Hooptedoodle #188 - The Psychopath Test

This note follows from a conversation I had with my wife, and an email I sent to Rod, so I must start by apologising to those individuals for recycling the same material into a blog post. Waste not, want not, my grandmother used to say.

I have recently read Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test – a friend recommended it, and I found it a worthwhile, absorbing read. It is, admittedly, written rather in the style of Bill Bryson (Notes from the World of Psychiatry?), but it is entertaining, informative and thought provoking all at the same time. The big messages for me were the surprising numbers of scary people who make it into positions of power and influence, and the extent to which the psychiatry and pharmaceutical industries have exploited public fear of mental illness, and have (apparently) even invented disorders – especially in childhood – whose very existence is debated, but which produce a very considerable revenue.

I am not going to trot out a full review – my mind doesn’t seem to work like that. I will mention, however, some small disquiet I felt as I was working my way through Bob Hare’s psychopathy checklist, which is an established diagnostic tool, especially in criminal psychiatry – it struck me that it seems remarkably crude, for a resource which is so highly valued and which actually results in people being placed in institutions – but then, what do I know? I also found, as I was going through the checklist, that a fair number of the characteristics described might apply to me. Good heavens, that one sounds like me as well.

No, no - that's a cycle path

Of course, I played it down to myself, but I was really quite relieved when I came to a section which stated that, if the reader was growing concerned that they might themselves have psychopathic tendencies, then they almost certainly did not, since a true psychopath would not have been concerned.

So that’s all right then – now I wasn’t worried at all. Then I started to consider, how would a psychopath have reacted to the news that anyone who was worried was probably not a psychopath? Would they then have become worried, since they had not been concerned about the checklist questions, or are psychopaths unlikely to be worried about something as cerebral as a book anyway? Should I be worried about the exact point at which I ceased being worried? Hmmm.

That's more like it - there's a man who had an accident with the ketchup bottle

By this stage I had finished reading anyway, so I have stopped worrying now. I’ll go back to worrying about my book about quantum mechanics, which was the worry I interrupted with this most recent book, though I am faintly puzzled to learn that The Psychopath Test is to be a film, starring Scarlett Johansson. I shall leave out the obligatory picture of Ms Johansson, since no-one else will.

I drafted this post yesterday, and this morning I find that my timing was inopportune. I am sickened, like everyone else, by the news coverage of the live execution of a TV news team in Virginia – having heard the BBC talking, once again, about “media coverage”, I am keeping the TV switched firmly off until things quieten down. I am upset by the event, the coverage, the reaction and the implications.

Apparently, this is what a TV looks like when it's switched off

Of course, this is a tragedy involving people in the news industry, so the TV people are very focused on that; they happen to have been rather attractive, young people, which makes the story even more interesting – complete with statements from fiancés, tributes from neighbours and former schoolfriends, etc; most obvious of all, the availability of a clip showing someone being killed on live TV is too much to resist – the media will get as close to the boundaries of the law and public decency as they can to outdo each other. I am not going to invite death threats again by lamenting the gun situation in the USA, but I observe that the perpetrator was a black guy, which will have been duly noted by those who keep score and those who support the present gun laws.

I wonder – to give us a context, how many unpublicised fatal shootings take place each day in the US? I also wonder – since I am now a bit of an expert – are the psychopaths the people who:

(1) Kill people on live TV?

(2) Televise the shooting in as explicit a manner as possible, to score viewing figures?

(3) Watch it again and again, to catch new details?

(4) Think about doing something similar?

(5) Keep the TV switched off, to avoid being confronted by it?

The questions are, of course, rhetorical – I do not expect anyone to provide answers. Thanks, anyway – if you are upset by this post, please purchase a bunch of flowers from your local filling station, and place them in front of your TV.

Just out of interest, I thought I’d have a look this morning to see if there are any prominent black members of the NRA. I got depressed before I’d formed a clear opinion, so I’ve done with the subject. Back to quantum mechanics.

