But nearly two weeks in, and already well past the target for the entire month, there’s time to do a bit of blogging. In many ways I have to admit I feel like I’m still recovering from the first two days of the month. Given the fact that my decision to attack my one day record – which had been just over 16k since 2008 – ended with me reaching 50k on November 2nd.

Having recovered at least somewhat from that sprint I’ve decided to try to write down how I did it before it fades completely. For one thing it’ll give me some place to send the people who keep asking how I did it, without having to give the same explanation over and over again.

BICHOK

I have no idea any more when or where exactly it was, but years ago I ran across this highly useful acronym: the BICHOK writing method. It stands for Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard.

And that in a nutshell is how I managed it. Yes, there is an art to sustained word-sprinting, but it’s mostly down to getting used to it. Over the years I have gotten used to it to a point where I can keep going for a long time. But still the main ingredient it takes is time.

I did 33k on day one, shattering the old 16k record, but I did it mainly because I typed for nearly eighteen hours that day. Getting to 50k the next day merely took another eleven or twelve.

Inspiration

One question several people have asked me, after I’d explained the above, is how I keep my inspiration going for that long. The honest answer to that is that I don’t know.

Maybe I’ve simply gotten used to imagining things that fast. Or maybe it’s something else. I know that the great P.G. Wodehouse, at the height of his career, was consistently writing 8k per day.

I’m not sure I could keep up with that pace for more than a few days. But for a couple of days at least I seem to be able to keep this up. And at the start of NaNoWriMo this year, as so often in the past few years, I started from the point of not having written for far too much of the year.

I have no idea whether it’s possible to store up underused inspiration. But if it is that may well be what enables me to sprint like this during the first days of NaNoWriMo.

Anyone still using URLs to the old /blog should now end up on the right page on the new setup. And I should be able to take down the old wordpress installation. A quick check doesn’t seem to show anything broken, and I’ll try to check in more detail over the next few days. But if you (the reader) should notice any problems please let me know in the comments.

Yet while I’ve read several National Geographic Magazines, around 140 pages each, adding them feels wrong to. Because they are, as the title says, magazines. But while adding a 56 page novelty book feels wrong, and so does adding a 140 page magazine, I had no doubts at all about adding Christopher Hitchens’s critical biography of mother Teresa (provocatively entitled “The Missionary Position”), even though at some 95 pages it’s not exactly a huge volume.

So length alone clearly isn’t a good way to define a book. But the question remains whether there is a good answer to the question “What constitutes a ‘book’?” What, in other words, gives a book its bookish essence. But perhaps there is no good answer beyond the famous statement of U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart when asked to define ‘hard core pornography’: “I know it when I see it”.

The new Andalusia 2011 set shows only 27 photos out of 1400 I took, so editing everything down to this level has been one of the delays. The major one however has been finding a combination of free time and energy to get around to it.

I know full well that being busy is my own fault, I could just stop myself from filling up my calendar to the extent that I do. But since I doubt that’s going to change any time soon, I’ll just have to try to do a better job of finding time to add more content (blogs or photos) to the side alongside everything else I’m trying to do.

So here’s the first post in far too long, ending in the hope that the next one will be along a bit more quickly.

This saying is commonly attributed to either Mark Twain, or Benjamin Disraeli. I was tempted, given the subject of this post, to look for some statistics on which is the more frequent attribution, but finally decided not to bother. I’ll be introducing one set of statistics shortly, and one is really enough. Judging by the length of this post, more than enough.

I first had the idea for this post a few weeks ago in the run-up to the Pope’s visit to Britain. Although I’m in the Netherlands myself I take in a good deal of British news, and one of the things that struck me was the battle of interpretations over this particular set of statistics.

The poll was executed by ComRes and commissioned by Theos (a pro-religion/pro-Catholic thinktank). Full results are available here. The point I’m going to be examining is Theos’s claim that “whatever the public thinks about the Pope’s visit, they agree with his social teaching”.

