Undercharged

I was undercharged again today - while in a cafe with Mrs H seeking coffee and a light lunch. That’s the third time it has happened to one of us in the past month or so. In these days of contactless card payment I tend not to notice exact amounts unless a discrepancy is obvious but it surprises me how often the person behind the till doesn’t notice an undercharge until it is pointed out.

It’s the old mental arithmetic habit I suppose. One coffee, one tea, two lunches – no that can’t be right. The error flag seems to pop up in my mind without conscious effort then the mental arithmetic clicks in and out jumps the error. 

As a cafe owner once said to me - contactless isn't like spending money. For the young people behind many tills it probably isn't like receiving money either. I wonder if it ever goes the other way - overcharged without noticing? I should check but the mental arithmetic habit would probably take care of that too. I hope so.

Hols

We are in Norfolk at the moment on a short break. Took a few moments to admire steam locomotive Black Prince. I'm not sure what it is about these machines, because after all they are only machines, but something about them stirs the blood and I'm not even a steam buff.

The siren song of certainty

I’ve been too busy to post over the past few days but the story about Sinéad O'Connor converting to Islam caught my eye.

Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor has announced she has converted to Islam.
The artist, who is best known for her 1990 hit version of the song Nothing Compares 2 U, said she had changed her name to Shuhada'.

In a message on Twitter, she thanked fellow Muslims for their support.

She has said that her decision was "the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian's journey". and uploaded a video of herself singing the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer.

Her stated reason for converting is nonsense of course and as such is uninteresting, but there is a wider aspect because there appears to be a global fear of uncertainty. 

This fear seems to be evident in hostility to Donald Trump because he is seen to represent uncertainty where the emollient but ineffectual Obama did not. It seems to be evident in the Brexit debate where the EU is presented as a bastion of certainty while Brexit is not.

Yet progress requires us embrace uncertainty, requires us to embrace even tentative knowledge over political doctrine, faddish social memes or superstition. It requires us to tease apart uncertainties and discover what can be known in the hope that future generations will face their future knowing more than we do. In too many areas of life this is not the ideal being pursued but without it Western civilisation won’t work.

So if you're not good at driving it's not a big problem

When it first came out I thought the Sinclair C5 should have been something like this.

A few headlines

Samsung’s folding ‘Galaxy X’ phone rumoured to arrive next month

Huawei Will Not Sell New Flagship Smartphones in the U.S.

It’s Official: Huawei is Number Two in Smartphone Sales

We now have confirmation that Huawei has surpassed Apple to become the world’s second-biggest maker of smartphones: Gartner has belated weighed almost a month after IDC did, noting the same milestone.


World's longest sea crossing: Hong Kong-Zhuhai bridge opens


China 'has the edge' in the war for 5G and the US and Europe could fall behind

Dyson chooses Singapore for new electric car plant

Plastic recycling firms accused of abusing market
It comes as councils cut back their plastics recycling services amid a fall in demand for exports to China.

The problem with slogans

source

Coleman Hughes writing for Quillette has an interesting piece on deepities.

The word deepity, coined by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, refers to a phrase that seems true and profound but is actually ambiguous and shallow. Not to be confused with lies, clichés, truisms, contradictions, metaphors, or aphorisms, deepities occupy a linguistic niche of their own. The distinguishing feature of a deepity is that it has two possible interpretations. On the first reading, a deepity is true but trivial. On the second, it’s false but would be mind-blowing if it were true.

To my mind the piece is interesting but not because we need a word such as deepity. We don’t because we have far more well-known words such as slogan. What we gain by exploring the word deepity is to remind ourselves of misleading slogan structures. Hughes gives a good example - 

“No Human Being Is Illegal”

On one reading, this claim is undeniable. Legality is a concept that applies to actions, not people. People can be male or female, introverted or extroverted, blind or sighted; but they cannot be legal or illegal. Like the claims, “no act of kindness is red” and “no prime number is lethargic,” the claim, “no human being is illegal,” is simply a category error.

The term “illegal immigrant” is similarly misleading. It’s not the person that is illegal (whatever that could mean) but the act of moving across a border without following certain procedures. Since the claim “no human being is illegal” is neither true nor false, it literally cannot be denied—that is, you can no more argue that “some human beings are illegal” than you can argue that “some prime numbers are lethargic”—and because the claim is undeniable (in the literal sense), it can sound plausible, and even obvious.

But the second reading of this deepity asserts something extremely controversial: everyone should be able to go anywhere on Earth with no legal or procedural barriers; every border should be fully permeable; strangers should be able to occupy your property—after all, no human being is illegal, and strangers are still human beings when they’re on your property. Needless to say, even advocates of open borders would not endorse this view in full. But if the view were ethically correct, then it would have profound implications for property law, the existence of nation-states, and the very concept of personal space.

The whole piece is well worth reading, but we cannot know if placard wavers actually believe their crudely painted slogans or if they simply see them as a means to an end. Probably both, but in any event dismissing them as slogans isn’t going to make them go away. Dismissing them as deepities is even less likely to achieve that. So we do the analysis, use our own language, ratchet up the contempt and the world goes on as before.

This issue also highlights another, in that we cannot speak rationally with everyone because not everyone wishes to be rational, especially if they would have to analyse their own deepities. So we talk with those who listen and the deepity-mongers know that and make use of it. They always have and as far as we can tell they always will.

Faintly flash

Every now and then we see Jehovah's Witnesses park their cars and gather together for one of their periodic house-to-house visiting sessions. For some reason we are always slightly surprised at the cars they drive.

As their religion is presumably be a large part of their lives, we'd expect them to drive something excessively modest. Something small and old with paintwork the colour of an old potato sack for example. I don't know why - stereotypes and prejudice I suppose. Anyhow the expectation seems to be wrong.

From our limited experience Jehovah's Witnesses tend to drive cars which are very modest but not as modest as the basic model. Their cars are tinged with the very slightest hint of cautious flamboyance. Two tone paintwork and even a hint of sporty aspirations. The Toyota Aygo pictured above is a good example. Faintly flash.