Bob Dylan in Concert

I don't know what it is about Bob Dylan, but I love his recorded music.

Back in about 1998, a guy I went to school with told me that he had been to a Bob Dylan concert, and that he had sounded like a drunk, scratchy, old man. He's 13 years older, so he could only improve with age, right?

I went to his Melbourne concert tonight and bought a t-shirt (because that's what Pirates do), and I was expecting to be disappointed, and I wasn't disappointed.

His vocals sounded like he was clearing his throat. There's a line in Things Have Changed that goes "I've used a camera" which came out more like "hyoo KA!" He'd pause for a couple of seconds, and then spit out a whole line or two quickly, frustrating any attempt to sing along, and one of the first things that struck me, was about half way through Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, people started applauding, because they'd just realised what song was being sung. This was a theme throughout the night, with people realising at different times what the current song was, as not only were the vocals generally unintelligible, the arrangements made the songs effectively unidentifiable.

I am pretty sure that Bob Dylan can actually sing though. There were times when a relatively clear, melodic voice would come through, and I'd find myself wondering why he couldn't sing more like that, but knowing that the answer was why I was there: It's Bob Dylan. It's kind of like Prince with Kiss. The little snatches of clear vocals are the reward for listening to the rest of it.

There were quite a few songs that I didn't recognise at all though. I'm not sure if I really didn't know the songs, or I just couldn't recognise the croaky vocals and new arrangements.

All of this was no real problem though, as this is what I had expected to see. The most annoying thing about the concert was the ticket seller: Ticketek. When I booked, their servers were busy crapping themselves, so I resubmitted before checking my email account, and of course ended up double-booking. In order to get a refund, I searched their website trying to find contact details, and of course couldn't, as Ticketek implement every Dark Pattern they can think of. I'd booked silver tickets, because the gold tickets were listed as "allocation exhausted". A couple of weeks later, I noticed that there were gold tickets available, so I got around to using Google, and searched for Ticketek contact details there and managed to find an enquiry form, so I submitted my request to refund one set of tickets and hopefully upgrade the other set.

I got an auto-reply, which included a phone number, so I followed the dark-pattern-filled path that they had set for me. I called the number (132849, in case you're wondering), and about 6 times over 3 hours, it was engaged. I finally got through and was on hold for around an hour. When I spoke to someone there, he tried to tell me that they had a strict no refunds, no exchanges policy. I wouldn't accept that, so he spoke to a manager, which was just his way of putting me on hold for another 5 or so minutes. I got the refund for the duplicate tickets, but he said that they couldn't let me upgrade the other tickets. I tried to pull out the old "misleading and deceptive" advertising thing (as I was lead into buying tickets that I didn't particularly want, because the ones I wanted were falsely listed as sold out), so he said he'd speak to a manager again and get back to me within a day, which never happened. Eventually, someone got to my email response and told me there was a strict no exchange or refund policy, however they had already given me a refund on the extra tickets by that point. Anyway, the point of all this is that my seat was shit.

Overall, I'm glad I went. It was what I expected, and as such, it was quite humorous. Bob Dylan is a legend and it was good to see him before 2024, by which time, I think his voice may be a little rusty.

NBN Oversight

I'm all for faster internet access, but I have to say, I'm not convinced that the National Broadband Network is the best solution out there. $40B+ for faster internet is about $2000 per human in Australia, which could be spent in so many other ways, such as:

1. Providing solar power for every household in Australia;
2. Building affordable, luxury apartments to sell at cost to about half a million people,* solving our housing shortage and allowing more immigration;
3. Giving it to the states to improve hospitals, public transport, education etc.

Even if we want to spend billions on faster internet, it feels like there are better options, such as:

1. Relying on existing market development (after all, Optus has been upgrading their cable network to support up to 100mbit per second);
2. Wireless for the last (most expensive) mile;
3. Using a fraction of the money as incentives for companies to invest further money building out their own networks.

Of course, I'm concerned that by building one government controlled network, there will be little impediment to large-scale monitoring and tracking, and it will make it easier for the government to implement censorship systems.

But this rant isn't about those aspects of the NBN, so that said, I'm happy to assume that the NBN is a good enough plan with which to improve our nation's infrastructure, competition issues aside, because sometimes any plan is better than no plan.