The Statistics

The part poll (at least the part of it we’re looking at here) is a series of 12 statements, taking from a papal encyclical letter (Caritas in veritate), with the participant asked to choose either agree, disagree, or don’t know. I’ll start with a quick overview of questions and percentages (percentages don’t always come to 100% due to rounding).

Moral eveluation and scientific research must go hand in hand
Agree: 74%
Disagree: 9%
Don’t know: 18%

An overemphasis on rights leads to a disregard of duties
Agree: 59%
Disagree: 15%
Don’t know: 26%

It is irresponsible to view sexuality merely as a source of pleasure
Agree: 63%
Disagree: 20%
Don’t know: 18%

The natural environment is more than raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure
Agree: 79%
Disagree: 9%
Don’t know: 12%

Investment always has moral, as well as economic significance
Agree: 63%
Disagree: 18%
Don’t know: 19%

The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly
Agree: 79%
Disagree: 7%
Don’t know: 14%

Technologically advanced societies must lower their domestic energy consumption
Agree: 82%
Disagree: 8%
Don’t know: 10%

We must prioritise the goal of access to steady employment for everyone
Agree: 80%
Disagree: 6%
Don’t know: 14%

Poverty is often produced by a rejection of God’s love
Agree: 6%
Disagree: 81%
Don’t know: 13%

The consumer has a specific social responsibility
Agree: 69%
Disagree: 15%
Don’t know: 16%

One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is isolation
Agree: 58%
Disagree: 24%
Don’t know: 18%

Food and access to water are universal rights of all human beings
Agree: 90%
Disagree: 5%
Don’t know: 4%

Interpretation

So those are the statistics, and they themselves I feel quite sure are not lies. While I don’t have the budget (or the inclination for that matter) to travel to Britain and redo the poll myself I would expect anyone doing so to come up with broadly similar figures.

So where are the lies? Well that’s all, quite literally, a matter of interpretation. Based on these figures we can say that the people of Britain broadly agree with the pope on 11 of the statements presented, and strongly disagree with him on 1 of them.

Selective Questioning

But for Theos to be right we have to get from these 11 statements to “the Pope’s social teaching”. And that’s where we run into trouble. Because although these statements are all part of the “the Pope’s social teaching” they are not the whole of the “the Pope’s social teaching”.

This is partly a simple matter of practicality. Having people fill in an “agree, disagree, don’t know” list for Caritas in veritate as a whole (it’s over 30,000 words) would make the results vague at best. And doing it sentence by sentence for the whole things is simply to time-consuming to find a substantial number of volunteers for. And that isn’t even touching on any of the Pope’s teachings not contained in Caritas in veritate.

Let us look for example at “It is irresponsible to view sexuality merely as a source of pleasure”. Now the poll needs pithy statements, but one can wonder what the result would have been had the second half of the original sentence “and likewise to regulate it through strategies of mandatory birth control.” been included. Given the stress on mandatory it might not have mattered a lot, then again it might have.

And if we move on from this sentence and read the whole paragraph it was taken from it’s clear that the Pope doesn’t only disapprove of birth control when it is mandatory. Indeed it is a well known fact that the Pope (and the Catholic Church) don’t approve of voluntary birth control either. Indeed another paragraph speaks of “the procreative meaning of sexuality”.

One might also wonder if the statement (still from the same encyclical) that “… States are called to enact policies promoting the centrality and the integrity of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman.” would have gotten a very positive response in Britain. Especially if it had been shortened to its core meaning “States are called on not to legally recognise homosexual relationships”.

Straying from the encyclical one could doubt that many British Catholics (never mind people in general) would agree with a statement by the Pope in March of 2009 that “… distributing condoms…. worsens the problem [of HIV/AIDS]“.

This is just a small selection on one topic. But I think it goes to show that claiming (or implying) that people agree with “the Pope’s social teaching” is a whole, is rather misleading based on just these questions.

Uniquely Papal?

Another potential problem with claiming that people agree with “the Pope’s social teaching” is the matter of their reasons to agree with a statement. This one is a bit tricky, so I’ll try to explain. When I say I agree that “It is irresponsible to view sexuality merely as a source of pleasure”. I say so at least partly on a utilitarian basis. Given the risks posed by STDs sexuality is not merely a source of pleasure, but also a source of responsibility: it must be done safely.