Hooptedoodle #187 – But Clouds Got in My Way

The Technology Illusion

When I first started driving, I owned a series of fairly dodgy pre-owned cars, and – though I sometimes look back on this period with some affection – the reality is that a journey was far more of an act of faith than I would be prepared to put up with now.

A number of things have moved on, of course: the technology has improved, the reliability of robot-built, computerised vehicles is unrecognisably better, the roads are better, the annual “MoT” tests have put most unserviceable vehicles off the road in the UK, and the whole approach to motoring has changed. When I consider the risks I put my young family through back in the 1970s I cannot help but shudder - driving in the Scottish Highlands in a Renault 12 which only worked some of the time, or travelling to France in an ancient 1300cc Cortina (yes, 1300cc - that’s about 1.5 horsepower with a tailwind, in a 2 ton vehicle consisting mostly of angle-iron girders, packed to the gunnels with kiddies’ high-chairs, camping equipment, and actual people).

It was not possible to go motoring in those days unless you had a working knowledge of distributors, carburettor jets, hydraulic bleed nipples and a whole catalogue of suspect bits. Far too often a long journey would require an early stop in a layby somewhere, with the bonnet up, trying to find where the power had gone, or what the strange noise was – or had we imagined it? The AA patrols were like guardian saints in the wilderness – if you got to your destination without some kind of mechanical catastrophe then you felt you ought to go to evening mass to give thanks. Those cars I had were really not fit for purpose – I used to lie awake, in my tent on my holiday campsite, wondering where in the Jura mountains I could get hold of an alternator for an obsolete British Ford, whether the brakes would make it all the way to Lausanne, whether the water-pump leak was serious, whether the exhaust pipe repair would last. If you listened really hard, you could hear these jalopies rusting. The only bits of the bodywork which were not rusting were the bits that had already rusted away and been replaced with fibreglass and porridge.

Nowadays, a car consists of a number of sealed boxes. Nobody really knows what they do – they are made by robots in a factory far away. If your car causes problems, which is very much less likely now, it is no use hoping to have a techie discussion with a proper mechanic about the distributor rotor – the mechanics are just fitters these days, and no-one remembers what a distributor was – diagnostics are carried out by plugging in a laptop computer, which will tell the man which box he needs to replace; if he has one in the store-room then you might get your car back today, otherwise he will email the supplier for one and you’ll get it back tomorrow.

It’s a different thing altogether, and I cannot pretend that it is not better. It seems to me that in the 1970s the reality of owning a car was that you had to understand, more or less, how it worked, or else you had to have a friend who could understand on your behalf. You were the direct successor to a whole line of men wearing their caps back to front, who knew that being a proper motorist required that you were also some kind of engineer. Now we are completely at the mercy of the repair-shop’s laptop, and everything is expensive, but at least we are excused the need to know how a car works, and – most importantly – we can now almost afford to take for granted that when we set out on a journey we are going to arrive at the far end.

The man with his cap back to front is a useful icon for my view of technology. When my father moved up to Scotland, in 2001, I took my laptop around to his new house to sort out a few issues with utility suppliers and so forth, and he was very interested in it. My dad was a very smart man – he was an electronics engineer who worked latterly for the UK Atomic Energy people, and he had lived through the development of computers. He had been involved with some of the earlier commercial applications of computers, performing forecast estimates of electrical supply requirements for power stations, doing mathematical modelling of reactor performance and so on. The computers he had worked with were the size of a room, with cabinets full of tape drives and deafening air-conditioning, and you communicated with them via punched paper tape or punched cards, but he knew all about computers.

My laptop intrigued him. “So what is it?” he asked, “Is it a word-processor, or a calculator, or an information storage device? – what is it?”

I said it was all these things, and could do a whole pile more – all we needed to do was provide a suitable application program, and the scope was almost limitless. I tried to explain conceptually what the functional bits of the machine were, and how an operating system glued everything together as “services” for the end-user. I also emphasised that I was not any kind of engineer, though I used computers a lot, and in fact earned my living with them. My dad was disturbed by the fact that he really couldn’t grasp this at all. For a start, anyone who was not any kind of engineer was probably beneath contempt, but he found it a surprise – and not a very comfortable surprise – that he was in a room with a small device costing a few hundred pounds, the nature of which he couldn’t get a feel for at all.

