So far, so handy. Handier still is the fact that these Google Calculator features can also be accessed in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Want a cell in your spreadsheet to show the value of $250 (US) in pounds sterling? Enter this in the cell:

=GoogleFinance("CURRENCY:USDGBP")*19.9

Great! Now you can, for instance, compare the cost of international products or services no matter which currency they’re given in.*

Want a second cell to show what 1lb is in kg? Enter this in the second cell:

=GoogleLookup("1lb","in kg")

There’s a gotcha here, though. The above will give you 0.45kg. That’s not just 0.45 with a cosmetic kg: it’s as though you’d typed 0.45kg into the cell. Having some non-numerical information in the cell (the kg part) makes Google Docs treat the entire contents of the cell as text rather than numerical data. That means you can’t use it for mathematical calculations unless you process it first to strip away the non-numerical part. Here’s an example of how to do that:

=substitute(GoogleLookup("1lb","in kg"),"kg","")

Now, go forth and multiply!

* If I’m not mistaken, Google updates its currency information 20 minutes after the live currency exchange markets. This means you probably shouldn’t use Google Docs for, say, currency trading… but since ethically speaking you probably shouldn’t trade currencies anyhow, I won’t be sorry if you make a fat loss on the currency markets by trying to use Google Docs as your analysis platform.

Let’s dissect that assertion, shall we? It’s designed to transfer responsibility away from the metal and on to the user. But is it fair? Are guns really no more dangerous than spoons?

Give somebody an ordinary dessert spoon, even one loaded with chocolate peanut butter ice cream or some other such popular and unhealthy foodstuff, and that person will not become suddenly fat, even if they use it on themselves. I’ve spooned ice cream like that into my body on multiple occasions, and I’ve never been particularly fat.

Give somebody an ordinary loaded gun, on the other hand, and if they use it on themselves they may well become suddenly dead.

Factor in human frailty – the capacity to make a mistake – and the risk of a gun killing someone (this poor boy, for instance) is obviously infinitely larger than the likelihood of somebody becoming fat because of an instance of misusing of a spoon.

Finally, lets compare the severity of the outcomes. Being fat isn’t necessarily a big deal, as Health At Every Size research shows, and even if it does bother you, you stand a good chance of being able to do something about it. Being dead, on the other hand, is so universally undesirable that everyone reading this – yes, you – is without doubt currently pursuing multiple strategies to try to avoid it.

… and after a moment’s thought, I’ve identified it. It is that voterpower.org.uk takes as a premise the falsehood that 1≠1 (i.e. 1 vote ≠ 1 vote; I quote: “statistical analysis by the new economics foundation shows that one person in the UK does not have one vote”). Believe a premise like that, and politics is the least of your problems. Each British citizen has one vote in a general election, by law.

On another note, I’ve never been a huge fan of first past the post, but no other voting system – proportional representation, for instance – is a perfect panacea: after all, which kind of proportional representation should one choose?

I find that the mathematics of voting can be astonishingly bizarre and intricate even without the doublethinking rubbish promulgated by sensationalist sources like voterpower.org.uk. It’s a shame that the New Economics Foundation is tarnishing its reputation with that kind of codswallop.

History can be viewed as matter of fact; or as interpretative; or as literary. Surely it can be viewed in other ways too - for instance, some people regard it as being essentially unimportant - but here I want to consider these three views. I should add that although I focus here on Darwin, much of what follows is applicable to all other (historical) figures, not least among them Emma Darwin and the other characters we meet in Creation.

There are, as Randal Keynes has put it to me, at least three Darwins: the Darwin of his published work, the Darwin of his correspondence, and the Darwin of his notebooks. These are in roughly increasing order of intimacy. They are also in roughly increasing order of knowledge assumed and therefore, one might say, in roughly decreasing order of penetrability for the non-Darwin scholar. (Fortunately, much valuable work continues to be done by professional Darwin scholars to provide the necessary contextual information to render the letters, notebooks and even the publications accessible to non-specialists.)