What concerns me, is that I was just listening to parliament on the radio, and they were debating a motion to disallow some delegated legislation. The legislation in question is currently in place to stop the parliamentary Public Works Committee from being able to oversee the project, and maintain transparency throughout the process. The motion failed, so the biggest, most expensive project in the history of Australia will have no parliamentary oversight to ensure that the project is running according to plan, or according to budget. As it is, from the 40% of the NBN plan that has been released, it is apparently going to optimistically lose 3%,^ due to the cost of capital being higher than the gross profit, which doesn't sound like the best of projections, considering the size of the project.

Despite this, Labor was talking about having awesome transparency. This is what annoys me the most. There is so much about this project that is hidden, so by calling this a transparently-managed project is complete doublespeak. And most people just swallow it.

/rant


* 500k people = 200k apartments = 400 high-rises = $100M per building or $200k per apartment.
^ Look up the parliamentary proceedings from today to find references to any figures I am quoting.

Do Not Knock List

After yet another religious type coming to the door today trying to sell us their non-evidence-based beliefs, and some semi-frequent hassling by utility companies, I started thinking: If we can have a Do Not Call list, then why not a Do Not Knock list?

If people could put their addresses on a list to indicate a lack of interest for certain types of door-knockers, then the householders could avoid being annoyed and the door-knockers could avoid wasting their own time and being abused for disturbing people.

I'm not so concerned about restricting the freedom of people who really want to communicate with others by door-knocking for non-sales purposes, as a legislated Do Not Knock list would have the same kind of exceptions for non-commercial communication as the Do Not Call list, but all this could lead to helping marketers to identify a household's demographic, which would be undesirable.

So, as an intermediate step, I've knocked up the following:

I tried to put one together that would refer to utilities, but I'm not very good with graphic design, and I was having trouble showing power plugs, gas flames, mobile phones and similar. If you like the idea and put together some better imagery, write a comment to let me know.

In the mean time, print out the image and stick it to the outside of your front door if you'd like to avoid having people annoy you with religious crap while you're sleeping, eating or otherwise uninterested. If they still annoy you, I'd guess you have licence to go nuts at them.

Edit: I decided to do a search and noticed that there is already a Do Not Knock campaign. Support it if you are interested.

Another edit: Completely unrelated to this post, but I just want to ensure that Pratik the Ninja's site gets indexed in Google.

Ways to Prove Homoeopathy doesn't Work

These experiments are not intended to be fully double-blind compliant or anything, but they are more scientific than homoeopathy, as low a bar as that may be.

Method #1:

1. Make a solution containing 9 parts water and one part bowling ball.
2. Stir.
3. Extract a drop of solution.
4. To the drop, add 10 litres of water.
5. Repeat 3-4 several times to ensure that no bowling ball remains in the solution
6. Drink the solution: You will notice that nothing happens.

Now, post your own ways of disproving homoeopathy in the comments.

Palantir Technologies

I once went for an interview with Palantir Technologies.

It has great technology for visualisation of data. It can be used to allow operators to see connections in unstructured data where they might otherwise remain hidden.

I saw a demo on the website that showed the system being used for anti-terrorism purposes, and while I thought it looked very cool, it raised the question, which I asked during the interview: From where does the data come?

When people use this software, are they getting court orders for bank transactions, phone calls, emails etc.? The answer I received was about what I would expect: Palantir provides the software and it is up to the users to use it legally. That's totally fine with me. It's the same argument that can be used for guns, drugs (including alcohol and cigarettes), BitTorrent and cars.

I thought that there was nothing about the fact that Palantir makes software that can be used in corrupt, illegal ways to imply that the company itself, or its employees, were unethical.

So, it turns out that in this case, I seem to have been wrong.

Through documents that were obtained when Anonymous hacked the security firm HBGary Federal, it has been shown that Palantir was directly involved in plans to attack WikiLeaks in order to protect Bank of America, about whom WikiLeaks is believed to possess a trove of documents.

Since this has all become public, Palantir has apologised profusely for its part in the scheme. Is that enough though? Who wouldn't apologise when caught red-handed trying to illegally attack another organisation? Surely the test for ethical behaviour is conducted when you don't think anyone else is watching. That's one of the main arguments for promoting the right to privacy: To enable people to choose to be good, rather than just forcing them to be, with no conscious thought.

In this case, Palantir's private actions came out, and it has failed the test. As it stands, no mere apology can compensate for its complicity.

If it truly wants to redeem itself, Palantir should put its money where its mouth is: Donate a large amount of money to organisations like EFF or WikiLeaks.

So, to Palantir CEO Alex Carp, put your money where your mouth is. Don't just talk up freedom of speech. Actively support it.