So he fell back on the engineering bit – “How does it work?” – and when my dad said how does it work, he meant semiconductors, bits of wire, transistors and logic gates (or their modern equivalent), diodes. When I admitted that I really didn’t know, had never built one and would be terrified to open one up, he snorted and jammed his cap firmly on, back to front, and that was the end of his interest in computers. 

One alarming aspect of the passage of time is that we catch ourselves turning into our fathers. We use the Internet a lot here – well, as much as our rural broadband allows – and the other night the Contesse was doing some digging into her family history, and found that she had a great-uncle who served in France in WW1. She found him on a Roll of Honour listing the WW1 service of people who were natives of Morayshire (North East Scotland), though he was a sapper in the Canadian Army. She had no record of this great-uncle previously – he does not appear on any family trees which have been produced to date – so this was all interesting and new.

Good. Very good – but it occurred to me that we would have been unable to explain to my dad, for example, what we had just done. Not least, this is because I for one simply don’t really know. Where did the information come from? – where has it been stored? – how does the search engine work? how does the information get organised and returned? – and how does it happen so fast? Don’t know. I have a vague, doodly idea of how all this works, but I don’t wish to understand it in detail – I am an end-user; I only need to know how to make use of it. My dad would certainly have regarded the term end-user as derogatory. He would have realised that the information had not somehow been stored in some dark place within the Contesse’s laptop, but his attention would have been focused on how the Internet worked rather than how to make use of it. His cap was worn the wrong way round for an end-user. He would have found the Internet wonderful, and intriguing, but would have been distracted by the nuts and bolts. Well, clouds.

Today my son comes to tell me that he has some good news in connection with his computer. Normally the words “good news” and “computer” do not sit together well in this context, but on this occasion I am well impressed. He lost his mobile phone a few months ago – a severe upset which, of course, we all got to experience to the full. A big theme of last week was trying to get Windows 10 to work on his laptop – we succeeded after a lot of research and some in-fighting. As a consequence, he now finds that his Microsoft account includes access to a cloud-type facility (is that the word?) called OneDrive which was available to users of Windows 8 (which was used by his lost phone) but not Windows 7, as his laptop was previously. Now, to his delight, he finds that he has access to all the photos and documents he lost with his phone, since they had all been faithfully hoovered up into OneDrive, without his knowledge or intervention, and are sitting there waiting – like Greyfriars Bobby – for what? Again, I would have had dreadful trouble explaining to my dad where they have been, or how we came to get them back. It doesn’t matter, but I can feel my cap starting to turn a bit…

It would now be possible to go on at great length about the illusory tech-savvy to which a complete generation now appears to attach great prestige, and about how these people are the endest of end-users – my dad would have worried about them – he would even have worried on their behalf, since they do not appear to know quite what it is they are doing. Maybe it doesn’t matter, after all – maybe we don’t need real technicians – maybe we just keep throwing the stuff away and getting our credit card to buy a new one, and trust in the Cloud.

I won’t do that. I’d like to end with an affectionate story about the first time my mother met my SatNav unit. This was about 8 years ago, back in the days when my mum still went out. She was introduced to Martina, the very polite, calm, English voice which my Garmin uses to give instructions. Mum was very impressed, listening to the Voice of Martina as we drove along.

“She’s very good, isn’t she? – she seems very calm, and she must have an awful lot of people to deal with at the same time. Where is she?”

No, no, I said – she wasn’t anywhere; the voice was a computerised thing that lived in the little black box in my car. The only thing that was outside the car was a satellite – or maybe two satellites – I couldn’t remember.

“Good heavens,” said my mum, “you mean the woman is in a satellite?”

No, no – there is no-one in the satellite - the only thing the satellite does is send a signal which says “here I am”, and probably sends an accurate time signal – everything else is done inside the car. I was very much aware that my father would have been very unconvinced by my description, but I stuck with it.