I view this trinity of Darwins as being compounded by a trio of fearsome multipliers: the multiplier of moments in Darwin's life, the multiplier of individual interpretations of Darwin, and the multiplier of the interpreter's days. I will discuss these briefly.

By talking of the multiplier of moments in Darwin's life, I mean that at each moment Darwin - as with all people - was maturing, physically and mentally. If we take the Darwin of his correspondence, we find that he was in a great many ways not the same in, say, 1836 as he was in 1866. Taking a smaller span yields smaller differences, but the point remains: a living human being is dynamic, not static - and is therefore somewhat new and different at each turn.

The multiplier of of individual interpretations of Darwin recognises the subjectivity inherent in learning. The Darwin of Janet Browne's biography is not the same as that of Desmond and Moore's accounts. Nor is either of them the Darwin of Annie's Box; and the latter is in turn not the Darwin of Creation. It is plausible that each person who learns about Darwin imagines him slightly differently; partly because of learning about him from different sources, perhaps, but also because of associating the information in those sources with understanding gained by personal experience, which necessarily differs from person to person.

By referring to the multiplier of the interpreter's days, I really mean the multiplier of moments in the interpreter's life. Darwin is not alone in being a dynamic human being. Each of us modifies his or her view of the world continually, prompted by experience. I feel confident in hypothesising that the mental models Janet Browne has of Darwin now are not the same set that she had when she finished writing her biography of him, and that those are again not the same as the ones she had before she embarked upon the biography. You needn't be a professional historian of natural history to change your mental model of Darwin in the light of new information about him, whether this new information comes from external sources or is produced analytically in your own mind. For instance, each person who sees Creation may well, as I did, find that it adds new sensory elements to his or her mental model of Darwin. (They may also find that some parts of it clash with existing elements, not least because Creation is a literary, imaginative - and thus somewhat novel - account of Darwin.)

These multipliers are fearsome because of the quantity of multiplication they produce. From three Darwins (which is more than enough to keep a small army of historians and modern scientists very busy indeed), we have in addition at least one Darwin in the mind of every person who has thought about Darwin, and in many cases multiple Darwins in each of those minds: new Darwins produced by shifts in the insights the thinker, and new Darwins for each moment of Darwin's development. Mathematically, assuming the number of ideas ever held by people is finite, this is an infinite but countable number of Darwins. Practically speaking, it is an uncountable number of Darwins.

The three views of history I mentioned earlier are all valid to some extent. History may indeed be factual: it may be objectively true that some things happened and others didn't. Yet even if we were there when those things happened, our accounts of them would be informed by our own subjective interpretations of them; and equally, if we were not there to experience them directly, our understanding of those events will still be informed by our personal experiences, try as we might to avoid this and to achieve an uncoloured perception. Finally, the human aching for narrative prompts us to view and to communicate history in the form of stories. These may be ostensibly objectively true stories, as modern historians strive for; or they may be more imaginative ones, as Creation is and as we see in the work of historical writers across the centuries, from Curtius to Eric Temple Bell and beyond.

What is not so valid is presenting a consciously imaginative account of historical events as a factual one, and consequently I was glad that at the screening last night, both Jon Amiel and Randal Keynes were present to discuss Creation with the audience and to explain some of the uses of dramatic license that were made in writing the film. They were enjoyably frank about its imaginative nature, Amiel saying at one point, There is plenty for the anoraks to cavil at [but] it's just a movie, get a life!. This is not unjustified, for what they have created is an affecting and at times deeply inspiring cinematic spectacle with many superb performances and striking, memorable vignettes. It is a worthy addition to the cinematic canon.

Still as I hope I have shown, if you want to learn about Darwin interpretatively, you will need to do more than to just see this film. Dive into his letters, his notebooks, his published works, and the secondary scholarly literature. Produce, for yourself, a set of Darwins of your own.

