Of Clare

Having made it to the top of Corkscrew Hill, we pause for a short celebratory dance.

Taken on the Galaxy Note’s 8Mpx camera, then given the ‘Antique’ effect. I’m very pleased with the quality of the camera. A lot of the images I saw in reviews looked a little unsharp, but the results are much more impressive in real life. And though the picture of the old sign I put up yesterday is definitely soft, for a shot in low light indoors without flash I’m more than satisfied.

The way we came.

So that’s a good start with photography. My next task is to find a browser that works well enough for primetime. Coming from MicroB on the N900 I am a little spoiled, but there really doesn’t seem to be such a thing as the perfect mobile browser yet. Of the ones I’ve tried so far – the inbuilt one, Firefox Mobile and the hot new Dolphin HD – I think Dolphin has the edge. Though this is mainly due to how easily you can make it display sites as they would appear in a desktop browser rather than a simplified mobile view. (Why would I use that, this phone has a higher resolution than my desktop PC…) Every one fails in some way when it comes to complex tasks like – well, like the one I’m doing right now, editing this blog. The WordPress interface just seems to overwhelm the touch metaphor. For example, the menus that pop up when you hover over them with your… Ah. Can’t really hover over them with your finger. Not until someone invents some sort of sonar finger-detecting screen at least

It’s worth mentioning though that the same pen technology as used here does precisely that on a tablet PC, which is why it was chosen by Microsoft. On a capacitive (or resistive) screen position is only detected on contact, so a touch is equivalent to both a mouse movement and click. A digitizer pen gives its position when it’s near the screen, so it is capable of triggering hover events like opening a menu. The hardware is in place therefore on devices like this phone and the Note 10.1 tablet, it just isn’t in the software.

Will such mouse events be available when support for them is introduced with Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich)? We can hope.

Categories
Cosmography

Where The Hell Am I?

Well I suppose we had to do something a little mad for St Patrick’s Day. Quite unexpectedly, I find myself driving to Doolin – a distance several times greater than any I’d driven before. Challenging too. Corkscrew Hill – a slalom for cars. A lovely meal, somehow ending up spending the evening with a couple from Texas – him a retired Navy pilot – and almost stealing beds in an unattended hostel.
Driving backthrough Clare, the whole Burren and its stars to ourselves.

Categories
Cosmography

Mná Mná

Niceol Blue seems to get mentioned on this blog more than any other person. That’s what comes I guess of having a wonderful voice and a computer almost permanently in need of repair – two things I have a weakness for. But she also organizes Mná Mná – Women in Music, a monthly showcase gig for musicians and particularly singers who are female. I’m worried overseas readers won’t get the title. Suffice to say, Mná is the Irish for Women, and is pronounced – more or less – “Mnah”.

It’s been on once a month for almost a year now, but to my shame last night was my first visit. I’ve been missing something good. A thing like this could so easily be what I might call… excessively supportive. But thanks to what I can only guess are hidden reserves of steely ruthlessness, the standards are excellent. Three acts last night, each worth the entrance.

Next month will be a special gig for their first anniversary – definitely one to watch out for. You can sign up for notifications here.

Categories
Technology

Getting To Know Your Android

Screenshot of Android 4 on Galaxy Nexus
Android 4, which I don't have yet

Ah, the slow terrible frustration of it…

I’m trying to be good here and give my new phone’s battery the best possibly start in life. I was advised that the way to do that is to completely flatten it and then recharge it for seven or eight hours, while switched off. Several times. That means I can’t use it while it’s charging, and as most of what I do want to do means going online, I can only squeeze maybe eight or ten hours of messing around with it out of a day. No of course that’s not enough!

Connecting it to the PC would charge it too, so I can’t synchronise it properly and, what’s much worse, can’t download the latest firmware. Ah! Nerd hell. And of course, I can hardly use it as my working phone either. So for the first few days it’s an invalid.

Just as well perhaps. At least I’ll have had some practice using it before anyone sees me trying in public. Having a phone as noticeable as this and not knowing what the hell I’m doing with it has too much comic potential. And I’ve never had an Android phone before (well, I did have an experimental Android install on my N900, but it wasn’t really usable), so I’ve little experience with it.

It has to be admitted, Android is a whole other operating system.There’s a lot I like about it already, but there are constant reminders that it’s not Windows or Mac OS, or even Maemo. I think what I miss most is control keys. Control+z especially… After that, definitely arrow keys or an equivalent. Moving back a single letter, for example, is not easily done by poking text on screen. I feel like the interface was conceived to work with single as well as multi-touch input, and in consequence is more restricted than it really needs to be now. But the Swype keyboard at least tries to make up for that, and works impressively well.

Plus I haven’t really used a capacitive screen before. With the N900 I could hit tiny links and so on with a fingernail, without having to zoom in, and it’s frustrating now when that doesn’t work. Basically I have to unlearn what I spent the last year learning.

First world problems.

Related articles
Categories
Technology

Galaxy Note – The Unboxening

I knew I was going to get it, but I had wanted to torture myself first. I wanted to handle one, test it for size and feel, see how the digitizer pen worked (even if it’s basically identical to the one on this computer), generally just… stall. But when I called the local Vodafone outlet – who had told me on Saturday that they might, just possibly, have one in on Tuesday – they said they had indeed got one in. For someone else.