“So there is no woman, then?” said Mum.

No – it is a series of digital recordings of a real woman’s voice, but it is a little computer making the noises. The system is just (just!) a satellite system and a little box on my windscreen.

My mother thought about this for a while, and then said, “No – I can’t see how that would work at all – there must be a woman somewhere who knows where your car is.”

So that was that. Nothing further to discuss about SatNavs.

Hooptedoodle #186 - Alice Is a Singer

This is not Alice - it is someone else

On Wednesday I received a piece of spam email from Alice, from whom I have had no contact for some years (I am delighted to say). There seems to be a virus of some type going about which sends junk portal-scam mail to the entire contacts list on someone’s smartphone, and this is why I heard from Alice. Well, of course, I didn’t really hear from Alice at all, but I was reminded of her.

Alice is a singer, of sorts. Mostly I try to keep my musical activities out of this blog, because I don’t really expect them to be of much interest and they are almost certainly an irrelevance too far. However, as in all walks of life, I have met some colourful people there as well.

Alice represents that much-abused sub-class, the girl who fancied being the singer with a band, but didn’t have the talent for the job. She has the complete profile – pleasant, untutored voice, no grasp at all of musical theory or even of rhythm, and deplorable taste. Oh – and dreadful, unpredictable tantrums. She must have been encouraged over the years by proud parents, envious school friends, drunken workmates, heartless people in the pub on holiday; I doubt that she needed much encouragement - I am confident that she sings like a megastar in the shower. It’s just that she has, to use a technical musical term, not a bloody clue. Not a Scooby.

This is how Alice sees herself, I believe...

I am lucky enough to have met and played with some excellent female singers – Carol Kidd and Maggie Mercer and Melanie O’Reilly were class acts by any standard – but as a species girl singers seem to have more head-crashers and plate-throwers than you would expect. Working with one also involves the more immediate problem that songs you have known and played all your life in the written key of F are suddenly in A-flat (etc).

Alice used to talk about her love of “jazzy” music – which usually got about as far from the Radio 2 mainstream as Billy Joel, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, Crystal Gayle. I asked her if she liked, or listened to, Billie Holiday or Ella, and she sort of glazed over and said she would like to sing Every Time We Say Goodbye. So we ran through it – disaster; she could sing the notes, but the phrasing of the first line is tricky – attempt to sing it from instinct and you can easily find you have lost a bit and are now a bar ahead of the band (especially if, like Alice, you are unable to hear the chord changes), with the inevitable traffic accident approaching. I commented that she couldn’t just sing a line of a song, take a breath and immediately start the next line – it was necessary to fit in with the structure, so sometimes she might have to count (silently, of course!) “two – three – four – one” or something and then come in.  Glazing-over time once again – she had no idea what I was on about.

I first became associated with Alice because she was rehearsing with a pianist who is a friend of mine, and he asked me could I help out – apart from anything else, perhaps I could sort out some of the horrible arrangements in her book and also (let’s be honest here) I was friendly with a pro double bass player who would be even more of an asset than me if he wished to join in. I had some spare time available, so I got involved.

Ouch.

We did a couple of small jobs in local pubs which went OK – Alice was very unsure of herself, and had a fragile, lost quality which went down rather well. But she very quickly turned into a budding celebrity, a monster.

We did a biggish show in a hotel ballroom in a nearby town. She was terribly nervous – especially because her boyfriend’s parents had bought tickets. So she drank about three-quarters of a bottle of red wine before we went on. Horrifying – my bass-playing chum was making his first appearance with us, and he was so furious that he has not spoken to me since. We scraped through the show, largely on sympathy, I think. But Alice was convinced she was now on a rocket ship to stardom. We held a series of grinding rehearsals to sort out and strengthen her repertoire – in fact “rehearsals” is not quite the right term here. A rehearsal is, or should be, a polishing-up of material which you already know. These rehearsals consisted of tentative attempts at hopeless projects – often the same things we had screwed up the week before – and there was an increasing tension, plus numerous hissy fits. At one point the pianist and I were trying to correct the chords in her train-wreck arrangement of Autumn Leaves, and she suddenly started shouting that we should stop faffing about, and just get on with playing it. We protested gently, on the grounds that until we had a sensible version of the piece we had nothing to get on with, and on the more accessible grounds that the audience would know these songs well enough to realise that we were buffoons.