DARLING DEAR
YOU ARE MY LOVING LUST: MY BEAUTIFUL HUNGER. MY AFFECTION LUSTS FOR YOUR WINNING HEART. YOU ARE MY DEVOTED FERVOUR: MY SYMPATHETIC LONGING.
YOURS AFFECTIONATELY
M. U. C.

... and people say the British are not romantic.

One of the earliest electronic computers, I recently discovered, was used to write love poetry. The Manchester Mark 1 was programmed by Christopher Strachey with the Loveletters program in 1952. (The letter above was outputted shortly before I wrote this blog post, by a Mark 1 emulator running the same program.) The Loveletters program constructs partially random sentences from a limited, but affectionate, vocabulary. Since many of the early electronic and electromechanical computers were motivated by military concerns, it's nice to see that the Mark 1 was used for something a little less combative.

Computer-generated partially random texts may no longer be very novel, but they are becoming increasingly sophisticated. The most engaging example I've seen so far, SCIgen, was written in 2005, and it generates scientific papers, based on a vocabulary of computer science terms. It's realistic to the point of satire - try it here, and be sure to click the Generate another one link when you want to see another paper. Incredibly, some of the texts it has generated have been accepted as submissions for supposedly reputable academic conferences and journals.

Anyhow, the closing arguments have now been made, and the jury has retired to consider the verdict. Although I have never in my life downloaded a torrent file hosted by The Pirate Bay, and although I am not a lawyer, let alone a Swedish one (and will be simplifying the legal aspect of my argument below), here is why I think the organisation's actions appear to be legal.

The Pirate Bay allows users to upload torrent files, to search for them and to download them. A torrent file contains information identifying a torrent. A torrent is a piece of information hosted by one or more people, which can be downloaded over the internet. The information in the torrent could be a PDF of a pamphlet you wrote and decided to share with the world, or it could be a promotional song a band wanted to release for free in a way that allowed fans to share the cost of hosting it for download. On the other hand, it could be a copy of the latest Madonna album.

Note the clear distinction between the torrent file and the torrent itself. It is much like the difference between a signpost (or a set of directions) and the place to which it points.

Now, it does appear to be the case that users are uploading torrent files to The Pirate Bay which link to torrents containing copyrighted material. If another user downloads that torrent file and uses it to download the copyrighted material in the torrent, the second user has breached copyright law. Those people providing the torrent may also have breached it, since they are offering their own copies for copying. The user who uploaded the torrent file to The Pirate Bay might also have abetted such breaches. But the site which hosted the torrent file has not copied copyrighted material, nor has it offered copyrighted material for copying. Therefore, it has not breached copyright law.

If you're getting lost in all these torrents, here's an analogy.

The market stall

Suppose I set up a market stall furnished with a noticeboard, and I allow passersby – unsupervised, and at their own risk – to post notices to the board and to read ones already there.

If the passersby just post notices about car boot sales and community fairs and other entirely legal activities, then all is hunky-dory.

If a user posts a notice advertising, say, illegal drugs for sale, then this is more problematic. Suppose this happens, and another user uses the instructions in the advert to locate a dealer who does indeed sell him drugs. Would I have abetted that by offering the noticeboard service?

There are four people involved here:

1. me, the provider of the noticeboard service;
2. the noticeboard user – let's call him the adman - who posted the advert offering the illegal drugs;
3. the noticeboard user – let's call this one the addict - who, after reading the ad, bought the advertised drugs; and
4. the dealer who sold the addict the drugs.

I think we can confidently assert that the last three of these people have committed crimes. The dealer sold the drugs, which were illegal to sell; and the addict bought the drugs, which were illegal to own. The adman greatly facilitated the selling of the drugs by posting a notice explicitly referencing them and explaining how to obtain them.

Did I, as the provider of the noticeboard, commit a crime? After all, the noticeboard is where the adman posted his ad, so looking at the noticeboard is how the addict found out where to get his drugs.