As I’ve demonstrated above, this is not what the Pope means by this at all, and certainly not the reasoning he would give for the phrase. His reasons (one would guess) are to be found in the so called “Natural Law theory” often touted by Catholic moral philosophers.

But I have no trouble making this statement as an atheist with a tendency to think in terms of utilitarianism and moral rights theory. In other words, the statement I’m agreeing with is not uniquely papal (indeed far from it). Yet the interpretation (dare I call it spin) that this means I agree with the Pope seems to suggest the statement couldn’t have been arrived at by anyone else. Even though any secular humanist with a liking for utilitarianism could have made the same statement. (Admittedly, human individuality means we would all likely phrase it slightly differently, but the meaning of the statement wouldn’t have to be altered.)

In fact the statement in the poll that comes closest to being uniquely papal (it’s certainly uniquely religious) is “Poverty is often produced by a rejection of God’s love”. This is the one statement that only got 6% of people to agree, and got 81% to disagree.

When the poll first came out I worked out a list, just to amuse myself, of utilitarian ways to arrive at the 12 statements given (I may end up posting this in future if I feel like tidying it up a bit). The rejected statement is the only one I failed on.

It would be easy enough to substitute another statement derived through utilitarianism here, or even the core doctrine that “We should strive to maximise the amount of happiness in the world” and come back with a poll that is at least as strong as evidence that “most British people favour utilitarianism”. Indeed a bit of utilitarian rephrasing on some of the existing statements might well improve the scores further.

Vagueness

The reason we could submit this list (with one substitution) as a utilitarian list is simple. The statements were selected (I suspect deliberately) to be quite vague. They were indeed selected not to be uniquely papal at all.

Because of this the result is vague. Another suggested summary might be “People agree with vague outlines of morality as sketched by pope”. That would still be something of a spin, but closer to the truth. The spin is of course the mention of the pope, because there’s an underlying secret here.

Vague statements of morality tend to work regardless of who uttered them. Because humans are (broadly) similar. We could never have made it this far if most people hadn’t though murder was a bad idea for example. This is why ethical discussions often turn into debates on definitions. We all agree theft is wrong. But taking a few office paper-clips home for personal use “that’s not really stealing, is it?”

The Bottom Line

The bottom line about statistics is this. If you want to know what they really mean, you pretty much have to read the actual research. While there are people legitimately doing their best to put select good questions and produce good summaries, there’s an awful lot of room to spin it any way you want to.

On the data we’ve looked at here I could have written a summary, just as legitimate as the one produced by Theos, to say “Most people disagree with the Pope” arguing that “although people will agree with vague general statements the pope makes, any uniquely papal statements in the sample were largely disagreed with. Clearly the people of Britain tend more towards secularism and utilitarianism”.

So, to return to the quote we started with, it’s quite often a case of “Lies, Damned Lies, and the interpretation of Statistics”. Although there are other ways to fake the statistics (but they too can be at least partly detected by asking for/looking at raw data). As a bonus to close with, at the end of this long post, here’s an example of a different way to manipulate your statistics.

It’s a good listen just for the fun of it, but I particularly like listening to it these days, because I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics for my NaNoWriMo project this year. Now what does ethics have to do with gameshows you may ask?

Well gameshows are games and Just a Minute is a beautiful example of game-theory in action. Game Theory in the context of ethics, for those who don’t know it, is an attempt to explain ethics as a result of equilibrium. Basically reciprocal punishment and reward throughout the game create a set of “de facto” ethical rules on top of the written rules.

In Just a Minute the repetition rule is a particularly good example of this. The only words exempt from this rule are those “on the card”, that is to say the words in the subject the player has been given. But even so it’s rare to hear a challenge for, more or less, unavoidable words like “I”, or “it”, or “a”. Unless of course a player uses them amazingly frequently. (You won’t get buzzed for two “it”s, but you might well be for five in close succession).