No! I was going to be first, dammit! For no very clear reason, I went into town to sort this. I was not actually determined to be the first on my block – consciously at least – but I did want clarification on when I would be able to try one.

When I got there, it didn’t take too long to work out that the other person it had been gotten in for was me. But – they couldn’t let me examine it first. And if I bought it unseen, I wouldn’t be able to return it no matter how unlike my expectations it turned out to be. I am about 99.67% certain that consumer rights say otherwise, but that’s the official line. (One reason I would have preferred to have stayed with O2, who don’t piss about in this respect, but it would seem Vodafone have an exclusive distribution deal here.) So I was faced with a dilemma: Commit myself, taking the risk that the phone was as unwieldy and flawed as a minority of reviewers claimed, or… or not. The alternative was to simply be patient until I could try it somewhere, whenever that may be.

And I had less than an hour before the shop closed.

Bugger.

I had a coffee and attempted to do some more expense-justifying calculations. But it was clear that nothing except an almost perverse effort of will could stop me now. Not having seen it there, so close, in its box. And at least from that I knew it could not be so unfeasibly huge as in the legends.

It’s not. Let’s fast forward. I bought it, I brought it home. There.

Basically, everything you’ve heard about its vasty vast vastness is excitable nonsense. Yes it’s big for a phone. It’s the biggest phone. But it fits in the hand well. And I have small hands – with short fingers even.

It just… works. Quite brilliantly. More details tomorrow, the excitement has quite exhausted me.

Categories
Humour

For World Day Against Cybercensorship

Categories
Humour

The Liberal State-Controlled Media

Leo Varadkar TD at a Fine Gael press conferenc...
An Illiberal

Well, it’s good to know I suppose.

Leo Varadkar, Fine Gael minister for transport, has accused state broadcaster RTÉ of “liberal bias”. Yes, his exact words. Just like he was on Fox News. Brings an entire new meaning to the term Irish Republican, doesn’t it?

Though it is sometimes hard to tell where Fine Gael are coming from politically, if you had to characterise them in a single word then “Liberal” would have been it. They’re a good fit for what it traditionally means – in Europe: In favour of individual freedom, including the freedom to use the advantages you were born into. So, laissez-faire economics and no particular interest in your private life.

But he seems to be using it in the American sense, where the phrase liberal bias has come to be coded language for anything not conservative, Christian and pro-Republican. Witness Conservapedia, the online encyclopaedia invented to provide information free from Wikipedia’s liberal bias – by which they mean evolution and other non-Biblical aberrations. In this mindset, neutrality itself is liberal bias.

I don’t claim RTÉ have no problems with objectivity, and I am sure that Varadkar is not actually a Creationist. But it is more than worrying to see a politician adopting the rhetoric of wilful ignorance. Does he really want to align himself with the likes of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum?

Related articles
Categories
Technology

The Future Is Coloured Paper

No backlighting - it just looks like that

What with all the stuff this week, I almost missed a new technology for electronic paper – in colour – hitting the streets in Asia.

The current leader, E Ink, uses tiny black and white spheres suspended just below the display surface and carrying opposite charges. Applying a positive charge brings the white ones up, a negative the black. Thus the display is a pattern of dots just like printing on paper, reflecting ambient light rather than emitting it like normal screens.

This is thought to be more relaxing on the eyes, and so is the technology you’ll find on Kindles, Nooks, and most other e-readers. But it doesn’t work very well for colour. (The Nook Color or Kindle Fire use ordinary backlit displays.) You have to use filters, a subtractive process that leads to a dimmer display with very muted tones.

The Qualcomm technology – branded Mirasol, but also referred to by the fun term “microelectromechanical” – takes a whole new approach, using tiny mirror-cells that reflect light back at a different frequency (colour) when an electric charge is applied. The extra-clever bit – that frequency can be in the invisible ultraviolet, meaning the screen can “shine black”.

Does it work? Well the colours look a little washed out to me, like photographs in magazines from the 1950s. Actually, like photographs in magazines from the 1950s look now. It’s not exactly vibrant, but it’s quite a pleasant effect in a low-key, old-fashioned kind of way. I’d call it usable, we can live in hope of improvements.

And excitingly, Qualcomm say that the display refreshes (changes) fast enough for Web browsing or even video. The obvious question then is what this would be like on laptops, tablets and phones. Requiring no backlight could extend battery life drastically. Are we looking forward to portable computers with weeks-long battery life like today’s e-readers? According to their white paper (PDF) on the technology, once displaying a given colour a pixel in the Mirasol screen requires “almost no power” to maintain it. So yes, this technology may really be as parsimonious as E Ink.

But the display is not the only factor of course; such devices need more powerful processors than e-readers, which are basically just glorified page-turning machines after all. They have radios that need to be on a lot – in the case of phones, constantly. We’ll want them to run greedy applications like browsers. So I doubt we’ll soon be seeing a battery life of weeks. But a few days begins to sound like a real possibility. Wouldn’t that be nice? Soon we may have phones like the ones we had years ago!

Or more seriously, I can spend a day using the mobile Internet – perhaps even a trip of several days – without worrying about where I’ll find a friendly power outlet. I think I could put up with some muted colours for that.

Related articles