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• Ex-BBC DJ Greening dies aged 44 - Kevin Greening was the best thing to happen to the Radio 1 Breakfast Show for years. Shame he only lasted a year. Very sad to hear of his premature death.
• The Megapixel Myth - More on the myth that more megapixels makes better pictures.
• Ban helps more smokers quit habit - It wasn’t until I went to The Netherlands last week that I remembered how nasty and smoky British pubs and restaurants used to be.
• The more pixels, the worse the images - The mega-pixel race has been hurting consumers, and is one of the reasons that I’ve been more than happy to stay with “only” 6MP on my Canon EOS 300D.

Do you remember where you were when you heard that Diana had died? I do. I woke up on the Sunday and switched on the radio over breakfast. Nothing but slow, miserable songs on Radio 1. And Capital. And Heart. Indeed, every channel I tried — and there are a lot in London. The occasional announcement that “due to recent events it wasn’t appropriate to continue with the usual programming” did little to enhance my understanding of what had happened.

After some time a flatmate emerged from his room and told me of the events in Paris that night. Many people, and not just the Daily Mail reading minority, seemed to feel the grief in a very personal way, much as one would a relative or friend. Walking in Kensington became a risky activity due to the large number of flowers covering the pavements and teary well-wishers stopping suddenly.

But my own mood failed to sync with that of the nation. Sure it was sad, but in the same way that I would be sad at the death of an actor from a seventies sitcom that I was only vaguely aware of. My reaction may sound callous, but I can’t fake it. I recognise that she helped raise the public understanding of AIDS and the plight of many countries still littered with land mines, but ultimately I didn’t know her. I never met her. And I couldn’t relate to her privileged lifestyle.

I didn’t want her to die but in the end she’s just one of many people that I didn’t know that died in 1997. There are thousands of road deaths in Europe every year and hundreds of thousands in Africa due to contaminated water, drought and civil war. I think it’s time that we paid more attention to them.

Last night we went to see the recording of a new BBC Radio 4 comedy programme called “His Master’s Voice.” It’s the first time that I’ve ever been to the Drill Hall (on Chennies Street in London) although I’ve heard many broadcasts of “Just A Minute” that were recorded there.

The programme itself is a political satire set in the offices of “The Blue Touch Paper,” the weekly magazine for the thinking Tory. I don’t want to give too much of the story away because I want you to tune in when it airs in July!

The script was pretty good, with a good number of laugh-out-loud moments, especially in the second episode. Afterwards we were debating whether that was just because we were more familiar with the material or not. It was also interesting to see some of the production process as they had to re-record some lines at the end of each of the two episode we saw. Even we were not blameless as at the end our applause was so loud that it crashed the end credits!

As we bundled into Goodge Street tube station to escape the May rain and head home, we saw about half of the main cast ahead of us. B shouted “Good Show!” but I don’t think they heard. An unusual end to a fun evening. Thanks for getting the tickets, C!

In this article in MacUser Howard Oakley notes that a number of schools have recently banned the use of wireless networks due to the unknown effects of the radio waves used. He then connects this with the declining number of people taking science subjects at those same schools and their ability to understand the likely risks of said networks.

It’s an interesting piece, but what I find interesting is that as the general populations understanding of how the world works dwindles, so our reliance on high technology increases¹.

One incredible thing is that sometimes we start moving to a highly technical solution despite there being little advantage in it. Or at least as far as I can see, the advantage is that it is digital and new.

My favourite example is that of electronic voting machines. It’s easy to point and laugh at all the problems that they’ve been causing, particularly in the recent elections in the US. But despite the problems, despite every indication that they often choose who wins an election rather than the electorate, there is still a drive to increase their use.

The main thing that I want to know about the voting machines is this. What problem are they solving? What part of the old system was so broken that it required a complicated, flawed and unreliable new system?²

Some say that the current system is inefficient or labour intensive or slow. Unfortunately, as far as I can see, that’s either untrue or by design. The system needs to be both anonymous and yet track fraud, two ends of the privacy spectrum. The model in use is similar to public key cryptography in that working out who made a particular vote is not impossible. In fact, in principle, it’s very easy. But unless you have plenty of time to manually check thousands of ballot papers it’s going to take a while. This is by design.

Similarly, the effort required to count the votes in the first place is also a benefit. It makes it more difficult for any individual to have a dramatic effect on the final outcome. This is a good thing.

And slow? It’s simple to make quicker: throw more people at it. That makes it quicker and reduces any inherent bias.

I love new technology and gadgets, I’m fascinated by how they work and the effect that some of them have on society. But in the end, you have to use the right tool for the job. And the right tool does not always have an embedded computer.

1. As this article asks, in relation to decreasing interesting in science degrees, “do they just totally not care about where things like web search and MP3 codecs and 3D graphics and peer-to-peer protocols come from”?↩
2. It’s also worth noting that before the new electronic machines, the US had problems. Remember the “hanging chads” problem with Bush’s first election? That was a flaw in a method of automatically counting votes.↩

I was sad to see the passing of Linda Smith. I never saw any of her stand up work but I heard her frequently on Just a Minute and The News Quiz, where she was always sharp and funny.

Jeremy Hardy called her “the wittiest and brightest person working on TV or radio panel games” which really isn’t very far from the mark.

Guardian Unlimited | Obituaries | Linda Smith (Jeremy Hardy)

Independent Online Edition > Media (Louise Jury)

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | ‘Her mind was extraordinary’ (Jeremy Hardy again!)