This unwritten rule is partially reinforced by the audience, which will boo loudly at an overly pedantic challenge. But it’s also reinforced by reciprocation. If you buzz another contestant for two “a”s, don’t be surprised when one of the others buzzes you for two “it”s.

After such a retribution challenge things will generally settle down again, unless of course there is another overzealous challenge to start things off again.

Now don’t get me wrong, Just a Minute is certainly worth listening to even if you’re not into game theory. It’s just a lot of fun. But with all the reading (and thinking) I’ve been doing on ethics lately I found it an interesting example of how game theory works in the wild.

I’ve had characters and a story in mind for months now, but a title, even a working title, was proving illusive. Finally though I’ve settled on Pure Time as a working title. Both to reflect the time-travel aspects of the story (pure time is a timeline without any time-travel incursions) and to reflect the moral dilemma I’m about to inflict on one of my characters.

The origin of the idea of Pure Time as a title was Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. That got me to Critique of Pure Time. But that seemed slightly to elitist as a title. I may change my mind about that later, but for now Pure Time will do as a working title.

I’m not sure whether or not I’ll import all the stuff from the old blog to this one. For now though you can still see it here.

I’ve been struggling with this for a while now, but after a lot of thought I’ve had to conclude that finishing this draft just wouldn’t be worth the time it would take. The edit has been an “off and on” project for too long, and my general writing style now isn’t what it was when I started the edit, so it would never truly read as one draft anyway.

On top of that I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on, and thinking about, the stories background recently. Adding in a lot of new worldbuilding, and rethinking some of the old. Once that process is complete it will need one or two major, and a lot more minor, changes to the narrative even in its second draft form.

All of which means that, all things considered, starting over from scratch once the worldbuilding is ready seems like the right thing to do. That will finally place my characters, and their actions, in the sort of rich universe I feel I’ve only been simulating thus far.

It will mean I need to put in more time to get a new draft ready, but I’m convinced it will be a better draft as a result. I’m hoping to map out a preliminary time-line with various targets on it tomorrow. And while I can’t guarantee I’ll keep to it, my current aim is to blog more actively about the project as it progresses.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to return to pondering faster than light sensor technology…

But as I do have my re-purposed file server keeping me connected to the essentials I’ve decided to do a little blog post about the surprising positives I’ve noticed in being cut off from my regular PC. Not that I’d recommend anyone get their mboard shorted out just to experience these…

Item One

I no longer have all the links I’d normally take for granted in my bookmarks, toolbar, and history. This may sound like a weird positive, but I find it is. It’s made me realise just how much of a creature of habit I really am. There are sited I visit regularly, sites I know the address off, which I simply can’t be bothered to go to when I have to actually type that address. Not bothering with those sites has left me the time to do a lot more reading than I had been doing for a while.

Item Two

Another positive thing for me is that lacking my PC has forced me to make some decisions. I’d been thinking about a Magnatune streaming membership for quite a while, but I only got around to actually getting one because I’ve been cut off from all the music that’s stored on my desktop. As a result I’ve listened to, and enjoyed, more new music in the last few days than in the previous month or so.

Item Three

Related to the missing links, but a little different, I’ve found that aside from my browsing habits my routine has also changed a little. Most the changes aren’t massive, I’ve made sure my backup desktop is now running pretty much the same software my PC normally uses, but it has made me reconsider other things – like that large number of RSS feeds I’m subscribed to, even though I mostly click “Mark All Read” because I haven’t the time to read them. I’ve already mentally scheduled a thorough RSS cleanup for when the PC is up and running again.

Looking Back

So what do I feel looking back after a few days? Well I’ll still be glad tomorrow when I can pick up my new board and get my regular PC up and running again. But even so these intervening days haven’t been as bad as I’d first thought they might be. And the replacement I’ve ordered – replacing mboard, proc & memory – is also an upgrade that should put off the need to buy a new PC entirely at least a while longer.

And of course when I do get the (upgraded) PC back up and running I can carry some of the changes to my routine made during the last few days back there. That way the crash may actually have a positive effect in the long term.