Next appearance was at an outdoor concert at a local seaside resort, in aid of a national charity. It was pouring with rain. I don’t know if Alice had been at the refreshment again, but she was unbelievable. She missed all her starting notes, sang verses in the wrong order, missed sections out - all our rehearsed endings and key modulations vanished without trace. She even introduced a couple of songs with drivel such as “we’ve only practised this song once, so it may not go very well!” – she was, of course, correct, as the forewarned listeners will have recognised. She was also a bit unfortunate in that the rain rendered some of her lyric sheets unreadable. I can clearly remember staring out at the audience, all with their anorak hoods up, sitting in the downpour looking as glum as I felt, and I was hoping like hell that no-one there knew me or recognised me. A paper bag for my head would have been welcome – the only saving grace was that a girl singer gets about 90% of the attention, so the sidemen are pretty much invisible. Even so, I have rarely spent an hour wishing more passionately that I were somewhere else entirely.

I left fairly abruptly at the end, and I phoned the pianist and said I was very sorry, but I really didn’t want to do this any more. Alice was very cross indeed, and was going to give me a piece of her mind for letting them down, but it came to nothing, and she probably didn’t have a piece to spare.

She is still around – she has a Facebook page which promotes her cabaret act, which she still insists is jazzy, and she seems to get work, so maybe she got better. I don’t really care. I hope her phone virus problem clears up OK.

In affectionate tribute to all the wannabe girl singers over the years who have struggled with the gulf between their dreams and their ability, here is the wonderful Jo Stafford, in the guise of the well-intentioned but awful Darlene Edwards, who provides a perfect demonstration of all the trademark clichés. Enjoy.

I've Given This Some Thought

Hooptedoodle #184 – Donkey Award – Edinburgh Residents’ Parking

Righto – two things right up front:

(1) I lived in Edinburgh for nearly 30 years, though I rarely drive into the city these days. Outdated knowledge of a place is confusing – you have to accept that you are a stranger, and read the traffic signs carefully, as a stranger would.

(2) I have very little patience with the eternal chorus of whingeing on behalf of the poor, oppressed motorist; I take my share of the collective blame, but our environment and (especially) our cities are being steadily destroyed by the motor car – something has to change soon, though I’m not convinced the things which are done at present achieve much beyond producing short-term revenue for the authorities.

This week I drove my van into Edinburgh City Centre on two occasions. Parking is a nightmare, which is hardly a surprise, but I was struck by a strange anomaly [I should be more careful – these anomalies get everywhere]. Edinburgh is a bit unusual since a lot of the central areas are residential – i.e. people live there (like). During the working day it is evident that there are a lot of empty parking spaces, but they are all marked PERMIT HOLDERS ONLY, which means residents.

I am intrigued by this. A large (and expanding) area of the city contains apartments and blocks of flats which have no gardens or garaging, and parking on the street requires a permit from the City Council. The cost depends on the location, and also on the size and emission level of the vehicle. It will normally be hundreds of pounds for a year – a vehicle of 3 litres or over will cost about £450 for a year’s parking. Application for a second vehicle for the same household costs 125% of the normal rate. You get the idea.

This is a hefty outlay – what the residents get for this is not an earmarked space, but a notional share in a number of parking spaces which is deemed adequate for the street. You have no control over who parks outside your house, but the detailed permits should be clearly displayed in the vehicles, and – in theory – there should be enough spaces available somewhere around.

Ah, but...

The PERMIT HOLDERS ONLY regulation applies between 7am and 6:30pm Monday to Saturday, and not at all on a Sunday. If one of the permit holders drives away to work, only another permit holder for that street will be allowed to occupy the space he has vacated. This means that, in areas where most residents drive to work, there is a lot of unuseable parking space of this type during the day – as I saw on my visits.