* * *

I think the answer's no in this case: unlike the adman, the noticeboard provider has not abetted the selling of the drugs, even though his noticeboard was used to advertise them. The great difference between the adman's actions and the noticeboard provider's is that the adman's were specific to the selling of the drugs, which is illegal, whereas the noticeboard provider's were not.

This is not to say the noticeboard provider wouldn't be irresponsible to leave the adman's advert in place if it came to his attention. But being irresponsible is not the same thing as being illegal.

Similarly, if the communication between the adman and the addict had happened in the form of, say, a conversation in a car, would the manufacturer of the car be liable because it provided a space in which the communication took place? No; no reasonable court would conclude that. The conversational conduct of the occupants in a car is not the manufacturer's legal responsibility. Nor is it the legal responsibility of a noticeboard owner to prevent users from using the noticeboard for illegal purposes: the users are responsible for their own actions.

And so it is with The Pirate Bay, as they make abundantly clear: The responsibility lies upon the user to not spread malicious, false or illegal material using the [torrent] tracker.

For the sake of justice, if nothing else, let us hope the jury is of a similar opinion.

Here are the lyrics, as best I've been able to transcribe them:

FX: (Muffled sawing and thumping noises, occasionally interrupted by a man screaming)
I swear I did my best to ensure that
His final moments were swift and free from fear,
But consideration should be made for the fact
That Sandor Katz was my first kill, so I trust the reader will

Understand that while his screams may well have seemed
Like conscious objections, they were in reality
Simply a reflex to honour his strength and speed.

With gratitude and tenderness, I seared
Every single hair from his body,
Gently flensed his decapitated head in a stock pot,
Boiled off his flesh and made a spreadable head cheese.

'Cause I believe that one can only relate with
Another living creature by completely destroying it.
I'm sure that Sandor's friends and family would appreciate this.

A rationale so moronic it defies belief,
The vegetarian of us submit to you respectfully.
Be careful what kind of world you wish for:
Some day it might come knocking on your door.

Let me in. Let me the fuck in.
I just wanna… fully relate.
I swear I'll do my best to ensure that
Your final moments are swift and free from fear.

The best way to ensure the survival of data is to make resilient copies of it in different physical locations. If I'm not mistaken, Ma.gnolia users were able to export their data (at least, before it was lost!), and could have done this. Del.icio.us and Google, along with many others, provide export functionality for the web applications they host in which users store data. So if you use one of these services, and you're diligent and skilled enough to work out how to export the data and store if somewhere else, you'll be fine if the service loses your data.

That's already quite a high barrier. Most people don't have the skills, time or inclination to back up all the data they have in the cloud. Do you back up your GMail account? Your Flickr photos? Well, maybe you do, or maybe you don't use these services, but you get the idea.

Much worse than the technological barrier that makes data like this hard to export are legal restrictions some sites impose on their users that actively prevent them from exporting their data. Perhaps the most well-documented case of this to date occurred in January last year when the prominent blogger Robert Scoble was kicked off Facebook after he tried to extract some of his data.

Other bloggers have pointed out, both before and after the Scoble incident, that Facebook's commercial competitiveness relies upon gaining control over users' data. Facebook isn't alone in using a business model like this, and this sector is where the greatest concern over data survivability should be directed. If you can't copy your data elsewhere, even if you did have the skills, you can't do much to guarantee its survival; your data is in the hands of the corporation you have entrusted it to, and if they lose it, it could well be gone forever. The archivist in me is raging mad at the thought of that!

Fortunately, there's a movement opposing such data traps: Data Portability. It has a long way to go yet, but it's a good start. As we become increasingly reliant on data in the cloud, the survivability of that data becomes paramount. Since that survivability depends upon portability, data portability is crucial. So what are you waiting for? Head over there, and get involved; empower yourself to secure the survivability of your data.

And if you need convincing, or you want to read stronger opinions than mine on the topic, why not read these posts by Marc Canter and Richard Stallman?