It also means, since anyone can park in these spaces after 6:30pm (the regulations stop at that time), anyone arriving home from work after 6:30pm will find that his street is full of parked cars, which do not require a permit, and thus he should not expect to get a space. Many of the parked cars will belong to permit holders from other streets, who arrived home a little earlier to find that their own street was full.

Therefore an outlay of some hundreds of pounds can be expected to result in an empty, unused space being available somewhere near your house during time when you are likely to be at work, and no space at all during the evening when you get home. I’m sure I haven’t quite thought this through, but there is something counter-intuitive about this arrangement.

Presumably this parking permit deal exists in other parts of the world beyond Edinburgh?

Hooptedoodle #183 - The Revenge of The Typing Pool

This morning I have nothing to offer but a brief rant. I shall make some token attempt to pick my words carefully, because it is a subject area where I have little intuitive feel for the expected degree of political correctness, and I fear that I may be guilty of providing insufficient balance in my views. I seek no comfort, and I offer no solutions – I wish merely to let off steam for a moment and then move blithely on, and let us hear no more about it.

When I was a young man, setting out on my professional career, I was required to be courageous and wise – sometimes beyond my years and experience. That in itself was a little stressful, but by far the most terrifying thing I used to have to do was to venture into The Typing Pool. In there, the smoke pollution and noise levels were very high, and the chatter was approximately a musical fifth above the pitch I was used to elsewhere. None of this in itself was too dangerous, but if you had ever caught even a hint of the conversation in there you would have rushed out screaming. If your brain was not actually destroyed on the spot you were still likely to run away to sign up for some silent order or other – preferably on a remote island.

The chatter was completely – and I do mean completely – without any import or redeeming merit. It was talk of shoes, and shampoo, and the trashiest of TV programmes, and endless, outrageous, poisonous gossip about anyone and everyone. I still shudder to think of it.

Well, the years pass, and one writes these things off to experience, and after a while I didn’t have to go in there any more. Rank does have its privileges. Eventually, technology changes actually meant that The Typing Pool was a thing of the past, and I began, in idle moments, to wonder:

(a) could it really have been as bad I remembered?

(b) whatever happened to the people who used to work in there? – what else could they possibly do? – were they all right?

I still ponder this occasionally, but as time passes I have become convinced that the people from The Typing Pool (or their direct descendants) are doing very nicely, thank you, and they now run the newspapers and the TV companies. It is now beginning to dawn on me that they have taken over my Internet Service Provider too.

My new-look email service from BT Internet now opens up with the glories of Yahoo News – there is no escape. If someone put a tabloid newspaper through my letterbox bearing the same trash I would chase them down the path with a garden hoe, but I am expected to grit my teeth and live with this as part of my everyday email presentation. I realise that BT (or Yahoo, or probably both) make advertising money from this garbage, and I’m sure they have some clever marketing people who know exactly how to optimise customer satisfaction and ad revenue, but it is also worth remembering that I do pay rather a lot of money for the service, and their choice of news and adverts does not sit well with me, given that our rural broadband speed is struggling to cope with the things we actually want.

Could you possibly have Schwartzheim’s Disease? – Doctors make shock discovery – that is a damned lie.

See intimate shots of Kate and William at Garden Party – no – give me a break.

This cute kitten was rescued from the Thames – it will probably die anyway.

Guide to 10 things your body language says about you – take our test – no – my body hasn’t said anything for years.

Watch the worst open-goal miss in the history of Egyptian league football – no.

Would you wear this £10 dress to Ascot? – no – bugger off.

See the 20 biggest dress mistakes from the BAFTAs! – no – bugger off.

Watch this video of a motorcyclist falling into a vat of glue – no – bugger off.

See this 50-year-old-woman who has discovered astonishing anti-wrinkle trick – no – bugger off.

And much, much more. You can’t fool me – it was long ago, but I have had glimpses of this level of sophistication and good taste before, in the distant past.

Just out of interest – is there an ISP out there with any class at all? I am very much afraid that mine is one of the better ones. No wonder I get depressed.